Toynbee: The Sins That Men Do...

[James Brody]

I covered in another posting Toynbee's difficulties as a historian. Israel gets into the mix, however, and deserves separate comment.

Toynbee is said to have hated nationalism and the creation of nations and, therefore, hated the idea of Israel. I'm skeptical and suspect that more questions might be put to him. Toynbee, for example, found that Hitler's plan to conquer Europe was a good one but badly executed! He also found the Jewish occupation of Palestine to be a greater moral crime than Hitler's killing six million Jewish adults and children at Dachau, Treblinka, or Auschwitz, or Buchenwald! (At one point, 480,000 Jews were packed by German orders into 1.3 (one and three-tenths!) square miles of Warsaw, roughly the area of New York's Central Park: approximately 42,000 escaped and another 50,000 perhaps slipped over the walls and adopted Polish identity.)

Churchill and Nietzsche mirrored Western ambivalence towards our Jewish cousins. I suspect some biases arise from poorly understood processes such as "regression to the mean" (anything that is too good is suspect and to be pulled under). Even as simple a thing as proxemics could be involved here!

From a news article by Anita Singh: Churchill, in an unpublished essay, wrote: "These facts must be faced in any analysis of anti-Semitism. They should be pondered especially by the Jews themselves. For it may be that, unwittingly, they are inviting persecution - that they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer."

The article goes on: "The central fact which dominates the relations of Jew and non-Jew is that the Jew is 'different'. He looks different. He thinks differently. He has a different tradition and background. He refuses to be absorbed."

Elsewhere, the article is sympathetic towards Jewish people and it is clear Churchill disapproves of their persecution.

He writes: "In fact, the Jew is as a rule a good citizen. He is sober, industrious, law-abiding. He identifies himself - up to a point - with the country in which he lives. He is ready, if need be, to fight and to die for it. Jewish soldiers served in the armies both of the Allies and of the Central Powers during the Great War. Twelve thousand of them died for Germany."

And Churchill ends by urging the British people to stand up for the Jews.

Nietzsche also had a mixed perspective, one that honors Jewish resilience but looks forward to their intermarriage with the rest of us!:

"The Jews will either become masters of Europe or will lose Europe, as they once lost Egypt. And it seems to be that improbable they will lose again. In Europe, for eighteen centuries, they have passed through a school more terrible than that known to any other nation, and the experiences of this time of stress and storm have benefited the individual even more than the community. In consequence, the resourcefulness and alertness of the modern Jew are extraordinary....In times of extremity, the people of Israel less often sought refuge in drink or suicide than any other race of Europe. Today, every Jew finds in the history of his forebears a voluminous record of coolness and perseverance in terrible predicaments--of artful cunning and clever fencing with chance and misfortune. The Jews have hid their bravery under the cloak of submissiveness; their heroism in facing contempt surpasses that of the saints. People have tried to make them contemptible for twenty centuries by refusing them all honors and dignities and by pushing them down into the mean trades. The process did not make them cleaner, alas! But neither did it make them contemptible. They have never ceased to believe themselves qualified for the highest of activities. They have never failed to show the virtues of all suffering peoples. Their manner of honoring their parents and children make them conspicuous among Europeans. Besides, they have learned to derive a sense of power from the very trades forced upon them. We cannot help observing, in excuse of their usury, that without this pleasant means of inflicting torture upon their oppressors, they might have lost their self-respect ages ago, for self-respect depends upon being able to make reprisals. Moreover, their vengeance has never carried them too far, for they have that liberality that comes from frequent changes of place, climate, customs and neighbors. They have more experience of men than any other race and even in their passions there appears a caution born of this experience. They are so sure of themselves that, even in their bitterest straits, they never earn their bread by manual labor as common workmen, porters or peasants....Their manners, it may be admitted, teach us that they have never been inspired by chivalrous, noble feelings, nor their bodies girt with beautiful arms: a certain vulgarity always alternates with their submissiveness. But now they are intermarrying with the gentlest blood of Europe, and in another hundred years they will have enough good manners to save themselves from making themselves ridiculous, as masters, in the sight of those they have subdued." Morgenrote, para 205. (In Mencken, p 164)

I believe in suicide and murder as sometime expressions of regression-to-the-mean: the weird is eliminated. Fear, envy, and schadenfreude led much of humanity to murder the Jews and thereby, to kill itself. The Jewish peoples gave us dreams that revolutionized how we live but, in return, we raped, starved, shot, stabbed, and gassed them. (One gossip observed that Israel exists because American Jews did not want a mass migration into the United States that might trigger a wave of anti-Semitism! Even Jews can reject other Jews for reasons of self interest.) Pope was wrong: Man is neither evolved nor made as a noble work but one flawed at its core, without the dignity of a worm and an abusive husband to life's kingdom. My inclination at this moment would be to give the IDF not only Central Park but all of Manhattan and its boroughs if they can turn those assets into bullets, bombs, missiles, and children!

References
Grynberg, Michal (1993/2002) (Ed.) (Philip Boehm, trans.) Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto. Philip Boehm, trans. NY: Henry Holt (Picador).
Montagu, Ashley (Ed.), 1956, Toynbee and History: Critical Essays and Reviews. Boston, MA: Porter Sergent. (A masterful display of 40 different ways to murder by pen)
Nietzsche F Morgenrote, para 205. In Mencken HL (1908/2006) The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. NY: Barnes & Noble, p. 164.
Singh, A "Churchill held Jews to blame for persecution" http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=385482007

[Fred H.]

Hey JimB, waddup?

I’d say the situation is more straight forward than all that: The Jews just tended to be more intelligent than the northern Europeans, and so on average they tended to have and control more.

I suspect you may have already seen this (perhaps we’ve even discussed it?), but here’s a summary of a talk given by Steven Pinker of Harvard in December 2005 discussing “Jews, Genes, & Intelligence” at the Center for Jewish History (from http://majorityrights.com/index.php/...gence_of_jews/ ):

Ashkenazi Jews—the Eastern European ones—really do have an average IQ that’s eight to 15 points higher than the northern European average. The Cochran/Hardy/Harpending paper says about four out of every thousand northern Europeans have an IQ of 140 or above. So, if Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 110, that means 23 out of every thousand Askenazi Jews have above a 140 IQ. Sephardic Jews, those descended from Jews expelled from Spain in the 15th century, have the same IQ distribution as the rest of Europe.

So, how did Ashkenazi Jews get to be the blindingly brilliant people we are today? Long ago, before the Diaspora, Ashkenazi Jews were unusually literate, but otherwise nothing special. As Christians were forbidden from lending money, the Jews grew to dominate the usury industry and other areas of finance, mercantilism and management. In medieval Europe financial success correlated well with reproductive success, and therefore the Jews underwent rapid natural selection for the mathematical and verbal traits that supported those occupations.

The second part of the story concerns how these genes get passed along. While Jews tend to have the smarts, we also frequently have mutated genes that put us at risk for a host of debilitating and life-threatening disorders including Tay-Sachs and breast cancer. At first glance these genes would appear to be poor candidates for natural selection; however, they’re all recessive. When a person receives a recessive gene from only one parent, it doesn’t cause the disorder and may even give the person some sort of “heterozygous advantage.” (For instance, people who carry just one recessive gene for sickle-cell anemia are immune to malaria rather than anemic.) The Cochran/Hardy/Harpending paper posits that, in the case of Ashkenazi Jews, deleterious recessive genes likely have the heterozygous advantage of above-average intelligence.

So there you have it JimB—less than 2,000 years of selection pressures resulting in Jews being 8 to 15 points more intelligent, and therefore having more control/influence than the typically dim-witted northern European apparently thought was fair, reasonable, and/or safe.

However, since Europe currently seems to be little more than an extended care facility, a native population of aging, secular, non-propagating pussies at the edge of extinction, perhaps they’re now paying for their past sins—although when the Muslims take over, in the not too distant future, I’d guess that things will get even more bloody. Isn’t life a bitch?

(And for anyone here that refuses to accept the reality that there are indeed racial/population group differences in intelligence (along with differences in various other traits), now consider the impact of tens of thousands of years of selection pressures upon various population groups, isolated in various environments having different selection pressures, and inbreeding among themselves, and perhaps you’ll begin to see why it was inevitable that we now see different average intelligence (along with differences in various other traits) between different population groups/races . . . but I digress.)

[James Brody]

Fred,

Thanks for the link!

According to Phil Rushton, Charles Murray has an essay in Commentary on the matter of Jewish intelligence.

Will post sections when I get my antivirus up to speed. My machine now parades somewhat naked!

Jim

[Fred H.]

Good article. Here's the whole thing from http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm...10855&page=all (hope it OK that I'm posting this):

[QUOTE]Jewish Genius, by Charles Murray, April 2007


Fred...you're a great guy but you might get me & the good Jewish doctor, Gil Levin, who owns this operation sued...

Standards move, writers are moving targets. If there is no financial loss to the source, then a reasonable quote is allowed for scholarship. Charles is one of my few heroes: hate to cost him a nickle...he might have been Jewish!


Love your enthusiasm! My best to Shelly!

JimB