Ashkenazim: the Genetic Origin

Who we – Ashkenazi – truly are? And who are the “Jews”?

First of all let us make the terminological mess clear. If someone says “Jew” she supposes one of the following identities:

1. Israelites – a semi-mythological ethnos from the Bible, which dwelled across Middle-East before dissipation of 2th century A.D. 2. Judaists (including those who were converted into Judaism – and their descendants) 3. Present ethnical groups – Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizraim.

It is clear that those who fall into 2nd and 3rd groups are not the same; even Navajo Indian can become a Jew, while ethnic Ashkenazi may be secular for several generations. It is much more complicated with kinship. Present “Jewry” is officially divided into 3 main parts: Ashkenazi (Rhein communities’ descendants migrated to the east as the Crusade and exile from the Northern Europe had begun), Sephardim (descendants of those who had been exiled from Spain and Portugal in the end of 15th century) and Mizrahim (all others). Both among Ashkenazi and Sephardim there are ancestral castes of priests - Cohanim and Levites.

How can we determine these groups’ kinship and their link to Israelites? With the DNA test’s help, which allows to link relationship both patrilineal (observing the Y-chromosome mutation) and matrilineal (with Mitochondria DNA’s help). There is a Middle Eastern haplogroup J haplotype, which is strongly defined among ancestral priests – Cohanim, which is called Cohanim Modal Haplotype (CMH). Having determined the amount of CMH in a population we can clearly determine the relation level to Israelites.

The problem is that only specialists research such issues, while the others usually link to the following statement (a very popular but erroneous opinion):

“There is nothing special about Ashkenazi Jews can be found during analysis’ – R1 group marker is found in 50-60% of population, about 10% of I and E3b, some of N and J – which is a usual Middle European set. Sephardim Jews on the contrary have J marker among 50% of population. Maximum of J markers by the way have nomads (bedouins) of the Arabic peninsula and Egypt (about 87% of J marker beholders)”.

Confident mood and scientisms’ overload make the illusion of rightfulness; however, as to Behar we will see that the above said is total crap for both Ashkenazi (who have no more than 10% of R1 and 40% of J) and Sephardim (who also have no more than 40% of J). Klesov’s unacademic article “Joseph and his brothers or the molecular genealogy games for the adults” is more credible. However there were no footsteps indicated in the book so we compared main professional Jewish genetics articles’ results and made sure that Klesov’s figures are the same as of the world’s consensus. The article which Klesov uses but does not mention is Behar, Hammer et al., Multiple Origins of Ashkenazi Levites: Y Chromosome Evidence for Both Near Eastern and European Ancestries (Haifa, London, Arizona, 2003). Below are the results of this and other articles in short: [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ].

Y-Chromosome analysis for “Paternity test”

1. Cohanim both Ashkenazic and Sephardic are Middle Eastern Israelites’ direct successors as to the paternity line. 87% (Kolesov for some reason indicates 91% which is not that important) Ashkenazi Cohanim and 76 Sephardic Cohanim possess haplogroup J. which means they are more homogeneous than Germans, Norwegians or Belarusians also included in the testing. Practically Cohanim are the unique Israelite nation, maintaining the blood purity at least according to paternity line.

2. Ashkenazim Levites have basically nothing to do with Middle eastern J group – only 10% possessed the corresponding markers. Instead 60% behold R1a1 marker, which is much more than Belarusians have (51%), but less then Serbians do (63%). Ashkenasic Levites are successors of Eastern Europeans converted to Judaism, with minimal following J admixtures and have nothing to do with Israelites. Most probably that they are the successors of Khazars. Thus there are only 3.4% Levites among all Ashkenazi.

3. 90% of Ashkenazi do not belong neither to Cohanim nor to Levites. They are situated somewhere in the middle between such extreme positions as to J and CMH markers frequency. Klesov does not provide total haplotype statistics among Ashkenazi. However we may find this information in Behar:

J (Middle east) – 37% E (Africa and the Mediterranean) – 22% - i.e. Southern Italians have 25% P (Siberia, Central Asia) – 15% BR (Nothern Europe) – 14% K (Asia and Southern Europe) – 8% R1a1 (Eastern Europe) – 4%

Totally there are 90% of modern Ashkenazi appear to be a metisized formation between Israelites’ successors (about 40%) and different European ethnos’ (about 60%) according to Y-chromosome. For the reference Germans and Norwegians also have all these haplogroups excluding K. However, there are only 3% of J among them. Sometimes tests results may vary (in the most extreme case R1a1 was found among 10%) but the whole picture stays the same.

4. Also we should emphasize that modern Israelite genes (both Ashkenazic and the rest) happened to be closer to the Kurdish, Turkish and Armenian then to Arabic and Arabic-Palestinian according to "The Y-chromosome pool of Jews as part of the genetic landscape of the Middle East" (pdf)” tests. At the same time arabs do not have an Israelite haplotype. This is to the issue of “pansemitism” and Ashkenazi’s’ and Arabs’ rights to the Israel territory.

Analysis acc. Mt-DNA

It is an even more complicated issue with women line – mitochondrial DNA. It has been a big sensation in the media when it was found out according to Behar that 40% of Askenazi originated from 4 women. However there is nothing sensational in this fact for the scientists figured the hypothetical common ancestors – so-called Y-chromosomic Adam and Mitohondrical Eve. Therefore there are 40% of Ashkenazi who bear mt-DNA which is different from the surrounding nations and can be minimally found among non-Ashkenazi Jews. Despite the fact that scientists announced these 40% middle eastern Jews, they still had to agree that they don’t have any hard proofs: "our findings are not sufficient to answer questions about the extent and location of the maternal deme from which Ashkenazi Jewry as population arose." The fact is that the small amount of these genes could be transferred to non-ashkenazic Jews from the Ashkenazi after the Rhine communities of 9-10 Century originated. There can be no certainty that 4 Ashkenazic ancestress had middle European blood, i.e. had been brought from there, especially taking into account the fact that the European Ashkenazic type is much different from Sephardic and Mizrah. Even in case that these women were Israelites and gave middle eastern genes to 40% of Ashkenazic population, the rest 60% of analysed Ashkenazi did not show any middle-eastern results. Therefore acc to mtDNA the correlation is either the same as to Y-chromosome (40% to the middle east and 60% - Europe) or the European percentage is even higher.

Now let us try to imagine our ancestors’ history

After Bar Kokhba rebellion (132-135 A. D.) a small group of Israelites (J) men – middle eastern ancestors of Ashkenazi – appeared in Spain either bringing their wives with them or breeding with local population (E). Taking specialties of Israelites’ life of that time into account, the most probable is militarized consortium of settlers searching for the wives on the new territory. Their successors spread in the region assimilating and partially becoming a metisized conviction, losing their belligerency. Some of them moved to Roman Köln and Trier, but mass migration to German lands begins after the Franks’ invasion and fall of Rome and Northern Italy (beginning of 9th century). The expansion continued to England and France. For all this time an active exogamy took place: a brand new sub-ethnos – “Ashkenazi” (i.e. “Germans”) was formed, which has little with Israelites who remained in Palestine or moved to Asia and Africa.

In the 11th century Ashkenazi suddenly got a professional national attribute – loansharking, which was banned for the most of Christians. This event was simultaneous with crusade and city-states rise: on the one hand European monarchies urgently needed considerable sums of money; on the other hand business did not suit them, which means the need for intermediaries and front men, who could be easily left behind in case of a failure and didn’t need any benefits in case of a fortune. Thus half-European Ashkenazi, non-Ashkenazic Israelites’ ancestors and harbor men (this is where E and K + parallels come from alone with Sephardim mtDNA) had been chosen in order to hurriedly create a new type of a weapon – sly and wily “Jews” according to the Christian propaganda written by anti-system Israelites in the beginning of a millennium. Talmud was used as a bonding material. The result is a cultural golem, an artificial formation, which covered courts’ financial operations and presented to the local population, crusaders and debtors according to the formula “King is good – Jews are band” after its mission was done (England 1920, France 1394, Germany 1400s). Bitter and deceived by the “masters” a metis-golem in the amount of 25,000 leaves to the East carrying Talmud along with the thoughts of being unique and cursed, instilled to it by Europeans for business purposes. It pupates and ghettoizes with exogamy fall to <0,5% for generation. Looks like that all finished.

However Talmud and usury “presented” from the Europeans gave Ashkenazi a unique criteria for the eugenic selection – the intellectual one. After 20-30 generations of Yeshiva, away from the battles and agricultural labor an average IQ grows up to 107-117 among Ashkenazi (European = 100) and remains the highest in the world. During 500 years the “masters” have already forgotten about Ashkenazi and when they finally bethink about them, they faced an intellectually superior white European sub ethnos, enlightened, suburbanly insolent, with political and mafia ambitions and moreover free from the heavy state machinery! Something had to be done urgently. And the next scheme “Treblinka – Tel-Aviv” is well known.

Thus we came up to following:

1. Ashkenazi is a metisized european subethnos with 40% Israelite mixture with average IQ = 110 and unique intellectual culture. It is a promising player who usually does not fully realize its subjectivity and gets manipulated.

2. Sephardim – Maghrebian-Middle Easterm subethnos with 40% Israelite mixture with average IQ lower for 10-15 points then of Ashkenazi. Considering itself an Ashkenazi discrimination victim, used for Israel Ashkenazi weakening.

3. Jews – an artificial formation, which unites different ethnos’ and cultures according to Israelite genes. Used by Europeans for the certain economic needs, tied with the Christians’ ban for usury in middle ages and need for covering the outstanding financial operations later. Presently it is actively formed in Israel under control of the “masters”. However, when saying “Jews” most people mean Ashkenazi, who form the majority of 80%.

4. Thus it makes sense to give the brand “Jews” along with the bulky religious and historical outfit to rastafari, lemba and all identical Christians and actively promote a perspective European brand “Ashkenazi”. Let Christians and Muslims fight for the biblical history. We can find subjectivity only with such identity.

Exogamy is ok. As our genetical set shows, our ancestors bred with native Europeans for centuries. However the Ashkenazic ethnicity proved to be resistant. Danger comes not from the mixed marriages, but on the contrary in the excessive endogamy and gene pool impoverishment, which leads to sicknesses and degeneration. Also it comes from “panjewishness” (Ashkenazi IQ and culture destruction in the “Jewry” melting pot) and “pansemitism” – intermixture with mythical “brotherly Semitic nations” in Palestina propaganda.

All our history is Nataly Portman’s (Hershlag) face.

By Valgerer

Ashkenazim: the Genetic Origin

David Frankfurter

Another Jew who fought back (and survived):

Having become convinced of the danger posed by the Nazis, Frankfurter kept an eye on Gustloff, head of the Foreign Section of the Nazi party in Switzerland, (NSDAP) who ordered the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be published in Switzerland. This culminated in the assassination which occurred in Davos on February 4, 1936. Frankfurter found Gustloff's address in a simple phonebook and on that day went to the Gustloff's home; Gustloff's wife, Hedwig Gustloff, received him and showed him into the study, asking him to wait since her husband was on the telephone but would be with him presently. When Gustloff, who was in the adjoining room, entered his office where Frankfurter was sitting oppositve a picture of Hitler, Frankfurter shot him five times in the head, neck and chest; he left the premises (according to Heinz Schön, while hearing Hedwig Gustloff's cries), went into the next house and asked to use the telephone. He rang the police and confessed to the murder. Immediately he went to the police station and coldly told the police what had happened. Frankfurter was put on trial for the assassination in Chur on December 9 of that year.

We should know our heroes.

- by Miron Fyodorov

David Frankfurter

Herschel Grynszpan: Martyr

The following is a modified excerpt from Is it Good for the Jews: The Crisis of America's Israel Lobby, published by Random House, Inc. It has been adapted for Jewcy by author Stephen Suleyman Schwartz.

He was seventeen, sensitive, with brooding eyes, and wept easily; little more than five feet tall, slender and dark, but handsome. He felt alone, angry, and confused, and outrage overwhelmed him.

He was a Jew. And he had a gun.

Herschel Feibel Grynszpan was born in Hannover, Germany, but held Polish nationality. By 1938, he had lived through three years of chaos. The Nazis were in power, and he was not allowed to become an apprentice nor otherwise gain employment. He wanted to go to Palestine but found no way to get there. Finally, he went to Belgium, then crossed the border to France without authorization.

He was a refugee, an illegal immigrant, non-Christian, unemployed, a troubled youth.

In Paris, the agitated Herschel argued with his aunt and uncle, with whom he stayed. He had received a note from the German-Polish frontier describing the conditions his family suffered. He had fantasies of joining the French Foreign Legion, but had probably been refused a visa to Palestine because of bad health, and it was unlikely he would succeed as a soldier of France. He threatened suicide, then slammed the door of his uncle’s house and was not seen for a night and a day.

On November 7, 1938, Grynszpan went to the German embassy on the Rue de Lille and asked to see the ambassador. An undersecretary, Ernst Vom Rath, was sent to the anteroom to find out what the visitor wanted. Grynszpan pulled a gun and shot at Vom Rath repeatedly, killing him.

“Being a Jew is not a crime,” Grynszpan told the press after his arrest. “I am not a dog. I have "Being a Jew is Not a Crime": Photo of Herschel Grynszpan after his arresta right to live, and the Jewish people have the right to live on this earth. Wherever I have gone, I have been hunted like a beast.”

By a terrible coincidence, the shooting came on the twentieth anniversary of imperial Germany’s capitulation to the allies—which the Nazis and other German antisemites blamed on the Jews, who had allegedly stabbed the nation in the back. On the night of November 9, the Nazis used Grynszpan’s reckless protest as a pretext for retaliation. The date would forever be known as Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass. The New York Times described “a wave of destruction, looting, and incendiarism unparalleled in Germany” since the seventeenth century.

The specter of Grynszpan briefly haunted the world; like a blazing silhouette, he had in an instant illuminated the deepest contradictions and challenges facing his people and all of oppressed humanity. The Jews had dedicated themselves to the common welfare of themselves and their Gentile neighbors for many centuries. Was it good for them to struggle for universal justice, even if they remained crushed by their fate as outsiders? Or should they declare that they, like the multitude of Gentile nations, had a particular interest to guard and nurture? Could Jews defend themselves? Could they take up the sword when threatened?

Only in America would this question never need to be directly posed. Only in America would Jews experience, miraculously, a permanent liberty and security. “Only in America” became a Jewish meme, employed to describe the almost dreamlike quality of life here.

Yet if American Jews were never threatened with such an outburst of medieval horrors, neither were they able to feel perfectly at ease. Though it is largely forgotten today, the Great Depression produced homegrown fascist movements that targeted Jews as the cause of American social and economic ills.

There were no American Jewish or Zionist lobbies with such power as exist today. American Jews were gaining political influence but still weak in social weight, with a leadership grossly hesitant to appear too assertive, as the Grynszpan case showed.

The New York Times, Jewish-owned but sunken in a cowardly attitude of constraint about asserting any Jewish interest, treated Grynszpan with barely concealed contempt. The Times referred to his having studied Hebrew but with “no intention of becoming a rabbi,” and later headlined the young man’s description of the shooting as “carried out in a trance.”

The leading American Jewish communal organizations, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Anti-Defamation League (ADL), produced no press releases or other emergency statements defending Grynszpan.

The American Communist party, anxious to draw attention away from its significant Jewish membership, treated the events in Germany ambiguously. The Communist paper referred to Grynszpan as “grief-crazed” and referred to Goebbels as a member of “the extreme antisemitic wing of Nazism”—as if such distinctions meant anything.

As the years went by, the Stalinists who described Grynszpan as insane were echoed by others. No less a figure than Hannah Arendt joined in the denigration of Grynszpan figure than Hannah Arendt described Grynszpan as “a psychopath, unable to finish school, who for years had knocked about Paris and Brussels, being expelled from both places.”

Today, Jews remain ambivalent about Grynszpan; he is seen by most as a warped and tormented figure whose only significance is that he helped bring about the tragedy of European Jewry—as if the Holocaust would not have occurred if Grynszpan had not murdered Vom Rath.

The treatment of Grynszpan by history, including by Jewish chroniclers, raises the issue of the morality to which Jewish self-defense must be held. Jews employed violence to protect their communities in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. They would do so again after the foundation of the state of Israel, but more regularly and with greater effectiveness.

Yet such behavior has almost always been greeted with disquiet by Jews and non-Jews alike. Under what circumstances is it permissible for Jews to commit acts of assassination, terror, and military conquest in the name of self-defense? This would become the great question of the twentieth century for the Jews, and a major challenge for the world—and so it persists.

And what of the desperate youth himself? His ultimate fate is unknown today. Grynszpan never saw trial. He was held in the French prison of Fresnes until June 1940 when he was sent south by the Parisian authorities, to a jail in Bourges. On the way he experienced a brief period of freedom when the train he was riding was attacked by German aircraft. In Bourges, he was kidnapped by the Nazis and transferred to Germany, where he disappeared in the night and fog of the Holocaust. He vanished without a trace, although rumors later proliferated describing his survival somewhere in France.

Still, the lessons of Grynszpan grow in relevance with every passing day. The situation today cannot be compared with that of the 1930s, of course. Even the undeniably great threat posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not bring us back to the 1930s. Israel and the Western powers are determined to confront and curb the hallucinated Iranian, and Israel will maintain its security.

My concern, however, has been for the future of American Jews in a society where the mainstreaming of anti-Jewish prejudice currently advances, and the Jewish establishment has been weak in its response. Once again, Jewish leaders appear too frightened to assert themselves.

Why was the campaign to identify the atrocities of September 11, 2001, with an Israeli conspiracy ignored by American Jewish leaders as beneath notice? The agitators responsible for that libel should be named and shamed.

Why was Michael Lerner met with indifference when he announced his belief that the U.S. government might be complicit in 9/11—declaring himself “agnostic” on the question? Lerner describes such arguments about Israeli involvement as “baloney”—hardly an appropriate response to such an attack. Would it be appropriate to merely dismiss the blood libel as “baloney?”

Why was the pamphlet against the Jewish lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, which resembled nothing so much as a nineteenth-century German academic outburst of “anti-Semitismus,” met with so feeble a public response? Jewish and other students should have gathered at the offices of Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago and Walt at the Harvard Kennedy School, and disrupted their work nonviolently, with signs and shouts. Further, the historic Jewish-associated publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, has contracted to put their pseudo-academic propaganda in a nice binding and dust jacket. Why does Tom Friedman or any other Jewish writer not break relations with the house? Why has no boycott been organized against FS&G? The freedom of speech and the right to publish do not include the right to be insulated from criticism.

The Jewish historian and essayist Tony Judt complained that free speech had disappeared from America, because a Polish diplomatic facility in New York—which is, after all, the property of the Polish authorities—refused to sponsor his speech. Judt alleged the Poles had been pressured by Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, but why did Judt not address his reproach to the Polish government? Perhaps because he knows the Poles have no interest in acquiring a reputation for coddling Israel-baiters.

We’re told that critics of Israel and the American Jewish community have their views suppressed. And yet Noam Chomsky, a ferocious critic of Israel and the American Jewish leadership, is the most adulated figure in American academic life. If this is “suppression,” the word has no meaning. A community hesitant to speak out in its own defense cannot even discourage insults, much less silence them.

The German intellectual Theodor W. Adorno declared that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. Perhaps he was right; the great Jewish poet Paul Celan, who challenged that view, finally committed suicide, as did other survivor-authors. But some Jewish poets who died in the Holocaust left messages of fire, like the deed and words of Herschel Feibel Grynszpan, for those who would come after. The Hungarian Jew Radnoti Miklos, executed on a forced labor march, wrote during his ordeal:

“I knew there was an angel, sword in hand, behind me—there in my time of trouble to guard and defend me… Where the angel with his sword was standing once/There may be nobody.”

- by Head Wide Open

Herschel Grynszpan: Martyr

Some other points

Herefore are some more comments on Miron's article "The Search for Jewish Nationalism" from Head Wide Open and Alex 'Eisod', which we decided to publish as a separate post.

After examining in further detail some of the positions associated with this nascent movement, I'd like to inject some of my own thoughts and critiques.

a Israel

My own personal position is that of general support for Israel but rejection for the typical Zionist position. I have been to Israel and while I found it a beautiful and inspiring place, I do not consider it "my" country. Rather it belongs to the pioneers who built it and struggled for it. I have observed that cheerleading for Israel has often taken the place of any broader and more nuanced Jewish identity. "Zionism" is an anachronism. If the purpose of Zionism is the establishment of a Jewish state, that state has been established. By turning the recognition of the existence of a nation into an "ism," we only propagate Israel's status among many minds as a rogue or artificial state. Israelis need to further coalesce their own identity as a Levantine state, and the paranoid, ghetto mentality of the Israel-or-nothing diaspora, most pathetically symbolized by the alliance with Christian Zionists who would see the Jews convert with the coming of Christ, is in the long run harmful to Israel's nationhood. Let us tap our own rich diaspora histories and let the Israelis build on theirs, rather than attaching our whole identity to a nation which is of course dear to us, but is not synonymous with Judaism and the Jewish people.

a The Holocaust/Anti-Semitism

A touchy issue of course, though I speak as one with no near relatives who suffered. So it's perhaps easier for me to say this but: let us not be defined by our tragedies. The litigious pursuit of marginal white supremacists is counter-productive, bringing more attention to them than less. Would Ernst Zundel be in the papers if he wasn't constantly being prosecuted? Of course not. He'd be a deranged hack with a website like thousands of others. One of the most heartening things I came across in recent times was the Israeli Holocaust cartoon contest, in response to the Iranian debacle. Now there is a brilliant, subversive and classically Jewish way to fight our enemies: expose their ridiculousness through our own free speech and superior irony. Let us focus less on Jewish lawyers and more on Jewish wit in fighting the useful idiots. If we want to create more anti-Semites, let's continue to sue fools and throw our suffering in people's faces. If we want to win sympathy, let's focus on the ingenuity, industriousness and humour which have earned our people respect.

a Religion

Personally I am not observant, though I come from an observant family. I understand the secularist attitudes of this group, and mostly agree. However I think it's counterproductive and ahistorical to ignore the fact that our nation through much of its history has been a nation of priests. Religion is strongly entwined with Jewish identity. From my understanding Russian Jews tend far more towards secularism, which is fine. But even if we don't believe the Bible, it is still our national mythology. The Ethiopians have the Kebra Negest, the Icelanders have their Viking sagas, the Chinese the Confucian aphorisms etc. So I support the secular orientation of this group, but think that we should respect the religious aspect of our history even if we don't agree with all its precepts. Let us not forget that the Jewish religious scholar tradition is part of the reason so many Jews went on to become successful and world-changing intellectuals, and why we tend to be an extremely educated and literate people.

- by Head Wide Open

Israel is not "my" state either and I don't feel connected with its middle eastern nature. I just not into this lifestyle! But still I love and cherish all good Israeli people who managed to do a helluva good stuff while being surrounded by hostile environment. So they have my respect yet I do not wish to live among them because its just not my place. My spiritual motherland is a European Diaspora who may not exist on the maps but do exist in hearts and minds of Ashkenazi Jewry.

As to various Jew-haters, well the prosecution is the best advertise for them, because in every age and epoch you can find some people who hate Jews with passion and ready to become martyrs of anti-Jewish struggle. So best way to deal with such kind its ridicule them, not prosecute!

As about religion...well its one really sensitive question, so before I say something, it would be interesting to hear your thoughts both on Judaism and its heretical offsprings such as modern non-orthodox movements, Sabbatianism, different kabbalist sects...

- by Alex 'Eisod'

Some other points

Horizontal Jewry VS. Vertical Jewry

When the material about Jewish Nationalism from Miron Fyodorov had first been published a year ago, it met vast criticism. From all opinions the following statements, which can be considered a typical reaction of someone who beholds a traditional left-liberal (sometimes libertarian) point of view attracted most of our attention. Below is Miron's answer to those arguments.

a Kinship "I am opposed to the given interpretation of this slogan, i.e. the necessity to build a nation by singling out a group of people according to their blood kinship. Generally, I don’t think it’s practical to establish a single and everlasting definition of Jewishness separating Jews from non-Jews. In each given historical period, a different definition may reflect the current position of the Jews most fully. The most sensible common denominator for such variation is ‘liberal/cultural’, i.e. a Jew is anyone who is prepared to join the Jewish civilization in any of its traditional/existing or non-traditional/prospective forms. I believe that one can belong to the Jewry at the same time as belonging to other similar national or quasi-national groups. For every person or group sharing the Jewish identity their Jewishness must not necessarily be the only thing they identify with, but one among a whole complex net of national and cultural identities which can, for example, simultaneously include a French or ‘Queer nation’ identity, etc."

A nation, unless it is an ongoing breeding experiment, cannot ever be ethnically “pure”. On the periphery, there will always be ethnically distinct groups associated with the nation through socio-cultural, economic or geographic factors. In the case of the Jewry, these are converts to Judaism (both as individuals and as groups) as well as those whose Jewish blood is either minimal or non-existent, but who see certain benefits in joining the Jewish nation by means of false claims to a Jewish ancestry (e.g. Slavic ‘repatriants’ to Israel).

Both processes are natural and no one should be excluded on the grounds of ‘race-laws’; on the contrary, new blood, if taken up in small amounts, enriches the gene-pool. But these processes take place automatically: if there’s a stable core, there will always be a less stable periphery. There is no need to cater for the needs of the periphery by including it in the definition of the Jewry: our priority is the definition of the core, the periphery will follow.

To be able to join something from the outside that something has to exist first. That is, the core of the Jewish nation must be clearly defined so that the periphery can identify with it – and today, that definition is only effective if based on genetic affilation. What you call the ‘Jewish civilization’ is the periphery; to be called Jewish at all this civilization has to have an ethnic core around which it can evolve. ‘Culture’, ‘civilization’, even ‘nation’ in its current popular usage are all too vague: the ‘French nation’ includes both Arabs and Chinese. This is why JN is ethno-nationalistic, but not racist. Intermarriage: yes, for our blood will prevail; multinationalism: no. This system has worked for other cultures for millennia.

a Democracy and anarchism "I fully support the idea of a horizontal system. Moreover, I reject the idea of a national state, whether Jewish or not, in almost any of its forms. Ex-territorialism must be a most important aspect of how the Jewry organizes itself."

It is important to understand that JN is not opposed to the idea of national states per se: we would gladly have our own state, or states (as Obadiah Shoher suggests in ‘Samson Blinded’, proposing the break-up of the current ‘Jewish’ state into Judea and Israel). What makes us resort to national-anarchism is that in today’s world, no Jewish state will really be Jewish. Wherever Jewish statehood will appear, it will be established by exterior forces using the Jewish desire for self-determination for their own ends: geopolitical, economical, military and occult. We have seen this in the case of Israel’s puppeteers; we are bound to see it elsewhere. Our national-anarchism is not founded on aesthetics, or the love for Bob Black and Hakim Bey: it is a pragmatic, temporary strategy for the coming century. Thus we are not opposed to the states we live in and do not desire their downfall; but we realize the need to prepare for their disintegration by building our own power structures.

a Defense "Defense must work effectively on all levels, both on the suggested direct level and various others: the ideological, the economical, etc. Limiting oneself to the least effective forms of defense does not seem right. I must also note that the creation and exploitation of various guilt complexes for atrocities against both Jews and non-Jews is currently one of the most effective forms of defense. This is what should determine the attitude towards the Holocaust and the ideology of defending human rights. Sustaining the general level of tolerance in a society by all means necessary, staying in close contact and cooperation with other horizontally organized minorities – all of this is a much more effective than using direct violence. At the same time though, the hyper-concentration of the Jewish consciousness on a single event in Jewish history certainly isn’t a positive thing. At the heart of the Jewish consciousness must lie the Jewish history in all its variety. Finally, the most important (though not exclusive) form of battling anti-Jewish ideologies must not be violent conflict but their integration into the existing social structure as a sort of minor and unimportant element, eclipsed by a broad range of others. Generally speaking, the main form of defense must be an 'International of closely linked minorities working together'."

The ideological measures you are suggesting (indoctrination of non-Jews, creation of guilt complexes, a focus on human rights, positioning ourselves as a vulnerable minority, relying on the goyim state for protection) have been employed for the last 50 years all over the Western world and are the current strategy of the Diaspora. They have failed. 41% of the British population, traditionally one of the most philosemitic in Europe (at least superficially so), have responded to a survey saying that a new holocaust can easily happen in the UK. And they’re right, it can happen among any local host population; my favourite near-anagram is ‘local host – holocaust’.

If anything, creating a guilt-ridden host population through indoctrination naturally fuels anti-Jewish sentiments instead of extinguishing them. Relying on the state for protection gradually erodes the instinct for self-preservation. It is not the goyim who are the real victims of the holocaust industry and Jewish ultra-liberal propaganda in the media, but the Jews themselves. Our non-verbal defense mechanisms have died off. We have no backbone, no self-protection of even the most basic kind; in this respect, we are not even a nation. This is why JN believes in a world-wide anti-Jewish conspiracy: we have been tricked into thinking we are safe, again and again, we have been brainwashed and taught to brainwash ourselves.

Every ‘vertical’ defense mechanism presented to us as the new means of securing our safety, such as large-scale Jewish presence in the media, politics and economics, is fake. However often we repeat the prescribed mantras of tolerance and multiculturalism, they will not protect us. Jews are the world’s village idiots cruelly mocked by being told they run the village. We are the naïve scapegoats employed to cover up the machinations of goyim governments and mafias.

There is only one solution to this sorry state we are in: horizontal structures of grassroots self-protection. At first, these will, no doubt, be pathetic: a tiny class of krav-maga pupils here, a sports summer camp turned nationalists there, an old village barn turned into a shooting range, an underground seminar on anti-Jewish occupation, etc. One will rightly ask how this ridiculous activity can possibly compare with the existing levers of supposedly Jewish power: the world banking system, the US think-tanks, the high-tech State of Israel with its air force and nuclear weapons?

The answer is simple: these measures will actually be Jewish, with no one else pulling the strings. Because none of the above are. It’s great to have a tank division or a nuclear missile for protection, but it’s not really ours. It’s great to control banks and governments as we do in ZOG conspiracy theories and hyper-zionist fantasies, but we never did that nor shall do. In reality, they control us, not vice versa, and there’s no way we can turn the game around. But we can opt out. That they won’t expect or take seriously, and when they will, it will be too late to stop us.

You may be surprised, but we do not want to ‘battle anti-Jewish ideologies’ at all: that is both difficult and futile. What we need are deterrents against potential aggression. I am sorry to say this, but liberal bubbles are there to be pierced: I think your view of the world is somewhat naïve. How are you planning to cooperate with the Arab or Chechen or Muslim minority, being both Jewish and gay (as far as I gathered from your journal)? I don’t think you will be welcomed OR safe if you try that. The state and its safety net will disintegrate, there is no question about that. Which network will be able to protect you then? The ‘Queer nation’? Non-White minorities? White nationalists? Come on, man. If there will be one group to protect you, it will be Jewish nationalists, your own people. And it is in your interest, as it is in the interest of all of us, to ensure that we are as strong as possible when the collapse happens.

- by Miron Fyodorov

Horizontal Jewry VS. Vertical Jewry

The Search for Jewish Nationalism

The following article of mine, "The Search for Jewish Nationalism", was kindly published by Troy Southgate in the latest issue of his Synthesis webzine. This choice of publisher was dictated by the plain fact that no Jewish website, whatever its political affiliation, would have accepted it. The article is a brief outline of the principles of Jewish Nationalism (JN); its aim is at least to provoke debate and hopefully bring together fellow-minded Jews. Please leave your comments, questions and suggestions below.

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One must admit that Jewish politics on the web are nothing short of a freak circus. Anarchist splinter-groups accusing each other of high treason, weedy Trotskyist shepherds quarrelling over a non-existent flock, orthodox Jews hurling Anti-Semitic slurs at the Reformists. Hyper-Zionists, rabid Anti-Zionists, Jews for Jesus, Jews in Neo-Nazi organisations: every aberration, every oddity has a niche of its own in this cacophonous bazaar of political superstition. And with all the wild juggling of political terminology going on, it is only natural to ask, “What about Jewish nationalism?”

Incredibly, no such thing exists. The most straightforward, healthy and innate political idea, that of nationalism, is simply missing from the spectrum of Jewish thought. The term itself does pop up every now and then, but is erroneously used interchangeably with “Zionism” and “Israeli patriotism”, though the former is not necessarily nationalist, and the latter not necessarily Jewish.

Nationalism holds that a nation, i.e. a distinct group of people of common descent, is the basic unit for human social life, and thus takes precedence over any other social and political principles.

Traditional Zionism, therefore, is not the same as Jewish nationalism, as it equates a nation looking back on two millennia of dispersion with a territory it came to inhabit only half a century ago, and asserts that territory’s sacral precedence over the nation. Whether secular or religious, Zionism, by claiming that all Jews should “repatriate”, subdues the Jewish nation to external forces – to history, geopolitics, and religion. But to do this means to place ideology before biology, for it is the concrete genetic code that determines one’s Jewishness, not, as many would have us believe, the vague abstractions of “culture” and “religion”. Contrary to wild speculations such as Koestler’s ‘Khazar theory’, genetic evidence (e.g. Hammer’s recent haplotype study) indicates that despite considerable exogamy, both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews are still fairly homogenous genetically and of a clear Middle-Eastern origin. A Jew is simply a person descended (fully or partly) from a particular Semitic ethnic group. Zionists may agree, but their approach puts that which is primary (blood kinship) after that which is secondary (geopolitics). Such a confusion of priorities is the exact opposite to what Jewish nationalism asserts: blood first, soil second; blood first, politics second. Zionism is not Jewish nationalism.

Nor is Israeli patriotism the same as Jewish nationalism; in fact, it is not even the same as Jewish etatism, for a Jewish state could have technically be founded anywhere, not necessarily Palestine (Argentine, Uganda and the Russian Far East have all been considered at some point, and the early 20th century Jewish Territorialist Organisation actively advocated establishing Jewish homelands wherever possible). Let us imagine for a second that Palestinians would, by means of a slow demographic takeover, become the majority population in Israel – a scenario not that improbable, considering that almost 1.5 million Arabs are now citizens of what was designed as a racialist Jewish state. In that case, Israelis of Arabic descent taking pride in their mostly Arabic state could be rightly called Israeli patriots. So to be an Israeli patriot, one does not even have to be a Jew – and yet under no circumstances could an Arab be a Jewish nationalist. Clearly, Jewish nationalism is not Israeli patriotism. So what is it then?

The answer is simple. Jewish nationalism (JN) holds that the optimal structure of the Jewish nation around the world is a decentralised network of democratically run, armed, secular communities of kinsmen. Thus it is based on four principles:

1. Kinship: To be a Jew is to have Jewish blood. Kinship ties come first, everything else second. 2. Democracy: To be among one’s kin is to be among equals. One Jew, one vote. 3. Defence: Kinship holds if kinsmen are strong. Democracy works if voters are armed. 4. Secularism: A Jew must be his own Lord, or else a slave.

Let’s look at these in more detail.

KINSHIP. We are not concerned with hierarchies based on the purity of Jewish blood, or with supposedly traditional matrilineality: whatever the intermarriage rate, Jewish blood prevails, for it is always the more distinct one. What we are concerned with is the nation as the totality of all those fully or partly of Jewish descent. Religion, ideology, acceptance or rejection of one’s ethnicity, the presence or absence of foreskin, one’s views on Israel – none of these external factors can make a person more or less Jewish. The degree of one’s Jewishness is invariable, fixed at the moment of conception. Genes do not simply vanish because a belief system requires them to; ideas, on the contrary, are man-made and variable. History teaches us that you either shed ideology in favour of your blood or shed your blood for an ideology. We therefore consider Jewish blood to be of primary worth: this is the sole source of our politics.

DEMOCRACY. So far, Jews attacked Zionism from the Left for its supposed imperialism, disregard for human rights and close ties with America (e.g. Chomsky), or else from the Ultra-Orthodox viewpoint for establishing a Jewish state before the arrival of the Messiah (e.g. Neturei Karta). We could not care less about “rights” or “religion”, but we care about our people. Jewish nationalism therefore criticizes Zionism from a Right-wing, secular point of view: for us, Zionism is simply not Right-wing enough. The violent evacuation of near-autonomous outposts like Amona has shown that the puppet-state of Israel can neither protect its own people nor enforce far-right values (individual liberty, armed democracy, private property) as successfully as a community of free and equal individuals bound by kinship ties. The furthest a state can go to the Right is Fascism, the unsavoury union of industrialists, clericalists and conservative bureaucrats, and the best democracy a state can offer is (mis)representative and plutocratic. It is the State and not the Left which is the true enemy of the Right. Rather than needing a state of its own, Jewish nationalism requires horizontal power structures existing parallel to the states where Jews now live – a world-wide network of private contacts, extended families, local communities, and trained militias. Jewish nationalism is by definition national-anarchist: no other approach will give us direct grassroots democracy which is essential for a nation’s self-sufficiency and self-esteem.

DEFENSE. In a globalised world, the traditional state is passing away as networks and communities flourish, and the very fact that today the state is struggling to tighten its grip on the individual is a sign of its decay. From blogging to hooligan firms, networks of all kinds are taking over the traditional functions of the state: information, defence, etc. The explosive issue of race relations, however, has not been extinguished by multiculturalism as predicted, and remains the crucial factor in uniting individuals into groups. New power structures are evolving, both internationally and locally, and, judging by demographics, it is only a question of time before large areas of Western cities will be patrolled by ethnic minority militias or subjected to Sharia law. All indicates that we have entered a century of unprecedented ethnic conflict in which communities bound by kinship will wage war against each other as well as the decaying State, and where tightly knit horizontal networks will successfully resist regular armies. With the temporal protection of the State gone, ordinary Jews will once again become victims of various ethnic, religious and political groups, and, judging by the vast problems Israel is experiencing today, it will not be able to provide the Diaspora with a safe haven. What we therefore need are our own horizontal security mechanisms, starting with individual physical fitness and including combat training, survivalism, firearms and militias. For inspiration, we must look to all historical precedents of Jewish grassroots defence structures, such as the early paramilitary defence groups in Europe and the British Mandate, or the Jewish mafia in American cities. From a fatally Holocaust-fixated, spineless tribe with a vague identity, depending on Gentile states for protection, Jews must evolve into a clearly defined nation of free, armed kinsmen, self-sufficient but ready to respond symmetrically to any aggression.

SECULARISM. The nationalism we envisage is enlightened and Western in character, putting the individual before the community, the community before the nation and the nation before everything else. Secularism is inseparable from this ideal: we are concerned with what is concrete and of immediate importance, such as biological identity and physical survival, not with metaphysical abstractions mutated into dogmas. However, our secularism is not merely anti-clerical, though we do, of course, firmly believe in the separation of religion and politics. Leaving the question of private faith for the individual to decide, and accepting a ‘private’ Judaism that is non-prescriptive, we nevertheless tend to go further. The religious view going hand in hand with Jewish nationalism is not lukewarm agnosticism but National-Atheism (the refusal to grant YHWH or any other being, even hypothetically, sovereignty over the Jewish nation) which in its extreme forms becomes National-Gnosticism, an open conflict with the “Jewish god”. It is irrelevant whether such a being exists or not, or whether it is a Demiurge or simply a national deity: what matters is the destructive influence its cult has on the Jewry, propagating the serf morality of Judaism and the fatal “chosen people” meme. If YHWH is dead, demented, displaced or if he simply never existed, then his cult must be opposed on the grounds of it being a waste of resources. If, however, he is the actual ruler of the Jews, then the Holocaust alone suffices to consider him an enemy and a usurper, and his cult an enemy force: “If God loves all that is anti-Jewish, the Jew must love all that is anti-God” (Ioan-Isidor Goldstein). Atheists tend to follow the former line, Gnostics the latter. Beside these two, no attractive alternatives exist as the search for non-Yahweist Jewish spirituality is still young, usually producing New Age mumbo-jumbo incompatible with nationalism, such as Jewicca. One appealing line of Jewish spirituality, however, which may be worth exploring because of its sound biological basis, is ancestor veneration. Yet whatever the options, our approach to spiritual matters is strictly non-dogmatic, the common denominator being secularism.

The search for Jewish nationalism is only about to begin. The basic principles have been formulated, the direction indicated; now is the time for all those who want to participate in shaping it. As a starting point, the LiveJournal community "Nationalist Jews"(rus) has been set up to stockpile ideas, discussions and contacts; please feel free to join, whatever your views.

Kinship, Democracy, Defence, Secularism. May we succeed.

- by Miron Fyodorov

The Search for Jewish Nationalism