A Racial Basis for Judaism?

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by Jonas E. Alexis

 

Eran Elhaik
Eran Elhaik

First of all, many thanks to Patrick Slattery for reading my second article on David Duke. I wish he would address some of the vital points I raised in the first article as well.

Let us cut to the chase, since we have too much to discuss. In response to my second article, Slattery writes,

“Duke cites the numerous genetic studies that show that, at least on the patrilinael side, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews are much more closely related to each other and to Middle Eastern populations in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria then they are to the European populations amongst whom they dwell.

“So there is a Jewish ethnicity, or at least a few closely related Jewish ethnicities, that can trace a good deal if not the bulk of their ancestry to the Middle East and the Hebrews of antiquity.”

Later he declares that “scientific genetic studies show (and they overwhelmingly do)” that there is “clear genetic evidence that [shows that] the Jews of today are related.”

Surely Slattery is aware of the prevailing assumptions which have come to dominate what one should call “Jewish science.” Slattery cites a 2012 article which was published by the Jewish Daily Forward to show that “Jews Are a ‘Race,’”[1] but Slattery does not even have the courage to let his readers know that the same magazine repudiated this very claim the following year![2]

In other words, readers who were hoping that Slattery was being objective could only see one side of this vitally important issue.

Is that fair? If he wanted to be objective, why didn’t he point this out? Are we really dealing with only scientific inquiry and intellectual honesty here? Well, the answer is a resounding no, and here’s why.

When Israeli-American geneticist Eran Elhaik of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health challenged Jewish biological determinism, which has enthralled some German and Jewish intellectuals and writers of various stripes for decades, he realized that much of the so-called facts and scientific evidence were cooked up to marshal a particular worldview.

Elhaik, of course, is thoroughly familiar with the literature and even read Jewish geneticist Harry Ostrer’s Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People. Now here is where ideology trumps real science. Elhaik asked Ostrer a simple question:

“It was a great pleasure reading your group’s recent paper, ‘Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era,’ that illuminate[s] the history of our people. Is it possible to see the data used for the study?”

In his response, Ostrer declared that the data he used could not be made available to Elhaik:

“It is possible to collaborate with the team by writing a brief proposal that outlines what you plan to do. Criteria for reviewing include novelty and strength of the proposal, non-overlap with current or planned activities, and non-defamatory nature toward the Jewish people.”[3]

Please, take some time to read the statement again. Ostrer has got to be kidding. He claims that he is doing science yet he cannot make the evidence available to other geneticists! This is obviously the work of an ideologue, not a serious scientist.

“Allowing scientists access to data only if their research will not defame Jews is ‘peculiar,’ said Catherine DeAngelis, who edited the Journal of the American Medical Association for a decade. “‘What he does is set himself up for criticism: Wait a minute. What’s this guy trying to hide?’”[4]

Judging from such an unscientific behavior, Elhaik had every reason to say, “First these researchers decided what conclusions they wanted to find, and then they set off to find evidence to support it.”[5]


Harry Ostrer
Harry Ostrer

Jews do not have bad or “superior” DNA in their systems. They are revolutionaries in the metaphysical and categorical sense because they willfully and categorically reject Logos, the essence of everything reasonable, logical, and orderly.

In the first century, the Jews rejected Christ and metaphysically attacked him. Once reason is abandoned, Talmudic mores and discourse take precedence. This Talmud, not DNA, is the essence of being Jewish and is also the essence of anti-reason and anti-order in their literal sense.[6]

This was one of the main issues in Poland during the 1600s. During that time, scholarship for the Jews was primarily drawn from two main currents: the Talmud and rabbinical literature.[7] Father of modern Jewish historiography Heinrich Graetz himself tells us:

“The study of the Talmud in Poland, established by Shachna, Solomon Lurya, and Moses Isserles, reached a pitch attained at no previous time, nor in any other country. The demand for copies of the Talmud was so great that in less than twenty years three editions had to be printed, no doubt in thousands of copies…

“The cultivation of a single faculty, that of hairsplitting judgment, at the cost of the rest, narrowed the imagination, hence not a single literary product appeared in Poland deserving the name of poetry.

“All the productions of the Polish school bore the Talmudic stamps, as the school regarded everything from the Talmudical point of view. The disciples of this school looked down almost with contempt on Scripture and its simple grandeur, or rather it did not exist for them…

“They knew something of the Bible from the extracts read in the synagogues, and those occasionally quoted in the Talmud…”

“A love of twisting, distorting, ingenious quibbling, and a foregone antipathy to what did not lie within their field of vision, constituted the character of the Polish Jews.

“Pride in their knowledge of the Talmud and a spirit of dogmatism attached even to the best rabbis, and undermined their moral sense…Integrity and right-mindedness they had lost as completely as simplicity and the sense of truth. The vulgar acquired the quibbling method of the schools, and employed it to outwit the less cunning.

“They found pleasure and a sort of triumphant delight in deception and cheating against members of their own race; cunning could not well be employed, because they were sharp-witted; but the non-Jewish world with which they came into contact experienced to its disadavantage the superiority of the Talmudical spirit of the Polish Jews.”[8]

Heinrich Graetz
Heinrich Graetz

Samuel Roth declared the same thing:

“The Polish Jew does not remain in Poland. He migrates. Eventually he finds himself a rich nest in England, in France, in Germany, in America, in one of the South American countries. To each of the counties of his invasion the Jew brings the whole bag of commercial tricks and statutory maneuvers with which he poisons the arteries of the civilized world.”[9]

This energized an anti-Jewish spirit among the Poles, for they knew that they were being cheated. This quickly led to violence among the Gentiles, who in 1638 “slew 200 Jews, and destroyed several synagogues.” Ten years later, Jews clung to the book of Zohar for Messianic revolution, and this again caused “bloody retribution,” during which both innocent and guilty Jews were slain.[10]

Because of this, both Jews and Gentiles died by the thousands in the same year. Within the next three years, anti-Jewish resistance led again to a bloody war that took the lives of thousands of Jews, and caused many others to move to places like the Netherlands, Bohemia, Austria, Italy, and Hungary.

Wherever they went, however, they took the study of the Talmud with them, bearing the same attitudes towards Gentiles.

“Far from giving up their own method in a foreign country, they demanded that all the world should be regulated by them, and they gained their point.”[11]


Israel Shahak
Israel Shahak

If one doubts that the Talmud is actually the essence of being Jewish, let us listen to Jewish historians and scholars themselves. Ken Koltun-Fromm, author of Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity, writes that for Hess “Jewish identity is rooted in a complex web of national and religious commitments.”[12]

Israeli academic Israel Shahak wrote,

“It became apparent to me, as, drawing on knowledge acquired in my youth, I began to study the Talmudic laws governing the relations between Jews and non-Jews, that neither Zionism, including its seemingly secular part, nor Israeli politics since the inception of the State of Israel, nor particularly the policies of the Jewish supporters of Israel in the diaspora, could be understood unless the deeper influence of those laws, and the worldview which they both create and express is taken into account.”[13]

Lloyd P. Gartner of Tel-Aviv University concurs in History of the Jews in Modern Times:

“Almost all Jews lived within the rich but constricted world of Judaism…Like Islam and Christianity, Judaism claims to be the truth…The path of life for a Jew was set forth in the sacred writings and summed up by rabbinic sages in law codes, whose prime source was the Talmud and its interpreters.”[14]

Jacob Neusner puts the issue even more simply, declaring that “the Talmud is the prism, receiving, refracting all light.” Neusner says that the centrality of the Talmud in Jewish thought and culture does not stop there, because it

“formed the starting point and the ending point, the alpha and the omega of truth; justify by appeal to the Talmud, rightly read, persuasively interpreted, and you make your point; disprove a proposition by reference to a statement of the Talmud and you demolish a counterpoint.

“In reading the written Torah itself, the Talmud’s exegesis enjoys priority of place…In all decisions of law that express theology in everyday action, the Talmud forms the final statement of the Torah, mediating Scripture’s rules.

“Innovation of every kind, whether in the character of the spiritual life or in the practice of the faith in accord with its norms, must find justification in the Talmud.”[15]

Graetz says that “the spiritual life of the Jews” is “ultimately bound up with the Talmud.”[16] During the thirteenth century, when thousands of copies of the Talmud were confiscated and burned by the Pope, the Jews realized that they could not “exist without the Talmud as without their souls,” and asked Pope Innocent IV permission “to retain their Talmudical writings.”[17]

Neusner and Graetz are not alone in acknowledging the centrality of the Talmud in the consciousness of the Jewish people. Robert Goldenberg, Professor of Judaic Studies at the State University of New York, tells us that

“the Talmud provided the means of determining how God wanted all Jews to live, in all places, at all times. Even if the details of the law had to be altered to suit newly arisen conditions, the proper way to perform such adaptation could itself be learned from the Talmud and its commentaries…The Talmud revealed God speaking to Israel, and so the Talmud became Israel’s way to God.”[18]

Isaac D’Israeli, whose son Benjamin Disraeli became British Prime Minister, declared,

“The Talmud…forms a complete system of the learning, ceremonies, civil and canon law of the Jews; treating indeed on all subjects.”[19]

D’Israeli also stated that “Judaism has been totally corrupted by the dictators of the human intellect, the Rabbins,”[20] for which, most likely, he would have been labeled anti-Semitic if he had not been a Jew.

Then comes Rabbi Yehiel ben Joseph, who tells us that “without the Talmud, we would not be able to understand passages in the Bible…God has handed this authority to the sages and tradition is a necessity as well as scripture…Anyone who does not study the Talmud cannot understand Scripture.”[21]

Finally, what about the testimony of Stephen Steinlight, former Director of National Affairs:

“I’ll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist…More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us.

“We were taught to view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we could rely on no one.”[22]


 DNA-double-helixIn short, the Talmud essentially determines what constitutes a Jew. As we have argued in the past, If DNA was the arbiter, then one must conclude that Christ and all his disciples and subsequent Jewish converts to Christianity over the centuries also had some bad DNA. Christ, then, was either a genetic defect or was probably not a Jew.[23]

Christ made things worse for the genetic theorists when he said that “salvation is of the Jews,” meaning that the central issue has little to do with race. Slattery or Duke never addresses those specific issues because those things will probably get them into trouble.

Slattery writes,

“And of course it is well known that, with the exception of those who undergo relatively rare conversion rituals, membership in the Jewish religion is based on birth as opposed to faith.”

What does Slattery mean by “rare conversion rituals”? We have already seen that it is highly presumptuous to say that “membership in the Jewish religion based on birth as opposed to faith.”

Many Jewish writers frame the issue that way so that they can continue to marshal the morally risible and essentially Talmudic idea that there is something special about being Jewish. If that were the case, then they would have to explain the following phenomenon to us:

“In 1962 Shmuel Oswald Rufeisen, known as ‘Brother Daniel,’ petitioned the High Court of Justice (the Supreme Court) to instruct the state [of Israel] to recognize him as a Jew by nationality. Rufeisen was born to a Jewish family in Poland in 1922, and as a teenager joined a Zionist youth movement.

“He fought as a partisan against the Nazi occupation and saved the lives of many Jews. At some point he hid in a monastery, where he converted to Christianity. After the war he studied for the priesthood, and in order to go to Israel he became a Carmelite monk.

“In 1958 he went to Israel because he wished to take part in the Jewish destiny and still saw himself as a Zionist. Having given up his Polish citizenship, he applied to become an Israeli citizen on the basis of the Law of Return, arguing that although he was a Catholic by religion, he was still a Jew by ‘nationality.’

“When his application was rejected by the Ministry of the Interior, he petitioned the High Court of Justice. By a four-to-one decision, the court rejected his petition to be given Israeli citizenship on the basis of the Law of Return. He was, however, granted an Israeli identity card, which stated, ‘Nationality: Not clear.’”[24]

Israeli historian Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University, who provides serious historical depth to the almost two-thousand-year-old conflict (though I would disagree with him on some issues), comments:

“Ultimately, Brother Daniel’s betrayal of Judaism by joining the religion of the Nazarene overcame the deterministic biological imaginary. It was categorically decided that there was no Jewish nationality without its religious shell.

“Ethnocentric Zionism needed the Halakhic precepts as its principal criteria, and the secular judges understood this national-historical necessity very well.”[25]

But that is not the end of the story:

“In 1968 Major Binyamin Shalit petitioned the High Court of Justice to order the minister of the interior to register his two sons as Jews. Unlike Brother Daniel, the mother of these boys was not a born Jew but a Scottish gentile.

“Shalit, a well-regarded officer in Israel’s victorious army, argued that his sons were growing up as Jews and wished to be considered full citizens in the state of the Jewish people. By what seemed a miracle, five of the nine judges who heard the petition decided that the boys were Jewish by nationality, if not by religion. But this exceptional decision shook the entire political structure.”[26]

The plot thickens: Israeli officials and geneticists, according to Sand, cannot use DNA to prove that they are descendants of Moses.

“Nurit Kirsh, who in recent years completed her doctoral dissertation at Tel Aviv University, has investigated the early stages of genetics research in Israel. Her conclusion is unambiguous: genetics, just like archaeology at the time, was a tendentious science subordinated to the national historical concept, which sought at all costs to discover a biological homogeneity among the Jews in the world.

“The geneticists internalized the Zionist myth and, consciously or not, attempted to adapt their findings to it…

“The Zionist idea of the Jewish nation-race materialized as a solid life science, and a new discipline was born: ‘Jewish genetics.’ What could be more convincing than publication in respected journals in the Anglo-Saxon world?

“The gates of Western canonical science—mainly in the United States—opened to the industrious Israeli researchers, who regularly blended historical mythologies and sociological assumptions with dubious and scanty genetic findings.

“Despite the limited resources available in Israel for academic research, it became a world leader in the ‘investigation of the origins of populations.’”[27]

The doctrine of Jewish genetics dominated Israel and much of the West for years, but by 2000, Haaretz messed things up by declaring that

“the genetic resemblance between the Jews and the Palestinians, discovered by previous research, did not exist. The scientists admitted that their earlier experiment had not been sufficiently grounded and detailed, and that its conclusions had been hasty.

“In fact, the Jews—or, at any rate, the male ones—were related not to the neighboring Palestinians but rather to the distant Kurds. The new paper, published first by the American Society of Human Genetics, showed that the sly Y-chromosome had fooled its inexperienced investigators…

“A new scientific study that investigated the mitochondrial DNA (which is inherited only from the mother) in nine Jewish communities discovered that the origin of the supposedly kosher Jewish women did not lie in the Near East at all.”[28]


In response to my claim that if there is a racial basis for Judaism, then Duke is implicitly supporting Jewish genocide in the Middle East, Slattery writes,

“[H]ow does Alexis get from there to his assertion that this would mean Jews have ‘every moral right to land on Palestinian bodies and crush them?’ How many people around the world are living in the same lands they (among many other peoples before and after) were two or three thousand years ago? The European tribal ancestors of the Irish were on Great Britain.

“The ancestors of the British tribes were in central and northern Europe. The ancestors of the Japanese were in Korea. The ancestors of the Zulus were in central Africa. Yet none of them would stake a claim on that ancestral homeland of millennial past.”

First of all, that does little to minimize the point I was making. Sure, the ancestors of the British tribes were in central and northern Europe, but are they living in Africa? As far as I know, they are still living in Europe. The ancestors of the Japanese are still living in Asia. The ancestors of the Zulus are still living in Africa.

Secondly, Slattery misses the overarching point, which I tried to emphasize in both David Duke articles: Darwin predicted that survival of the fittest was the way to move forward. Darwinism is merciless, cruel, and cut-throat competition, not the sort of kind and peaceful diversity that Duke is currently advocating.

According to Darwinian principles, the weak, the “imbeciles,” the “lamed,” by extension, will have to die in the struggle for life. How Duke or Slattery can promote a Darwinian paradigm without even touching on those issues is beyond comprehension.


 Slattery made some statements which implicitly put him in mid-air:

“[T]here is absolutely nothing in international law that would lend any support to Jews or any other group reconquering a long lost homeland…

“No person would dare say that because a group lived somewhere two thousands [sic] years ago they would have the right to come in and steal the land and terrorize, murder, torture and ethnic cleanse the inhabitants who lived there.”

First of all, those statements are impressively incoherent from a Darwinian point of view precisely because, according to Darwinian metaphysics, might makes right. As The famed Scottish evolutionary anatomist and anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith (1866-1955) put it in Evolution and Ethics, if evolution is true,

“then we have to abandon the hope of ever attaining a universal system of ethics [because] the ways of national evolution, both in the past and in the present, are cruel, brutal, ruthless, and without mercy…

“Meantime let me say that the conclusion I have come to is this: the law of Christ is incompatible with the law of evolution—as far as the law of evolution has worked hitherto. Nay, the two laws are at war with each other; the law of Christ can never prevail until the law of evolution is destroyed.”[29]

If Darwin is right, then Jews have every right to follow the struggle for existence. Keep in mind that when Rome destroyed the Jewish Temple in A.D. 70, thousands upon thousands of Jews went to slavery and misery and calamity were everywhere.

In other words, if we follow the Darwinian paradigm, then it can be extrapolated that one thousand years from now, David Duke or Slattery’s indignation about Zionism trampling on the rights of the Palestinians will be proved meaningless and irrelevant because the Jews may eventually triumph over their enemies.

Slattery called the Khazarian theory an “unsupportable view.” But there is historical evidence which suggests that the theory is far more plausible and historically satisfying than the view that Jewish behavior is genetic.[30]


 Slattery took issues with the idea that if the issue is really genetic, then the ultimate way to solve the problem is to eradicate the person carrying the bad genes. He appeals to evolutionary psychology to buttress the claim that there might be a genetic basis for behavior.

Once again Slattery takes these things on faith and never tells his readers that numerous scholarly studies have shown that the metaphysical nature of evolutionary psychology is not as solid as people think it is.[31]

Furthermore, he ignores the fact that biology, as Jewish geneticist Richard C. Lewontin himself has declared, can be used for social and political needs. And scientific frauds, forgeries and fabrications are rampant in the academic world. One of the most vivid frauds happened in 2010, when it was discovered that evolutionary psychologist Marc D. Hauser of Harvard for example cooked up many of his “evidence” and even tried to force his students to accept his theory without serious examination.

“Modern biology,” Lewontin wrote, “is characterized by a number of ideological prejudices that shape the form of its explanations and the ways its researches are carried out.”[32]

Those “prejudices” are the worldviews that lurk beneath the surface, and many times they cannot be easily detected without an exhaustive examination. On many occasions, some scientists cannot even challenge those “prejudices” because they might lose their job. In fact, many scientists are being blacklisted by academia simply because they seem to suggest that things in nature look as if they were designed.[33]


 If Slattery is appealing to evolutionary psychology to marshal the claim that there is a racial basis for Judaism, then his position again is really in a bad shape precisely because, according to the premises as articulated by evolutionary psychologists and philosophers, man does not have freewill, which means that Jews simply cannot choose between good and evil. If that is the case, how again should the Jewish question be solved? This reminds me of John Calvin, who posited that God decreed from eternity to eternity that Mr. X goes to hell but somehow Mr. X is responsible for that.

Moreover, evolutionary psychology tells us that there is no serious distinction between the brain and the mind, that man is just material stuff, and that this universe was all an accident! We are just robots and machines.[34] Listen to Daniel Dennett:

“We are each made of mindless robots and nothing else, no non-physical, non-robotic ingredients at all.”[35]

Dennett elaborated on this idea in his book Kinds of Minds:

“We are descended from robots, and composed of robots, and all the intentionality we enjoy is derived from the more fundamental intentionality of these billions of crude intentional systems.”[36]

Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett

Psychiatrist Frank Ervin and neurosurgeon Vernono Mark write:

“Once we are aware that thinking is a physical process, Aristotle’s ‘soul’ and Descartes’ ‘mind’ are no longer useful concepts.”[37]

Similar assertions are found in the work of neuropsychologist Chris Frith of University College of London. The purpose of Frith’s book Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World, is to

“show that [the] distinction between the mental and the physical is false. It is an illusion created by the brain. Everything we know, whether it is about the physical or the mental world, comes to us through our brain…

“By seeing through these illusions created by our brain, we can begin to develop a science that explains how the brain creates the mind.”[38]

Some scientists have even attempted to show how brains think![39] Laurence Tancredi argues in his book Hardwired Behavior that

“Though it is indeed a social construct, morality gets its timelessness and universality from the human brain.The community’s demands for cohesiveness and continued existence—its own ideas of what is appropriate human behavior—brought into play certain qualities that were already present in the human brain.”[40]

Tancredi goes on to say that “the underlying foundation for morality appears more and more to be in our biology, hardwired in the brain.”159 Tancredi even believes that “the brain directs the mind.”

This is an Enlightenment principles which people like Lametrie propagated in books such as Man: A Machine.

There is no doubt that neuroscientists are able to “dissect” the brain and discover and label its components. Yet the idea that our physical brain matter has the capacity to think and reason is irrational, inadequate, and unscientific. As neuroscientist Mario Beauregard points out,

“Materialism has no workable science model for consciousness and no idea how to acquire one.”[41] Nobel laureate Sir John Eccles once noted that the brain is “a machine that a ghost can operate.”[42]

In other words, the brain cannot think on its own. The real person inside does the thinking, and tells the brain what to do. Hence the old saying “Use your brain,” not “Let your brain use you.”

As a corollary, your brain is not the operator, but the machine. You tell your brain what it must do, and the brain acts on that basis. Your physical brain does not think, reason, experience love and emotion, or have the capacity to discern between truth and error, justice and injustice, right and wrong, etc.

However, because reductionists do not want to admit that man is more than a physical entity and that we all are creatures of Logos or God, they are trapped into the materialist thinking that the brain does their thinking.

In addition, if man is more than material stuff, there might be some evidence which seems to suggest that non-physical elements such as the soul and spirit actually exist. There might also be some evidence which points toward the idea that man is not actually in charge of the universe—God is—and that one day we all will be accountable to him.

When materialists are confronted with requests to provide evidence for this madness, they have no answer. For example, in a heated debate between Richard Dawkins and David Quinn, Dawkins’s quick answer to the question of free will was that he was “not interested in it.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7SfEXAQTkA

Dawkins declares at the beginning of The Selfish Gene:

“We are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”[43]

Yet, in the last paragraph of the same book, Dawkins writes:

“We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination…We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”[44]

In essence, Dawkins is saying that we can choose whether or not to rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. If Dawkins is not interested in free will, why then is he smuggling free will into his writings? Either humans have no free will or we have the capacity to choose; Dawkins cannot have both.

Yet Dawkins, like his fellow materialists and indeed Slattery, is locked into this mumbo jumbo because Darwinism and materialism have not been able to provide a serious metaphysical model for the world.


 Then Slattery claims,

darwin“So if it turns out that Jews have a higher genetic propensity for ethnocentrism than most other groups, does that mean that they have to be annihilated?

“How ridiculous! Anthropologists could point to dozens of tribes around the world, from the Amazon to New Guinea, that believe they are the only true humans. The Eskimos call themselves Inuit, which means ‘the people,’ and they are hardly the only group that refers to themselves with such a moniker.

“If one has a genetic propensity to alcoholism, he should avoid alcohol and never turn on those genes. If one has a genetic bias for weight gain it makes sense to watch your diet.

“Duke reiterates ad ad nauseam that violence against the problem of Jewish supremacism would be above all morally unthinkable, not to mention completely ineffective.”

I am well aware that Duke talks about abstinence from violence. In fact, I pointed this out very clearly in the first David Duke article. What I am saying is that if one follows the conclusion that Jewish behavior is genetic, and that if this behavior has been around for centuries and has produced really negative consequences for much of the world, how does one deal with that issue seriously? What would Darwin say?  I’ll let Slattery answer that question.

Furthermore, why would Slattery be mad when Jews follow the genetic principles which Slattery himself has articulated?


 What we are seeing here is that Slattery and Duke have raised the issues that Christ repudiated throughout his ministry. Obviously we come face to face with two models: the essentially materialist model, which is consistently compatible with Talmudic disputations, and the essentially Christian model.

The-Selfish-GeneAccording to the Christian model as articulated by the Church and early Church fathers such as Augustine, Justin Maryr and others, the word Jew can fall into two categories: ethnic and theological.  God is the creator of ethnicity and the issue certainly does not lie there.

But the Jewish question is, at bottom, theological, not DNA or ethnic. We find similar implications when the Pharisees told Jesus that they are “Abraham’s seed” and therefore “Abraham is our father” (John 8:33, 39).

In other words, they were declaring that they are God’s chosen people by blood and therefore Jesus had no business telling them to believe in Him in order to be a part of God’s family.

Jesus denied their claims by saying, “If ye were Abraham’s children, ye would do the works of Abraham,” which means that they would believe in Him, for “Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad” (John 8:39, 56).

They further declared that God was their father, to which Jesus responded, “If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me” (John 8:42).

After a long back-and-forth conversation, Jesus told them, “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do” (John 8:44). They eventually tried to kill Jesus, but He “hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by” (John 8:59).

From this point on, anyone who dared to say that Jesus was the Messiah or the Son of God was cast out of the temple (see John 9). As we have already seen, Israel today reiterates that theological system by refusing to give citizenship to Jews who converted to Christianity, which means that the issue is not about DNA and blood.

The gospels largely mark the beginning of the key issues which would set Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism apart for centuries to come, and though some scholars erroneously believe that the conflict happened later, the New Testament and historical writings make it clear that the theological divergence happened during the time of Jesus’ ministry.[45]

Some modern scholars, many of them Jewish, have even gone so far as to propose the historically and theologically untenable idea that the two systems never parted.[46] Not so. They parted from the beginning, and the teachings of the Pharisees evolved into Rabbinic Judaism, which became the predominant worldview for the Jewish people.[47]

Those who followed the theological teachings of the latter routinely began to persecute Christians, and Paul lamented that those people “have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost” (1 Thessalonians 2:15-16).


Finally, I could not help but see how David Duke (in the video) completely builds a caricature of the Old Testament without any contextual analysis and historical exegesis and then demolishes it with great relish.

Why did God forbid the Israelites to marry other people? Why did God allow or ask the Israelites to kill the Amalekites? Why did he allow the Israelites to “enslave” non-Israelites?

Well, Duke never told us. He only cited passages to prove that it was morally repugnant. He then declared:

“I’m not taking anything out of context. This is no trick. Pause this video if you want and get your Bible and check out other verses, and check out thousands of other verses along these lines.”

Is this how historical scholarship is done?

The fact is that numerous scholarly studies have been done over the past decades discussing these issues in a much subtle but simple way,[48]  and the issues are not as black and white as Duke seems to portray. This issue is far too long to be discussed here. Perhaps I will address the historical context in March.

Furthermore, if Duke is right—that you can dismiss a serious issue by citing a number of passages here and there—then we can literally dismiss Darwin for what he wrote in The Descent of Man and On the Origin of Species: Or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Let us cite him again:

“We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skills to save the life of every one to the last moment…

“[If we] do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world.”[49]

As we have argued repeatedly, many British intellectuals of the same era said something similar, and the history of their ideological foundation has left a detrimental chapter in the twentieth century.[50]


One final point, Duke declares in the video that

“In truth, if you go back far enough, there is a common ancestor of all mankind. In fact there is a common ancestor for every form and variety of life on Earth. Each and every one of us is related. We are related to every other human being…We come actually from the stars themselves.”

Duke here is basing his statement on Darwinian metaphysics, which he cannot follow logically and consistently all the way through. The only people who have been consistent on this point are the social Darwinists in the nineteenth century because they had the intellectual courage to follow Darwin to the end. Darwin said in the Descent of Man:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the save races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes…will no doubt be exterminated.”

Yes, every human being is related, but we come from the stars themselves? And this is science?

Perhaps George Orwell was right in saying that there are some ideas that are so preposterous that only a few “experts” will believe them. And perhaps the Darwinian paradigm, which is mathematically incoherent and unsustainable,[51] has led people to believe the unbelievable. Atheist philosopher Michael Ruse was probably right when he stated,

Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledge alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality…

“This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.[52]

I honestly am not sure if Duke is aware of the serious debate in the evolutionary literature because on many occasions he only presents one side of the issue. The real issue boils down to the difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution.

Micro-evolution is a scientific theory which can easily be demonstrated. Macro-evolution is a philosophical undertaking which has little or nothing to do with real science. Duke seems to base many of his extraordinary claims on the latter.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHeSaUq-Hl8


[1] Jon Entine, “Jews Are a ‘Race,’ Genes Reveal,” Jewish Daily Forward, May 11, 2012.

[2] Rita Rubin, ‘‘‘Jews a Race’ Genetic Theory Comes Under Fierce Attack by DNA Expert,” Jewish Daily Forward, May 10, 2013.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Jim W. Dean, “New Genome Study Destroys Zionist Claims to Palestine,” VeteransToday.com, March 1, 2013.

[6] See Peter Schafer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

[7] See David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (New York: dover, 2004), 92-93.

[8] Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Vol. V (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1893), 4-6.

[9] Quoted in E. Michael Jones, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict Between Labor and Usury (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2014), 1187.

[10] Graetz, History of the Jews, Vol. V, 6-7.

[11] Ibid., 17.

[12] Ken Koltun-Fromm, Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 2.

[13] Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (New York: Pluto Press, 2004), 2.

[14] Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews in Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2.

[15] Neusner, Rabbinic Judaism: Structure and System (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1995), 205.

[16] Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Vol. III (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1893), 575.

[17] Ibid., 3:579.

[18] Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, 141.

[19] Ibid., 191.

[20] Ibid., 195.

[21] Ibid., 344.

[22] Stephen Steinlight, “The Jewish Stake in America’s Changing Demography,” Center for Immigration Studies, October 2001.

[23] I have had people telling me that the latter is the case and even sent me some nice pictures proving their case!

[24] Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (New York: Verso, 2009), 288-289.

[25] Ibid., 289.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid., 275-276.

[28] Ibid., 276-277.

[29] Arthur Keith, Evolution and Ethics (New York: Putnam, 1947), chapter 4.

[30] See for example Kevin Alan Brook, The Jews of Khazaria (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010).

[31] See for example Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Random House, 2000); Nancey Murphy and Warren S. Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Isabelle Peretz and Robert J. Zatorre, eds., The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). For similar studies, see Mario Beauregard, Brain Wars: The Scientific Battle Over the Existence of the Mind and the Proof that Will Change the Way We Live Our Lives (New York: HarperOne, 2013).

[32] Richard C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 41.

[33] I simply cannot take time to cite all the scientists who have suffered in this regard.

[34] See for example Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology

of Belief (New York: Ballantine, 2001).

[35] Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Penguin, 2003), 2-3.

[36] Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness (New York: Basic

Books, 1996), 55.

[37] Quoted in John G. West, Darwin Day in America: How our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2007), 93.

[38] Chris Frith, Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 17.

[39] See for example William H. Calvin, How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

[40] Laurence Tancredi, Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals About Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6-7.

[41] Beauregard and O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain, 120

[42] Sir John Eccles, The Neurophysical Basis of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), 285.

[43] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 215.

[44] Ibid., preface.

[45] See Douglas R. A. Hare, The Theme of Jewish Persecution of Christians in the gospel According to St. Matthew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[46] Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, ed., The Ways that never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).

[47] See Shaye D. J. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).

[48] See for example Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster: Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011); David T. Lamb, God Behaving Badly: is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist, and Racist? (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2011).

[49] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: The Modern Library, 1936), 901.

[50] Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Decline of Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002); Paul A. Lombardo, ed., A Century of Eugenics in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Robert Dowbiggin, Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880-1940 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1997); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Mark B. Adams, eds., The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, eds., Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996).

[51] See for example Fred Holy and Chandra Wickramasinghe Evolution from Space (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981); Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Philadelphia: Wistar Institute Press, 1966); See also William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Donald E. Johnson, Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability: A Call to Scientific Integrity (Charleston and Lexington: Booksurge Publishing, 2009).

[52] Michael Ruse, “Saving Darwinism from the Darwinians,” National Post, May 13, 2000.

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Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.