The Jews of Oxford and the forbidden weapons

You’ll see people say—gloat, really—over the historical fact that the Jews have been expelled time and again from various countries, whether Christian or Muslim. This is the case and, of course, in Western liberal democracies, this is a “hate fact” that contradicts conventional political indoctrination—where it is held that people disdain the Jews for “irrational” reasons, perhaps connected to religion, or, otherwise, connected to envy as regards their financial success (itself a “hate paradox”, because if you mention it in another context that the Jews are more wealthy than other social groups that is also taboo—it is only permissible to admit Jewish wealth when you say people envy them for it, yet to bring it up otherwise is hateful; and that is because the leftist belief system is just reaction formation, an attempt to keep reality at bay).

Yet, if you pause for another moment, the implicit inference that you are asked to make per “expulsion” does not hold—the inference is “the Jews are constitutionally bad, anything bad that has happened to them is deserved”. However, how can it then be that the Jews exist in societies for long periods before they are expelled? It’s not like the expulsion occurs in a decade—often, the Jews have been in a society for centuries before they are expelled or pogromed. This suggests that the relationship between host and Jew is not always negative.

The Jews can be symbiotic and parasitic upon a society—indeed, the period when the Jews are expelled or pogromed might be said to be the decadent stage in the relationship, not unlike a divorce in a modern marriage (the “seven-year itch”). The Jews are characterised by their cosmopolitan international nature; famously, this gave them an advantage in banking because at times when even paper currency had not been invented it was difficult to carry out financial transactions long-distance—the Jews, as an ethnocentric clannish group, could be trusted, basically through cousin networks, to transmit money about the place (Jewish blood could be likened to “biological cryptography” in the sense that the family network guaranteed safe transaction).

Further, the Jews were not only useful for financial services—once religion became homogenised in Europe under the Church there were certain things that were forbidden, and yet there are things that are forbidden that make the world go round. That is to say, in Jungian terms, you don’t always want to obliterate the unconscious—you want to integrate it, but you don’t want to become spotless (just like in the yin-yang symbol, the white has a little black in it and the black a little white—and the Mona Lisa a little mole, a little beauty spot).

So you always need gypsies, homos, crapulous monks, defrocked priests, actors, petty thieves, tarts, rough diamonds, starving artists, and, basically, Jews to do certain “dirty deeds” that are not perhaps “evil” but are a bit smutty and a bit borderline—certainly not respectable, like a smear of vaginal secretion on cotton panties. In other words, you need what used to be called bohemia—the place where people aren’t really bad but definitely aren’t good. You need some blue-light cabaret bar where deals can be done and leaked memos from foreign embassies can be “lost” and “found”.

So in at least these two respects, finance and the grey-zone, the Jews could be genuinely useful. To take a concrete example from my hometown, Oxford—the Jews, before they were expelled, used to provide a space for the king to store certain arms, crossbows and the like, that the pope, very much like the current hippy in the Vatican, had banned from Christendom on the grounds that such weapons encouraged unChristian warfare.

Now, I hold that life is strife and war is the king of all—if you don’t let people use all the weapons available to them then: a. you’ll lose; b. society will stagnate; c. wars will last longer and be more severe. So it was “good”, in situational and relational terms, to have those weapons stored by the Jews—and it would have been better if they had not been on the grey market at all, if their potential had been fully developed at once (if you want peace, prepare for war—the pope made the world more violent and vicious).

This gives you an idea as to how the Jews can be symbiotic with a society they live in—and not just as in the most well-known case, banking, which is always contentious because of course people take loans out from the Jews and nobody likes their banker (whether Jew or Gentile), that’s just how man is constituted. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that Jews did more than financial services—they were that necessary beauty spot (which, paradoxically, is ugly, because you need one little bit of ugliness to off-set the beauty for it to be beautiful, otherwise you’re in uncanny valley). The Jews could fulfil this role because they were a nation within a nation with their own moral code—and that was a situation that was “mutually beneficial”.

Until it wasn’t. There are obviously innumerable ways in which such a situation, however mutually beneficial at first, could become bitter—a grey-zone can turn from more than a grey-zone into something actively sinister and “evil”, i.e. it’s not just artists sipping absinthe and tarts at the piano but Jack the Ripper and the full evisceration game. Financial deals turn sour—nobody likes their banker, however fair he is; and at a certain point there is bound to be a clash (which is more pronounced because the official moral code doesn’t endorse the action undertaken anyway, you sort of feel guilty you resorted to usury in the first place—and rather than taking responsibility for that, you’ll punish the purveyor).

Ultimately, the Jews work the grey-zone because they can play all the sides—but, of course, you will never trust the person who plays all the sides (those who can’t belong, betray—as one of the Cambridge Spies, a homosexual, said). Even if one party is innocent, their general actions will seem disloyal whichever way the cake is cut—and while Jews have been loyal ministers to Ottomans and Americans alike, they have also opened the gates on Crusader castles and sold dar al-Islam down the river. Everybody hates a traitor—even the Soviets kept the Cambridge Spies at arms length when they defected, because man has an inherent revulsion against those who turn on their own (or those they have sworn loyalty to).

It is the misfortune of the Jews to be a mirror—they are a feminine race, like women, who are also mirrors—and what they mirror to Gentile societies is all the repressed content in that society that keeps it respectable (pornography, prostitution, usury, espionage, non-orthodox intellectual ideas). When people beat the Jew they beat the transgressions that always happen but are usually denied, they beat their own transgressions in the form of a man—“I’m clean, he’s dirty”.

For anti-Jewish people and philo-semites, the question is whether or not you will be “beastly” or “gentlemanly” to the Jews—and both sides are about as morally outraged as to whether you “love” or “hate” the Jews, both proud that they adore them or hate them (ashamed of their sins, or proud of their sins).

The actuality is more that the Jews are just cosmopolitan by nature, are biologically adapted to undertake certain activities, and due to the inherent need for “the naughty” are bound to play are role in activities that their host societies find “evil” (yet need in order to function—but your relationship with your drug-dealer is also ambiguous too, somewhere between a family member and a mortal enemy; you depend on him, but he’s poisoning you). Yet it is the case that the Jews are useful and beneficial to societies in certain circumstances, yet those very circumstances—already marginal—are fated to decay so that the relationship turns parasitic, and then the Jews are expelled.

It’s a rhythm—and to say “never again” is about as useful as to say to the tide “never again”. When philo-Semites point to Jewish achievements—to Einstein or Spinoza—what they say is true, but it doesn’t change the meta-context that Jewish influence can turn malign; and, in the same way, what anti-Jewish people say is also truthful, somewhere further down the line of the relationship—when things have turned perverse and sour. It is the case that how you perceive the Jews, if you are truthful, will vary in accord with how long they have been in your society and how far the relationship has turned from symbiosis to parasitism.

A solution to this problem would be for all the Jews to move to Israel, but, of course, that is easy to say but hard to achieve—for a start, the Jews, about half of their global population, have a massive investment in their diaspora and for second they are even biologically adopted to be a diaspora people (their whole history is diaspora in a way—from Egypt to America—with there being a sojourn in Israel for a period).

You can’t just overcome that condition with the enthusiasm generated by 19th-century nationalism—now mostly dissipated. In any case, the return to the soil promised by Zionism never really worked—there was a brief enthusiasm for the kibbutz, just like any socialist revolution, of which kibbutznik Zionism was one, and, within a generation or so, people decided they’d prefer to live an urban middle-class existence sans collective nurseries.

So the Jews didn’t really return to the land, become a clean-limbed people “like any other” as Zionists hoped—and now the whole notion that there are peoples has itself been uprooted by modernity, so it is more the case that everyone has become a diaspora Jew (even Zionists who wanted to be rooted to the soil of Israel are really out of step with the times).

Hence, to my mind, I just don’t see that the pattern so far established will change. The Jews will experience periodic spasms that expel them from societies followed by periods where other societies will see an advantage in them being admitted, as in the transfer of Jews from Spain to the Netherlands in the time of the Inquisition. The process is evolutionary itself—it’s natural selection, each pogrom eliminates Jews who are not good at surviving pogroms (not good at blending in, only the best blenders and the prudent fleers survive); each extermination campaign refines the Jewish ability to enter into a society as a symbiote and then turn into a parasite, to be expelled.

It might be the case that the pattern will become less extreme in these latter days, since, as noted, everywhere is cosmopolitan now—so there is less sense that the Jews are outsiders, everyone is an outsider everywhere in this sense (in the global airport lounge); and, further, due to extreme liberalism everyone is bohemian now—the thrill of lacy can-can dancers and the whiff of smuggled absinthe vanished long, long ago. It’s highly fashionable to take your nephew to a drag show today—an activity that 77 years ago would have been almost beyond bohemia, beyond oh la la and titillation. What role is there for a “beauty spot” when the whole of society is a beauty spot—by which I mean, ugly?

To settle “the land of Israel” is all a bit academic in an age when in industrial society the agricultural workforce will be about 1.5% of the population—unless you’re a settler driven by a religious motivation, but then you’re pretty much a hobby farmer in modernity and still are as a settler. Israel is modern and novel—it’s not a religious society, it’s a modernist project and modern things don’t tend to last; actually, religious Jews are very sceptical about Israel and Zionism, even if they live there, and so there are strong grounds to think Israel will not exist in fifty years or so—just like her sometime quasi-sister, apartheid South Africa (another modern project rooted in “race science” more than religion). I could imagine there being large communities of religious Jews in Palestine fifty years from now, but whether they would live under a Zionist state I find doubtful.

I had a vision that the Jews should accept Christ—and perhaps, since magic is real, that would change their nature (blood is magic, the strongest magic); but I wouldn’t force them to convert to Christianity because I don’t think it ever works to force people to convert to religions and, besides, at this point, there are so many iterations of “Christianity” I don’t know which one, if any, really reflects the message of Jesus (and I don’t follow Christ myself, anyway).

It would be best if we returned to a pre-modern relationship with the Jews whereby they are only confined to certain functions (which they are adapted for, anyway)—far from reducing the pogroms, the emancipation of the Jews, going right back to Cromwell’s invitation for them to return to England, has led to ever-greater pogroms (the most recent being the holocaust, which utilised all the techniques of technological modernity to achieve its goals).

As usual, leftist measures hurt those people they profess to help: anti-racism hurts blacks, and feminism hurts women—and the emancipation of the Jews magnified the hatred of the Jews (because with their high intelligence and high ethnocentrism they could now dominate much more than the restricted worlds of banking and espionage); and so the pogroms have become much grander in modernity—the democracy, the emancipation of the Jews, has increased envy against and suspicion of the Jews, not reduced it; and even Marx understood that, and it was why he didn’t think that the Jews were truly emancipated in modernity and that all that had happened was that “everyone had become a Jew”.