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Recently I was asked, as happens periodically in this forum, to clarify my position on that thorniest of thorny questions: The Jewish Question. Specifically, @faceh asked me, after I had criticized his equating White Nationalism with statements about “gassing the Jews”, whether I would support the removal of all Jewish individuals from positions of power in White countries. Work stuff pulled me away for a few days and I’ve been unable to answer his question, but I think it’s a useful opportunity for a larger post.
I’ve spoken before about how my conception of Whiteness can be modeled as a series of concentric circles. The central circle - the cluster of the most archetypally and uncontroversially representative examples of Whiteness - consists, roughly, of the historic populations of what can broadly be called Northwestern Europe (the British Isles, Scandinavia minus Finland, the Low Countries, Northern France) plus the German-speaking peoples of Central Europe and the Tyrol, as well as the diaspora populations of these ethnic groups in the New World. Some ardent Nordicists would stop here and say that only people who fit into this first circle count as properly White, but this is a fringe position and not one to which I subscribe. My ancestry is 100% British Isles on all sides as far back as I can trace it, which is hundreds of years, so I don’t object to the Nordicist position out of any personal conflict of interest, but it seems to me that any conception of Whiteness that leads you to conclude that the Romans weren’t white is just a massive own-goal.
So, then we move on to the second circle, in which we find the populations of Spain, Portugal, most of Italy, Southern France, Finland, Hungary, and arguably the West Slavs and the Balts. All of these ethnicities have certain aspects that make them non-central examples of Whiteness - such as partial admixture from non-White substrates, like the Finns and the Iberians, or speaking a non-Indo-European language, in the case of the Hungarians and the Finns. Still, these are very White-looking people, relatively speaking, and their cultures have all played an important part in European history.
Past that, you get to a third circle, encompassing the South and East Slavs, the Romanians/Moldovars, the Maltese, the Sicilians, and the modern Greeks. The boundaries of this circle are blurry, and there are certainly aspects of these cultures which strike members of the central circle as quite distinctly foreign, which is part of why nativists and White Nationalists of the early 20th century vociferously resisted the mass immigration of these peoples into Anglosphere countries. Many of these ethnic groups contain very significant recent genetic admixture from non-European conqueror groups. An argument can be made (and sometimes is made) to exclude this circle from discussions of Whiteness. For me personally, though, any model of Whiteness that kicks out Tchaikovsky and Nikola Tesla is, again, an avoidable own-goal. The outer edges of this circle is where pretty much any commonly-used understanding of Whiteness would stop, though. There’s one glaring exception, though, and that is Ashkenazi Jews.
If you ask the average American if Jews are White, he’ll probably say yes, although it’s likely he hasn’t really thought much about it. If you show him a picture of, say, the Beastie Boys, he’ll readily and without hesitation identify it as a trio of White guys - he might not even be aware that they’re Jewish; still, if he reflects a bit on Jewish history and the fraught relationship between Jews and gentile Whites, he might concede that the question is complicated. And indeed it is! On the Dissident/White Identitarian Right, the question of whether or not Jews are White is generally considered to have been definitively answered - in the negative - and has been for some years now. However, there are some of us in that sphere who aren’t totally comfortable with nor confident about that answer.
I’ve spoken before about my warm feelings toward Jewish culture and Jewish people. The first girl I ever loved was (and still is!) Jewish, and my most recent long-term relationship was with a Jewish woman. The Jewish approach to comedy forms a foundational piece of my sense of humor: clever, heavily verbally-oriented, sarcastic, self-deprecating, at times neurotic, and suffused with a general sense of unease and alienation. From an early age, I strongly related to the Jewish intellectual tradition: contrarian, relentlessly critical and deconstructive, never taking anything at face value or uncritically accepting a proposition. It’s a culture that venerates intelligence, high verbal IQ, and the ability and willingness to argue. I strongly considered converting to Judaism for years, because I suspected that I would feel at home in that tradition. (And could land a beautiful Jewish woman - I have a type, and the Ashkenazi female phenotype epitomizes it.)
So, when I started getting deeper into the Dissident Right sphere, I found the discussion of the “JQ” to be by far the most difficult part to digest. While there is still a healthy Jew-welcoming (or, at least, Jew-neutral) faction of the White Right (Jared Taylor of American Renaissance has never publicly recanted his statement about Jews - “They look White to me!” and Paul Gottfried and Nathan Cofnas are still important rightist voices), the overwhelming stance of the hard Right is that the JQ has not only been answered in the negative, but is one of the most important questions - if not the single most important question - that one must answer when considering geopolitics today. I tend to keep my head down when the Jew stuff comes up in those spaces, simply because I know I’ll be shouted down and potentially singled out for suspicion as a subversive/infiltrator. But, the doubts and reservations I feel internally have not been resolved to my satisfaction.
Basically, I place Ashkenazi Jews in a nebulous fourth Circle of Whiteness. This peripheral circle’s boundaries are in flux, and ethnic groups in this circle can drop out or drift into this circle based on political and material developments within their own cultures. Groups that orbit in this circle also include the Japanese, the South Koreans, Latin American mestizos, Persians, Ottoman Turks, Indian Brahmins, and Arabs. The history of relations between these groups and the more central circles of Whiteness is incredibly fraught, and filled with periods of violence and persecution, conquest, inter-ethnic competition, and mistrust. Arabs and Turks were the great racial/religious enemy of Europeans for centuries, with enormous bloodshed and iterated conquests on both sides; on the flip side, they were on the forefront of scientific/cultural advances during a time of severe cultural regression and stagnation in Europe, and Arab/Turkish scholars were primarily responsible for preserving the works of the great Greco-Roman thinkers during that same time when White Europeans were busy abdicating their responsibilities as stewards of that tradition. Jews in medieval Europe were heavily represented in a parasitic rentier class, which contributed greatly to the animosity so many Europeans felt toward them; however, they were also massively overrepresented in vitally-important technical fields such as medicine. Something like two-thirds of doctors in medical Germany were Jews, meaning that countless gentile White lives were saved or immeasurably improved by Jews.
The great question, to my mind, when it comes to this fourth circle is: will these groups ever see themselves as White? Obviously these groups are always going to be peripheral to Whiteness; nobody is ever going to see a Japanese person as just as white as a Dutchman. However, with the looming population explosion in sub-Saharan Africa and the Global South more generally, we could be approaching a situation in which it will become necessary for the civilizations of the Global North to begin mounting a coordinated defense against the waves of migration that could soon begin spilling out of the Global South. In the same way that Christian Europeans had to bury their long-standing inter-ethnic enmities in order to present a unified front against Saracen and Turk invaders, it may be necessary for societies above a certain level of material and cultural development to bury the hatchet and form a phalanx against the marauding hordes spilling across the Sahara and the Darien Gap. If such a scenario arises, civilizations such as China, India and Iran may have to make the crucial choice about whether or not they want to stand with Europeans, in a united Eurasian front - a Fortress Eurasia, if you will - to repel the invaders, or whether to actively join or facilitate the invaders as they overwhelm and annihilate the already weakened and degenerated peoples of Europe and the Anglosphere.
If such a scenario arises, I want these civilizations on my side. (“I never thought I would die side-by-side with an Arab.” “What about a friend?”) Under such conditions, a criterion of “White enough” will necessarily be sufficient. Jews are well within the “White enough” category, as far as I’m concerned, and I wish that others on the White Right would not be so cavalier about continuing to ignite the already-burning bridge with an ethnic group that still has the capacity to become a powerful ally, but which also had the possibility to continue its development into an equally powerful and implacable enemy.
So, the Jewish Question is actually a series of questions, and some of those questions need to be answered by Jews themselves. I don’t know how many Jews, or what percentage of Jews, see themselves as my enemy, or are likely to act as my enemies as worldwide racial conflict begins to boil over. I’m open to believing that the answer isn’t as dire as many on my side believe. I don’t know the answer, and I’m still trying to talk it out.
These classifications seem so bizarre. Like, I get why the term 'white' replaced English, German, French etc in the new world as the settler groups admixed. But if you define white as a literal skin colour, them surely you don't need to classify different ethnic groups, you can just look at them?
And if 'white' means European, then in what world are the French somehow more European than the Italians?
If you're trying to classify European ethnic groups, it would be better to think like a European and not an American. 'White' is not a meaningful category in this context.
The rule for white in American history is that you look around the room and figure out what is the minimum number of people you need to classify as white to have a sufficient (loyal) white majority in numbers/money/power to oppress the non-white, then inventing the rule that will deliver this majority with the minimum number of extraneous inclusions.
That's how you get from ilforte's quote from Ben Franklin excluding most of Germany to "idk, maybe we count the Jews and the Japanese and some Indians and throw in Persians too and see how the math comes out?" You go from needing only the English/Scots/some Germans to have a supermajority, to needing all the Germans and the Swedes and French, to needing the Irish, to needing Italians, etc. That's why Mexicans went from being considered white in Texas before sufficient quantities of outside European immigrants had shown up, to Mexicans briefly "Losing" their white status after enough European immigrants made Texas majority non-hispanic white, to now having their white status "restored" as white Texans need the numbers.
White has no functional definition outside of that algo, everything else is backwards rationalisation to justify and give credibility to what the rule spat out as the line that would give "whites" a majority and exclude someone else. OP's concentric circles of whiteness are just different solutions to the same problem.
I think whiteness is about not standing out because of your appearance to euro-americans. Under this definition there are large swathes of south european people who would not pass because you could tell them apart based on their appearance but its fuzzy because race is not a discrete thing.
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'White is the minimum number of ethnic groups needed to do racial oppression' does not seem like it would pass the ideological Turing test, at all.
How about 'white' means 'assimilated into Anglo-American culture'?
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In fairness, colorism is a bit of a strawman promoted by people who oppose racial perspective and seek to make it appear more ridiculous. When Anglo racists with above room temp IQs say that Eastern Slavs are not white, they aren't literally trying to compete on fair pigmentation (and by the way Turks can have very Aryan skull shapes)... it's an unfortunate conflation of terms.
The fact that it's not a strong argument in favor of HBD does not make it a "straw man".
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There are some distinct cultural traits with the English, French, and Germans that southern Italians don't share.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manorialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajnal_line
Very loosely, under Manorialism a couple could get a chunk of farmland to work by presenting themselves to the lord as honest, hardworking, and not a source of trouble. It lead to more atomic family structures and smaller families.
It replaced a clan centric system, where individuals had to preserve the honour and reputation of their clan. Tolerating an insult could lead outsiders to think that your clan would tolerate injuries. So it was critical that everyone understood that they should not mess with your clan.
For instance the Scotch-Irish were famous for feuds like the Hatfields & McCoys.
There's also a zero-sum aspect to altruism where the more you care about your extended relatives the less you care about your unrelated neighbours.
So for a traditional resident of small town America it's expected that they would help their old school friends and neighbours before their second cousins.
That's not going to be the case for more clannish societies.
There's no good name for "within Hajnal" societies but it's generally what people are thinking.
I am trying to promote the terms "cisHajnal" and "transHajnal".
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Your certainly right, but to classify people north of the hajnal line as 'more white' doesn't make any more sense than classifying them as 'more redheaded'.
'More outbred' would be more accurate, and actually hint to what you are taking about.
Although I doubt OP was talking about outbreeding, nuclear families and manorialism. I'm pretty sure they were awkwardly trying to apply idiosyncratic American ethnic terms to a world where the terms make no sense.
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Yeah, but white southerners are mostly scotch-irish by extraction and these people consider them white.
Hajnal put all of Scotland inside the line. I have seen arguments that the Scottish Highlands were actually transHajnal, but my understanding was that the Borderers (from whom most of the Scots Irish are descended) were clearly inside it.
The traditional Irish culture is also transHajnal, but the Scots Irish put a LOT of effort into not assimilating into it.
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