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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.
What does it matter if you or the rest of the dissident right deign to categorize Jews as your fellow Whites («enough»), if they are aware of still being Jews? Moreover, what do they gain from this recognition to consider accepting it? You say you're involved in WN circles. How much has changed since this 2011 note, sans the fact that Google doesn't find this page by its title now (even so, results are worth checking out)?
Arguments about definitions are usually interesting inasmuch as they reveal reasons people hold for drawing lines, or talking about those lines in public. It seems that most of the time questions about some group's Whiteness status on the far right are driven by two concerns.
The first is prestige; Whiteness is perceived as an elite club, or perhaps the preoccupation with its membership is meant to conjure this status into reality. A piece by a Cuban-Jewish-American M. Yglesias quoting Ben Franklin springs to mind:
What's that about? (Incidentally, an American has recently said that I'm one of «Literally the palest people I've ever seen!»). Let's be charitable and assume that Benjamin spoke not of the Asiatic admixture you hint at, but of some less trivial measure of racial quality. East Slavs are low-quality, low-prestige people. Putting Tchaikovsky in your camp is a no-brainer, but you would happily do without hundreds of millions of less illustrious Ruskies throughout history. Likewise, Indians are mostly «Pajeets» but Ramanujan is kinda cool And Pichai runs Google so eh, fellow upper caste Indo-Aryans can get a second-class seat. This kind of discussion makes for a genre of an intra-right status game, where one gets to boast of historical and anthropological erudition, magnanimity appropriate of a superior breed, and/or also condescension and intensity of disgust reaction. This is rather uninteresting to those of us of Swarthy and Tawny Races of the World who don't buy into the idea that the acknowledgement of racist Anglos is a worthwhile thing to pursue. (We're more into acknowledgement of Teutons).
The second angle is instrumental. «Can those people be of use to our White Nationalist cause, and will they?» The pan-White narrative serves to build a maximally broad camp.
The problem, of course, is that they have no reason to come into your camp. Not Arabs or Slavs, and particularly not the Jews.
To put it mildly, in the current year being White is uncool. On average, you get to have some advantages such as on the dating market, but they're not conferred on you by the identity or by group membership; every single way in which Whites have it good is a product of positive individual traits correlated with being White, perhaps to some meager extent of Bayesian priors various markets have due to distributions of those traits. Meanwhile, bad things are inherent to the identity in the social context. Whiteness in the US, and by implication elsewhere, is a construct tainted by the history of slavery and racism, not just due to propaganda or real events, but even simply because of self-sorting. If you want to be on the strong team, you have Civic Nationalism, and therefore identify as an American Patriot, maybe a MAGA Republican or a «degenerate mutt» like Hlynka. (Similar dynamics exist in other majority white states, e.g. France). If you want TRVDITION, you have actual national and ethnic cultures of your forefathers beginning in Europe, the more specific, the better; not long ago, this meant affirming Anglo-Saxon supremacy but nowadays only Putin uses the term seriously. You can also put some other facet of your identity in the first place: from a Trans person to an Eco-Activist, the world offers you many lauded options. Who the hell needs White Nationalism? Only people who have not managed to escape from sanctions levied on Whiteness, or who have deemed such an escape unseemly for ideological reasons. Those are not cool or powerful people. Many of them go so far in repudiating sanctions that they justify past evils.
And the sanctions are severe. One could say that «Whites» are de facto disenfranchised to an extent. They cannot organize, research and lobby explicitly for anything like common white interests, and it is illegitimate to even discuss such interests in the political realm. This is unpopular to notice, but immutable group membership plus the doctrine of group equality allow to smuggle in any kind of demand, including bald extortion under the guise of redistribution to right historical wrongs or straight-up prohibition on critique directed at members of a group. So Whites qua Whites are second-class citizens in their own countries: they do not possess a crucial right to agitate and lobby for their collective interests, and are forced to resort to humiliating roundabout stratagems like economic reforms with desired second-order effects, while inefficiently coordinating to pretend they favor those policies out of some lofty general principle. Jews, of course, enjoy the exact opposite position, because they can simultaneously be praised for stalwart Jewish nationalism and also have legal rights of regular citizens of Western countries, including the right to lobby. Why on earth would they want to be seen as White?
You try to sell the narrative of a common geopolitical enemy. Do Jews need to face those «common enemies»? I don't think so. In fact this is just a rehashing of Islam As The Civilizational Threat To Our Judeo-Christian Enlightenment, a neocon take obviously peddled by Israeli Nationalists to secure Israeli interests. And today Abraham Accords are signed, Israel is improving relations with Arab countries, Militant Islam isn't looking too hot, Iran is on its last legs (as are Jordan, Lebanon) so the question is moot. Africans, lol? What do Israelis care? In general, Israel positions itself as a no-bullshit self-interested Middle Eastern nation that happily deals with other non-Western states, including hostile ones like China and Russia (why not fight them, by the way?); they do not need to be inserted into anyone else's delusional fights. Frankly this search for a threat to unite against looks like desperation.
And one corollary of the above is that strongly identifying Jews who nevertheless grace White causes with their support will be fundamentally unserious about it. They may see value to the «White» civilization, but they know they have their own thing to retreat into if things go badly or their new friends are ungrateful, and that thing's on a much more solid footing. It's a bit of a game.
I believe that the appropriate answer is «What good would that do?»
The problem of WNs isn't that there are many Jews in positions of power. It's that Whites in similar positions have no agency, qua Whites. Chuck Schumer is a conscious, proud member of a millenia-old ethnoreligious community headquartered in Israel, and explicitly takes actions to advance their interests using his position as an American politician (including assistance in suppressing people who notice and take issue with this agenda). Mitch McConnell is just some turtle-looking Republican. If you remove Chuck, Mitch won't start caring about the continuity or glory of your race. Neither will Nancy.
What can be done with that? Not much, I'm afraid.
I wholeheartedly agree, any alternative solutions then? As it stands it seems like any (gentile) white person in the West with even a semblance of racial consciousness is basically dissident by definition. Converting to Judaism or trying to run back to my grandparents home country in Eastern Europe seem like the only viable options, but both seem incredibly foreign compared to my upbringing. I guess there’s always the Orthodox Church as well.
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