Presentation of the Jewish Problem
EVOLA
14 April 2016Non classé	

Between December 1936 and September 1941, Julius Evola published forty articles or so on the Jewish problem in various Italian papers. Thirty-one of these writings, all signed ‘Arthos’, appeared in La Vita Italiana, and have been compiled by the Italian publisher, Il Cinabro, into an anthology. Of the remaining articles, not included in the anthology, one seems to be lost, namely: ‘L’Internazionale ebraica e la profezia della nuova guerra mondiale secondo Ludendorff’ (‘The Jewish International and the Prophecy of the new World War according to Ludendorff’), which appeared in 1932 and has not been found so far. Another, ‘La Guerra occulta – Ebrei e Massoni alla Conquista del Mondo’, appears in French translation in the ‘Previously unpublished Writings in French’ section of this site, as ‘La Guerre occulte – Juifs et Françs-macons à la conquête du Monde’, and is the first article he wrote on the ‘Jewish action’ that we know of, dating from December 1936. The title of the anthology is borrowed from a set of three articles published by Evola in La Vita Italiana in 1936 on the subject of the destructive action of Judaism: ‘Il Genio d’Israele’  (‘Israel’s Genius’). This title is a happy and legitimate choice, since, as Il Cinabro recall in their bibliographic summary, Evola himself pointed out, in the first of these three articles, the organic nature of the study of Judaism which he was about to carry out in a long series of articles, ‘whose systematic coherence will certainly not escape the attentive readers of La Vita Italiana, ‘Il Genio d’Israele’ is divided into four sections. They are (1). ‘L’Azione distruttrice’ (‘The Destructive Action’); (2). ‘Guerra occulta e “Protocolli”’ (‘Occult War and the “Protocols”’); (3). ‘L’Intervento nella Storia’ (‘The Intervention in History’); (4). ‘L’Antisemitismo’ (‘Anti-Semitism’). The present article is a translation of ‘Inquadramento del Problema ebraico’, which is found in the first of these sections. Our readers are strongly advised to take particular notice of an absolutely crucial point made by Evola in this article in relation to the fight against the Jewish influence which has been exerting itself in occupied Europe for a few decades, too often blanked out by those who claim to oppose it, even by those whose good will in this connection cannot be questioned: the Jewish substance, like the French Republic, is, so to speak, ‘one and indivisible’; whether Orthodox or non-Orthodox, Zionist or anti-Zionist, and so on, the Jew, nolens volens, consciously or unconsciously, develops an action which works towards the same effects: denaturation, corrosion, destruction.

A favourite tactic of the emissaries of Judaism consists of accusing their adversaries of ‘one-sidedness’. And, we must acknowledge, the anti-Semitic controversy, especially in its political aspects, today, in the transalpine countries, gives rise to examples of one-sidedness, owing to various confusions and too hasty an aggressive spirit, and, for this reason, those who like to think they belong, first and foremost, to the cause of ‘truth’ and ‘justice’, readily lend an ear to the hypocritical moaning of the Jews, of that people eternally persecuted, victims, on their own account, of violence of all sorts. In Italy, we are privileged to be able to still consider the Jewish problem with coldness and without any urgent necessity. More than for any other people, it is thus possible for us to put things in perspective, to return to each his own, and, in the harsh light of an objective vision, to set forth the vital points which are to be defined and grasped, while avoiding the expedient of a hypocritical humanitarian ideology.

For a real presentation of the Jewish question, it is necessary to distinguish, in the whole Jewish reality, three elements or aspects. Let us identify them straight away : there is, firstly, the more or less modernised or bourgeoisified Jew of a faceless middle-class ; in the second place, there is the Jew as cultural agent, the Jew as writer, artist, ideologist, sociologist, scientist and so forth ; in the third place, there is the Jew as creature of the Jewish law, and as conscious instrument of the Jewish law. The Jewish problem, and, as a consequence, the anti-Semitic controversy, must be differentiated in relation to each of these aspects or elements. Their distinction, however, must not make us lose sight of the common element that is present, which is to be understood on the basis of the following consideration. Many say that Judaism and racism are, at the end of the day, the same thing, though with an opposite sign. This is not true at all : in its current form, racism is the doctrine according to which it is thought that any value derives from the innate qualities of a blood and of a race which has retained its original purity – racism rules out any idea of the formation from above, from a supra-biological reality, of a biological raw material. We have exactly the contrary in Judaism. What comes first in Judaism is the law, not the blood. It is the law that has given shape and unity to the Jewish people, not a race in the strict sense of the word. Ethnically, and originally, very different bloods have flowed into the Jewish people ; the Old Testament itself speaks of many tribes and races contained in this people and modern race research has come to admit, therein, the presence of elements even of Aryan or non-Semitic origins, as seems to be the case in particular for the Pharisees. It has been said, by a Jew, that, just as Adam was formed by Jehovah, the Jew was formed by the Jewish law, and this truth is not limited to the Judaism of the Old Testament, whose spiritual history has been much more eventful than is assumed, but extends also to the Judaism of the Diaspora, in which it becomes even more emphatically the case, since the Talmud appears as the real essence and the real soul of Judaism

A first important point which derives from recognising this is that ‘Jewishness’, before being sought in the blood, must first be sought in the spirit : ‘race’, here, is essentially a behaviour, a way of being and of thinking, which, in philosophical terms, can be said to be a ‘category’ of spirit. It is important to establish firmly in one’s mind this point in order to be able to identify a field of action of Judaism much vaster than the one that is defined by blood alone.

In this paper, we have pointed out a process of inverted assimilation which has occurred lately and which was made possible by the fact that the Western civilisation has become spiritually Judaised in important sectors, and is thus affected by a forma mentis of a more or less Jewish type, even where no crossbreeding has taken place and, therefore, there is no reason whatsoever to speak of an influence by way of blood.

To note this, and, therefore, to assert the necessity of identifying Judaism as a spiritual category, does not prevent us from also noting that the persistence of an idea, of an attitude, of a belief through generations ends up finding expression in an instinct, in something which penetrates into the blood, lives and acts in the blood, and, in many cases, completely irrespective of everything that the individual, as reflexive consciousness, thinks and believes he wants; this is the second aspect of Judaism, this is Judaism, strictly speaking, as ‘race’ ; race, therefore, in a rather special, non-naturalistic, sense.

This having been emphasised, we can return to our starting point, that is to say to the tripartition of the substance of Judaism. This tripartition, so to speak, refers to three different degrees of intensity. It is either absurd or naive to consider that the thousand-year-old action of the law on a people, which, in accordance with it, has also put up ethical and social barriers which have isolated it for centuries from the rest of humanity, can be entirely scattered or dissipated. We must consider a central core, in which the Jewish substance is found at the highest degree of concentration and as self-consciousness ; within this core are those who are today Jews and are proud to be so, those who, besides, do not forget the promise of the Regnum, in which Israel will rule supreme over all peoples and will own all wealth on earth; it is from within this central core that originate the mysterious veins of the international and supranational Jewish action, the masked forces which have acted and keep on acting from behind the scene of history and at which we will have a closer look in a further writing, in connection with the problem of the ‘authenticity’ of the famous ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’.

In the second stratum, the Jewish substance is found in a lesser degree of concentration, no longer as true self-consciousness, but instead as instinct, race. Here we find the Jews who are, more or less, ‘geniuses’ or ‘creators’ in the various fields of culture and science. There is no doubt that, in most of these cases, each Jew does not subordinate his work to any special intention and that he thinks he does nothing else than what non-Jewish writers, philosophers or scientists do. This does not prevent ‘race’ from being, without his knowing it, the essential driving factor, and this is how in all the works and the creations of Jews, almost without exception, however ‘objective’ and ‘ideal’ the fields to which they refer are, something common, a common character, common tendencies manifest themselves ; an action which, indirectly and unintentionally, is along the same lines. It is very important to set this situation firmly in one’s mind. The liberalistic and individualistic way of thinking is prone, here, to absolve the Jew from any fault and make people start bandying words like injustice, fanaticism and barbarism about those who do not respect, in the Jew, the taboos of ‘genius’, of ‘science’, of ‘art’ and so on. Those who, on the contrary, have the sense of the deepest forces of history and thus see the obvious responsibilities beyond the plane of the ‘humanistic’, know what is, in this respect, true justice and will acknowledge the necessity of a suitable response. It is in the nature of fire to burn, and yet no one sensible will blame the fire for burning ; the fact remains nonetheless that those who do not want to be burnt will take suitable measures and will limit or paralyse the power which proceeds not so much from the ‘intention’ of the fire as from its nature. It is exactly like this with respect to the cultural exponents of Judaism. It is not, we must emphasise, about animosity, nor hatred, nor clannishness. It is only, let us say it again, about the fact that we consider as naive, limited and irresponsible the ‘Humanist’ attitude and its related immortal and inviolable values of Thought and Art. We see much further than this nonsense and we adopt the cold attitude that is appropriate with regard to ‘influences’ we could ignore only by closing our eyes. The necessity of action in this connection derives also from the fact that, even if automatically, a connection, an efficient solidarity develops between the Jewish cultural action which, unintentionally, derives from these more or less dispersed Jews and the conscious action which is governed by the central core of Judaism. The former spread a virus of decomposition and subversion in any field, capture and stimulate the most obscure forces in the already disintegrated and intoxicated cultural forms of the Western society and thus unconsciously pave the way for the others, for those who know what they do and are very conscious of the occult means likely to realise their goals.

One will ask how we can justify the assertion that the common element of Judaism in culture has a destructive nature : we shall come round to that in our next writing, on the basis of a certain number of typical examples. Let us now consider the third and last aspect of Judaism. As we have said, it concerns the common, modern, Jew without any special function or action, a part of that formless, levelled, mixture of men without faith, without caste and without tradition, which comprises at least two thirds of so-called ‘civil society’. Here the Jew seems to be of the same mind as the non-Jew in a common agnosticism with respect to any higher value, in a common profession of liberalistic, bourgeois, conformist, mercantilist faith ; both seem to consider as really important only profession, profit, social position, and the Jew will be prone to consider his law a dead thing just as the ‘liberated’ non-Jew mocks and refers to as ‘medieval superstition’ the dogmas, the rites and the sacraments of the Western faith. The Jew of this type will readily make any concession in order to enjoy peacefully the advantages of the modern society in the nation he lives. Baptism itself will not be an insurmountable obstacle for him. Since there are many of these Jews and they are those that people meet most of the time, taking the part for the whole and the appearance for the essence, they do not manage to understand how there can be a ‘Jewish problem’ at all. On the other hand, the true Jews do not miss a chance to point out these colleagues of theirs as a sort of alibi, which is supposed to confirm the absurdity of the anti-Semitic controversy and thus to protect their hidden action.

Here, as far as we are concerned, it is appropriate to grant that, towards these Jews, who have really come to such a level of agnostic and bourgeois decomposition, we would have no reason to adopt any special attitude. At most, it is here a matter of individual sympathy or antipathy: a common Jewish residue can hardly have entirely disappeared in the way of feeling and of seeing of these Jews, which can turn out to be bearable to some people, unbearable to others. On this level of stupidity to which social relations are reduced nowadays, we do not feel the need to adopt a special attitude a priori towards them and to exclude them more than we would members, equally befuddled in a bourgeois way, of other peoples. To be consistent, we would have to exclude from our circles a far greater range of peoples who exist in this world without castes and without true traditions.

Now that this point is clarified, we must however restrict its validity, by drawing attention to the fact that, in many more cases than it is thought, the agnosticism and the denaturation of the modern Jew are only apparent and that, albeit in a diluted and secularised form, the original influence of the Law and of the formation of the Jewish people according to it, have reached them. As a matter of fact, a sort of solidarity with respect to business, interests and inclinations must still be at work even among these Jews, which has kept them united in the society where they find themselves and which gives to their community, if not the character of a conspiracy, as in the case of the true activist Judaism, at least that of something resembling a Mafia. In this respect, it is true, not all these Jews behave in the same way and it must be acknowledged that external circumstances and the necessity of a defensive unity in the period of open persecutions have played a part. But, in other cases, the statistics speak for themselves ; the high percentage of Jews who, in some countries, in the liberal-democratic period, rose to positions of responsibility in the liberal professions and in the main branches of public and cultural life speaks for itself and justifies an anti-Semitic response even without any reference to the higher, spiritual, point of view from which we look at things and which must be already known to our readers from our previous writings ; here, indeed, the conviction that, in a given nation, it is just that the members of this nation should hold the main positions and exercise their social activity in preference to any alien element would close the matter. These are practical views with which one can agree or not, depending on whether one is in favour of the modern idea of nation and of national community ; therefore, regardless of the question of whether the Jews behave, in their social and professional activity, differently from the others.

When we say that the Law in a secularised form can be found in this latter stratum of Judaism, we have to say that, here, we also refer to all the forms in which the ancient Jewish longing for worldwide dominion of a sacred race chosen by God, materialising itself, has given rise to the capitalist instinct and cynicism. But here we should recall the distinction already made between Judaism as spirit and Judaism as action, strictly speaking, of members of the Jewish people. Capitalism indisputably reveals the influence of the Jewish spirit, working in conjunction with the equally non-Aryan Protestant and Puritan spirit. This is the case regardless of the direct part that the Jews have or can have in the International of high capitalism and high finance. And this is enough to justify, once again, anti-Semitism. Indeed, what we have already seen in respect of cultural Judaism occurs again here. Even though the power and the instinct for dominion of capitalism, be it Jewish or non-Jewish but Judaised in the sense of having its origin in the Jewish spirit, the Jewish Law, and secularised Mosaicism, does not reveal in every case any direct intention, does not fulfil in each case some part of a general plan, these elements nevertheless inevitably support an action which, whether intentionally or unintentionally, whether directly or indirectly (as when capitalism causes by antithesis socialist subversion, also Jewish-led), creates the optimal conditions for those who are the conscious and militant bearers of the occult will of Israel and who have maintained as self-consciousness that which appears in others as mere materialistic and instinctive praxis. And the fact that the Jewish capitalist, more or less ‘legally’ and ‘honestly’, in the liberalistic meaning of these words, has managed to come to power and to become the master of gold cannot mean anything in this connection, nor be a valid argument against a full anti-Semitism.

These are the terms in which, in general, the Jewish problem is to be presented. In order to justify what has already been said, we must speak of the common, destructive element, peculiar to the Jewish culture, in general, in the modern world, and, then, of the existence or not of general plans of the Jewish action, and this is why we shall have to tackle the famous question of the meaning of the ‘authenticity’ of the ‘Protocols’. These will be the arguments of our two next writings.