Eugen Dühring on the Jewish Question, Part 2 The Jewish Question
Part 2: The Jewish Question
One of the most important contributions of Dühring’s work to the history of anthropology and culture is the distinction he makes between the Jews and the other Semites so that all the features of the so-called “anti-Semitism” are in fact directed only to the Jews as a specific branch of the Semitic race, “the most vicious minting of the entire Semitic race,” and not to all the members of that race in general.
The Jewish question too is not a religious one but of the inherent and unchangeable character of the Jewish people.[1] Thus, as Dühring puts it,
it lies in the interest of a noble mankind, thus of a true humanity and culture, that this obscurantism of religion which has up to now covered and protected the worst characteristics of the Jews with its darkness be fully removed so that the Jew may be revealed to us in his natural and inalienable constitution.[2]
In general, Dühring believes that all official religions are encrusted with superstition and it would be best to substitute religious dogma with something more genuinely spiritual in social institutions. The point of departure for Dühring’s critique of Jewry is thus an entirely moral one. The chief accusation against the Jews is that they are morally corrupt and therefore thrive most in a society where moral corruption has already set in or has begun to set in.
This is the justification of the appellation of the Jewish race as a parasitical one since it feeds on the moral corruption of the host society, a corruption either created by it or, if already present to some degree, fostered by it. The dangers of moral corruption through the admixture of Jews into European society have increased particularly after the emancipation of Jewry in the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century. The source of the Jewish corrupt nature is located by Dühring in their basic lack of conscience and cruelty vis-à-vis the other nations. Exploitation of other nations is their major aim and a genuine sense of human rights is utterly lacking in their commercial, essentially usurious, dealings. This lack of a moral sense makes true politics impossible among them and their involvement in all sorts of so-called Socialist movements is only conditioned by their desire to extract advantages for themselves from disturbed social and economic conditions.
The religious constitution of the Jews is evidenced most clearly in their overarching theocratic ideas of society wherein the Jewish people are enslaved to their Lord God but, in turn, must enslave the rest of mankind to please this sole, jealous monarch of the world.[3] Yahweh is indeed nothing but an embodiment of the Jewish self-interest and represents the very opposite of the Indo-European natural pantheon.
Germanic mythology is ruled by concepts of fidelity and nature-based spirituality which have unfortunately been obscured by the overlaying of the original German moral character by Christianity, a religion which is very closely related to the Jewish racial culture in which it arose as a reaction to the evils of the Jewish nature.[4] The Jewish religion has no truly religious character but, instead, a markedly economic-political one. Given their natural proclivity to profit-making, it is not surprising that the Jews have, in their extensive wanderings away from their homeland, curried favor with power-holders in all ages through their financial loans. The Alliance Israelite Universelle based in Paris is in fact a modern confirmation of the operation of the political influence of Jews on an international scope under the cover of an apparently religious organization.
The influence of the Jews on society is more evident in the upper and middle classes than in the lower, since the former are more exposed to the thoroughly Judaized press and literature of modern times.
The Jews themselves lack all creative power in science as well as in art and merely trade in the ideas of others. The Jewish economist, David Ricardo, for example, derived his famous ground-rent theory from the Scot James Anderson, and the Jewish mathematician, Carl Gustav Jacobi, derived his ideas from the Norwegian Niels Abel. Even the sole distinguished philosopher of the Jewish race, Spinoza, has produced a system which is singularly lacking in all ideals above rational calculation. The neglect of compassion in his Ethics as a feeling-based category to be overcome by rational understanding points to the real cult of intellectual power which lies at the base of his system.[5]
The Jewish talent in literature is always of a hybrid sort displaying even amidst occasional attempts at Germanic sublimity an irresistible proclivity to buffoonery, as in the case of Heine, and to polemics, as in the case of Börne. The Jews have also turned Lessing’s sympathetic attitude to the Jews (perhaps, as Dühring maintains, because Lessing was himself originally of Jewish descent) into an exaggerated cult of Lessing as the glory of the German Enlightenment when in fact his works are entirely artificial and lacking in genuine emotional power.
The Jews lack all heroism of character required to produce epic or dramatic literature and can, at best, attain some weak lyricism as revealed in their ancient Psalms. Like Richard Wagner, Dühring also criticizes the unpleasant manner of Jewish chanting in the synagogues and goes even farther than Wagner in his anti-Judaism in maintaining that Wagner himself compromised in the end with the Jews in accepting generous donations from the Jews at Bayreuth and in purporting to save those Jews who supported his “music of the future,” rather like a dispenser of indulgences. The general unsuitability of the Jews for artistic enterprise is, in fact, located by Dühring in their lack of “that free and unselfish activity of the mind which alone advances to uninterested truth and beauty”.
The Judaized press, however, constantly ridicules the German as having the nature a simpleton, of the “deutschen Michael.” The Jews have, through their involvement with the political parties of the present, corrupted the concepts of socialism and social democracy. Their aim in the realm of economics has been always, whether it be through Marx or through Lassalle, to foster economic dissatisfaction through terms such as “class-warfare” in order ultimately to achieve a “merging of all nations into a Jewish kingdom.”
The German state was in fact founded originally on the moral quality of loyalty, which was the basis of the feudal system which developed therefrom in the Middle Ages. Loyalty should thus be the source of future German politics as well. Jewish politics, on the other hand, is based on betrayal—of Europeans as well as, occasionally, of Jews too by other Jews. The intolerant Jewish ethos can operate only in an exploitative manner and under the enforcement of a terrorism learnt from their fear-inspiring Lord God.
True piety is lacking in their politics as much as in their religion. The Jewish infiltration into the legislative activities of the German state after their emancipation has enabled them to herd the German people under the thrall of individualistic “freedom” into the exploitative hands of the Jews. In this they have been abetted by the university professors and intelligentsia, since the latter depend for the most part on the Jewish press for their reputation. The advancement of Jews from an original pariah status to the leading political positions in the European nations is evidenced by the rise of Gambetta in France and of Disraeli in England. Gambetta rose to power on the basis of a French political fiasco for which his own people were responsible.[6] Disraeli’s opportunism is manifest in his use of the stock-exchange business to acquire foreign lands.[7] But the true manipulative schemes of the Jew are revealed by Disraeli himself in his fictional writings such as Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred. The very appointment of a Jew like Disraeli as the head of the English aristocracy is a sad sign of the degeneration of the English in recent times.
The solution of the Jewish problem must be an international one if it is to have any lasting effect. One of the major preparatory steps is the elimination of the false idea of tolerance. Tolerance of baseness is a contradiction of the principle of human tolerance itself: “Humane reciprocity will consist in living in peace insofar as the nobler humanity comes together in the good. For the rest, however, precisely battle and destruction will emerge so much more energetically against the inhuman.” Similarly, the principle of equality cannot mean the consideration of that which is unequal as equal. The economic communes and corporations which Dühring suggests in his Socialitarian system thus must reserve the right to exclude harmful economic elements like the Jews.
The political solution of the Jewish problem lies first in the spiritual emancipation of the people from the Jewish mentality and ethos. But individual natures are too weak to carry out this process of reformation of society by themselves and so must be helped by state legislation and administration. The disenfranchisement of the Jews is a sine qua non of all remedial action with regard to the Jewish problem. Their exclusion, internment, and deportation must be encouraged wherever possible.
However, Dühring is too realistic to think that the creation of an independent Israeli state in Palestine and the deportation of the Jews to it would suffice to solve the Jewish problem. For, the Jewish race is an essentially nomadic one and will soon disperse again throughout the world even if it did manage to concentrate itself in Palestine for a while. The nomadic nature of the Jews itself is explained by Dühring as being due to the basically unpleasant nature of the Jews, so that they are repulsive even to themselves when they are alone with themselves and not in the midst of European society—to whom they are, naturally, far more repugnant.
The specific means to be adopted against the Jews must be undertaken in three fields, the political, the economic, and the social. Political representation and occupation of official positions by Jews is to be curtailed immediately in such a way that no Jew can be elected to Parliament any more than any Jew can exercise a right to vote in European elections.
The excess number of Jewish judges must be reduced through forced retirement; the cost of retirement payments incurred hereby would be much less than the damages that are to be anticipated if the Jews continue to distort legislation and justice in the country over a long period of time. The financial measures to be adopted against the Jews should be directed by the knowledge that all Jewish racial economics is based on avarice and the ambition to dominate others. The powerful Jewish financial houses must be nationalized forthwith and placed under official curatorships and state supervision.
This step must be carried out not only in Germany but in every country where the Jews exert such financial power. If we remember Dühring’s identification of the main means by which most of the Jewish finance was acquired by cheating, then we will understand the indispensability of such steps against it. The social means should at first be focused on the chief Jewish agent of social influence, the press, wherewith the Jews turn public opinion into Jewish opinion. Jews must be removed from all ownership as well as editorial positions of newspapers; though, for the cultivation of a public opinion different from the present predominantly Jewish liberal one, radical political changes are necessary as well.
Education too should be reoriented in a native Germanic way by the exclusion of Jews from school and university instructorships. If the Jews have succeeded so far in their social endeavours, it is precisely because the university professors have, in their weakness and corruption, encouraged the parasitical activity of the Jews.
Other important social means against the Jews consist in the discouragement of intermarriages between Germans and Jews. He rightly points out that the case where a Jewish woman marries a German man is somewhat better than the reverse since the man is the bearer of the inherited spiritual qualities.
Dühring does not yet[8] think that legislation is necessary for this purpose since the natural aversion that Germans, especially German women, have to Jews will act as a deterrent. Also, the reduction of the financial power of the Jews and the increasing economic independence of women will make German women less tempted to marry rich Jews for economic reasons. In general, the danger of such mixtures can be successfully reduced only if there is strict legislation regarding the number of Jewish immigrants permitted into a particular territory.
The state’s role in anti-Jewish measures must be supplemented by agitations on the part of the people. The parties themselves are impotent in their narrow programmes and have too much connection to Jewish agencies to be effective in any way. For example, the measures taken by the German Conservative parties to reduce corruption in society were not specifically limited to the Jews and affected even the better elements engaged in the occupations in question. The Jewish question is first and last a moral question and demands the reestablishment of German loyalty and trust against the frivolity of the Jewish mind and the corruption that creeps under cover of this frivolity.
What is at stake is the very existence, moral and material, of the European peoples, for “if things are not directed, the descendants of traders in old wardrobes, scraps and cattle bones must get to the very bones of the modern peoples after they have pocketed their wealth and lamed their mind through inoculation”. The solution to the Jewish problem must be an international and a continually lasting one, and Dühring maintains that even the most powerful means cannot be shied away from in the effort to free the better peoples and nations from what he calls their “internal Carthage.”
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The social effect of Dühring’s work can be estimated more generally in the anti-Jewish Congresses organized first at Dresden in 1882, and then at Chemnitz in 1883. At the latter, a division occurred on account of the ideological differences between those who favored Dühring’s more uncompromising views and the Christian elements at the meeting. However, a loose confederation of ‘Reformvereine’ sprang up in the 1880s, and by 1890 there were 136 of them. As Peter Pulzer reports,[9] the extreme view, associated with Dühring, predominated in Westphalia, under the leadership of Dr. König.
While the state social legislation of Bismarck served to allay the enthusiasm regarding the Jewish problem somewhat and to disintegrate these anti-Jewish organizations, the movement acquired a new impetus from the leadership of Theodor Fritsch in Leipzig who revitalized it according to the extremist point of view. It was Fritsch’s call for an anti-Jewish organization “above the parties”[10] which created such seminal nationalist societies as the Thule Society and the Germanen Order. It is true that the latter were in fact not so directly influential on the NSDAP itself, which—though created initially by Karl Harrer (along with Anton Drexler) at the suggestion of the Germanen Order that several economic ‘Rings’ of the society should be set up all over the country—ultimately proscribed the Germanen Order for its overly Masonic qualities.[11]
However, Alfred Rosenberg, the National Socialist ideologue wrote a work on the Jewish question very similar to Dühring’s called Die Spur des Juden im Wandel der Zeiten (The Track of the Jew Through the Ages) (1920).[12] In it he discusses first the historical circumstances of the Jews from their diaspora after the destruction of Jerusalem to their various interventions in modern European politics. The second section deals with the Jewish mentality as revealed in its religious documents and cultural and economic works. The work ends with a discussion of the Jewish ambition for economic and political mastery of the world and suggests ways of curbing this tendency forthwith in Germany. The points contained in Rosenberg’s anti-Jewish program are in many ways similar to the points of the Nürnberg Laws of 1935.
Thus, even if it may not have had an immediate political connection with the programs of the National Socialist regime, the extraordinary value of Dühring’s work on the Jews consists in its prophetic accuracy. Dühring’s systematic uncovering of the viciousness of the Jewish character and his suggestions for the removal of this evil bear the closest resemblance to the increasing anti-Semitic mood, ideological as well as popular, and the actual course of anti-Semitic events in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
Starting with the measures to exclude Jews from official positions and the prohibition of intermarriages between Jews and Germans promulgated in the Nürnberg Laws of 1935 and ending with increasing irritation with the very presence of Jews on German soil, the anti-Judaic programmes of the National Socialists were anticipated almost to the last detail by the blind philosopher of Berlin. Between the first appearance of Dühring’s work and the first major political measures taken against the Jews by the National Socialist regime there had elapsed a rather long period of about sixty years; neither Jews nor Jewish sympathisers can blame the Germans for having been too rash in their dealings with a racial group whose social and cultural influence had been philosophically identified as morally criminal. The claims of George Mosse and Donald Niewyk that the brutalization of German politics was spurred by the defeat of 1918[13] is only partially accurate, since the sharp turn of anti-Semitic trends in the Weimar Republic was actually propelled by the blatant arrogation of power by those very Jewish elements whom intellectual anti-Semites from the start had sought to exclude from German society through more rational social discrimination.
The moral corruption associated with Jewish finance and mores showed no signs of improving since the first publication of Dühring’s work but, rather, it achieved a giddy triumph at the end of World War I in the ill-fated Weimar Republic, which was initially established as a Socialist republic by Karl Liebknecht, the Jewish agitator, and conducted in a markedly Jewish social and political climate. It cannot be very surprising to one who is familiar with Dühring’s analysis of the Jewish ethos and its role in modern Germany that the Germans reacted to this ethos with a populist movement such as National Socialism. Those sections of the population which suffered most from the sense of exploitation at the hands of the Jewish economic and social system naturally supported a German nationalist movement which sought in the end to destroy the Jewish evil at its very roots. As Dühring had foretold, “The German, to be sure, moves his limbs mostly only when the usurpation become too malicious; but if he does that once, then he does that which he undertakes, no matter what, also in a fundamental way.”
In retrospect, therefore, we may consider the National Socialist movement as being in no way an aberration but one which was clearly predicted in advance by philosophical understanding. Historical discussions of Hitler’s regime which puzzle over the extreme measures taken by it against the Jews and Jewish Bolshevism and quickly dismiss them as the products of the monstrous psychological complex of one individual are clearly handicapped by their unfamiliarity with the real philosophic impetuses of an ideological political movement such as National Socialism. Peter Pulzer’s suggestion that Hitler was merely relying on the political effectiveness of anti-Semitism,[14] for instance, seems not to understand that anti-Semitism was in its origins, and throughout its career in the early years of the twentieth century, not a mere tool in German politics (except perhaps in the case of Bismarck) but the very aim of it.[15]
The failure of the National Socialist regime was partly due to its rashness both in internal politics and foreign policy. The hasty foreign political moves made by Hitler at a time when neither the German people nor the remainder of the European nations had yet been forged into a political and cultural unity could not but fail. Besides, the powerful influence of the Jewish presence in America and Britain was not reckoned with adequately to forestall the defeat at the hands of the Allies.
The real tragedy of World War II, however, is that the failure of the Nazi movement and the discovery of the National Socialist attempts to eliminate Jewry in Germany have only succeeded in handing over the sympathy of the public to the very elements which formed the pivotal issue of the war. The corruption and degeneration that Dühring and the National Socialists attempted to check have proceeded with redoubled vigor after the war, and the enslavement of the European peoples to the Jewish baseness and vulgarity has become almost complete.[16] Dühring’s prophetic philosophical work on the Jewish character thus clearly retains its cautionary significance.
[1] This is in fact borne out by the evidence of Josephus regarding the circumstances of the expulsion of Abraham and his tribe from Chaldea, for he states that the Chaldeans drove him out because he forsook the lofty, astronomically oriented, natural philosophy of the Chaldeans for a more mundane ethics (Jewish Antiquities, I, 157; cf. Philo the Jew, De mutation nominum, 72–76, and De migratione Abrahami, 184). This first recorded expulsion of the Jewry from a host country is strengthened by the second, dating from Egyptian antiquity, when, according to Dühring himself, the Jews revealed their avaricious worldly nature in their attempt to take as much of the Egyptians’ gold and silver with them as possible when they left Egypt.
[2] All quotations from the Judenfrage are from my translation of the second edition.
[3] Compare Schopenhauer’s contempt for the Jews which was directed by his recognition of their worldly nature and superficial theism, rationalism, and optimism. The references to these characteristics of the Jewish mentality are ubiquitous in his works. For instance, in his ‘Fragments for the History of Philosophy’ (Parerga and Paralipomena, I), he declares: “[the religion of the Jews] is, therefore, the crudest and poorest of all religions and consists merely in an absurd and revolting theism—While all other religions endeavour to explain to the people by symbols and parables the metaphysical significance of life, the religion of the Jews is entirely immanent and furnishes nothing but a mere war-cry in the struggle with other nations”, (cf., Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Ill, Art.48, IV, Art.59; Parerga, I, ‘On Philosophy at the Universities’; and II, ‘On Religion’).
[4] In Sache, Leben und Feinde, Dühring points out that “The belief which Christ demanded was the belief in his person, the blind subjection to the word of the master and prophet, but not that naturally grown fidelity such as it lies in the nature of the better peoples and characters” (p.288) and both in this work and in the Ersatz as well as in the later editions of the Judenfrage, Dühring maintains that the ascetic ordeal of self-crucifixion exemplified by Christ in his life is valid only for the inferior Jewish flesh, embodying the characteristic Jewish self-interest, and should not apply to the healthy peoples.
[5] In his Kritische Geschichte der Philosophie, Dühring declares: “The concept of so-called virtue coincides with that of power. From the logical affirmation of individual power the symbol of all ethical principles is supposed to be ultimately produced by means of the understanding and higher insight” (3rd. ed., Leipzig, -excha1878, p.306f.).
[6] The 16 May 1877 Crisis that brought down the royalist president Patrice MacMahon.
[7] The acquisition of the Suez Canal for Britain with funds derived from the Rothschilds is a case in point.
[8] That is, at the time of writing the second edition (1881).
[9] Peter Pulzer, The rise of political anti-Semitism, London: Peter Halban, 1988, 99.
[10] Hammer, XI (1912), 153–58, ‘Vom partei-politischen Antisemitismus’.
[11] See Reginald H. Phelps, “’Before Hitler came’: Thule Society and Germanen order’, Journal of Modern History, 35 (1963), 245–61.
[12] See my English edition of this work, The Track of the Jew through the Ages, London: Ostara Publications, 2016.
[13] See George Mosse, “Der erste Weltkrieg und die Brutalisierung der Politik: Betrachtungen über die politische Rechte, den Rassismus, und den deutschen Sonderweg”, in Manfred Funke et al. (ed.), Demokratie und Diktatur: Geist und Gestalt in Deutschland und Europa, Düsseldorf, 1987, pp. 127–139 and Donald Niewyk, “Solving the ‘Jewish problem’: continuity and change in German antisemitism, 1871–1945”, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 35 (1990), p.370.
[14] Peter Pulzer, The rise of political anti-Semitism, London: Peter Halban, 1988, p.202.
[15] Cf., in this context, Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, London: Pinter Publishers, 1991, where he points out that German Fascism can be explained only in terms of a “palingenetic” effort on the part of the German nation to rid itself of all Jewish forms of social and political life.
[16] See for example Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority, Cape Canaveral, FL: Howard Allen Press, 1976, Ch.15, p.178f, where he points out that “what is happening today in the United States today is what has been happening throughout much of Western history. The Jews, finding themselves unrestricted and uncurbed in a land rich in resources and labour, are rapidly monopolizing its wealth. It is almost certainly the same historic process that took place in Visigothic, Arabic and Catholic Spain, in medieval England, France and Germany—and most recently in twentieth century Germany. Yet no one cares—or dares—to notice it. Those who are so concerned about labour monopolies or business cartels, about the influence of the Roman Catholic Church or the military-industrial complex, about the WASP domination of the big corporations or the international Communist conspiracy, seem strangely silent and utterly unconcerned about the activities of an ever more powerful, ever more dominant, supranational ethnocentrism with almost unlimited financial resources at its command”. The reason for the relative silence regarding the Jewish power in America is of course, as Robertson himself shows, the domination of the press and the media in America by the Jews. Not only does this domination help to curtail criticism of the political and commercial manipulations of the Jews but it also, more harmfully, forces the Jewish vulgarity in well-nigh irresistible doses onto the gullible masses through the film, television, music, and sports industries financed and administered in large part by the Jews.
