The Decline of American Judeophilia

...and What Comes Next

It’s that embarrassing time of year when the lights go up on the houses, tinsel and holly start to occupy every space, and I can’t go through a checkout line without having that little twerp Ralphie staring at me from some weird novelty candy. It’s the Phony Christmas Season, that which now eats up Hunting Opener, Thanksgiving, and Advent. It’s embarrassing to be amidst all the bogus cheer, especially if you truly love Christmas. Phony Christmas effectively squelches the real Christmas season, which is supposed to begin on December 25^th, not end on it. Yet it’s hard to complain much, because the desire to celebrate Christmas is obviously based on Christian impulse, though one which is devoid of Christian rationality. The result is a status quo that’s logically anti-Christian.

This is basically how I feel about most American Christians’ philo-Semitism. Jews are more popular among American Christians than Christians are among themselves. Much could be said about the strange roots of this situation. Suffice it to say that American Jew worship is a sentiment born out of good impulses, out of attempts at altruism and charity sprung from a kind of half-understanding of the Jewish persuasion. The problem is that it is nonsense, absolutely abhorrent with relation to dogma and history. It prevails because even the remaining Christians long ago abjured the rational bases of the faith and operate only on sentiment. The end result is a status quo that is everywhere anti-Christian.

Before the 20^th Century, it would never have need be said that the interests of Jews and Christians are at odds. The basic fact is this: Judaism or Jewishness has no positive existence or unitive force apart from the Christian religion and culture. What unites Jews as distinct as the Ashkenazi and the Ethiopians, Amy Schumer and Rabbi Shmuley? Is it race? No. Culture? Definitely not. What is it? A contempt for Christ and Christianity. That's it. There is no other principle of unity. 

The root of the English “perfidy” comes from the Latin word for faithlessness. That it is in our language synonymous with treachery is no great mystery: Treachery is just to be assumed from a nation that does not share your values; the operative question is only how the ruling class wants to deal with it. Hence there was no Jewish Question before 1789. The Judenfrage was easily answered by a system of segregation. It was only with the breakdown of civil discrimination that the great mass of Gentiles had to deal with how they wanted to interact with this foreign nation-in-a-nation, and how Jews wanted to think of themselves when their identity was no longer recognized by the state. Jews may act as a dissolving agent on a society, but it is only because our non-Jewish ruling class wanted them to.

America has always been susceptible to Jewish influence, moreso than in countries where Jewish presence was much larger. The Age of Reason favored doing away with civil discrimination against the Jews once thought necessary in a Christian polity, and our literally Godless Federal Constitution promised all the equality they could have desired. To the man of the Enlightenment, the Jew stood preeminent as the exemplar of civic virtues independent from the trappings of particular Christian morality or culture. Later on, the pandering done to urban immigrants in the Progressive Era saw the Jews as immigrants par excellence. To the Progressive man the Jew was the wayward cosmopolitan, the man who never had a home just as industrialization had uprooted a new proletariat and transformed man’s traditional home into something wholly changed. The term “melting pot” was coined by one Israel Zangwill, who when the time came cut and ran to be one of the leaders of the Zionist movement. So the Jewish world turns.

Still, the Zionist victory in the Holy Land in 1948 is probably the determinative date of establishing the current love of Jews. If Christendom didn’t end with World War I, it certainly ended with the Christian powers acquiescing to Jewish control of Jerusalem. Though all three Abrahamic religions claim the Holy Land as a place of importance, it is only to the Christian that it is essential. Jerusalem holds importance not as an artifact but for the churches still standing, the precious ground anointed by Christ's blood. The Jews' interest in Jerusalem is at best sentimental, at worst pure truculence. The great attraction of the "Wailing Wall” has no significance beyond nostalgia and as a site to humiliate visiting Christian into implicitly renouncing their creeds.

The 1948 invasion ended Jerusalem’s role as an international city, which it was in practice under the rule of the Ottomans and British, and which was to be given official standing by the United Nations. The invasion was the kind of act that would have spurred a Crusade in ages past, but now the anti-Christian nature of the event is all but forgotten. Few Christians in the modern West could contemplate any reason to personally care, let alone shore up support for such a cause. 

Christianity stopped playing any material role in American government in the 1960s, and appropriately it was when modern philo-Semitism came into its own. Listening to RFK Jr.’s fervent defenses of Israel takes one back to the clean idealism of the early 1960s, and indeed the myths of Camelot have a good deal of similarity to the Zionist state. Both came to power through not-quite-legitimate means, but claimed they their intellectual and moral superiority gave them a right to rule.

The nature of Israel’s enemies also changed at this time. No longer were the Zionists the upstart enemies of international order. Since 1979 their enemy has been the “Palestinian,” which has come to be the epitome of the generic Third-Worlder, of the poor pitiful colored masses crushed by European power. This was somewhat of a forced moved, perhaps an inevitability considering the collapse of Pan-Arabism and other genuinely “postcolonial” movements. But it’s another transformation that should elicit some sadness. Zionists and their defenders sometimes tell us that their conquest of the Holy Land is akin to the American conquest of the West, but even in this they expose their contempt for America. North America was essentially empty and there was no civilization there, because there were no cities. The Palestinians occupied one of the most important areas in our Civilization, and through the long course of centuries, they developed the habits which allowed them to manage a land of irreconcilable religious and ethnic conflicts in a pacific manner. The long angst of a man like Edward Said is emblematic of this in one individual: The struggle between the civilizational heritage of the Levant and the savages striving to overcome it.

So the Israelis go from being perpetual nemeses of Christian civilization to being the front lines of that remains of Western Civilization—these the preferred terms of battle for both Zionist and Palestinian. Western domination of the Third World is more complete than it has ever been—far more than under any actual colonial regime—with masses of billions totally dependent on Western technology and largess to feed, clothe, and mend them. Third-worlders come to resent the material benefits they don’t and can’t understand. In turn, simply stating that wealthy industrial countries have a right to exist becomes an ideological act.

And that’s how we come to the present battle: An explicitly anti-Christian force that nonetheless rises out of our own civilization is pitted against a group who wield huge masses of biopower hoping to destroy it. It is a malignant tumor of the West opposed to a force that would euthanize the entire patient. It is a war between those who want to prop up a photo-negative vision of Christendom and those who want the whole thing eradicated. It isn’t strange that Americans would side with the Israelis, even with all their atrocities. It isn’t that strange that Europeans, a conquered people who have lost even the sentiments of Christianity, have sympathized with the savage counterparts in Gaza.

In America, the sentiment seems to be finally running out. Demographics are behind this, but even if the demographics hadn’t changed the sentiment would be nearly impossible to maintain. The idealism one might feel about Israel has died along with Americans’ idealism about themselves. Modern Americans are losing even the sentimental attachments to the trappings of Christendom.

Maybe there’s something positive in younger generation recognizing the fact that they live under a hostile occupation just as the Gazans do. But there is no chance of turning this resentment into a positive force. You can get barely-literates like Kanye West to rant about Jews, or get the groyper army to post “Christ is King” ad nauseum, but these are reactive outbursts. These trends have everything to do with America losing her last connections with her Christian past, not becoming more in-touch with them. They have everything to do with modern Americans adopting the self-conception of the Third World, of being creatures wandering over a decaying order they cannot understand and therefore come to resent. They are, ironically, Judeo-centric, for they are reactions to Jewish power, not visions of what Christian rule—the actual kingship of Christ—would look like. Whatever new version of Christendom that could conceivably arise from our current situation would be so drastically different from anything the world has ever seen that we might as well be Communists arguing about the contours of our future “postcolonial” utopia. In the end, it has no relationship to the civilization that was Christendom at all.

The death of American philo-Semitism is bittersweet. It is the removal of a wrong, of 75 years of placating and supporting those who are at heart an enemy. But it will not be accompanied by any movement towards the right. It proves the extinguishment of Christian consciousness, not a reawakening. I can dream about a real Christmastide replacing Phony Christmas, but I have to concede that there are no signs of a reorganized Christian consciousness that could make it so. What comes after is that the lights go out.