Cherchez le Juif: Satanism as the Hidden Grammar of America (1)
In La Defaite de l’Occident, Emmanuel Todd claims that the collapse of the American empire was caused by the evaporation of Protestantism, which he describes as its hidden grammar.
America is now facing defeat in the Ukraine because of the complete disappearance of the Christian foundation of its culture, “un phénomène historique crucial qui, justement, explique la pulvérisation des classes dirigeantes américaines” (a crucial historical phenomenon which, precisely, explains the pulverization of the American ruling classes).
Protestantism, which “to a large extent, has been the economic strength of the West, is dead.” Both the United States and England have been caught up in a “centripetal, narcissistic then nihilistic drift,” which has led both the present empire and its predecessor to something which Todd calls the “Zero State,” which he defines as a nation state which is “no longer structured by its original values,” which in this instance means that the Protestant work ethic and the feeling of responsibility which previously animated its population has evaporated. Both Trump and Biden epitomize the apotheosis of the Zero State because Washington’s decisions under both administrations have ceased to be moral or rational.
The Zero State was preceded by the Zombie State, which retains the form but is emptied of its content. Todd sees Benjamin Franklin as a typical Zombie Protestant, who no longer practices his religion but retains its ethics, attached to the values of honesty, work, seriousness, and always aware that man only has a limited amount of time. Zombie Protestant society emerged in Europe when Germany and Great Britain created a world:
“in which religious practice withers but where the social values of religion persist, as well as the rites of passage prescribed by the various Churches. Neither baptism, nor marriage, nor burial are called into question. But, as a sign that the West no longer respects the biblical commandment to grow and multiply, – fertility is falling in the middle classes. Deprived of its supervision, the Protestant work ethic in Britain devolved into pure nationalism. Literacy is a fundamental Protestant value because sola scriptura requires the masses to be literate in order to have access to the Scriptures, which makes every man his own priest, thus promoting democracy and egalitarianism.”
Todd derives his understanding of Protestantism from Max Weber’s famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In his attempt to answer the question “Qu’est-ce quel’Occident?” (What is the West?) Todd identifies himself specifically as a pupil of Weber. Todd is “en bon élève de Max Weber, qui plaça la religion de Luther et de Calvin à la source de ce qui apparaissait à son époque comme la supériorité de l’Occident” (as a good student of Max Weber, who placed the religion of Luther and Calvin at the source of what appeared in his time as the superiority of the West).
The best exposition of the Weber thesis in the English-speaking world is R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Tawney writes: “Weber, in a celebrated essay, expounded the thesis that Calvinism in its English version was the parent of capitalism.” According to Weber, “religious radicalism went hand in hand with an economic radicalism.”
One of the first critiques of Weber’s thesis, however, noticed the connection between the Puritans and the Jews. In his 1907 book Jews and Modern Capitalism, Werner Sombart points out that everything Weber said about Puritans was a fortiori true of Jews. If Sombart’s earlier book on capitalism caused Weber to write his articles on the Puritan spirit, those articles led Sombart to write his book on the Jews. “In fact,” Sombart writes, “Max Weber’s researches are responsible for this book. I have already mentioned that Max Weber’s study of the importance of Puritanism for the capitalistic system was the impetus that sent me to consider the importance of the Jew, especially as I felt that the dominating ideas of Puritanism which were so powerful in capitalism were more perfectly developed in Judaism and were also of a much earlier date.”
Having read Weber’s thesis, Sombart wonders:
“whether all that Weber ascribes to Puritanism might not with equal justice be referred to Judaism, and probably in a greater degree; nay, it might well be suggested that that which is called Puritanism is really Judaism.”
According to Sombart, Puritanism is nothing more than an aberrant form of Judaism because both are based on:
“the preponderance of religion interests, the idea of divine rewards and punishments, asceticism within the world, the close relationship between religion and business, the arithmetical conception of sin, and, above all, the rationalization of life.”
Sombart was hardly the first one to notice the connection. He cites Heinrich Heine who asked: “Are not the Protestant Scots Hebrews, with their Biblical names, their Jerusalem, their pharisaical cant? And is not their religion a Judaism which allows you to eat pork?”
Or as one Calvinist put it: “If I am to say on my honour why I am become a Calvinist, I shall have to confess that the one and only reason which persuaded me was that among all the religions, I could find nothing which agreed so much with Judaism and its view of life and faith.”
Writing 60 years before Sombart attempted to correct the Weber Thesis by claiming that Capitalism was Jewish, Karl Marx wrote in Zur Judenfrage that the worldly cult of the Jew was huckstering and his worldly god – money – and that the most Jewish country on the face of the earth was New England because of the Puritans who settled there:
“the devout and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind of Laocoon who makes not the least effort to escape from the serpents which are crushing him. Mammon is his idol, which he adores not only with his lips but with the whole force of his body and consciousness. In his view the world is no more than a Stock Exchange, and he is convinced that he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbour. Trade has seized upon all his thoughts, and he has no other recreation than to exchange objects. When he travels, he carries, so to speak, his goods and his counter on his back and talks only of interest and profit.”
Marx too emphasizes the practical sphere of life, specifically commerce, as the area in which Jewish values have most influenced their nominally Christian imitators and admirers, the Puritans. Money, not theology, is the true ecumenical lingua franca:
“Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it. The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of this world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.”
As Tawney showed malgré lui, there is no difference on the theoretical level between the Puritan and the Catholic when it comes to the relationship between morality and economics. On the practical level, however, the opposite was true. If we ask what the Jew and the Puritan have in common on the practical level, the answer is Capitalism, not theology.
Marx, like William Cobbett, whom he admired, felt that Capitalism began with the looting of the Catholic monasteries. In breaking with Catholicism, English Christianity became Jewish because by benefiting financially from the looting of the monasteries, the Anglican Church accepted Mammon as its god. This is what Marx meant when he said that the Christianity which “issued from Judaism has now been re-absorbed into Judaism.” The same Christianity which Marx characterized as “the sublime thought of Judaism”:
“became Judaism, which is to say, the worship of Mammon, once its raison d’être became the rationalization of looting. The moment in which English Christianity got absorbed back into Judaism is known as the Reformation. Capitalism is the worship of Mammon.”
At the beginning of the Christian era, the Christian was a “theorizing Jew.” He achieved this state by choosing the quest for heaven over the quest for money. Any Christian, on the other hand, who asserts the hegemony of mammon over morals, becomes a “practical Christian,” which another word for a Jew. Or as Marx puts it: “The Jew is the practical Christian. And the practical Christian has become a Jew again.”
As soon as he subordinated morals to economic considerations, which is to say as soon as he began to worship Mammon, the true god of the Jews, the Christian became a Capitalist, which is to say, a Jew, and Christianity became a form of Judaism, henceforth known as Calvinism or the Geist of Protestantism. Framed in these terms, Marx’s formulation explains the hidden grammar of both sides of the English Civil War: the Anglicans (who benefited from the looting when they became the state Church and the owners of stolen property) as well as the Puritans, who became envious of their ill-gotten wealth and hijacked it 100 years later. The common ground which both came to share in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, when Roundhead and Cavalier joined together for the first time as “Protestants,” was Capitalism, which is the worship of the Jewish god: money.
Sombart’s reading of Weber sounds like a continuation of Marx’s treatise on the Jews. According to both men, the Geist of Capitalism is Jewish. “The Jewish outlook,” according to Sombart, is “modern.” All these activities are summed up in the word “capitalism.” Sombart substantiates Heinrich Pesch’s claim that modern capitalism is state sponsored usury when he claims that money-lending, the quintessential Jewish occupation, “contains the root idea of capitalism.” Like Marx, Sombart felt that “the Jewish religion has the same leading ideas as Capitalism.”
“Rationalism is the characteristic trait of Judaism as of Capitalism”. Capitalism, like the usury upon which it is based, is, as Sombart puts it, “contrary to Nature.” Before capitalism could develop, “the natural man had to be changed out of all recognition, and a rationalistically thought mechanism introduced in his stead.”
The rise of Capitalism in Christian Europe meant that the businessman would become more and more “Jewish” in his dealings with fellow Christians. The pious Jew was forbidden to take interest on money lent to fellow Jews, but he was “not oppressed by the burden of the anti-usury prohibition which weighed upon the Christian” when it came to lending to non-Jews. Before long the permission turned to a form of encouragement, that quickly degenerated into a Talmudic culture of cheating in which the Jew was praised for his usurious dealings with Christians. The Jew “took delight in cheating and overreaching.”
As this attitude spread among Christian businessmen and combined with the undeniable fact that the looters in England belonged to the aristocracy, class conflict began to emerge among the English, where Jewish concepts like the “goyim,” were applied to the those who were not part of the Calvinist Elect. In the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, when, as Marx put it, “Locke supplanted Habakkuk,” economics supplanted theology, and the reprobate “goyim” were redefined as the proletariat or the lower orders. According to John Locke and Adam Smith, labor was the source of all value.
Capitalism was created by the Whig oligarchs who created the Bank of England as their way of appropriating surplus value via usury, and the laboring classes who were the source of all value became via this same alchemy, the goyim, which means, in short, the people whom it was permitted to cheat. By the time Marx arrived in England, class conflict was an inextricable part of the capitalist system.
Similarly, the concept of the just price was not unknown among Jews, but it only applied to fellow Jews. In the Jews’ relations with the goyim the price became whatever the Jew could extort. This distinction would have far-reaching consequences. As Sombart points out, over the course of the centuries Jewish standards of commerce became more and more the norm throughout Europe. Christian merchants began acting more and more like Jews, and gradually those methods began to supplant the commercial dealings that were based on Catholic moral theology. With the rise of Capitalism, the Christian who aspired to treat every man as his brother in Christ was more and more supplanted by the Capitalist who treated the customer in the same way that the Jew treated the goyim in his business dealings with him. The Christians who were most likely to succeed in commerce became those most willing to act like Jews, as the success of the Lombards as pawnbrokers in Brugge proved.
Like Yuri Slezkine, Sombart felt that “the Jewish outlook was the ‘modern’ outlook.” As a result “the Jews have been champions of the cause of personal liberty. They resisted regulation, supported free trade, free competition, and advanced economic rationalism. The Jewish religion and capitalism contain the same spirit. Both are alien artificial elements in the midst of a natural, created world. Both are creations of the intellect.”
Unlike Weber’s theory of the origin of Capitalism, Sombart’s thesis actually corresponds to the historical progress of Capitalism because that “economic activity follows the wanderings of Jews as they passed from the nations of southern to those of northwest Europe. Holland, England, and France became significant economic actors from the first appearance of the Spanish Jewish emigres in those countries.” According to Sombart the Capitalist ball began rolling with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain:
One of the most important facts in the growth of modern economic life is the removal of the center of economic activity from the nations of Southern Europe—the Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese, with whom should also be reckoned some South German lands—to those of the Northwest—the Dutch, the French, the English and the North Germans. The epoch-making event in the process was Holland’s sudden rise to prosperity, and this was the impetus for the development of the economic possibilities of France and England.
Many Jews from the Iberian peninsula ended up in the Spanish Netherlands, and as a result Antwerp became the most significant entrepot linking the Atlantic trade in gold and silver, the Spice trade from the East Indies, the Mediterranean trade from the South and the Hanseatic cities of the Baltic. Given Antwerp’s link to all of these markets as well as to the river trade in Germany, commerce took a quantum leap forward, and, given the role that Jews recently expelled from Spain (in collaboration with English Protestants and Dutch Calvinists) played in defining how that commerce would be conducted, it is not surprising that Capitalism would become ipso facto inimical to Catholic interests and the moral law as well.
Read the second part of the article
Author: E. Michael Jones
yogaesoteric
April 8, 2024