Cherchez le Juif: Satanism as the Hidden Grammar of America (2)

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Sombart, like Marx before him, felt that the United States was destined to become the pre-eminent Capitalist country because of the circumstances surrounding its colonization and birth as a nation. Foremost among them was “Jewish access to newly discovered gold and silver in the countries of Central and South America,” which “facilitated their role in international trade in luxury goods.” As a result, “the United States are filled to the brim with the Jewish spirit.”

After deconstructing Weber’s claim, Sombart proposes his own myth concerning the origin of capitalism. Modern Europe was created by a confluence of two groups: Germans rooted in the soil, and Jews who were wandering herdsmen. According to Sombart:

“The capitalistic civilization of our age is the fruit of the union between the Jews, a Southern people pushing into the North, and the Northern tribes, indigenous there. The Jews contributed an extraordinary capacity for commerce, and the Northern peoples, above all the Germans, an equally remarkable ability for technical inventions.”

The main premise upon which the German half of Sombart’s origins thesis rests is the claim that “From the very first [our ancestors, i.e., the Germans] seemed to be rooted in the soil.” This means that Germans, who live in cool forests, are closer to nature (“Man is brought into closer touch with Nature in the North than in the hot countries.”) than the Jews, who “have received their peculiar impress from the thousands of years of wandering in the wilderness.” The German genius, in other words, brought forth the “feudal manorial system,” a system tied to the soil:

“from the soil which the ploughshare turns up arose that economic organization of society which was dominant in Europe before Capitalism came—the feudal, manorial system, resting on the ideas that production should be only for consumption, that every man should have a niche to work in and that every society should have differences in status. The peasant’s holding, strictly marked off as it was from his neighbor’s, gave prominence to the idea of each man’s limited sphere of activities, of ‘the estate to which it had pleased God to call him’ there he was to remain and work in the traditional way.”

This system finds its antithesis in Jewish Capitalism: “From the endless wastes of sand, from the pastoral pursuits, springs the opposite way of life—Capitalism.”

According to Sombart:

“Their constant concern with money distracted the attention of the Jews from a qualitative, natural view of life to a quantitative abstract conception. The Jews fathomed all the secrets that lay hid in money and found out its magic powers. They became the lords of money, and, through it, lords of the world.”

As with Max Weber, whose book he criticizes, Werner Sombart runs into trouble when he tries to formulate a theory which can explain the origins of Capitalism. To begin with, the German half of Sombart’s foundational myth flies in the face of historical reality. The Germans were not bound to the soil, certainly not “from the very first” as Sombart claims. In fact, the rise of German hegemony over European culture, as symbolized by the Holy Roman Empire, began with the exact opposite of attachment to the soil. It began with something the Germans term the “Voelkerwanderung,” i.e., with the wandering of the German tribes beginning in earnest around the Fourth Century AD. When the Goths settled on the southern bank of the Danube and defeated the Roman legions in the battle of Adrianople in 378, the stage was set for centuries of looting and pillaging as these barbaric and largely Germanic hordes swept over what was left of the Roman empire and remade Europe in their image.

The Lombards (or Langobards) are a typical example of one of the wandering Germanic tribes who changed the face of Europe after the fall of Rome by looting and plundering. After subduing the local population, the Lombards exacted tribute so that they could engage in things they considered important, namely, hunting, warring, and raising pigs. The Germanic invasion would have significant consequences for the economic development of Italy, and once northern Italy became Europe’s premier power in banking and finance, their development would have significant consequences for all of Europe, and once Europe founded its colonies in the New World, consequences for the entire world as well.

The Lombard conquest of Italy began when the entire Lombard nation (200,000 strong) was driven out of their most recent home in Pannonia on the Danube by the Mongols. Following the route already established by the Roman legions, the Lombards crossed the Julian Alps into Italy in 568 “and soon overran Venetia and the valley of the Po as far west as Milan.”

In the aftermath of the invasion, the conquered “Romans” had two choices. They could remain on the land, in which case they became slaves of the Lombards. This peasant class supplied the material needs of the Lombard elites because “The main activity of most free Lombards was warfare and hunting; their land they left to be worked by the dependent population.” A new Germanic aristocratic culture replaced its Roman predecessor, and “Their principal activity was hunting and the breeding of swine and other animals most easily adapted to forest life.”

By the middle of the seventh century, the Lombards controlled a land area four-times larger than Byzantine Italy, but “the Lombards were practically cut off from all maritime activity and even neglected to use their two ports of Genoa and Pisa.” The “Greeks,” on the other hand, controlled all of the coastal districts, all of the ports, and therefore all of the commerce of what was the former Roman Empire in the West. Commerce continued in Italy during the “dark ages,” largely because of the ports of Byzantine Italy, all of which “maintained perpetual contacts with Constantinople and the eastern Mediterranean, which at that time were economically the most vigorous and enterprising part of the world.”

Those who chose not to serve the new Germanic masters left the land and took up residence in the complex of islands that made up the delta of the Po and Adige Rivers, which came to be known as Venice. Venice retained its identity as an outpost of the Roman empire largely through its navy, which facilitated trade with Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Empire which remained untouched by Germanic invasions. Culture in Italy, as a result, took on a dual Germanic-Greco-Roman character. Tilling the soil according to the system of the feudal, manorial economy characterized the Germanic, Langobardian interior of Italy, while commerce with the Greeks, which engendered a money economy, characterized the cities along the coast. Eventually, during the course of the Middle Ages, these two Italies, along with their different economic systems, would come in conflict with each other, and it would be up to the Catholic Church to adjudicate their differences and decide which economic advances were compatible with a Christian social order and which were not.

The final element which contributed to the development of economic life in post-Imperial Christian Italy was the Catholic Church, in particular the large ecclesiastical estates which were first managed in a systematic way by the monastic orders: “The man most responsible for this was St. Benedict (480-543) who in his famous Rule, compiled about 534 for the abbey on Monte Cassino, provided a model for the economic practice of all the Benedictine houses subsequently founded throughout Italy and western Europe.” Gradually under the influence of Benedictine monks, who in addition to the traditional vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, took a vow of stability binding them to one place, animal husbandry and agriculture took the place of the hunting and looting, which had been the basis of aristocratic Langobardic culture.

Sombart got it wrong when he ascribed to the Germans some mystical connection to the soil. The Germanic connection to the soil came not from the culture of wandering German tribes but from the Catholic Church in general and the vow of stability taken by Benedictine monks in particular, as they tried for 1,000 years to civilize and Christianize the Germanic barbarian looters who constituted the ruling class in Europe.

Economic development in Italy took place in a cultural matrix composed of these three competing forces. Gradually, the forests and swamps of the Po Valley, where the Lombards did their hunting, were cleared and drained under the tutelage of the Benedictines, and the surplus food which this land produced helped feed the commerce-oriented population of cities like Venice, Florence and Milan, which could then engage in increasingly far-flung and sophisticated trading with Byzantium and the Levant on the one hand and Flanders and England on the other.

This increasingly lucrative trade, especially after the added impetus of the Crusades, led, in turn, to increased economic development, which led to the need for increasingly sophisticated financial instruments to keep track of and facilitate even more complex forms of commerce. As increased economic activity led to increased wealth and increased wealth to increased power, conflicts arose between the stable feudal culture of the land and the money culture of commerce that was slowly replacing it as centers of northern Italian commerce like Florence, Lucca, Siena and Milan rose to prominence alongside Venice. “In the Middle Ages it was the international trade ventures that did most to favor the rise of the capitalist spirit.”

Trade flourished in spite of ecclesial skepticism and downright disapproval. St. Thomas Aquinas felt that trade destroyed culture: “For,” the angelic doctor wrote,

“the city that for its subsistence has need of much merchandise should necessarily submit to the presence of foreigners. Now relations with foreigners, as Aristotle says in his Politics, very often corrupt national customs: the foreigners who have been brought up under other laws and customs, in many cases act otherwise than is the use of the citizens, who, led by their example, imitate them and so bring disturbance into social life. Moreover, if the citizens themselves engage in commerce, they open the way to many vices. For since the aim of merchants is wholly one of gain, greed takes root in the heart of the citizens, by which everything in the city, becomes venal, and with the disappearance of good faith, the way is open to fraud; the general good is despised, and each man will seek his own particular advantage; the taste for virtue will be lost when the honor which is normally the reward of virtue is accorded to all. Hence in such a city civil life cannot fail to grow corrupt.”

By the end of the 15th century, it looked as if Aquinas’s prediction had come true for the city-states of northern Italy, where “competition had become intense, and beyond what was allowed by law” and no longer “mitigated by aspirations towards a society based on brotherly unity.” This is certainly the case if we take the sermons of the Mendicant preachers as an accurate picture of what is going on. Instead of embodying the Catholic ideal, Florence under Medici rule was becoming a place where: “no one feels shame if he acts in a capitalistic manner. The younger men, swept along by the current, drag the old ones with them. Capitalists seek to break down the barriers that civil and ecclesiastical legislation set on their action.”

Schooled by Weber’s understanding of Protestantism, Todd ignores the Catholic monastic contribution to the development of the work ethic in the Germanic speaking lands of the Roman Empire from “Ora et Labora,” the motto of the Benedictines, to “Arbeit macht frei,” the Nazi distortion of that concept, to the Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s. He also ignores the role of the Jewish revolutionary spirit in subverting that work ethic by promoting both usury—symbolized best by the rise of the Rothschild family—and revolution—symbolized best by agents of the Rothschilds like Heinrich Heine or agents of the Schiff family like Lev Trotsky.

The common denominator for both usury and revolution is Jewish, just as the common denominator which unites all those who feel that labor is the source of all value, including Karl Marx, is Catholic. Protestantism provided the transitional vehicle from the latter to the former throughout northern Europe, which is how Todd defines the “West.” Defined more narrowly, the West is based on three revolutions which create a “select club which only includes England, the United States and France. The English Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 are the founding events of this narrow liberal West.” The “entire Protestant sphere,” to use Todd’s terminology, is based on revolution.

At this point Todd’s adherence to Weber’s thesis sidetracks his own argument, causing him to focus on extraneous issues like literacy and predestination while ignoring the main point, which is revolution. The Protestant Reformation began as a looting operation which despoiled the monasteries of 900 years of accumulated labor, but it soon became the Protestant Revolution, which sought to consolidate those ill-gotten gains through theological contortions of the sort Tawney characterized accurately when he wrote that “the upstart aristocracy of the future had their teeth in the carcass, and, having tasted blood, they were not to be whipped off by a sermon.” In this sense, Tawney, Weber, and Todd misunderstood the trajectory of Protestantism, which was basically an after the fact theological justification of looting.

Conspicuous by its absence from Todd’s list of foundational revolutions was the revolutionary decade of the 1640s in England, which preceded the Glorious Revolution by 40 years. Todd, for some reason, omitted the prime example of the Revolutionary spirit in both England and New England, namely, the Puritans, who are doubly significant because of their overt and obvious link to the Jewish revolutionary spirit, but also because one of the most famous Puritans was John Milton, the man who wrote the Protestant epic Paradise Lost, which portrayed Satan as the patron saint of Protestantism. Both William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley believed that Satan was the hero of Paradise Lost:

“They both critiqued Milton’s Satan by finding several imperfections in Paradise Lost. Both tried to surpass Milton by creating their own perfect version of Milton’s Satan. Shelley goes a step beyond Blake when designing his Satan by producing a new tragic hero that does not have a hamartia.”

Read the third part of the article

Author: E. Michael Jones

yogaesoteric
April 11, 2024