Jewish Influence in the Lives of Peoples

Remarks on Evola’s Empire of the Shopkeepers. I recently reread this essay, and decided to offer a few comments on it.

by Organon tou Ontos

IN 1066, William “the Conqueror” brought with him and the Germanic peoples that had also come, the first Jews to the British isles. Thus it was that an historical accident and decision of one tribal leader to allow Jews to accompany him would establish the basis of inevitable conflicts of ethnic interest between the indigenous Germanic elements that created a nation and fragments of the Jewish people. This already revealed itself within a mere two centuries and King Edward I issued his famous edict: All Jews were expelled from Britain in 1290. In expelling Jews, medieval Britain echoed an archaic precedent in dealing with them.

The problem is that Jews coagulate and almost always find a way to return. A shiftless and rootless people, they cannot settle somewhere, grow, and from there, expand, in the way a normal people does. Instead, they insinuate themselves into a people, and from within, they undermine the national life of the people they absorb themselves into. This pattern is seen in ancient history, recurs in the Middle Ages, and revisits us in this modern era. Even with all their claims of atrocities in World War II, rather than immigrating wholesale to Israel or taking flight to the US, they reabsorbed themselves into European countries after the war.

In 1657, almost four hundred years later, Oliver Cromwell permitted the Jews to return. And so it was that another decision made in isolation from the native peoples of Britain led to the infusion of the Jewish people back into the life of the British people. This decision was to have momentous consequences, for from the time of their return in question through the early twentieth century, the decision to allow them to return would lead to a fatal intertwining of Jewish and British interests that would cost the British people an Empire their ancestors had built and lead to the decline of their nation and ethnic decay of native Britons.

In his essay, “Disraeli the Jew and the Empire of the Shopkeepers,” Julius Evola argues that the decision to permit the Jews to return to Britain would lead to the creation of an Empire that, he claims, was a “travesty and a contradiction of a real Empire.” A real Empire, Evola argues, is built on “heroic, aristocratic and spiritual values.” The indigenous British qualities of martial prowess, proclivity to monarchy, and perseverance were corrupted by the Jewish elements that had been permitted to return. A clear demonstration of his point is the British role in fomenting and sustaining first World War I and, in two decades, World War II.

Evola observes:

The penetration of Judaism into England is not a thing of recent days alone. It was the English Revolution and Protestantism which threw open England’s doors. The Jews, who had been expelled by Edward I in 1290, were readmitted to England as a result of a Petition accepted by Cromwell and finally approved by Charles II in 1649. From this time forward, the Jews, and above all the Spanish Jews (the Sephardim) began to immigrate en masse to England, bringing with them the riches which they had acquired by more or less dubious means, and it was these riches, as we have just explained, which allowed them to accede to the centres of command within English life, to the aristocracy and to positions very close to the Crown.

This influence led to the primacy of commercial interests in the subsequent expansion of the British Empire. In short, Evola is arguing, the British Empire was itself a Jewish construct and wholly alien to the life and interests of the British people. An analogous argument was made regarding ‘Americanism’ within his book, The Jews and Modern Capitalism by Werner Sombart. He implies that the proximity of early settlers to incessant commercial activity and their perpetual absorption into the domains of its interests, a byproduct of Jewish influence, resulted in a national predisposition that has ever since been fundamentally Jewish.

Evola’s claim that the British Empire became an instrument of Jewish interests is accurate, but any implication that its creation was owed to Jewish influence is not. The British Empire originated in the period of initial rapid European exploration in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, when there were no Jews in Britain or Jewish influence on British political life. By the time that the Jews had been readmitted to Britain by Cromwell in 1657, an Empire had already been built and owed its origins to a combination of colonialism, commercialism and exploration. The British Empire was, primordially, the product of Britons, not of Jews.

Evola is also correct to stress that Benjamin Disraeli, the first Jewish Prime Minister in the history of Britain, solidified the British Empire’s Jewification. However, to focus on Disraeli’s tenure as Prime Minister and to stress the role he played in completing the Jewification of the British Empire is to again overlook its primordially British character. It was Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists that sought to reverse the Jewification of his nation. This unfolded on two levels: He wanted the British people to revitalize their country, and shift away from Jewish values, and also, he wanted to prevent an Anglo-German war.