Jewish Social Chameleons

American South

I’m sharing this here with Lew because it touches upon what Richard Thornbourn was saying at The Occidental Observer about Southern Jews:

“Southern Jews became social chameleons, changing their colors so as to blend into the background. Evidence of this need to belong was everywhere. Traditional religious observance was often as low as intermarriage was high.”

Lots of Southern Jews privately supported the Civil Rights Movement, but the vast majority of them were not actively involved in pushing for it:

“Jews understood above all that the continued goodwill of white Gentiles could only be guaranteed through their uncritical acceptance of the southern caste system. Although most southern Jews sympathized with the incipient Civil Rights Movement, political realities compelled their silence. When the northern journalist John Gunther attended a social function in Natchez, Mississippi, shortly after the Second World War, he made the mistake of expressing sympathy for the plight of African Americans. In his words, “Several leading citizens almost broke blood vessels trying to exclaim that I must be a ‘Communist’ or ‘be influenced by Jews’ to hold such views.” Faced with this pervasive sense of suspicion, southern Jews were forced to watch their every word and action. According to an opinion poll conducted in 1959, southern Jews were considerably more supportive of civil rights initiatives than were white Gentiles. So successfully, however, had Jews concealed their true convictions that only 15 percent of Gentiles believed them to be in favor of integration; 67 percent confessed not to know how Jews felt.

Even in cities with a relatively progressive reputation, such as Dallas and Little Rock, Jews carefully avoided controversy. The same was true in Atlanta, arguably the most cosmopolitan city in the South. According to sociologist Solomon Sutker, Jews “were conspicuous by their lack of active political participation.”

The moral of the story is that omnipotent Jews do not exist: the behavior of Jews in any given society is determined in large part by the culture of their host society and its attitude toward Jews.

In places like the South where Whites were extremely racially conscious and militantly policed the color line with Klan bombings, Council boycotts, social ostracism, lynchings, and social disrepute, Jews may have disagreed with the status quo, but it wasn’t “good for the Jews” to challenge it, and self interest dictated that Jews blend in and avoid attracting attention to themselves.

Unlike the North, the South was a very homogeneous society. Dixie was overwhelmingly Protestant, the White population was overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic, and the South was conservative and monolithic in its racial customs and militant about enforcing them.

In the early twentieth century, the North was ethnically and religiously in chaos. It was liberal in orientation and had civil rights laws dating back to Reconstruction. Racial consciousness was relatively weak there compared to the South. The North’s industrial economy also had Whites far more pitted against each other along class, ethnic, and religious lines than in the South.

Jews thrived in these huge urban ant heaps like New York City. In a place like rural Arkansas, which were the exact opposite of a “melting pot,” Jews much more easily fell under suspicion.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

50 Comments

  1. “Jews thrived in these huge urban ant heaps like New York City. In a place like rural Arkansas, which were the exact opposite of a “melting pot,” Jews much more easily fell under suspicion.”

    Yep, diversity allows them to hide.

  2. The main problem I see here, is that a good many of these delusional liberals and greedy developers flee South after their utopias begin to implode. They are busily flooding the Southern states with concrete and degenerate ethics. As insult to injury they bring along their vulgar cosmopolitan accent.

  3. The moral of the story is that omnipotent Jews do not exist: the behavior of Jews in any given society is determined in large part by the culture of their host society and its attitude toward Jews.

    Lawrence Auster used to say that if whites asserted themselves as a powerful majority, i.e. as the undisputed rule-makers and tone-setters of society, then the Jews would quickly fall in line behind them. I think there’s a lot of truth to this, but it’s incomplete. “Numbers are of the essence” said Enoch the Great, and the number of Jews in the Northern states was and is exponentially greater than the Jewish population in the South. In fact, back in the Civil Rights era (1945-70), there were probably way more Jews within 30 miles of Manhattan than in all of the Southern states combined.

    In places like the South where Whites were extremely racially conscious and militantly policed the color line with Klan bombings, Council boycotts, social ostracism, lynchings, and social disrepute, Jews may have disagreed with the status quo, but it wasn’t “good for the Jews” to challenge it, and self interest dictated that Jews blend in and avoid attracting attention to themselves.

    In South Africa, whites were even more racially conscious and militant than in the American South. Yet because of their numbers (about 3% of SA’s white population compared to probably less than 1% of the South’s white pop.), Jews *did* challenge the racial status quo repeatedly and effectively. And they went out of their way to attract attention to themselves, virtually alone amongst the white population, as staunch opponents of the apartheid regime.

    Unlike the North, the South was a very homogeneous society. Dixie was overwhelmingly Protestant, the White population was overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic, and the South was conservative and monolithic in its racial customs and militant about enforcing them.

    Obviously South African whites weren’t as homogenous as whites in the South, being divided about 60-40 between Afrikaners and Anglos. But these whites were even more overwhelmingly Protestant than Southern ones, the Catholic population of SA being miniscule. And the two major strains of racial thought in SA were the Jim Crow-like segregation of Jan Smuts’ United Party, supported by most Anglos, and the far more robust Grand Apartheid of DF Malan’s and Hendrik Verwoerd’s National Party, supported by the Afrikaners. To the hardcore Boers, the Southern US and the more Anglified provinces of the Cape and Natal were bastions of racial liberalism in comparison to the Transvaal and Orange Free State.

    There was one key difference, besides sheer numbers, between the Jewish population of the South on one hand, and the South African and Northern Jews on the other: the former were largely Sephardic while the latter were overwhelmingly Ashkenazis. The Sephardic Jews, with their long history in the slave trade, were well-attuned to being part of the slave-owning ‘master race’ caste, whether Muslim or Christian, and therefore weren’t as inclined to rock the boat. They were also less intelligent and had poorer organizational skills than their Ashkenazi co-religionists, and so posed less of an intellectual threat to the existing order.

    The Ashkenazis, with their much greater intelligence, with no real experience in a mixed-race society and a virulent oppositional culture fine-tuned under the Tsar, had no such qualms about attacking the majority populations in the Northern states and South Africa. That, combined with their much greater numbers, is what differentiated them from the Southern Jews.

    So, in short, the three major reasons for the different behaviour of Jews in various host societies are:

    1.) The attitude of the majority. All other things being equal, the stronger and more self-confident a society is, the less disruptive and destructive the Jewish minority will tend to be.

    2.) Numbers, or more accurately, percentages. The higher the percentage of Jews in any given society, the more havoc they are capable of wreaking.

    3.) Origins. Ashkenazis, with their high intelligence and superior organizational abilities, are much more of a threat than Sephardics, Mizrahis or any other non-European Jews.

  4. In the 1950s, there were 2.5 million Jews in the New York City metro area:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City#Jewish

    The New York metropolitan area is home to the largest Jewish population in the world outside Israel. Until late 2005 or early 2006, when Israel surpassed the United States as having the largest Jewish population in the world, the New York metropolitan area had more Jews than Tel Aviv. After dropping from a peak of 2.5 million in the 1950s to a low of 1.4 million in 2002 the population of Jews in the New York metropolitan area grew to 1.54 million in 2011.

  5. Obviously, it was much easier to control the 2,457 Jews in Mississippi, the 8,584 Jews in Alabama, and the 2,354 Jews in Arkansas, than the 2.5 million Jews in the New York City metropolitan area.

  6. Jewamongyou, has gone to the trouble of translating from the original Hebrew the book “The Ashkenazi Revolution” by Kalman Katzenelson.

    Published in 1964, this book was banned/removed from circulation in Israel shortly thereafter. Recommend downloading the pdf from his site, if you are interested.

    A small sample of some of the most interesting passages (at least to me, anyway) from this extraordinary book:

    “The Spanish Inquisition was a minor blow compared to the catastrophes that repeatedly visited Ashkenaz. The Jews of Spain were expelled, but the Jews of Ukraine were murdered in the pogroms of 1648 and 1649. But despite this, Ashkenaz always recovered and established new strongholds, in Poland, in Germany, in the United States and recently in Israel. In contrast, the civilization of Sepharad never recovered from the blow it received from the Spanish Inquisition.”

    “There was an opportunity to establish large Jewish settlements in Latin America, but the Sephardic Jews who arrived there assimilated and disappeared.”

    “We have proved ourselves stronger than the Sephardim in Holland. We put Sepharad in our shadow in England, in which it had been rooted for generations…It appears that, in every case, history granted Ashkenaz success in overcoming every challenge that Sepharad failed at. Ashkenaz founded great communities in the United States, took advantage of, as appropriate, the charter of the Land of Israel, build a state within it, and collected the dispersed tribes of Sephardo-Mizrahi Jews. This and more: Ashkenaz knew how to unite its tribes and to transform them into one integrated people.”

    “As the migration to the United States intensified, after the pogroms of 1881-1882, Yehuda Leib Gordon supported the opinion that saw the United States, and not the Land of Israel, as a refuge for the masses of escaping Jews.”

    “It is a pity that Hitler did not finish all of you”, or “it is a pity that Eichmann did not work overtime” are common curses among the Sephardo-Mizrahi Jews, and they are heard in the workplace, in offices, and even in schools.”

    “Just as the Confederacy of Jewish Peoples is special, among the peoples of the world, so too is the Ashkenazi People the chosen people among the Jewish peoples.”

    “Are we rulers of the world and conquerors of the world, as the anti-Semites claim? Or are we the downtrodden, and victims, of the world? We should ask, whose question is the Jewish Question?…There is no doubt that the truth lies more with the anti-Semites, who claim that we are conquerors of the world, than with the various Jewish representatives, who claim that we are the downtrodden of the world.”

    “The first condition for the creation of a successful civilization of any sort, in the State of Israel, is the immediate nullification of the Law of Return, and the implementation
    of a careful selection process in immigration.”

    Omnipotent? I think not.
    Merely human.

    Excellent comments, Hunter and jeppo.

    Deo Vindice

  7. Interesting reading personal accounts on the issue, however Thornbourn’s concluding generalization based on an anecdote is fallacious reasoning and confirmation bias.

    I think the attitude of the hate-nurturing, secretive, duplicitous, murderous schoolboy in the Delores School in Cuba mirrors the attitudes of “our good Southern Jews.”

  8. Of course, a civilization which would encourage millions of leftwing revolutionary Jews to settle within its borders in such concentrated numbers was already seriously diseased to begin with.

  9. Yeah, today you see Jews showing up on the board of directors of what were White Southern Protestant institutions i.e. colleges, hospitals, charities etc. I don’t think this is positive, and it displaces a White Protestant who should be on the board. The same goes for Catholics. Does every damn board of directors have to have a Catholic nun on it?

    Somehow White Protestants managed to found a country, and write a Constitution & Bill of Rights without the help and guidance of the Jews or Catholics.

    Now you got Hindus & Moslems too.

    Pathetic.

  10. I think the racial homogeneity of the South is one of the big reasons that the great War Between the States is better remembered in the South than the North. The North, following the war, allowed all kinds of racially indigestible elements into the country to fuel its industrial growth. In particular, it allowed in all kinds of socialist refuse from Eastern Europe, including but not limited to Jews, who had absolutely no interest in American ideals of limited government. They had taken no part in the war and were largely indifferent to it. Why should they remember it?

    I also think the distinction between Sephardic and eastern, Khazar Jews carries great weight. The ostjuden are poison. It is interesting that the American Council for Judaism, the first formal anti-Zionist Jewish Organization in America, was founded in San Francisco in 1942 by assimilated German Jews disgusted by their Khazar-Bolshevik brethren. “The Ashkenazi Revolution” sounds very interesting indeed.

  11. “Somehow White Protestants managed to found a country, and write a Constitution & Bill of Rights without the help and guidance of the Jews or Catholics.”

    Mr. Butz, who was Charles Carroll of Carrollton?

    Doh.

    Deo Vindice

  12. I would agree that one of the major contributing factors of the different attitude of Southern Jews was their small population (other than Charleston), and thus they didn’t have enough influence to assert themselves. Also, Southern Whites had a much stronger ethnic identity than did the North, thus making Jews feel they had to fit in.

    Writer Eli Evans explains:

    “Being Jewish in the South,” according to Evans, “is like being Gentile in New York. “What I mean by that is that Jews in the South live as a minority in a majority culture. The schools close on Jewish holidays in New York; they don`t in the South. The generation of my friends in New York played stickball in the streets of the East Side while I was picking blackberries in the backyard. They were upwardly mobile; we wanted roots.”

    Some have suggested, such as Bertram Korn, a rabbi and historian of Southern Jewry, that Jews in the South defended slavery as a means of redirecting hostility away from them, a more defensive strategy rather than how Northern Jews use non-White minorities to promote diversity and anti-racism as a means of suppressing anti-Semitism.

  13. The Founders came overwhelmingly from the Anglican tradition, Butz. There were Baptist scum rotting in Virginia jails that were freed only after the disestablishmentarians unfortunately won out before the war started. Baptists, being a fringe cult were refusing to pay taxes to any state government that was not dedicated to freedom of religion and other enlightenment values you bemoan today.

  14. Likewise, in fact, when “the northern journalist John Gunther attended a social function in Natchez, Mississippi, shortly after the Second World War” and “he made the mistake of expressing sympathy for the plight of African Americans,” he was doing exactly just what Southern Jews (and white people in general) were doing: going with the flow of what they think is “in” at the moment based upon which way the wind seems to be blowing.

    The Northeast somehow came to be identified with the voice of America. All their idiotic “ideas” thus became the rage. The South and her people are like they are because down there they didn’t recognize the Northeast’s trend setting status and provincialism.

    Money see, monkey do, based upon which authority figure or trend setter your group looks to. But these days fewer people in the North in general buy into the supposed North East’s sophistication and “superior” education status. Nobody much cares about Harvard and Yale anymore. Nobody outside of the NE is going to send their kid to a NE “prep” school or college like used to be the case, thinking it was somehow better and that the kid would somehow be better educated and more cultured. People just a few decades ago really believed that.

    Not the case today.

  15. I hate to tell you, but, Charles Carroll had nothing to do with the US Constitution. The Catholics churn out as much bullshit as the Jews. LOL.

  16. He only signed the Declaration of Independence, Butz-boy.
    Exactly how many Germans were there at the Constitutional Convention?
    The bullshit comes straight out the Butz…as usual. LOL

    Deo Vindice

  17. You’re gonna push this guy to start wearing an armband. If an unstable chap like Butz realizes the master race didn’t write the Constitution in gothic script and nail it to a door… Some things are better left unsaid.

    Butz, please don’t download German rosetta stone. Think of Baron von Steuben and Babe Ruth and other teutonic Americans whenever you consider growing a toothbrush mustache. You wouldn’t want to get your Welch’s grape juice and hard-tac crumbs stuck in your ‘stache on Sunday, would ya?

    Course you wouldn’t.

  18. Butzhead…or my great grandfather..one of those awful Irish catholics who happened to be born in Mobile, Alabama in 1841, spent 3 years in the 3rd Alabama Infantry, whose regiment was in the lead on Jackson’s flank march around the Union lines at Chancellorsville..was wounded in that fight. I agree that the present day Catholic bishops are treasonous assholes..but it wasn’t always like that,..after all your beloved Protestant president Abe Lincoln screwed the south, Come to think of it…US Grant was a Protestant.
    Apulieus..I think this guy is a troll who comes here to divide whites,..he is obviously an ignoramus

  19. Hey butthead,,,check out these full of shit Romanists
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Semmes
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._G._T._Beauregard
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Mouton
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_W._Dowling
    http://www.sligoheritage.com/archconfedirish.htm
    http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Father-James-Sheeran-Immigrant-Priest-and-Confederate-Pat-McNamara-04-05-2011.html
    So listen you little disgusting Yankee troll…go handle snakes at with dixiegirl at one of your palaces of ignorance.

  20. The closest thing to handling snakes Butz and Dixie Chick get up to is spooling nematodes out of eachothers’ barefeet in the back of the dirt-floor “church”.

  21. The Jewish question is a red herring that is elevated in importance by a few full time activists who dedicate themselves to it.

    They should just be ignored and their life works ignored.

  22. I think the white nationalist view is actually more optimistic and mine more nihilistic.

    The wn view is that everything could be set right if Jews were ejected. My view is that the state of the world is largely a result of the means of production and that those things don’t change easily, therefore I’m guarded about any hope of a big improvement. There have been revolutions, but you are talking about taking down one of the most technologically advanced and sophisticated ecconomies. That’s a bit different than building a society in Cambodia where people had nothing.

  23. Apuleius says:

    ‘Saw a link to this article on the rebellion website. Somebody’s getting nervous.’

    Poor Robert (little weasel) Reich is so worried. With a name like Reich he certainly must be German, right?

    Not hardly!

    Let’s just get to the crux of the article.

    Reich: ‘Finally, it can reduce the power of minorities. For more than a century “states rights” has been a euphemism for the efforts of some whites to repress or deny the votes of black Americans. Now that minorities are gaining substantial political strength nationally, devolution of government to the states could play into the hands of modern-day white supremacists.’

    Oy! The horror!

    The Chosen have been riding that hobby-horse for a long, long time.

  24. Jesus Christ, yet another article desperately defending Jews. And, on top of that, it sounds like the SPLC wrote this article, “Klan bombings, Council boycotts, social ostracism, lynchings”.

    Butz is right about Catholics.

  25. “Meh. Everyone has their hobby horse.”

    Except you, of course, who are fully objective, Hunter? I just read and skimmed through this thread. One of Jeppo’s comments was outstanding, though the distinction of Ashkenazim and Sephardim is overdone, I think.

    I still say that the “Antichristian influence” is related directly to white Apostasy, and Apostasy is the primary cause of the troubles of whites both below the Line and above it. Blaming nearly everything bad that happens to whites below the Line on “the nature of whites who live above the Line” is wrong.

  26. “Southern Nationalists” seem to think the multiracial caste elitisms of the historical “Golden Circle” and contemporary Brazil are good models. WNs recognise that multiracialism and elitism (especially cooperative Talmudic-and-white elitism) are evil and dangerous to whites.

    The final, true solution to all these problems is Christian revival. Accept it, live it, pray for and preach it to others.

  27. “Actually, I thought you guys would be pretty happy about the “social chameleons” quote and the polling data that supported it.”

    Hunter, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t with some folks.
    It is obvious that JP never read the article, which was hardly a “desperate” defense of Jews. Far from it, in fact. R-E-A-D-I-N-G is fundamental.

    Once you have a toddler in your house, you’ll recognize the behavior:
    http://www.newsrealblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/tantrum_lead_wideweb__470x3210.jpg
    Some things are just too upsetting to hear mentioned. The J-word is for some, it seems, unless you’re ranting and foaming at the mouth…like mein Fuehrer.

    “Southern Nationalists” seem to think the multiracial caste elitisms of the historical “Golden Circle” and contemporary Brazil are good models. WNs recognise that multiracialism and elitism (especially cooperative Talmudic-and-white elitism) are evil and dangerous to whites.

    The final, true solution to all these problems is Christian revival. Accept it, live it, pray for and preach it to others.”

    Nice strawman, Mosin. Bet you don’t win many converts with insults, do you?
    Granny always said you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

    Deo Vindice

  28. Hmmmm. Barack Obama did not tear up the pump motor on my pool. So, for stating that simple fact I must now be a full-fledged Obama supporter and “apologist.” This must be so, according to quite a few of the posters here.

    None of these essays are even remotely “apologetic” pieces for Jews.

  29. The Golden Circle articles explain the origins of the culture of the Lower South and why we rejected Americanism and hoped to achieve through the creation of the Confederacy.

  30. Here’s what I personally believe:

    1.) I believe that Americanism is naturally degenerate and has brought us to this point. I see it less as a Jewish conspiracy and more as Yankees – because they define themselves as a proposition nation – pushing the boundaries of liberty and equality to ever greater extremes over time.

    2.) Although I value my racial identity, I believe the White Republic was a failure.

    There have been three incarnations of the White Republic: the U.S. until 1861, the Confederacy, and the Jim Crow South. They were all destroyed by the same people in the name of Americanism.

    White Nationalists want us to create another White Republic. Would a fourth White Republic end any different for the South than the previous three?

    3.) I believe creating the Union was the worst thing that ever happened to the South. It created the indispensable political context that has allowed countless disasters to be imposed on us against our will.

    4.) I believe that dissolving the Union (the method isn’t important) is necessary to arrest and reverse the damage.

    5.) I believe that the Northeast has a fundamentally different culture than our own and that any Union with the Northeast will always be damaging to the South and will result in an endless tug of war with people who are driven to create a consolidated government with unlimited powers.

    6.) If we could do it all over again, I wish we would have created a Union with the British West Indies, which had a culture very similar to our own.

    7.) I’m comfortable with my own culture and find much to admire in my heritage.

    I think slavery was a positive good. It was the foundation of our culture. It forever defined us a conservative, agrarian, racially conscious people – traits which have persisted long after the demise of slavery.

    Because of slavery, White Southerners enjoyed more freedom and equality and self government than Europeans, but like the Greeks and Romans, and unlike Yankees and the French, we never got carried away with it.

    Slavery is what kept the South from jumping the tracks and becoming a Black Republican dystopia like the Northeast or Jacobin France.

    8.) The Northern model of civilization is a problem for the South and the rest of the Western world which is suffering under it. The less influence it has, the better for everyone, including Northerners.

    I was just thinking today that the dissolution of the Union would have a positive impact on the rest of the civilized world: Western Europe, Russia, Japan, China, the Islamic world, everyone who cares about the future of civilization stands to gain from fatally weakening this monster.

  31. I run into some of these weird Southern secessionists that for some reason want to keep non-Whites around. I always bitch slap them and set them straight. Most of them are usually ignorant of physical anthropology, genetic differences, the racial and subracial foundation of our country, etc. Once exposed to that information they usually naturally evolve in the right direction over time.

  32. As long as the dissolution of the Union occurs while we have protections of our own and leaders who are racially conscious, not conservative leaders who defend multi-racialism.

    Aracial secessionists and even HBDers who merely promote a majority White population are a dead end. We need certain basic protections in place that we used to have in this country, Whites-only citizenship and anti-miscegenation laws.

  33. It wasn’t slavery per se that saved the South, but the fact that we had a racial consciousness and segregation. We had a hard color line, not a color continuum like Latin America. White slaves/indentured servants could win their freedom and be assimilated by society, free blacks could not. In the 17th century nearly two-thirds of settlers to the New World from the British Isles came as indentured servants.

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