“Know that we have taken into our hand, custody, and protection Leo the Jew our goldsmith and all his affairs. And therefore we command that you keep ward and defend the said Leo and all his affairs, doing no hurt or injury to him.”

Proclamation of King John of England, 10 Nov. 1199 “My office was created by law and designed to protect the Jewish people throughout the world. Think about that. The world’s greatest power is focused, by law and design, on protecting the Jews.”

Elan Carr, U.S. State Department Envoy on Anti-Semitism, February 2019

By almost every metric, Jews are the most protected ethnic group on earth. At the frontline of this protection, Jewish institutional security is heavily subsidised by taxpayers throughout the West. In Germany, the government provides an annual stipend of $15 million to the Central Council of Jews. In the UK, the government spends around $20 million annually on both security for Jewish institutions and “Holocaust education” designed to combat “anti-Semitic ideas.” This is in addition to the UK pledging almost $70 million for a new Holocaust memorial designed to achieve the same ends. Hungary has promised $3.4 million to “fight anti-Semitism in Europe,” and Sweden has handed over 2 million kronor for increasing security at Jewish institutions. France has invested $107 million in “fighting anti-Semitism” since 2015. This brings us to a grand total of over $215 million in “protecting Jews” and “fighting anti-Semitism,” and doesn’t even take into account spending in the United States (somewhere between $20 million and $50 million annually for frontline security at Jewish institutions), or the spending of Jews on their own defense (the ADL’s annual budget alone is in the region of $58 million). One gets the distinct and remarkable impression that, globally, diaspora Judaism probably requires something approaching $1 billion simply in order to feel safe.

Jews are protected in other ways. Since mid-2018, resolutions and other legal measures against anti-Semitism have been gathering in pace and increasing in spread. In May 2018, South Carolina became the first US state to pass the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which effectively shuts down speech against Israel on college campuses by requiring South Carolina’s public institutions of higher education to “take into consideration the [State Department’s] definition of anti-Semitism for purposes of determining whether the alleged practice was motivated by anti-Semitic intent” when “investigating, or deciding whether there has been a violation of a college or university policy prohibiting discriminatory practices on the basis of religion.” In February 2019, President Macron of France announced a “crackdown on anti-Semitism” that would involve dissolving three pro-White organizations, defining anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism, and introducing new laws against “hate speech” targeting Jews on social media. Just a few weeks ago, Florida passed legislation defining anti-Semitism and making it illegal under state law. Tennessee has attempted to pass an Anti-Semitism Awareness Bill, and recently passed a resolution “fighting anti-Semitism” by declaring unequivocal support for Israel. This, of course, follows hot on the heels of the House resolution “condemning anti-Semitism” in the aftermath of Ilhan Omar’s now notorious remarks on the Israel lobby.

There simply isn’t another ethnic group elsewhere on earth that enjoys the same level of financial and legal protections enjoyed by Jews. Of course, the uninformed, when confronted with such a fact, might reply that this level of support is both needed and deserved. According to the received narrative, recent history suggests that Jews are the West’s most vulnerable and victimised group. All of these laws, and all of this funding, is therefore merely a response to an acute need. But recent history has nothing to do with Jewish protection, and nor are these measures responsive to any real immediate threat. In order to gain a full appreciation for what exactly is going on, we need to go much further back in time.

Should you ever happen to visit the English town of Lincoln, I recommend you pay a visit to the Jew’s House restaurant. As well as enjoying some fairly good cuisine, it will give you an opportunity to look inside one of the five surviving houses of Medieval England. The building was once, as the name suggests, a Jew’s house from the middle of the twelfth century until the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. Its last Jewish owner is said to have been Belaset, daughter of the moneylender Solomon of Wallingford. Belaset was hanged in 1279 for coin-clipping, a 13th century practice whereby (predominantly Jewish) money dealers would lightly shave gold and silver coins, eventually accumulating enough shavings to create new, illicit money. Jew’s House is not the only medieval home still standing in Lincoln. A short walk away is Norman House. Like Jew’s House, it was built around 1170 for a Jewish moneylender, Aaron of Lincoln, and also housed Jews until the expulsion.

The fact that England’s oldest houses are almost all Jewish in origin, and that two of them are in Lincoln, is no accident. Lincoln Jewry was both the most affluent and the most numerous of all medieval Jewish communities in England, and the survival of these dwellings owes much to two factors – Jewish wealth and the Jewish need for security. Jews had the money to build homes with expensive local limestone, and they had a desire to build very strong, almost impregnable, homes that could withstand the onslaught of both Man and Time. A key architectural feature is asemi-sunken undercroft that would have provided secure storage for the wealth of those residing in the living accommodation above. This relatively luxurious style of living was pioneered by the Jews who moved to Lincoln as part of the Norman conquest, and was based on the Jewish experience of living closely with Norman elites in the ducal halls of Normandy. The construction of such homes in 12th century England thus sent a clear message: Jews were an intimate part of the new elite; Jews were arriving predominantly as dealers in money; and, Jews expected to be hated and to require high levels of protection. One thousand years has now passed, and yet it is one of the remarkable features of world history that these three aspects of Jewish life haven’t changed at all. Jews remain an intimate part of the elite, Jews retain a ‘special’ relationship with money, and the facts outlined at the beginning of this essay suggest that Jews fully expect to be hated and require high levels of protection.

The Jewish strategy among Europeans has always been predicated upon high-risk, high-reward ventures. For much of the last thousand years, this primarily involved exploitative financial relationships that were incredibly lucrative but contributed to tremendous hostility among non-elite European populations. The standard method of balancing profit and danger was to form a relationship with very strong elites, and to implicate those elites in the sharing of profits (thus also ensuring they would suffer a loss from any attack against Jews). Throughout European history, when attempts to forge or maintain such relationships failed, the results of high risk ventures were disastrous for Jews, as resentment from below was finally allowed to fully vent. This can be seen in instances where the power of the monarch weakened (e.g. the expulsions of Jews by Edward I as a response to the rise of the barons), where there was a break between the death of a king and the coronation of another (e.g. killings of Jews around the coronation of Richard I), where the monarch was immovably hostile to Jews and their interests (e.g. the creation of the Pale of Settlement by Catherine the Great), and where popular support for government elites and their authority collapsed rapidly (e.g. Weimar Germany and the subsequent rise of Adolf Hitler). Very high levels of elite protection are thus seen by Jews, not entirely without reason, as absolutely essential to the continuance of Jewish communities and their behaviors among European populations.

Writing on Jews and the State in medieval Europe, Robert Chazan writes that “the Jews were normally accorded substantial protection by the secular authorities. This meant warnings against violence when passions were inflamed, efforts to put down violence when it did flare up, and finally the imposition of penalties when the attempts at protection failed and Jews suffered loss of life and property. The basic thrust of governmental policy towards the Jews was protection.” [emphasis added] Kevin MacDonald has argued that Jews have excelled as flexible strategizers, and this ability to adapt to circumstances is certainly in evidence in relation to the need to secure privileges in the form of elite protection. Jewish historian Yosef H. Yerushalmi has pointed out that wherever Jews lived they tended to establish liaisons with “the highest governmental power available, whether that of emperor or caliph, count, duke, or king, bishop, archbishop or pope.” Yerushalmi described such relationships as a “direct vertical alliance.” Magda Teter has laid emphasis on the flexible manner in which Jews approach the establishment of direct vertical alliances:

At the beginning of their settlement in Poland, Jews forged a strong relationship with monarchs, who issued privileges and assured the Jews’ protection. When Poland’s balance of power shifted from a strong monarchy to a decentralised nobles’ republic, the Jewish relationship with the king was transformed into a symbiotic relationship with the powerful nobles. Jews’ reliance on royal protection was transferred to reliance on the nobles. First kings, and then the nobles, often placed Jews in positions that often gave them authority over Christians.

As well as blending financial interests with the nobles, another feature of the early modern period through to the nineteenth century was intermarriage between Jews and the European aristocracy. This was quite literally the physical joining of interests, perhaps the ultimate protection against suffering a backlash from the elite. By the early 20th century, the scale of Jewish intermarriage with the British aristocracy was such that it led L.G. Pine, editor of Burke’s Peerage from 1949–1959, to write in 1956 that “the Jews have made themselves so closely connected with the British peerage that the two classes are unlikely to suffer loss which is not mutual.” Given the trends of history in the centuries prior to the 1950s, it’s extremely difficult to imagine that this occurred by accident, or without some level of conscious or unconscious design.

As flexible strategizers, Jews were more than capable of handling the transformation from aristocratic rule to social democracy that occurred between the 19th and 20th centuries. As an interregnum of sorts, however, there were early problems with Jewish security while the new form of direct vertical alliance was established. A general rule worth operating by is that where the elite is pro-Jewish or tied to Jewish interests, Jews are likely to be reliable supporters of the governmental status quo, to support strong government, and to be against the freedom of the individual (e.g. see overwhelming contemporary Jewish support for gun control). Conversely, when elites are perceived as less inclined to support Jewish interests, Jews are likely to be vastly over-represented among anti-elite elements, as radical socialists, and as regicidal revolutionaries (e.g. the Bolshevik Revolution). Where the form of government merely weakens, Jews are forced to reconfigure their strategies in a more time-consuming, but no less pressing, manner. Indeed, a key feature of 19th century socialism was a strong anti-Semitism that rejected Jewish claims to being part of “the people,” and many anti-Jewish socialists portrayed such claims as opportunistic and cryptic strategies to secure power anew under the new form of government. One of the most memorable statements of the era in this regard is the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s remark that far from being a genuine socialist, Karl Marx was “the tapeworm of socialism.” Proudhon (1809-1865), seen by many as the father of anarchism, regarded apparently socialist Jewish “allies” like Heinrich Heine as “nothing but secret spies” whose hidden agenda was merely to secure Jewish privileges and protections under the guise of social justice – a perspective apparently lost on the ignorant hordes who today believe themselves to be anarchist “Antifa” while striving to protect similar “tapeworms” in their midst.

As social democracy became ascendant, Jewish strategies to maintain privileges and security had to make significant adaptations. Most obviously, social democracy was ostensibly the move to protect mass interests over those of an elite. Since Jews were an intimate part of the elite, this would necessarily lead to a decline in power, unless Jews could undergo a transformation in the popular mind into a more generic “mercantile elite,” “bourgeois elite,” or even most audaciously, masquerade as part of the proletariat. It was in eastern Europe that the clash between Jews and the interests of the masses became most acute. Faced with increased calls for freedom and democratic representation, the Tsars sided with the masses rather than the Jews, freeing the serfs and withdrawing protections and privileges from Jews. I would argue that this move, rather than the specific content of Bolshevism or Communism, was the most decisive factor in the eventual rise of the Jews against the Tsar and the Russian aristocracy during the Bolshevik revolution. The apparently incongruous position of Jews fighting alongside the peasant class against the elite wasn’t altogether lost on contemporaries. As one Ukrainian Communist put it in 1876, “The weight of the Jews’exploitation is great and their harmfulness unlimited … If we find it possible to preach revolution, and only revolution against the nobles, how can we defend the Jews?” But Jews did want to be defended, and if they weren’t going to be defended by the Tsar, and they couldn’t trust the masses, then they would simply disguise themselves as part of the proletariat (Proudhon’s “secret spies”) and establish their protections and privileges themselves.

The perceptivity of figures like Proudhon and the Ukrainian Communist was lacking in the overall movement, where Jews were dominant in intellectual and activist roles. Within weeks of the revolution, Jews were able to cancel all restrictions imposed on them by earlier Tsarist regimes and abolish the Pale of Settlement initiated by Catherine the Great. Between 1918 and 1930, anti-Semitism was legislated against and massive amounts of literature purporting to debunk anti-Semitic attitudes were disseminated as part of a society-wide “education” campaign. Plays and films were made portraying Jews and anti-Semitism is a strongly philo-Semitic manner, and trials of individuals convicted of “anti-Semitic crimes” were made very public. It was the 20th century equivalent of building the Jew’s House of Lincoln, now constructed not of heavy limestone, but of slick lies and oppressive legislation.

Today, Jews still reside safely, if a little paranoid, in a house built with lies and legislation. They have established “direct vertical alliances” with every Western elite, including the most “populist.” I smile wryly at the theatre of Viktor Orbán toying with George Soros, while he pumps millions into Jewish education programs throughout Europe educating people on the “dangers of anti-Semitism” and provides a European “hotline” for concerned Jews to call in the event that they feel a little insecure. The same situation prevails with the “populist” boy wonder Sebastian Kurz in Austria. Kurz recently unveiled a “Catalogue of Policies to Combat Antisemitism.” The policies, endorsed by Kurz and later to be introduced to the entire European Union, include:

a commitment of a percentage of GDP annually to fighting antisemitism;

barring antisemites from political parties and public office;

committing financial and other resources to guaranteeing security for Jewish communities in Europe;

making Internet companies liable for antisemitic content on their platforms;

and advising companies not to do business with countries or organizations that support antisemitism in any way.

These measures reach a level of protection for Jews not seen since the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, and only contribute to the growing reality that much of our politics now seems to exclusively revolve around the issue of anti-Semitism. It used to be the case that Jews considered everything within the framework “Is this good for the Jews?” Today, it seems that our governments, media, and academia are preoccupied with the same question. This reality, of course, clashes dramatically with the narrative that Jews have no overarching influence in our politics and society. On this note, I might add that I was recently axed from Twitter for the ninth time. On my last two Twitter accounts, I pursued a strategy of presenting such glaring contradictions in short, witty comments – just enough information to make the point clearly, and just enough humor to make it stick in the mind. In very short periods of time, I amassed many thousands of followers before the accounts were invariably suspended for “targeted harassment” even though I never interacted with other users, and merely presented facts or witticisms. I don’t think I will now return to Twitter, but one of my last parting shots, before being reported by a delusional neurotic named Gabe Hoffman (who apparently claimed I insulted him personally, without evidence, despite the fact I never interacted with other users), was:

Jews are the most oppressed people in history and I know this because they used their extraordinary wealth, their near monopoly of mass media, their massive political influence, and their censorship of alternative viewpoints to make sure I got the message.

This is the central paradox of our time. Jews enjoy extraordinary privileges while presenting themselves as the most oppressed people in history. Were they oppressed when they lived in the fortress in Lincoln? When they received the personal protection of King John? When they received charters and special protections to live in the German principalities, complete with reinforced walls for the streets in which they lived? When they intermarried with the aristocracy? Were they oppressed when the Tsar and his family were butchered? Were they oppressed when they made anti-Semitism illegal, had show trials against anti-Semites around Russia, and flooded the schools and universities with information on how marvellous they truly are? Are they oppressed when they produce legislation for the European Union and have it imposed at their will? Are they oppressed when they dictate to Big Tech what is and isn’t allowed on their platforms, under legal penalty? Are they oppressed when they demand a percentage of the GDP of each one of our nations to protect them? Are they oppressed when a leading figure at the U.S. State Department says: “The world’s greatest power is focused, by law and design, on protecting the Jews.”

No. They are not oppressed. Oppression is having your hands cut off by the King’s men because you refused to pay your debt to Aaron the Jew. Oppression is being told what you can’t say in your country, your own land that your fathers sweat and bled on in the hope that you could one day walk on that soil a free man. Oppression is being made to hand over your taxes and a percentage of your GDP, without any vote taking place on the matter, so that it can be passed to a population already influential and extraordinarily wealthy. Oppression is being banned from participating in politics because you happen to object to the influence of foreign actors in the business of your own people and country. Oppression is when the wealthy and powerful use their influence to starve you financially into submission to their interests. Oppression is when you go to prison because you disagree with something written in the history books.

The situation, I will admit, doesn’t look hopeful. But just as history relates a tale of direct vertical alliances, and all that they entail, it also relates the stories of collapsing elites, uneasy interregnums, and the rise of figures who side with their people and reject such alliances. One day in 1290, the Jew’s House of Lincoln stood silent, cold, and unoccupied, its money vaults emptied, its past residents hanged or exiled. It stands today, to my mind, not as a testament to durability, but as a monument to hubris and a mockery of pretensions to invulnerability. I see a time when our contemporary hubristic constructions are hollowed out and left vacant by the sweeping rush of history.

Notes

R. Chazan, Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages (New Jersey: Behrman,1980), 11.

Quoted in M. Teter, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 28.

Ibid.

R. Wistrich, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, The Jews and Israel (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 187.