Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism

by Kevin B. MacDonald

MacDonald develops a theory of anti-Semitism based on an evolutionary interpretation of social identity theory--a major approach to group conflict in contemporary social psychology. Beginning in the ancient world, anti-Semitism has existed under a variety of religious and political regimes. MacDonald explores several theoretically important common themes of anti-Semitic writings such as Jewish clannishness and cultural separatism, economic and cultural domination of gentiles, and the issue of loyalty to the wider society.

Particular attention is paid to three major manifestations of Western anti-Semitism: the development of institutionalized anti-Semitism in the Roman Empire, the Iberian Inquisitions, and the phenomenon of Nazism. All of these movements exhibited a powerful gentile group cohesion in opposition to Judaism as a group strategy, and MacDonald argues that each may be analyzed as a reaction to the presence of Judaism as a highly successful group evolutionary strategy. Because of the repeated occurrence of anti-Semitism, Jews have developed a highly flexible array of strategies to minimize its effects. These include: crypsis during periods of persecution, controls on Jewish behavior likely to lead to anti-Semitism, and the manipulation of gentile attitudes toward Jews. This controversial work challenges prevailing views. Students and scholars involved with evolutionary approaches to human behavior and Jewish Studies will be interested, as will social scientists and historians in general.

Genres: History, Politics, Sociology, Psychology, Nonfiction, Antisemitism, Anthropology

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Kevin MacDonald is an American psychologist. He is a retired professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), best known for his controversial application of evolutionary psychology to characterize Jewish behavior as a "group evolutionary strategy." He is currently the editor of the Occidental Observer, which he says covers "white identity, white interests, and the culture of the West." He is the author of more than 100 scholarly papers and reviews, and he is the author of Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis (1988), A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (1994), Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1998), and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (1998). He has also edited three books, Sociobiological Perspectives on Human Development (1988), Parent-Child Play: Descriptions and Implications (1994), and Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Development (2004).

In October 2004, MacDonald accepted the Jack London Literary Prize from The Occidental Quarterly, using the award ceremony as an occasion to argue for the need for a "white ethnostate" to maintain high white birthrates.

In 2010, MacDonald accepted a position as one of the eight members of the board of directors of the American Freedom Party, which declares America a white Christian nation and advocates for limiting "non-white" immigration into the United States.

Reviews

[Danny Druid · Rating 5 out of 5]

In many important ways, this book is actually much better than the Culture of Critique. The in-depth look at particular instances of Jewish-Gentile group conflict shows the ways in which Judaism is un-assimilable and that it necessarily results in Gentile societies becoming more collectivist and authoritarian in order to compete against Judaism.

I particularly enjoyed the section on the Late Roman Empire, and how during that time Christianity was defined in its opposition to Judaism, with the former being a universalistic and supernatural religion whereas the latter is an ethnocentric, materialistic religion.

But there were a few things that I felt Kevin Macdonald should have addressed. He mentions how the stubborn refusal of the Jews to refuse to be assimilated by Europeans by intermarriage. But what is the effect of this intermarriage, precisely? We all know that when a White European and a darker-skinned person like an African or an Arab mate, that the children almost invariably come out being darker skinned and not looking European at all, such that Europeans could theoretically wind up being completely assimilated by them through marriage in this way, that European genetic recessive traits could be wiped out through miscegenation. Dr. Macdonald seems to suggest that if Jews were to marry White Europeans, that their own traits would be wiped out in a similar fashion, that is to say that Jewish-White European marriages have the same effect on Jews that intermarriage with Africans has on Whites. This claim is never scientifically proven, which is immensely frustrating in a book that is otherwise intensely academically rigorous. The only proof offered is the fear of the Jews that this is what would happen. But are there any studies of Jewish genes disappearing over time due to intermarriage with white Europeans or do they "stick" in the way that African genes stick to White Europeans?

I also find it strange that during the sections on Christian Rome and the Inquisition, that the question of Jesus' jewishness was never discussed... surely some saint or theologian must have had to comment on the fact that their deity is a Jew, especially given the ferocity of gentile-Jewish conflict? Did no one ever feel uncomfortable worshipping a Jew one day a week and then hating them every other day of the week?

I have heard it said that Jesus' divinity negates his jewishness, or any kind of racial aspect. This argument should have been brought up in the book. It is a huge thing to not mention.

All in all, if you loved the Culture of Critique, as I did, then it is imperative that you read this book as well. The three chapters that form the core of the book, on Late Rome, the Inquisition, and Nazi Germany, are the best of Dr. Macdonald's writings that I have read so far. But there are some questions that needed to be addressed that I feel Kevin should have brought up.

[LP · Rating 1 out of 5]

A JUST-SO STORY POSING AS “SCHOLARSHIP”

Informed by warmed-over Social Darwinism, SAID claims that Judaism evolved from biblical times as a strategy to ensure the genetic fitness and survival of Jews. It argues that Judaism is still used today to maximize Jewish advantages at the expense of others. And it seeks to prove this by drawing on works of reputable (predominantly Jewish) scholars. The problem is, it does not “draw on” these sources; it ransacks them. Mountains of contrary evidence are toppled in the search for nuggets of “truth”.

Consider SAID’s view of the Jewish role in the Western economy through history – a vast, and complex subject if ever there was one. To MacDonald, a psychologist, not a historian, Jews depleted Gentile resources in collusion with kings and lords, countered only now and then in the Middle Ages by Christian collectivism. SAID ignores the overwhelming evidence that Jewish participation in the pre-modern economies of Europe was widespread because (and as long as) it was indispensable—not only to the wealthy, but to the overall prosperity of commerce (e.g.16th century Venice, 17th-18th century Bordeaux) and manufacturing (e.g. textiles, metalsmithing, leatherwork). Of 19th century Austria, historian George Berkley notes: “It was largely the Jews who had built the country’s steel mills and railroads, who had developed its textile, sugar-refining, meat-packing, and numerous other industries.” They were the backbone of commerce, administration and science in medieval Spain, where the very word “Jew” was synonymous with “literate”. The point is, Jews contributed to the economy as much as they benefited from it. So, too, did the Christian Lombards and others who followed them into usury and trade. To look at the big picture and suggest, as MacDonald does, that Jews depleted “Gentile resources” is to do violence to the evidence supplied by the very sources he cites. Secondly, to suggest that exploitation between members of different ethnic groups is inherently more meaningful than exploitation by class is to take an uncritical, and scientifically unfounded “genetic” view of human conflict. In fact, a preponderance of enmity throughout history has occurs WITHIN ethnic groups and between classes over the distribution of resources. When the Jews left Western Europe en masse at the close of the Middle Ages, was there any letup in the level of exploitation and conflict there? Any historian worth his salt knows the answer to that one.

What SAID ignores, with its zero-sum mentality, is that ALL ethnic groups in America have prospered by COOPERATING with each other. Thanks to the wisdom of our founding fathers and the good sense of the American people, our political institutions, medicine, science, technology, and economy are the envy of the world. ALL ethnic groups (and multiethnics) would suffer catastrophic harm if America split up into ethnic fiefdoms. That’s why only the tiny minority of people suffering from extreme status anxiety contemplate a return to the Dark Ages. As even a Machiavellian like MacDonald must surely recognize, there’s no future in it.

SAID attests to the slipperiness of evolutionary psychology in uncritical hands. MacDonald cites the relative genetic distance between European Jews and non-Jews as proof that Jews have adopted an evolutionary group strategy. Then he cites European Jewish and non-Jewish genetic CLOSENESS as further proof of the same strategy! That is, Jews seek to be separate enough to maintain their distinctiveness, but not separate enough to trigger Gentile efforts to cast them out (like antibodies casting out foreign viruses.) How’s that for an ironclad case? And all this is being unconsciously coordinated by millions of Jews lacking even the most elementary acquaintance with either genetics-- or MacDonald’s “thesis”! Presumably the only way Jews could invalidate it would be by throwing themselves off cliffs like so many lemmings.

SAID cites the traditional endogamy of the Jews as proof of their evolutionary group strategy. Certainly, Christian Europe has been unusually exogamous over the past 1,000 years. Nevertheless, there have always been many exceptions even there (Goody, 185). Were these exceptions practicing evolutionary group strategy, too, or is endogamy a form of this strategy only when Western Jews practice it? What’s more, over 50% of American Jews marry out. Secularism and social tolerance, not a purported shift in evolutionary group strategy, offers the most parsimonious explanation of this switch to exogamy.

Speculation runs wild throughout. SAID supposes that poor Jews were always more likely to leave Judaism, rendering the remaining Jews more eugenically fit. Actually, there’s no conclusive evidence either way. But upper-class Hellenistic Jews probably were the most assimilationist, while the wealthy Sephardim of medieval Europe and wealthy Jews of modern France, Hungary etc certainly were. Men of the upper and middle classes like Montaigne, Proust, Sir William Hershel and quite possibly even Christopher Columbus, were the products of assimilation.

Forgetting that satire is the chief tool of any underdog, including Christians of varying racial, economic, and ethnic backgrounds, MacDonald argues that Jews are willfully engaged in an all-out assault on Western culture. Jewish radicalism is thus a group strategy though he concedes that most Jews are not involved in or support it. In other words, any political movement, left, right or center, can constitute a Jewish group strategy if its Jewish members are self-consciously Jewish (?!) while engaged in these movements. By this logic, when “New Christians” de las Casas, Cervantes, Vitoria, and Suarez championed the cause of the skeptic, the Indian, the common man, and humanism generally, were they practicing a Jewish group strategy? If so, how odd that they failed to perform the most important eugenic task: producing and raising another generation of Jews. And if we don’t regard these progressive figures as practicing evolutionary group strategy, on what basis would we not assume the same of Jewish progressives today?
It’s a good thing for sociobiologists (er, evolutionary psychologists) that they can’t be sued for malpractice. This book makes hash of an interesting field that often lacks the critical rigor we have the right to expect from science.

[Jukka Aakula · Rating 4 out of 5]

My book review in the Finnish language https://sarastuslehti.com/2015/01/05/...

[Graham Seibert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkable in that it got published; important in its subject matter; oversights in its content.

Gentiles always seem to get caught flat-footed. Jews claim historical victimhood, emphasizing the Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, the Holocaust and other sufferings. There is always the tone of wounded innocence, as if it is nothing that they ever did but purely a product of evil Christianity. The Gentiles, with no conscious recollection of ever having done anything to offend the Jews, are usually at a loss to defend their ancestors, and certainly at more of a loss attempting to justify their behavior.

MacDonald provides the immense service of constructing an evolutionary social identity theory of group interests. There is no disputing the Darwinian observation that animal populations are in constant competition with one another. The same is certainly true of human breeding groups. The Jews' rituals and beliefs set them apart, and their practices of endogamy, even consanguinous marriages, and a general refusal to accept converts keeps them apart from their host societies.

Today's charges of anti-Semitism, and racism in general, are made against the backdrop of today's moral and ethical values. It is important to recall that in every century prior to our own it was natural and expected for identifiably different groups of people to be in conflict with one another. The French and the Germans went at it for years. Going back to the Jews, the Bible is a 2000 year litany of conflict between the Jews and their neighbors, in which God himself endorsed genocide against Israel's enemies. The Bible states that the Jews took over the promised land of Canaan from the peoples who dwelt there before the time of Moses and Joshua, and who, because they had had no contact with Israel, cannot have been guilty of any aggression against them. Unprovoked, Israel invaded Canaan and killed everybody, man woman and child, and livestock as well.

MacDonald's task is not to apologize for events such as the Third Reich's Endlösung. His mission is to explain it, and to that and he dedicates a chapter. He has another chapter dedicated to the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions, and a third dedicated to anti-Semitism at the time of the Roman Empire. Similarly, MacDonald does not condemn Israel for its ethnic cleansing of the pre-1948 Arab inhabitants, or its discrimination against the few who remain within the state of Israel, but he explains the phenomenon in the light of evolutionary psychology and social identity theory.

MacDonald tells you four times that the Jews have an average intelligence of one standard deviation above that of Caucasians. One time I might believe; two times is excessive. But four in one book? Moreover, the footnote cites his own previous book. He should have chosen one of the many other authors who have documented the same thing. Henry Harpending, Arthur Jensen, and Tatu Vanhanen, among the world's most respected psychometricians, all make the point.

MacDonald's thesis is in conflict with Harpending's in one particular. The latter posits that the Jews achieved their exceptional intelligence by surviving adversity, especially in Eastern Europe. Putting it bluntly, the dumb ones died off. Harpending and most researchers find that there are gradients among the Jews. The Ashkenazim achieve the stated one standard deviation above the norm. The Sephardim are a little ways down, and the Oriental Jews are simply not that exceptional. MacDonald's should at least have some footnotes to attempt to reconcile his theory that classical era anti-Semitism was sparked by resource competition of Gentiles against exceptionally talented Jews with other hypotheses that would suggest they were not that exceptional.

Arthur Jensen suggests that widespread consanguineous marriage is a major reason for lower intelligence among populations in the Middle East. He even gives a figure in his masterwork, "The g Factor," of about a seven or eight point intelligence deficit due to "inbred depression." MacDonald talks about widespread cousin marriage among the Jews, with the Rothschild family being exceptional even among the Jews for the incidence cousin marriages and uncle-niece marriages. Nobody has noted an intelligence deficit among the Rothschilds. Somebody needs to come up with a reconciliation.

MacDonald advances a thesis that liberal societies such as sprung up in England and France, and historically characterized the United States, are impossible to sustain in societies with large numbers of unassimilated minorities. He also advances the thesis that good times tend to mask the problem, and bad economic times to exacerbate it. This is an important observation and seems consistent with what one sees recently in both the United States and Europe. The politics in both places are becoming increasingly polarized, with the middle and lower class indogenes resentful of the successful minorities - read Jews and Occupy Wall Street - and the immigrants who threaten their livelihoods. He would predict that we will become increasingly polarized, fragmented into ethnic groups. So far the political process in the United States has managed to hold agglomerations of different interests together in the two major political parties. This is not the case throughout Europe, and it may not remain the case in the United States. In other words, diversity is anathema to the liberalism which invited diversity in the first place.

MacDonald pursues his theory into the first half of the 20th century, claiming widespread endogamy and also exceptional reproductive success for Jewish populations. I would like to see some evidence. My observations, having lived in California, Washington DC, Germany and now Ukraine, are that Jewish families have faced the same reproductive struggles as Gentile families. Specifically, Jewish kids grow up to be homosexual at least as often as others. Even in the 60s Jewish kids often married outside the faith in the cosmopolitan US areas where I lived, which are architypical Jewish habitats. Jewish girls certainly experimented with Gentile guys. My observation is that Jewish families are often childless, and more frequently adopt than WASP families. I believe that MacDonald's observations may be more true among the relatively small Jewish populations remaining in Germany and here in Ukraine, and among the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) in the United States, and I will grant their historical validity, but I am sure that they are not broadly true in contemporary America.

His last chapter is titled as a question: "Is Diaspora Judaism Ceasing To Be An Evolutionary Strategy?" He cites the increasing number of marriages between Jews and Gentiles in the United States, the fact that their children are most frequently not raised as Jews, and the general small size of Jewish families. A countervailing tendency is the increase in Haredi Jewish communities, with their intense belief and large numbers of children. Moreover, he points to Israel and says that exogamy is not an issue there, obviously enough, and that it too is becoming more fundamentalist. His conclusion is that it is too early to count the Jews out. They will probably survive.

I think he is leaving a couple of factors out of his equation. The most important is feminism, or rather female emancipation. Jewish men no longer have control over their women's reproductive practices. Jewish women, endowed with those great intellects, find that they are very welcome in the workplace all over the world. Just look at any postgraduate program in any American university and you will find lots of them. Moreover, these women are generally quite secular in their outlook, and often do not want to sacrifice their career opportunities for family. In conversation, they usually do not speak terribly highly of Jewish men as marriage prospects. Without the social pressure applied by a strong, cohesive community my bet is that they will not be raising anywhere near a replacement level of young Jewish children.

Ecology is a second question. A breeding community needs a critical mass in order to survive. Grizzly bears, for example, need large unbroken stretches of forest. Jews are so thoroughly accepted in the United States, so unconstrained in their choice of where to live, that Jewish communities even in expensive suburbs tend to be fairly dilute. The Jews see each other in synagogue and perhaps in Jewish day schools, but a large proportion of their social interactions are with Gentiles of similar social class. The exceptions to this are few enough to name: Crown Heights in New York, other neighborhoods on Long Island, and perhaps certain neighborhoods of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Outside of these precincts, Jews will find the constant interaction with Gentiles will be an anodyne to religious fervor.

A third factor is the strength of religion. Upper-class WASPs, churchgoing or not, often merely observe the forms of religion while finding the dogmas difficult to swallow. The same applies to Jews. Why should they follow the 613 laws of the Torah? How can they be certain that theirs is the only God, or even that their God exists? Secular Jews have been among the most vociferous atheists of our age. MacDonald brings this issue up, the relevance of Judaism after the enlightenment, but posits that it is headed back to a pre-enlightenment fundamentalism. I wouldn't be so sure.

To conclude, it is a very important book. It's importance is underscored by the stunning, absolute silence with which the Jewish community itself has received the book. While it should be the topic of lively discussion, even to mention it is infra dig at best, or taken as prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism. Jews, the most successful human group ever to walk the planet, should have thicker skins than that. If Jewish anthropologists can roam the world studying native tribes in search of support for theories such as those of Freud and Marx, isn't turnabout fair play?

[Fred R · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a weakness for bold multi-disciplinary historical theorizing, and so I will continue to read Kevin MacDonald despite his obvious defects.

In MacDonald's model, the presence of a cohesive, endogamous, commercially and reproductively competitive group (known as the Jews) within individualistic western societies gives rise to anti-Semitic reactions, which often take on characteristics of the Jews (mostly under the heading "more collectivism") to compete.

This is his explanation, anyway, of Christianity's rise in the Roman Empire, the Spanish Inquisition, and the National Socialist party (yes I am over-simplifying).
Jewish responses to these movements usually takes the form of crypsis, the prototypical case perhaps being the "New Christians" of Spain. Other times, they attempt even greater separatism (Zionism, for instance).

To the question (or counter-argument) of assimilation, he (often implicitly, sometimes explicitly) argues that an ethnic core is maintained, while a certain portion intermarries with gentile women to create bridges, increase social networks, and aid in crypsis. As long as a certain core group remains endogamous and culturally apart, such intermarriage will benefit the group at large, and help ensure its future.

The greater ethnocentrism found in Jewish communities is not convincingly proved to be intrinsic, rather than a natural reaction (under social identity theory) to persecution. The arguments about assimilation are ingenious, but a little too Rube Goldbergesque for my tastes. Generally speaking he faces all the difficulties of discussing Group Selection in an evolutionary sense (what are the mechanisms of motivation, etc.), and Social Identity theory doesn't do enough to help him out of those problems.

I wish he would have discussed Palestinian nationalism, which seems to fit into his model much better than the examples he does choose.