“That remedy is that the Jewish Race should abolish itself”

Excerpted from a longer piece, “A Reasoned Case Against Semitism” from Australian Quarterly magazine, 1940 by Australian intellectual P. R. Stephensen (no ellipsis added between unquoted paragraphs):



It is often arbitrarily assumed, by persons who are themselves irrationally prejudiced in favor of Semitism, that Antisemitism is based on irrational prejudices.

Essentially, Jews are a minority, self-differentiated as such, a Race Apart not only from the rest of mankind, speaking generally, but also from any particular community in the midst of which they may reside. This fact makes the usual postulates of political discussion—namely, universal humanitarianism, or, alternately, the welfare of a National Unit, considered as a Whole—inapplicable to the Jewish Question. It is absurd for Jews to preach (as many of them do) that men are all of one Kind, while this preachment is belied by the fact that the Jews themselves, by their own Choice, remain a different Kind from all other kinds of men. Similarly it would be absurd for Jews to preach the welfare and advancement of any one nation as a paramount political consideration, while holding themselves racially apart from the majority in that nation. It can never be true that “all men are brothers,” either within one nation or in the world at large, while Jews continue to practice an extreme form of biological differentiation through rigid selective breeding.

Jews cannot “have it both ways.” They cannot expect to be listened-to with respect when they preach to Gentiles the Universal Oneness of Mankind, while at the same time they, as Jews, remain a Race Apart. It is when this discrepancy between their words and their actions is recognized, that Jews become disliked by non-Jews. Nobody likes to be humbugged, either by financial confidence-tricks, or by metaphysical and political verbal play. In brief, if Jews are going to persist in keeping themselves racially apart from the rest of mankind or from a particular nation, then they should also keep themselves politically apart. The Antisemite brings this point of view to the fore. He starts from the same premise as the Jews themselves—namely that the Jews, by their deliberate practice of Racialism, are differentiated from non-Jews. But, as soon as this differentiation is accepted as an unalterable fact, and is brought to the full consciousness of non-Jews, a prejudice is created against Jews, in the minds of non-Jews, which makes a further dispassionate or detached discussion of the entire topic virtually impossible. The implication of the Jewish practice of Racialism is unmistakably Themselves First—Themselves versus the Rest. Once understood, that constitutes a challenge to the Rest of Us which cannot conscientiously be disregarded.

The discussion, then, comes down to prejudice versus prejudice, the result of a clash of interests which cannot be resolved by any form of words. Carried further, this means propaganda versus propaganda—a process termed, by both sides, “enlightenment.” The most honest thing to do is to avow the prejudice, and stand on it. As a non-Jew, I avow that my prejudices are non-Jewish; and this means that, in any conflict of interests between Jews, on the one hand, and non-Jews on the other, my instincts place me naturally in the non-Jewish camp. When I see an organized minority of Jews, actuated by their self-interest, engaging in operations for their own sectional self-aggrandizement as against the interests of the community-as-a-whole or of the non-Jewish majority in it, then, as a non-Jew, I claim the same right to organize non-Jews as the Jews have claimed and obtained to organize themselves.

Antisemitism arises in any community when the influence of the Jewish minority becomes so grossly disproportionate to the percentage of Jews in that community as to give rise to an anomaly.

Many “Liberal” thinkers profess to be horrified at the thought of organised Antisemitism, because they profess to believe that this must lead to massacres of Jews, or other ill-treatment of them, as so often previously in human history. What, then! Are we to assume that the Jewish Problem is insoluble in any other way than by force? To claim that a mere discussion of Semitism might lead to pogroms, and therefore to taboo such a discussion, is surely tantamount to an admission that Semitism has a case that is logically weak, when presented for approval to non-Semites. The taboo, to be fully effective, should be applied also to arguments in favor of Semitism. Do “Liberals” also advocate this?

Again, there are many who shrink from discussion of the subject because it has a “religious” flavor. It is objected that Semitism (or, more properly, Judaism, since Arabs and Syrians are also “Semitic”) is not a proselytizing religion; and that therefore there is no need for a counteracting propaganda to it. This is a nice point; but the real opposition to Judaic-Semitism, by the most convinced Antisemites, is not on religious, but on socio-political grounds, and on those grounds only. Admittedly there is a religious obfuscation in the claim, made by Jews themselves, to be the “God-Chosen Race”; but into the validity or otherwise of that claim there is no need for the secular-political thinker to enquire. Beyond noting it as an extraordinary manifestation of Jewish Exclusiveness, as claimed by Jews for themselves, we need not attempt either to refute or endorse it. In the present argument, the entire theological approach is eschewed, and the religious claims of Jewry are considered as of concern only to the Jews themselves. The fact that Jews do not proselytise their religion rules it out as a valid subject of discussion, except among themselves.

From the secular-political point of view of a non-Jew, the Jewish religion appears as the most obvious method by which the Jewish Race has preserved its identity. The synagogue is not only a meeting-place for Jews; it is the focal-point of their Racial preservation. Their marriage-laws, which make it a religious offense for a Jew to marry a non-Jew, have, in practice, preserved the Jewish Race as a distinct Race throughout the centuries; and it is upon this aspect of their organization, considered secularly and socio-politically, that Australian attention will necessarily become focused, as more and more Jewish immigrants enter our territories. While there is a natural reluctance to discuss religion, when religion is solely a matter of individual conscience, it is only fair to point out that no other church in Australia, and possibly in the world, makes Racial origin a condition of membership. Even this would not matter, if it had no socio-political repercussions.

The basic bio-political principle of Australian national organization is enshrined in our Immigration Acts, and made effective by the famous Dictation Test. It is clear that the intention of our Legislative Forefathers was to base Australian life on what may be described as Fused-European Homogeneity. In effect, those laws claimed Australia for the “European” (or “white”) races exclusively—the term “Aryan” not being as frequently used fifty years ago as it is now. Pursuing that basic policy, we have not only excluded—and deported—Asiatics and Kanakas, but we have extended the principle to the indigenous Natives of the country, segregating them in Concentration Camps (otherwise known as “Aboriginal Reserves”) with the effect, if not the avowed intention, of reducing their numbers by gentle extermination. The unmistakable implication of our national policy is that Australia’s future citizens will be bred from a free intermixing of the various imported European strains—avoiding in particular the social problems which would result from Eurasian miscegenation, or alternatively from segregation of alien racial minorities within the general community. Australia was thus the first nation in the modern world to “go nap” on Racialism. Within our definition of the term, we antedated Hitler’s “Racial Theories” by fifty years. When Jews come to Australia, therefore, they should remember that they are coming to a country which has already made up its mind to be a Homogeneity, not a hodge-podge: a country which is acutely race-conscious and intolerant of any tendency to form separate communities within the larger entity.

In Australia, as in all other countries, the segregation which the Jews practice in order to preserve their racial purity from an admixture with non-Jews, is entirely voluntary on their part. For note: if Jews freely intermarried with non-Jews, then the Jewish Race, as such, would cease to exist; and, with its disappearance, the Jewish Problem would disappear. It is solely because the Jews insist on preserving their racial identity—refuse to become absorbed into, or assimilated with, the “Gentiles”—that they are a Problem in every country in which they settle.

Here, then, we are faced with a defiance, by Jews, of the fundamental biological principle of Fused-European Homogeneity which it is the basic aim of Australian national policy to establish and maintain. They claim the right, not only to settle here, but to maintain themselves, in perpetuity, as a self-segregated minority, of different and distinct racial stock from the rest of the Australian community. Their exclusiveness gives them many advantages. Being all of one Tribe (or, in a large sense, of one “family”), they are naturally disposed to help one another, and to further the interests of their own limited community—even at the expense of the general Community, in the midst of which they live, but from which they deliberately hold themselves, in perpetuity, apart. That this self-segregation is advantageous to Jews is obvious from the fact that, by practicing it, their Race has survived—and flourished—for thousands of years, though scattered among many communities and nations larger than their own. Yet their exclusiveness, with all its advantages, also has disadvantages, as is only right and proper, under the inexorable law of compensation.

The answer to Semitism is Antisemitism; and when Jews gain too many advantages for themselves, by their practice of self-segregation, they invariably find (and surely, should expect to find!) that the majority of non-Jews will resent, and eventually will curb, the privileges which the Jews have won for themselves by concerted sectional action. This is what will inevitably occur in Australia, sooner or later, if a large colony of self-segregating Jews is allowed now to establish itself in our community. Our hearts may be temporarily moved with pity for the plight of people who have been forced to flee from parts of Europe in which they had become disliked and unwanted; but there can be no guarantee that they will not become similarly disliked and unwanted here. They know the remedy; it is simple: let them cease to be Jews, intermarry freely with Gentiles, abandon their claim to be “The Chosen Race,” abandon their exclusiveness, mix with the common stock of the community which gives them refuge! If they did that—if they ceased to be Jews—there would be no Jewish Problem.

But they will not do it. They will not become absorbed into the general stream of Australian life. They will follow their instinct, and remain Apart. They insist that we should accept them on their own terms, not on ours. Our principle is homogeneity; theirs is segregation. Between the two points of view a clash is inevitable—if not in this generation, then in the next, or the next after, when our descendants would have no longer a motive of pity for “refugees,” but would be faced with the fait accompli of an Alien Minority established permanently in their midst.

So the issue will be joined, and no amount of Prosemitic plausibility will conceal the fact that the fundamental antagonism, between Jews and non-Jews, here as everywhere else, is created by Jewish Exclusiveness—the refusal to be absorbed. This goes to the heart of the matter, and, compared with it, all other trends of Antisemitic argument are merely superficial. It is well-known that there are many Jews who are good citizens, honest and cultured, despite the reputation of the generality of their Kind of being financially “tricky,” unscrupulous, and parasitical. That there are intellectual and sensitive Jews is also as well-known as that there are many “Flash Yids” who degrade and debase public culture. No case can be made against Jews generally, except the one I have outlined, namely that their insistence upon Racial self-segregation is anti-social, considered from the point of view of the community-as-a-whole. We cannot concede to them in Australia a right which, if conceded in perpetuity to other types of immigrants, such as Italians, Germans, Danes, Irish, Scots, would lead to the sectionalizing of the community and its disunification. Permissive heterogeneity in Australia would lead ultimately to the dissolution of the nation.

While the Jews deliberately, and in perpetuity, set themselves apart from the rest of the citizens in the nation, they cannot expect ever to be cordially welcomed here. Let them take their stand on Racial Purity, and exult in it! But, “they cannot have it both ways.” Life is not like that. The resentment against them may be passive, or merely smoldering, for long periods while the Jews themselves are relatively quiescent; but, when they erupt in an active propaganda of Semitism, as they have done in Australia during the past six years, and when their numbers are suddenly increased by a wave of unassimilable immigration, then they themselves must know that the slumbering spirit of Antisemitism will arise: and they must know that there is only one remedy for it.

That remedy is that the Jewish Race should abolish itself, by becoming absorbed in the common stream of mankind. If this is impracticable—as must seem likely after 5,000 years of their aloofness—then we others, who are so strictly excluded from the Jewish community, have at least a reciprocal right to exclude them from ours.


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I read this article in Counter-Currents Publishing