by Eric Straiker via littoria
The academic world has been buzzing with arguments seeking to explain the origins and mechanism of Jewish power in the modern West. The question is rife with landmines and one side of the debate is heavily stifled.
One theory gaining traction, promoted by figures such as Richard Hanania and Cambridge lecturer Nathan Cofnas, is that the massive overrepresentation of the Ashkenazi Jewish population derives from their genetic superiority to whites in the area of intellect. This theory has been proliferated through Jewish-owned publications of great import, such as the New York Times, which published a piece titled “The Secrets of Jewish Genius” by Zionist author Bret Stephens. The paper later apologized for promoting what is effectively racial science to its angry liberal audience, but the article has yet to be fully retracted.
The Ashkenazi IQ hypothesis has been reduced to conjecture on one front by Dr. Kevin MacDonald, whose evolutionary theories of Jewish cohesion were challenged by Cofnas, leading to a debate between the two men in 2021 published in the academic journal Philosophia. In 2022, Philosophia retracted Dr. MacDonald’s defense of his theories while keeping Cofnas’ attacks — a blatant act of scale tipping irreconcilable with the spirit of free debate.
Ron Unz, who is Jewish himself, has also published serious work refuting claims that dramatic Jewish overrepresentation in Ivy League universities (which are a golden ticket into the American elite) is the product of merit or intelligence in “The Myth of American Meritocracy.” In this work, Unz demonstrates Jewish mediocrity in intellectual pursuits relative to their overall professional and economic positions.
More recently, Dr. Neema Parvini has written an in-depth study on the flimsy data supporting the Ashkenazi high IQ thesis, effectively refuting all of it on the grounds of lack of convincing replication, shoddy methodology, and in some cases, such as Dr. Richard Lynn’s 2004 “The Intelligence of American Jews,” effectively making it up.
On its face, the hypothesis promoted by Cofnas, Hanania, Stephens and others is weakly supported when looking at control groups. We will use Asians, rather than whites, in order to control for this author’s potential personal biases.
If inherited intelligence, high educational attainment and overall merit alone explain relative influence among the American elite, why are East Asians — who proponents of the Ashkenazi IQ theory all agree have the highest IQs of all the races in the world — broadly absent from American power junctions such as politics, finance and asset management, law and media?
The total East Asian population (Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese, etc) is higher than that of Jews in the United States. According to US federal work force data, Asians are drastically overrepresented in professional jobs (12% of the total work force), yet are less likely to be promoted to corporate management positions than both blacks and mixed-race Spanish speakers. Some may explain this as a problem of the Affirmative Action regime, but then, why are Jewish capitalists so heavily represented despite being legally categorized as “white,” the most discriminated group of all?
In the realm of asset management — the world of real estate, private equity, hedge funds and other important sources of money and power in the Jewish community — the disparities between the smart Asians and Jews are even more stark. The entire population of Asians in America (5.6%) control a mere 2.4% of asset management firms, and within that, manage a nanoscopic 0.3% of all assets, despite studies showing that these companies are better managed than non-Asian owned competitors.
Compare this to just one major Jewish asset management firm, Larry Fink’s Blackrock, which enjoys a special plutocratic relationship with the Federal Reserve. Fink alone manages close to $10 trillion dollars, despite requiring bailouts from around the world due to episodes of mismanagement.
It is unsurprising then that among major billionaire donors to the Democratic or Republican parties, where Jews working in asset management industries (money that is “easy-come-easy-go”) are 50% or more of major patrons, the American political structure is highly responsive to the capricious whims of the state of Israel while simultaneously targeting China with trade wars and a geopolitical challenge in Taiwan.
We can see the same dynamic in other fields, such as the elite university system. This power was put on display recently in the humiliating sacking of Claudine Gay from Harvard University and Liz Magill from the University of Pennsylvania (the few non- Jewish presidents of Ivy League schools) in response to protestations by Jewish hedge fund and venture capitalist donors over their supposed toleration of anti-Israel student protests on their respective campuses.
In the sphere of non-governmental organizations, which exercise enormous power in the United States and throughout its satellite states around the world, Wall Street “philanthropy” rules the roost. George Soros is the most famous example, but he is barely the tip of the iceberg (the role of Jewish finance in NGOs is a topic for a separate article). A handful of billionaires, virtually all of them operating in the world of investment banking and tech, provide bottomless wells of cash for foundations, activist groups and think-tanks changing the West from within without democratic consent.
In the realm of mass media, private equity underwrites the majority of it in the US. Jewish control of the mass media is today common knowledge, so listing every single owner is not necessary.
It is safe to say that the power to amass capital quickly and then bankroll institutions — once again largely through finance, real estate, private equity, and so on —rather than objective individual merit is more influential in deciding who becomes the next president of Harvard, whose start up gets injected with venture capital, who shareholders elect to manage a company, who gets a platform at the New York Times, who gets appointed to run the State Department and Department of Justice, and so on. A mountain of studies have proven beyond reasonable doubt that the United States functions as an oligarchy.
Perhaps the Ashkenazi domination of these major institutions is backed by oligarchic appointment, but good management still requires high intelligence to keep them functional, one could argue. But few would seriously conclude that America’s media, politics, big businesses, NGOs, law firms, and top universities represent our brightest and best citizens. On the contrary, survey after survey finds that the average American has no confidence in any of these ruling institutions to solve national and social problems, or even tell the truth. The broadest view is that these structures are directly responsible for driving our country into the ground — no confidence.
Defenders of the Ashkenazi IQ theory, if they do concede the power of gold, stock market swindles, and compound interest as the primary foundation for Jewish elite overrepresentation, could fire back that nothing is preventing non-Jews from challenging Jews on the stock exchange floor in the so-called free market economy, but this has also been proven false.
When independent actors decide to play the money game according to the stealth rules of the winners — trickery, speculative conspiracies, pump-and-dumps — suddenly Jeremy Bentham’s “Nightwatchman state,” unable to restrict or fight the power of rapacious oligarchy, nevertheless remains strong enough to crush its opponents.
One recent anecdote where this was exhibited was the 2021 Gamestop stock ordeal.
The incident began when a Jewish financier, Gabe Plotkin of Melvin Capital, invested $6 billion dollars to collapse the stock of a struggling company, Gamestop, and consume its carcass.
An individual spotted Plotkin’s big move and took to social media to call on small time traders using the RobinHood app to take a counter-position.
Soon enough, the internet driven Gamestop pump began, wiping out 50% of Melvin Capital’s money and redistributing it to the workers, college students and unemployed taking part in the financial campaign.
Rather than accept the new players in the market casino, the Securities and Exchange Commission launched a direct intervention. Jewish SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, who worked at Goldman Sachs prior to joining the federal government, stepped in on behalf of the Jews of Melvin Capital to threaten the app for allowing minnows to come together to fight back against the whales and had the stocks hurting the investment bankers delisted. The SEC then passed new rules to prevent the new broader access to the market provided by apps and chatrooms from allowing this type of challenge to Jewish finance from ever materializing again.
Werner Sombart and The Power of Gold
The ongoing debate on the origins of Jewish power over the West thus requires an alternative hypothesis. For this purpose, we can consult Werner Sombart’s work, which provides a theoretical foundation to analyze the origins, structure and mechanisms of Jewish power.
Sombart, an economist of the German school, was an internationally acclaimed academic and colleague of Max Weber. In 1911, Sombart published The Jews and Modern Capitalism, his refutation of Weber’s well-known The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), the latter which posits that capitalism and finance emerged from the works of John Calvin and Protestantism.
The crux of Sombart’s counter-theory is that Protestant merchants, such as those who backed the violent overthrow of Charles I by Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century, held values on money and trade taken verbatim from Judaism. In most instances, figures such as Oliver Cromwell and William III of Orange were even directly financed by Jews in their power-grabs.
It is important to preface that The Jews and Modern Capitalism was not considered an anti-Jewish work at the time of its publishing nor was Sombart seen as an anti-Semite. Until his falling out with Jewish communist revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg, Sombart enjoyed deference from the international left as a pioneer of capitalist critique, authoring milestones in economics and even creating the popular “meme” of “Late Stage Capitalism” that circulates in anti-racist leftist circles today. It was only in the 1930s and after World War II that Sombart’s works became controversial, but this was due to the fact that he later embraced Nationalsocialism as an alternative to both Marxism and capitalism, not any debunking of his academic work or studies.
In The Jews and Modern Capitalism, Sombart disputes both hereditarian and Marxist arguments that at the time sought to explain the prominence of Jews in European nations. His theory is distinct in some regards from MacDonald, but overlaps with it.
In Sombart’s view, the major catalyst for the rise of the Jews that had taken Europe and later the Americas by storm since the 16th and 17th century derived from the discovery of the New World and the establishment of the world’s first stock exchange in 1602 in the city of Amsterdam.
According to Sombart, Jews laid the groundwork for mortgaging and modern investment banking, usurious loans (in contrast with the ancient Roman loan system, which dealt largely with personal borrowing), developed sophisticated strategies of commerce in the Talmud, and quite literally conjured up the concept of the modern stock market itself through the creation and command of previous financial instruments like the system of bills of exchange. As global markets opened up through the discovery of the new world and a native European bourgeoisie began to develop, Jews found political allies among merchants who relied on them for their international connections and access to foreign exchanges, as well as kings and princes who needed loans from wealthy Jewish moneylenders, weapons from Jewish arms contractors and provisions to wage wars, expand their imperial economies, or wrestle titles from competitors.
Jews since ancient times mastered the art of moneylending, allowing them to build power blocs that caused unrest among the populations of Europe and led institutions such as the Catholic Church and absolutist monarchies to ban them from participating in political life. The exploitative commerce practiced by Jews was seen as evil or socially destabilizing by host peoples. There are many cases where Jewish practices provoked domestic unrest, leading to riots and full expulsions.
This began to change once the Spanish and Portuguese discovered the Americas. Though Jews were officially expelled from both nations in the late 15th century, the Jews who had amassed great fortunes as merchant elites under the Moorish occupation were often able to keep their money and stay in the country by converting to Catholicism. These individuals, despite being baptized, by and large retained their Jewish identity and practices, leading them to be described, at times pejoratively, as Conversos or Marranos.
The Spanish royal treasurer, Luis de Santángel, was instrumental in financing Christopher Columbus’ historic 1492 voyage, which embarked in hopes of finding an alternative trade route to China and India. Instead, he was able to discover America. Following this lucky breakthrough, Marrano Jews with ties to Santángel grew even wealthier and more powerful through the funding of new world trips and setting up merchant colonies in the Americas, returning to Spain and Portugal with ships full of gold and silver.
Before New York and London, There Was Amsterdam
The growing power of the pseudo-Christian Jews through New World plunder caused widespread antipathy to grow against them again in Iberia, leading to a wave of emigration out of Spain and the Spanish-ruled Low Countries to Amsterdam, which at the time of this 16th century population exodus was ruled by the anti-Spanish, philo-Semitic Protestant leader William the Silent.
It is here that Jewish power as we know it began. Sombart quotes Dutch contemporaries describing the arrival of the Sephardic Jews of Portugal and Spain as bringing with them immense wealth, including troves of precious metals in quantities they had never seen before. Following the establishment of the Amsterdam stock exchange, which was established to privately fund the foreign ventures of the Dutch East India Company, Jews immediately snapped up a massive proportion of the shares, effectively monopolizing the stock exchange floor for themselves.
Exact figures for Jewish representation in the Amsterdam stock exchange are extremely difficult to come by. This has perplexed historians due to the fact that much smaller and irrelevant stock markets that emerged in other parts of Europe generally published public lists of shareholders.
In Larry Neal’s 1982 paper, “Efficient Markets in the Eighteenth Century? Stock Exchanges in Amsterdam and London,” he openly concludes that the secrecy of the Amsterdam stock market system was in hopes of not provoking local controversy over the vast overrepresentation of Jews, which even dwarfed the heavily Jewish 18th century participation in the City of London: “the absence of printed lists in Amsterdam may derive from the much greater importance of Jewish stockbrokers in the Amsterdam than in London.”
Neal continues that according to random samples of Amsterdam stockbroker lists that are available, “In 1739, 22 of the 32 stockbrokers listed in Amsterdam are Jewish. In 1764 another publication showed 36 or 37 of the 41 brokers listed to be Jewish.”
Following Portugal’s victory over the Dutch in the Jewish-populated African slave port (the first of its kind in the new world) of Recife, Brazil, the local Jews were forcibly expelled by Portuguese forces. These Jews set sail for the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (at the time, south Manhattan, New York), which was governed by Dutch West India’s (formerly Dutch East India) employee Peter Stuyvesant.
Stuyvesant feared that an influx of Jews to his small colony would undermine it and petitioned his employers to expel the new migrants in 1654. Stuyvesant’s request was rejected and he was commanded to allow the Jews to settle and trade in New Amsterdam by the Dutch West India company in 1655 in a letter which stated that Jews could not be turned away due to the fact that they were major shareholders in the company.
In Amsterdam, it became clear that the Jews felt more at home in the stock market than even the Synagogue. The first and most influential book ever written on how to use and dominate the stock market was 1688’s Confusión de Confusiones, authored by Spanish-Jew Joseph de la Vega. The work is an in-depth guide on how the Amsterdam Stock Exchange operated: bull and bear plots, stock-index trades, futures contracts, and so on. For these Jews, the stock exchange was completely intuitive.
Though Jews faced some barriers to direct political representation in 17th and 18th century Amsterdam, Jewish merchants — through the conquest of finance and international trade — established numerous newspapers and publishing houses aimed at a Gentile audience such as the influential Amsterdam Gazette (the first ever Jewish owned paper, which was published in multiple languages) and the Amsterdam Current. They were able to ingratiate themselves easily among local bourgeoisie and titled gentry, and especially used their money to mainstream and manufacture prestige for intellectuals such as Menasseh Ben Israel (born Manoel Dias Soeiro, and whose benefactors were Jewish merchants Antonio de Montezinos and Abraham Pereyra), whose Judaizing works played a significant role in the development of English Puritan thought that would in his lifetime seize power in England. Later, on Ben Israel’s counsel, he managed to have King Edward I’s 1290 edict to expel the Jews reversed in 1656 under the military dictatorship of Puritan fanatic Oliver Cromwell, whose army was kept supplied by the Jew Antonio Fernandes de Carvajal.
Here we can see a very familiar historical pattern: the dominance of high finance, business, and globalized trade as precursor to political and social influence and eventually full capture of institutions, often through frontmen, bribery and violence.
Very few of the bankers, merchants, speculators, intellectuals and media Jews who took Amsterdam were Ashkenazi, the supposed branch of Jews with the high IQ. These were Sephardics to a man, and most of them were baptized as Christians.
The Conquest of England
From their power base in the Dutch empire, Jews were able to back the takeover of England by their asset, the anti-Catholic William III of Orange, in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a date of great importance when examining the beginning of Jewish power in the English-speaking world.
William III’s war effort bankrupted Dutch coffers and ultimately hastened the decline of Holland itself, but he was able to keep his army armed and fed thanks to support from Jewish weapons contractors Solomon de Medina and Moses Machado. The whole campaign was bankrolled from start to finish by Jewish banker Francisco Suasso, and some writers, such as William Joyce, have suggested that the Dutch-Jews who had recently ingratiated themselves in English courts under Cromwell played an important role as spies aiding the Dutch invaders with sensitive information about defensive troop deployments and movements.
Upon consolidating power in England, William III began to pay back the Jewish bankers through the establishment of the usurious Bank of England in 1694, which Sephardic Jews became the main proprietors of, as well as the establishment of an Amsterdam style stock exchange in the city of London in 1698, which the group of Jewish money-men who accompanied King William, such as de Medina, quickly came to dominate.
Through the seizure of money power, Jews came to dominate the English and Dutch empires. The global trade in sugar and African slaves became concentrated in the hands of Jews in hubs such as Guayana, Suriname, Barbados, Jamaica, and so on. In South Africa, the Jew Benjamin Norden enjoyed first dibs and became the first and most prosperous “British” merchant in the land. In Australia, the first British commercial enterprise in the country was in the hands of banker Moises Montefiore, whose wealth was derived from the City of London. Once the British state embraced the ideology of free trade, concocted by Dutch-Jew economist David Ricardo, the wealth and power of the Jewish community compounded, often at the expense of domestic English interest such as agriculture.
Jews were easily able to circumvent parliamentary bans on direct Jewish participation — which were only superficially upheld to prevent English workers and peasants from rioting — through paid-off Gentile representatives and legalistic loopholes. While most Jews could not serve in parliament at this time, the local profit-hungry bourgeoisie enthusiastically brought them into their social circles and Masonic lodges.
By building their status as wealthy financiers, often through illegitimate power grabs, extortion and corruption rather than merit as Europeans understand it, bankers such as David Salomans and Lionel de Rothschild were able to force through the 19th century emancipation of Jews under British law, which the House of Lords had previously rejected due to public safety (commoner riots) concerns. England finally elected its first Jewish “Christian” Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, whose government expanded the City of London’s power further.
The 1:1 analogue of the rise of the supposedly lower IQ Sephardic Jews from 15th to the 19th century with that of high IQ Ashkenazi Jews operating in Germany, Eastern Europe and the United States more recently suggests a strategy (perhaps evolutionarily intuitive, as MacDonald believes, or premeditated, as Sombart contends) — where the establishment of trade monopolies, palm-greasing, spying, predatory banking, Bolshevistic conspiracies, nepotism, and stock market swindles are central — similar to a high-stakes poker player who always wins because he has large amounts of funds collected through scams or trickery and information on the other player’s cards. We can see this type of behavior with the rise of one of England’s first and most prominent Jewish capitalists, Menasseh Lopes, who somehow had advanced knowledge that a rumor declaring that Queen Anne was dead, which collapsed the London stock exchange, was false. This information made him fabulously wealthy, since it allowed him to buy shares at fire sale prices. Is this a product of merit-worthy intelligence or naked criminality? Lopes’ incarceration for bribery provides a hint to his character.
Back to Sombart. While writing The Jews and Modern Capitalism, he anticipates the challenge of “Yankee Capitalism” — the view at the time that Jews were not only rare in American business life, but in fact were relatively humble, newly arrived immigrants to New York City in 1911.
He goes on to debunk this notion by saying that while narcissistic individual Gentile capitalists were occupying the pages of newspapers and drawing attention to themselves, Jews were working as a group to quietly embedded throughout American life from the country’s first settlements, listing several banks and industries controlled by Jews, and even declaring entire states such as California as being in the thrall of Jewish finance.
Finally, on the question of America, Sombart predicts that Jews will use their unassuming wealth to recreate the strategy of financial, media, intellectual, and finally political capture of Amsterdam and London. Here, he makes a bold prediction about the then impoverished Jewish immigrants and America’s future:
“Consider that there are more than a million Jews in New York today, and that the greater number of the immigrants have not yet embarked on a capitalistic career. If the conditions in America continue to develop along the same lines as in the last generation, if the immigration statistics and the proportion of births among all the nationalities remain the same, our imagination may picture the United States of fifty or a hundred years hence as a land inhabited only by Slavs, Negroes and Jews, wherein the Jews will naturally occupy the position of economic leadership.”
A 2017 translation of same passage in The Jews and Modern Capitalism does not have the Slav reference, but instead foresees the future of America as a “negro slum” overseen by Jewish financiers. The mention of “Slavs” appears to be a mistranslation of the German word for “slave.”
If a theory’s validity derives from its predictive power, then perhaps Sombart deserves a second look.
(Republished from Substack by permission of author or representative)
