As one of your "Jewish readers," I felt compelled to write a response to your essay, "The Jewish Problem," published at Robert Frenz's Web site on June 28, 2000. I correspond frequently with Mr. Frenz, and while I agree with practically none of what he believes, I value that he judges me first and foremost as an individual and not a "Joo."

I intend to address your essay paragraph-by-paragraph, pointing out what I believe to be falsehoods, inconsistencies, or other questions as they crop up. This response will by no means be comprehensive, but I do hope to speak to the key issues that I feel need examination.

First, I am unaware that Karl Marx was born with the name "Levy." I would appreciate a source for this information. Marx, by the way, is almost always a name associated with Jews. Consider the most prominent example beyond Herr Karl -- the Marx brothers, also Jewish.

The reason for requesting a source for this information is my recent knocking of heads with someone claiming that Lenin changed his name from a Jewish name (which presently escapes me). This particular idiot insisted that while Lenin's name was, at one time, Ulyanov, this Russian name was in fact adopted to replace a more clearly Jewish name. Pressed to present evidence, my opponent crumbled, but a search of my own found nothing but "revisionist" sources to corroborate such a claim. As I reject out of hand the "Jewish conspiracy" to cover up such information, I must reject the claim that Lenin ever had a Jewish name. I have a serious dislike for disinformation (not to be confused with misinformation) -- perhaps an even greater dislike than I do for anti-Semitism, though the two often go hand in hand. Disinformation seeks to manipulate the "proles" through dishonesty. I'd rather every anti-Semite in the world was Tom Metzger; with him, there's never any guesswork. He tells the truth as he sees it and doesn't try to use untrue propaganda to enforce his point of view.

But I digress. I do not deny that Lenin had Jewish ancestry on his mother's side. He also had German ancestry. From the standpoint of Jewish law, since it was his maternal grandfather and not his maternal grandmother who was a Jew, Lenin himself was not Jewish. The Nuremberg Laws and the government of Israel would take a dissenting point of view, of course. I also do not deny that Marx was a Jew, as were Trotsky, Kamenev, and Kaganovich. But all these men acted primarily as communists and not as Jews.

I also don't deny that now, as you say of the Weimar Republic, Jews constitute a greater number of asylum inmates than they do members of the general population. Jews also score more highly on IQ tests than non-Jews. Does this mean that Jews are smarter than non-Jews? Of course not: Both measurements -- intelligence and insanity -- are totally arbitrary judgments. I can teach a chimpanzee to ace an IQ test given enough time and enough #2 pencils. Nonetheless, if we accept that "intelligence" (however defined) and neurosis go together, then we must expect that, given Bell Curve evidence, that there are more whites than Latinos or blacks in asylums. And we'd be correct in that assumption.

On to Jewish name changing: Traditionally a Jew is called by a patronymic, e.g., my great-grandfather's name was Imanuel ben Shmuel (Emanuel son of Samuel), but his legal name was Emanuel K-----. This is because the government under which his ancestors lived forced him to take a surname for census and tax purposes. Did some Jews change their names upon arrival in America to avoid discrimination? Of course they did. So did many Italians, Poles, and other "non-Aryan" ethnic groups.

And this brings up the issue of persecution -- which seems central to your essay. Can you honestly deny that Jews were persecuted for 1900 years in Europe for the charge of deicide? Mr. Thomson, there is true historical revisionism, what I deem "revisionism" (Holocaust denial, primarily), and then there is willful ignorance. To suggest that Jews were not subject to persecution on religious grounds is to ignore a significant portion of history. Consider the large number of Jews living under Islamic rule before 1948. They were not afforded the same persecution as in "Christian" Europe, primarily because Muslims don't believe the killing of Jesus to have been deicide. In fact, they don't even believe that Jesus was crucified, despite his status as a prophet in the Islamic religion.

Regarding the issue of the "chosenness" of Jews, this is a term grossly misunderstood by Gentiles and many Jews both. To be chosen is not a privilege or a right -- it is an obligation imposed by the Jewish religion. In order to be Jewish and be chosen, a Jew must obey the Torah to its fullest extent. If he does not, he is not chosen -- period. Nor does chosenness imply superiority over Gentiles; it implies the duty to be, as the prophet Isaiah wrote, "a light unto the nations." Therefore, if Meir Kahane, to use an extreme example, breaks the Toraic commandment to "not oppress the stranger [non-Jew in the land of Israel], for you were strangers in a strange land [Egypt]" by his treatment of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, then he isn't chosen anymore.

Furthermore, the Hebrew word goy does not, in any circumstances, mean "cattle." Strictly translated the word means "nation." Perhaps the most famous usage of the word in the Hebrew Bible is in God's promise to Abraham that he will make of him a goy gadol "great nation." Has the word's meaning shifted to mean "non-Jew"? Yes, it has. Do some Jews use this designation pejoratively? Yes, they do. Does this mean that word means "cattle"? No, it does not. This reminds me of something I wrote on my (now defunct) Web site many years ago of Posse Comitatus leader and Christian Identity preacher Mark Thomas, who is now serving time for his collaboration with the "Aryan Republican Army." "Rev." Thomas had written that shabbos goy was Hebrew for "stupid cattle." (A shabbos goy is a non-Jew hired by Sabbath-observant Jews to perform certain Sabbath-forbidden activities.) I wrote that the correct translation of "stupid cattle" into Hebrew was Mark Thomas. History seems to have borne out my interpretation.

In reference to Marcus Eli Ravage, you refer to Jewish positions of "power and influence in our societies." I will not deny, again, that Jews are more highly represented in media installations and in government than they are in the general population. But what does a closer look reveal? In the case of the media, stockholders are the power-holders, and they are, by and large, not Jewish by a majority or even a plurality. And in the case of government, Jewish politicians are voted in by a 98 percent non-Jewish electorate. And Jews in appointed positions are appointed by politicians voted in by that same 98 percent non-Jewish electorate.

I've been reading Randolph Calverhill's novel Serpent's Walk recently, and the "solution" that Calverhill suggests seems much more constructive than the race war that Dr. William Pierce urges weekly yet refuses to launch himself. If "Aryans" would consolidate their capital and buy into the media, they could wrest influence away from "liberals and Jews." What do they do instead? They bitch and moan, which is not terribly productive.

Moving along, neither the Babylonian Talmud nor the messianic idea in Judaism preaches Jewish supremacy. In the case of the former, there are certainly Jewish-supremacist statements made by some commentators therein, but the Babylonian Talmud is primarily a compendium of opinions and not law. As for the messianic idea, all the messianic promise of Judaism grants is the ingathering of the exiled Jews of the world in our "promised Land," where we are required to treat non-Jews there with respect and dignity (see above). And this ingathering is also, as I mention above, limited to those Jews that, through their conduct, have remained "chosen." Expansionist, bigoted Zionists should not expect to see Kahane in the messianic age -- or themselves.

As for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they may be fairly dismissed as a forgery, as scholars both Jewish and non-Jewish agree. They were adapted in late nineteenth-century Russia from an anti-Bonapartist tract written by Maurice Joly in the days of Napoleon III. But even if we do accept the Protocols as genuine, how do we reconcile this "master plan" with the present economic prowess of the U.S.? The Protocols require economic ruin, but we have yet to see it -- in fact, we haven't seen anything close to it in 70 years. Surely in the only country with more Jews than Israel, the Protocols would have been implemented in full force by now. I see no evidence that they have.

You maintain that Jews held power in Egypt, Athens, and Rome. Regarding Egypt, ancient Israel spent most of its history as either a direct combatant or a vassal of Egypt. This is also true regarding Greece, though the Greeks (at least under the Seleucids) treated the Jews in their occupation more kindly than the Egyptians had. And as for Rome, the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE and the barring of all Jews from Jerusalem in 135 as acts of the Roman government would seem to prove your theory wrong. And once the Romans adopted Christianity as its official religion in the fourth century, anti-Semitism on the basis of deicide became a matter of Roman law.

You blame the fall of the Russian Empire on "Khazars." Here the argument is flawed on two points: 1) Most Eastern European Jews claim descent from Jews who had been living in the Rhine River valley since Roman times -- long before the numerically insignificant conversion of the Khazar Empire's nobility. Some Jews are undoubtedly descended from Khazars, but not nearly all or most; 2) What truly destroyed the Russian Empire was authoritarian rule by the tsars that angered enough of the polis (Jews and non-Jews both) to merit a revolution. As for what destroyed the Soviets, you can blame Ronald Reagan's outspending of them for that. Unfortunately, no economic Marshall Plan will be implemented to help Russia recover from its bankruptcy stemming from the Cold War. Russia is the sick man of Europe, and we have no one to thank for that but the people who elect governments in this country that first bankrupted Russia and then refused to bail them out once they were essentially neutralized as an enemy.

Your understanding of early Zionism seems to me to be one-sided. Clearly some Zionists envisioned an Arab-free Israel, but many did not. Look at the Israeli Declaration of Independence and ask yourself if there is anything implicit or explicit in that document that calls for an Arab-free state. The truth of the matter is that the whole "Palestinian problem" could have been avoided had the Mufti of Jerusalem, speaking for all Palestinians (whether Muslim or not) had accepted the U.N. partition of Palestine in 1947 and not rejected it. Smart Arabs, like Morocco's then-crown prince Hassan II knew this and begged his fellow Arab League members to accept and recognize Israel. Intransigence was instead the reaction of the Arab world, and it was met with the same by Israel. Can you honestly blame them?

You pose this question in your essay: "Why are you so determined to defile and destroy this country?" And you base this assumptive question on the legitimacy of the Protocols. That being the case, I could easily ignore the question, but I must instead ask what we are doing to "defile and destroy" America. If liberalism is the culprit, it was an active force long before Jews arrived here. Of course there are more liberal than conservative Jews here in the U.S., but there are conservative Jews, and many Orthodox Jews would view the "defiling and destroying" of America that you describe as reprehensible as you do. What does this say about an "organized Jewish" attempt to undermine non-Jewish America? Jews are even more politically and socially fractious in Israel. What I'm suggesting, in short, is that there is no monolithic entity to which one can point and label "the Jews." It boils down to our asking to be judged as individuals and not based on our largely involuntary membership in an ethnic/religious group.

Finally, I will say that I have no problem with you protecting your interests as long as you do so within the confines of the law. Your rights extend only as far as they do not entail infringing on mine. With that understanding, you can go your way and I can go mine, and we can engage in blissful ignorance of one another. But as long as you engage in misinformation and disinformation concerning Jews and Judaism, what can a Jew who values his Judaism do but respond?

Andrew E. Mathis, Ph.D.

16 July 2000