On the Semitic Roots of Western Civilization

Under the influence of the high culture of the Semitic East (Assyrian, Phoenician, Aramean), Greece laid the foundations to create a culture that would eventually dominate the Mediterranean—classical civilization. —John C. Scott

     Quite a few folks on the so-called hard right are pretty much obsessed with “The Jews” being the cause of most (if not all) of the problems of modern (and postmodern) western civilization. Some hard leftists also revile them, or at least they revile Israel, ostensibly because of all those poor, poor marginalized Palestinians. We can ignore the antisemitism of the radical left for the present moment though, and just consider claims (some of them valid) made against “The Jews” for derailing the modern west.

     Anyone who has read Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements must have some idea of the influence of “progressive” Jewish activists making deliberate efforts to weaken and undermine the prevailing culture of the western world. They did this largely by promoting Marxism, racial issues, feminism, gay rights, anti-Christianity, the breakup of the nuclear family, and cultural and moral relativism, and also by promoting the immigration of tens of millions of people from non-western cultures and races into the USA, the rest of the Anglosphere, and Europe. But this certainly was not the beginning, or anything near to the beginning, of the influence of Jewish “progressives” against the traditional culture of the west.

     Before taking this matter of modern problems attributed to modern Jews further I suppose I should briefly review some ideas that I discussed in an earlier post, explaining why so many people (especially in the west—the Muslims have had their own reasons) distrust and dislike “The Jews,” and have done for many centuries.

     A large part of it, initially, was the early Christian prohibition on lending money at interest, known as the sin of usury. Because of this religious prohibition money-lending, banking, and much of commerce in general were the domain of Jews, and they took this domain very seriously. The Jews came to be bitterly resented by the Christian majority largely because of the Jews’ greater wealth (and although not all of them were rich, some were astronomically so). This resentment inspired hatred, which of course was reciprocated, building up a mutual hostility between the followers of the two religious systems, and which resulted in many Jews considering it a positive virtue to swindle Gentiles—which of course increased the friction. Furthermore, Christianity, when it was young, and up until relatively recently, has been VERY intolerant of other belief systems; and the only reason why the Jews were allowed to survive at all, aside from their usefulness to the Christian nobility in their capacity as money-lenders, was the Christian belief in the Bible’s claims that the Jews were, at least at one time, the Chosen People of God Almighty. Anyway, this condition of mutual hostility continued for centuries, with Christians loathing and occasionally massacring Jews, and Jews loathing and fleecing Christians; and some rightwing thinkers like Julius Evola evidently saw the perpetual mutual antagonism of Aryan Gentile and Semite Jew as a kind of polar antinomy that has perversely become fundamental to the structure of western civilization: the feminine and Semitic “liberal” attitude versus the masculine, more fascistic Aryan one, struggling against each other (and consequently reinforcing each other) in a chronic state of kinetic friction.

     But considering the beginning of the end of western civilization at the hands of “The Jews” to be Communism, the Frankfurt School, the Jewish influence over immigration “reforms,” Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, or even the traditional Jewish influence over international banking and finance (plus the publishing and entertainment industries), is nowhere near to the truth. The beginnings of Hebrew undermining—or rather radical influencing in Semitic, non-European ways—of western civilization goes back many centuries before the advent of medieval bankers’ guilds, let alone the birth of Karl Marx.

     Not long ago I made a troll meme to post on Minds.com which is applicable here, and which says:

Many of the same people who blame “The Jews” for everything bad in society are themselves followers of a religion that literally worships a deified Jew. “The Jews” did not take over western civilization with Marxism or the Frankfurt School or their influence in international banking, they took it over with the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and the conversion of Constantine to Christianity in the year 312CE.

This is the truth of the matter; for the past almost 2000 years the people of the west have literally worshiped a deified Jew, and have considered the Jewish scriptures, glorifying the Jews, to be the infallible Word of God. Furthermore, the hysteria and fanaticism of this reform movement of Judaism resulted in every authentically European or Indo-European spiritual system in the west being essentially exterminated. So this, in my opinion, is a much more serious case of undermining European civilization than Karl Marx, the Rothschilds, Franz Boas, or the Frankfurt School ever managed to perpetrate.

     (Some radical rightwing Christians who thoroughly disapprove of “The Jews” go so far as to wallow in a bit of cognitive dissonance on this issue, vehemently insisting that Jesus of Nazareth was himself not a Jew, and maybe not even a Hebrew. But the evidence of the Bible should be sufficient to demonstrate very clearly that, for example, his earliest followers were Jews; his name and family were Jewish; he lived within a predominantly Jewish culture even though he was raised in Galilee; and his earliest devotees considered him to be the promised (Jewish) Messiah and a descendant of King David himself. A Christian is essentially a follower of a schismatic sect of Judaism (though the case for Islam being an offshoot of Judaism is a little more complicated).)

     These considerations should be enough to inspire some serious reflection in anyone who values an Indo-European western heritage, but it could go even farther: in a way, Semitic relatives or even ancestors of the Hebrews were involved much earlier, even at the very beginnings of western civilization. (And this has nothing at all to do with the astonishing conspiracy theory I learned of recently from one of its astonishing proponents, namely that “The Jews” were responsible for the Bronze Age Collapse around the year 1200BCE. No, “The Jews” did not cause Bronze Age civilization to collapse in the eastern Mediterranean—although a fringe theory has the Hebrew tribe of Dan as one of the marauding Sea Peoples that were instrumental in the collapse, but more likely the people in question were the Danaoi, or Acheaean Greeks.) The influencers in question were a Semitic people known as the Phoenicians.

     The Phoenicians were an ancient Semitic, Canaanite people who lived mostly in what is now called Lebanon. They were the northern neighbors of the ancient kingdom of Israel, and closely related to the equally Canaanite early Hebrews. Both spoke a western Semitic Canaanite language and originally had a similar culture and worshiped similar gods—including El, Canaanite god of creation and forerunner of God Almighty, found in Hebrew names such as Micha-el, Gabri-el, and Isra-el. The Hebrews branched away from the mainstream Canaanite stock and became their own tribe, or rather group of tribes, around the time of Moses, with the conflation of the Edomite or Midianite god Yahweh with El, though they continued to share common blood and many cultural elements (though worship of Yahweh as the chief or only god wasn’t one of them).

     The rise of a relatively advanced urban civilization in Europe was heavily influenced by these seafaring, mercantile Phoenicians. The scholar John C. Scott wrote with regard to the ancient west:

     

By the third millennium B.C., there were two core powers, Egypt and Mesopotamia. “Semi-peripheries” were capitalist polities that conducted trade between cores and the undeveloped peripheries. Just to the north of the Phoenicia region was the small Canaanite kingdom of Ugarit; it was semi-peripheral to Mesopotamia. Actually, many scholars treat Ugarit as a purely Phoenician city. Phoenicia proper formed a unique, westward-facing maritime region that served as a semi-periphery of both cores—thus stimulating the rise of a new civilization in the West.

     Primarily through trade, and simply by being a relatively advanced civilized race with cultural elements viewed as worth imitating, the Phoenicians inspired radical cultural development, especially in the area of Greece. The Greeks derived some religious elements from the Canaanite Phoenicians, including the worship of Aphrodite, based on the Phoenician goddess Astarte, who had a large and important temple on the island of Cyprus, considered by the Greeks to be the birthplace of the goddess. Technological innovations copied from the Phoenicians included silver money, well-made wooden ships, adjustable sails on ships to allow for tacking against the wind, multiple banks of oars on warships, books instead of scrolls…and possibly most important, a very useful phonetic alphabet. The Greeks and Jews both derived their alphabets ultimately from a kind of proto-Canaanite alphabet; hence the first three letters in Greek are alpha, beta, gamma, and in Hebrew they are aleph, bet, gimmel. Furthermore the Phoenicians, being traders, introduced Egyptian and Middle Eastern technology and cultural elements into Europe. Even the earlier alphabets of the west, Linear A of the Minoan Civilization and Linear B of the Mycenaean Greeks, are believed to have been derived from an earlier Semitic alphabet.

     There was pre-urban, preliterate civilization in Europe before Semitic influence of course, but the urban, literate civilizations of west Asia and Egypt had a profound effect on Mediterranean Europe. (My father used to say that the Chinese were wearing silk and living in palaces while our ancestors were still eating each other, which is an exaggeration; but still, some Chinese were wearing silk and living in palaces while our ancestors were still wearing animal skins and living in huts. Why and how we caught up and began dominating other races in various ways is an interesting question, but one addressed elsewhere.) Cultural diffusion in the early Bronze Age was mostly from east to west, and thus much of the cultural influences flowing into Europe were from the Levant, and from west Asia in general.

     But west Asian, eastern Mediterranean influence goes back even further. The neolithic agricultural revolution began in the Near and Middle East around the end of the last glaciation of the latest Ice Age, and included what later became known as Canaan. The Mediterranean subrace of caucasians, with black hair and an olive or light-brown complexion, also evidently came from that area, and migrated westwards bringing their farming techniques and walled towns with them. The “experts” even say that Homo sapiens, anatomically modern humans, had already interbred with Neanderthals before ever reaching Europe, and so that too probably happened in west Asia even before the Cro-Magnon people arrived and supplanted the European Neanderthals.

     So anyway, Semitic influence goes all the way back to the beginnings of classical European civilization, with some of those Semites being cousins or even ancestors of the modern Jews. And they really didn’t cause the collapse of civilization in 1200BCE, and probably won’t single-handedly collapse it in future—though they evidently have really mucked it up considerably in certain ways. And if our civilization does collapse (and judging from the corrupt and tyrannical direction the globalist establishment has taken very recently, and the sheeplike acceptance of it by half the population, we are arguably moving in that direction now), “The Jews” will have played their part. But ultimately, what happens to us is the fruition of our own karma, our own doing.

that structure on the right is the Milvian Bridge

A lot of info on Phoenicians and their influence on Europe, including the quotes above, comes from: Scott, John C. (2018) "The Phoenicians and the Formation of the Western World," Comparative Civilizations Review: Vol. 78 : No. 78 , Article 4. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol78/iss78/4