The Psychology of the Jews: Case Study #1 Arthur Katz
I have long maintained an interest in what could be called jewish conversion literature or put another way: the usually autobiographical accounts written by jewish converts to non-jewish religious belief systems that are then published by their new faith and used to try and convert more jews. In many ways this is a phenomenon which is largely confined to the jews in that although there are other concentrations of conversion literature - for example from Islam to Christianity and vice versa - there is a different tenor to it and it doesn't focus on the origins of the convert.
The point within that - to elucidate slightly for the reader's benefit - is that to many religions: the conversion of jews seems - on the basis of the conversion literature - to be based on a value judgement of their worth based on their nationality rather than the simple encourage to adopt a different faith. Or to put the point another way: conversion literature in regard to the jews focuses on the fact that a jew is a jew regardless of religious confession, while other conversion literature calls the convert an atheist, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu and so on.
The importance of that is very simple: the conversion literature is tacitly describing jews as a national not a religious group while comparatively it only talks of non-jews in the sense of being lapsed or active adherents to other religious systems.
In other words: it is categorically different.
As conversion literature is difficult to come by unless one actively seeks it out: I have resorted to combing the stocks of book dealers, Abebooks and Ebay for it. One such example of my searching has been the work of a jewish convert to Christianity named Arthur Katz.
Katz's short autobiographical work 'Ben Israel' was published by the Ben Israel (presumably meant to be 'Bene Israel' ['Ben' is singular] lit. 'Sons of Israel') fellowship, (1) which is a small Christian outfit that functions in the tradition of lay communal Christianity (i.e., living as a small faith-based collective not dissimilar to an Israeli Kibbutz) (2) and operates out of Laporte, Minnesota.
What I find particularly interesting about Katz is that he seems to have become the leading light of this small Christian group, and his memory is maintained to this day by this small cult. (3) Katz in many respects is a representative case of why I take an active interest in jewish conversion literature in that here is a jew who has tried many different things: Marxism, atheism, jewish nationalism, Judaism and so forth.
Yet he is a failure in all of these and eventually when he has failed to make his name and achieve his egoistic aspirations in these areas: he suddenly has a religious epiphany, which leads him to become the leading light of small cult of slavish gentile worshippers who accord him the respect and admiration that he so desperately needs to fill - what I have come term - his personal egoistical black hole.
The one theme that runs through all of Katz's writing is his identity as a jew and how he is supposed to interact with the rest of the world. Katz's 'Ben Israel' - written in the literary form of a somewhat unorthodox diary (it jumps about and reflects on different parts of his life at different intervals) - and starts out in 1953 with Katz at the former Dachau concentration camp near Munich, Germany.
Katz - in his preface - tries to suggest that his 'raw' sentiments are merely outrage and not to be taken too seriously: however it is extremely difficult to not take Katz's 'raw' sentiments seriously given that he constantly expresses explicit and implicit ideas on the subject of the innate superiority of the jew when compared to the gentile as well as outrage (and concomitant hatred) at the historic prosecution of the jews.
That hatred is beyond merely vicious: it crosses over into the outright genocidal.
To quote Katz talking of a former German soldier (who had lost both his arms and legs in the war) with whom he shared a railway carriage in 1953:
'“Suffer, you blond bastard!” I thought, “Whatever pain you feel is nothing compared to what your people inflicted upon mine!”
We sat facing each other. The Aryan and the Jew... the persecutor and the persecuted.... the German and the GI... the uniform of the occupation and the empty sleeves and trouser-legs of the defeated... the vanquished and the victor. Had he, years before, been one of the rioting mindless bands of Hitler Youth that broke the windows of little Jewish shops? Had he zealously squeezed the trigger for the Reich and been decorated and idolized as a representative of the Master Race? Had he envisioned his blond counterparts mastering and metering law and order to the world's inferiors – of whom I was one? And what had been his thoughts in the blinding, deafening, horrible moment when the shrapnel dismembered his limbs and left him lying in the muck, feeling his lifeblood spurting from the stumps? Yes, blond Aryan, you have sowed – now reap!' (4)
Not exactly 'raw sentiment' is it?
This is something altogether.
We do have an appropriate name for it however: murderous race hatred.
However, it isn't the 'blond Aryan' screaming abuse at the helpless jew, but rather a cowardly jew (Katz was a non-combatant translator in the US Army) wanting every non-jew who had not fought on the side of the jews to suffer horrendous and awful deaths while he watched and cheered from the side-lines.
Katz tries to repair the unmistakable aura of strident anti-gentilism that his remembrance gives off by claiming that he afterwards 'helped' said 'blond Aryan' and that said 'blond Aryan' was sorry about what the Germans had allegedly done during the war. However as Katz openly admits to having freely edited his diary in his preface we may dismiss this as later addition as it is an inorganic element (i.e., it stresses the Christian concepts of forgiveness and mercy which Katz explicitly tells us he didn't sign up to at the time) to the story: after all if you feel a burning hatred for a man then why are you going to try help him relieve his pain and then have a chat with him about the beauty of all things German?
Simply put you aren't.
So as stated we may disregard the elements to Katz's tale that seem to be inorganic to the whole and are likely to be later additions to fit in with Katz’s professed Christian beliefs of the Evangelical mould at the time when he edited the entries.
We should further stress that Katz - in his account of his visit to Dachau - makes an interesting faux pas in so far as he tells us that:
'Then the gas rooms with jets still in the ceiling. Here my brothers had been herded like cattle into cars. Women and children. Stripped naked. Old men and young boys. They stand beside me now, their skeletal forms giving them the appearance of the walking dead. The doors clang shut. The overhead jets open and hiss. I stand in the middle of the great empty room listening to the cacophony of screams and prayers ascending and echoing off the bare walls around me.' (5)
Now obviously we know for a fact - and have known for quite some time - that there were no gas chambers or homicidal gassings performed by the Third Reich at Dachau, but yet we can see that Katz believes there to have been when he visited the camp in 1953. Further - as Katz points out - this was clearly encouraged and claimed by the camp museum, which he speaks of as effectively a modern Auschwitz type set up those acts as kind of emotional tourism unrelated to the facts of the issue (as even at this early juncture there were numerous voices being raised about the absurdity of the charges vis-a-vis Dachau).
Further we note that Katz has preserved another element to the early ‘Holocaust’ myth when he speaks of how there were 'conveyors belts where the bodies were dispatched to the giant ovens.' (6)
That Katz has preserved this; and bear in mind that this a jew who achieved two graduate degrees (one in history) suggesting that it is unlikely he wouldn't have known that the Dachau element had long been side-lined by the turn of the millennium is interesting and indicates that there is certainly an original core to the diary entries he has edited to create 'Ben Israel'.
It also pointedly suggests to us the fact that even Katz himself realised the unfortunate fact that the 'Holocaust' is more something that a lot of jews and gentiles need to believe in (as it serves as a fundamental element of validation for their own thought process, perceptions of themselves and the filters through which they interpret events) than a mere historical theory. After all, if the 'Holocaust' was merely a historical theory - as opposed to an overly political and intellectual crutch - then there would not be an issue around its supposedly 'unique' nature.
This comes down to a very simple question: if all human life is sacrosanct then why is the 'Holocaust' unique?
This is a question that jewish scholars have yet to find a cogent answer to: although that is not for want of trying.
Some - like Anne Applebaum - try to claim the 'industrialisation' of death to make it 'unique' (but forget that Stalin's NKVD, for example, created a system of industrial mass execution in the mid-late 1930s [which resembled an abattoir] well before the alleged 'Holocaust' took place) while others - like Deborah Lipstadt - try to cite the 'unique' status of the jews as the reason (i.e., jewish lives are worth more than gentile lives).
Both arguments fall flat as is pointedly obvious from the fact that they have gained little to no intellectual traction outside of the immediate fraternity of Zionist hard-liners and even then, the take-up of such ideas among so receptive an audience has been minimal.
The point - in relation to Katz - is simple in that even to the jews the 'Holocaust' is a political and intellectual crutch, which justifies everything the jews have done as a people since 1945 and also retroactively justifies every Zionist action facilitating the carving out of a homeland for the jews before and after Hess and Herzl.
Furthermore the 'Holocaust' acts as the defining moment for the jewish historical and political consciousness, which Katz expresses when he tells us that he wanted to hitch-hike around Europe in order to 'find the meaning' of his jewishness.
This sense of jewish victimhood and this idea that the jew - in-line with historic and current Zionist thinking - should strive to be the new Übermensch and that as the chosen of Yahweh: they are destined for this role (i.e., they suffer on behalf of the world because they were specially chosen). One of the aspects of this assumed Übermensch status is the idea that the jews should quench their hatred by acting it out against those they hate the most (a-la psychoanalytic therapy vis-a-vis Sigmund Freud).
This expresses itself in Katz - as well as in many other jews both after the war and since - as a need to bed gentile women - particularly blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauties- and thus in a sense 'turning' jew-haters into jew-lovers: thus asserting mastery and domination over them. Obviously, such thinking is repugnant to the discerning mind, but it is not an uncommon thought process among jews: after all does not the Mishnah tell them that gentiles particularly lust after jews and seek to corrupt them in doing so?
Katz tries to quench his hatred of all things German and European by manipulating a young mentally scarred German girl named Margot: (7) who - when he was a conscript translator attached to the US army in Germany - he picked up at a dance. Katz even goes as far as to say that German girls - who were desperate for food and the little luxury of a cigarette - routinely slept with American soldiers to feed themselves and their families.
What turns the stomach even more about Katz is that he actually has the gall to suggest that the presence of half-jewish children in the bellies of these former BDM girls is the 'last shattering of their fragmented illusions'. (8) Effectively this is a creature [I refuse to call it a man] - who professes to be a Christian when writing up its diary - who condones without qualification or apology deliberately impregnating young girls who are selling their bodies because they have nothing left to lose (after 8 years of harsh Allied occupation and ethnic-cleansing) in such a way as to effectively torture them and cause them to be rejected by their own people.
Yes, my dear reader: there is a name for that too.
War crimes.
Not content with that Katz selects Margot to be his bought-and-paid-for paramour only to discover that try as he might: he cannot impregnate her. This made clear by the fact that Katz unhappily refers to the childlessness of their union and seeks to imply that it was because something was wrong with Margot. I would differ on that in so far as Katz - by his own reckoning at least - slept about quite a lot and didn't manage to impregnate anyone: suggesting that the problem was not with the vessel but with the seed.
Or to put bluntly: Katz was likely an impotent little jew.
Indeed, we can see from what Katz relates that Margot was mentally-scarred by the Allied terror-bombing raids during World War II - when she was a member of the BDM [as Katz is quick to relate] - and that in spite of Katz's claim that their relationship was always 'stormy': he deliberately drove her over the edge. We can see this in so far as Katz tells us that when Margot discovered that Katz had started sleeping around [with one of Margot's friends] she had a breakdown. (9)
Katz then promptly had Margot sent to an obliging mental institution where she was given 'electric shock therapy'. Katz shows the extremely malignant side of his personality at this juncture as he promptly declares that Margot wasn't getting any better despite being subject to sanctioned torture for little to no reason at all on the face of it. (10)
Further we later find out that Katz is the abusive partner in the relationship when Katz's friend and fellow jew Saul Goodman recalls that Katz has abandoned Margot - after sleeping with her friend - and is currently wandering around Madrid and then Central Europe. Indeed, Goodman even goes as far as to point out to Katz that he shouldn't keep telling Margot he loves her in letters, raising false hope and then sleeping around (with the semi-assurance that Margot will hear of it) as it is maiming her mind.
In effect Katz is emotionally torturing Margot and is doing so in all probability, because of Margot's status as a former member of the BDM and as a German. This - as we can quickly see - is a form of trying to assert the alleged status of Übermensch on the part of the jews over the Germans. A fact that can quickly be understood that Katz later all but admits that was had long been his goal. (11)
Indeed Katz talks about trying to bed numerous different non-jewish women he meets in his travels: in doing so he reveals the lack of belief in himself, which leads him to constantly try to fill the gaping void of his own perception of himself against what he has actually achieved with emotionally satisfying pyrrhic victories against the gentiles (in the form of having sex with and trying to conceive children by gentile women) he fundamentally regards as inferior persecutors of the 'chosen nation'.
We must further point out that no-where does Katz apologise or qualify his actions: he leaves them as read and seems to assume – amusingly - that his reader will overlook his fundamentally vicious and vindictive not to mention childish nature.
Katz also tells us that he was a Marxist who had attended the Jefferson School of Social Science in New York - (12) which was then run directly by the Communist Party USA and was cited on innumerable occasions in the anti-Communist backlash of the 1950s as being the source of much subversive activity on an intellectual and practical political level - and that if it had 'not been for the devastating Khrushchev revelations about the Stalin period as well as materials seeping out of Yugoslavia concerning the political realities there, I'd be a Marxist yet, with more than a sightseer's interest in the affairs of East Berlin.' (13)
Effectively what Katz is saying here that if Khrushchev had not spoken out against the terror undertaken on Stalin's explicit and direct orders - which did disproportionately although unintentionally target jews (no doubt a fact that Katz factored into his reasons for rejecting Marxism) - and that there had been a little less of the iron fist in the velvet glove then he would have spent the rest of his life happily proclaiming the virtues of a mass-murderer.
Perhaps he would have nominated Stalin for sainthood?
St. Stalin... has a nice ring to it: doesn't it?
In spite of his alleged break with Marxism - or rather Stalinism - in the early 1960s: Katz continued to be a communist in practical ideological terms: throughout 'Ben Israel' he constantly refers to his intellectual yearnings. This is given form by such obviously egoistic claims as his third-person reference to himself being a superior-being (when compared to mere non-jews) as he could quickly master Marxism after mastering empiricism and then existentialism.
This is further suggested by Katz's constant use of overblown literary references to Kafka, Goethe, Shakespeare, Huxley and so on. In essence Katz sees himself as a Nietzschian jewish Übermensch trying to assert his superiority over the gentiles.
This is particularly evident in his time in Israel where he visits two different Kibbutz: Yom Mordechai and Lavi. The former was a socialist Kibbutz which eschewed religion and worked on the principles of the co-operative model. The latter was a religious Kibbutz which modelled itself on the principles of the rabbinically-governed jewish shtetl (lit. 'little town') of the old Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe.
Katz writes breathless and overblown praise of Yom Mordechai but feels he cannot relate to Lavi. In Yom Mordechai Katz describes seeing the socialist 'new man' in creation: a man without greed, with an egalitarian communal spirit, without archaic religious traditions imposed by the ruling class and so forth. (14)
The concept of the 'new man' is one of the oldest ideas in the socialist intellectual canon and can be dated back in modern terms to the ideas to Sir Thomas More's sixteenth century book 'Utopia', which talks of the creation of an ideal society via the creation of a 'new man'. One could further put back the dating to the ideas of the Spartanophile Greek philosopher Plato who - as he explains in his 'Republic' - believed that a 'new man' could be mould by the state.
In its original Platonic form, the idea of the 'new man' was a good one: whereby the state and the nation would become a fused whole that moved as one to protect itself, but retained individuality while brutally crushing would-be revolutionaries (as was exemplified by Odysseus' treatment of a deformed soldier who was a 'railer against all authority' in Homer's 'Iliad'). (15)
However, the concept of the 'new man' became corrupted by socialist philosophers of the early twentieth century to mean that man could rise above his nature rather than be one with his nature (i.e., driven by a train of thought that can be reasonably traced to More's 'Utopia'). Or put another way: the arrival of atheist/agnostic materialism as a respectable philosophy posed an intellectually problematic question for socialists precisely because what biology told them was the case (i.e., ruthless individual and group competition was and is the order of the day) conflicted with their own ideas about man's communal pre-capitalist era (i.e., Rousseau's origin of man in nature). (16)
In order to deal with this, thinkers of the left progressively modified the concept of the 'new man' to explain the grandiose social experiments that they proposed and also to get out of thorny problem of the constant reincarnation of class warfare that was proposed by the new state of play in the biological sciences. This lead top-tier communist thinkers - like Jean-Paul Sartre - to spend a large amount of their voluminous writings directly or indirectly dealing with the concept of the 'new man' and how he was to be created.
Sartre is one thinker - along with the philosopher of religion William James and the works of the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung - to whom Katz constantly makes reference especially in relation to the concept of the 'new man' (the other two are primarily in regard to their work on the rationalizing of the frequently irrational religious experience), which then plays into Katz's belief that what he was seeing at Yom Mordechai was the prototype of the socialist 'new man' in literal gestation.
However, there is a very jewish undertone to this belief that the 'new man' is being created in Israel: in so far as the jew is showing the gentiles the way forward by his rising above history.
It is worth remembering that Katz believed in a jewish nationalist version of history and sees the jews as 'meek' in the faces of their 'evil persecutors' (17) as well as that jewishness is defined biologically (hence his constant refrain that he was 'born a jew') (18) and yet further that Katz implicitly believed that jews should lead the world into a new age (quietly invoking the concept of Tikkun Olam ['Repairing the World'] as well as of the coming Messianic golden age in Judaism). (19)
This vision of the world ruled by pioneering jews leading the newly-remodelled gentiles is fairly obvious if one concedes that the Marxist movement has been - and still is - one in which jews are disproportionately represented among its leadership and intellectual class.
If we fit this view of the world into the aforementioned paradigm of Katz's belief of the jewish Übermensch dominating their former 'persecutors' - particularly those of German and/or Nordic origin - we can begin to see that Katz was in reality - although he probably wouldn't have thought so at the time - a jewish nationalist with radical social and economic views.
This belief also accounts for another singularity in Katz's story in that the only girls he tries to bed is those who are gentiles (as it turns out looks don't matter as long as they aren't jewish) - (20) to the point where Katz is described by his friend and fellow jew Saul Goldman - as going out of his way to bed shiksas. (21)
Indeed, Katz leaves the term in the text of 'Ben Israel' to my mind probably because he presumed that most readers wouldn't know what it meant and even fewer were likely to realise that it is one of the worst insults a jew can level at a (female) gentile. It is in a sense highly specific in that in means a gentile woman (usually with blonde hair) who actively seduces jews in order to take them from their people and produce halakhically non-jewish children (i.e., destroy the people of Israel).
In other words, it means a combination of thief, prostitute, rapist, hussy and anti-Semite all in one.
Hardly the kind of thing that even a jew would throw lightly: is it?
In essence Goldman is placing the blame for Katz's seduction of a string on gentile girls (often barely out of their teens while he was in his late twenties/early thirties) on the girls and removing Katz from any responsibility other than that he gave in to the 'evil urge' and bedded these girls. This is a view that Katz doesn't correct or even do anything to contradict: if we read Katz literally, we would have to conclude that gentile girls across Europe were literally throwing themselves at him.
This isn't exactly likely given that even in Katz's accounting: it is clear that it is he who seduced the girls not the other way around. For example, he describes Inger - an apparently rather plain girl in Denmark who he met - as being very reluctant to have sexual intercourse with him only consenting when he - in a word - insisted. (22)
It is also clear that Katz doesn't view gentiles as being equal as jews as he rather imperiously describes how surprised he was that Sigrid - a girl in Norway – could - as a non-jew - understand Kafka. (23)
Katz also repeatedly tells Inger in his letters that she just 'can't understand him' (because she isn't jewish) and looks down on her because he considers her to be a simpleton. (24) He also takes some pride in reporting that Sigrid was - like Margot - admitted to a mental hospital after spending time with him. (25)
Indeed, what becomes obvious throughout 'Ben Israel' is that Katz is a jewish sexual predator who is after bedding as many vulnerable gentile women as possible with the implicit aim to fill the bellies of as many gentile women as possible with half-jewish babies. (26) Thus - as before noted - making natural jew-haters into jew-lovers by the results of his behaving as an ideologically-motivated love rat.
This is while - of course - having delusions of grandeur about becoming a famous artist, a famous writer and not-least a famous explorer who had protected all the precious antiquities from jewish quarter of Cairo (a-la Solomon Schechter). Katz's pipedreams of course never become a reality and as such point to a deeply troubled ego which believes itself to have been placed on this earth with a divine mission, but yet every time Katz thinks he has found his metier vanishes like a mirage in front of him (much to his evident frustration).
This however changes when he meets Christianity full-on. Now Katz openly states that he was (and continued to be) hostile to 'conventional Christianity' and that this had little appeal for him in spite of his alleged burgeoning faith in Jesus. (27)
What Katz is saying here - as is exemplified by his view of Christianity as a fulfilled form of Judaism - (28) is that to him all Christian congregations that are primarily run by gentiles for gentiles were not 'his kind' of Christianity. His kind of Christianity was the kind of communal religious life in a socialist form that he saw and fell in love with while at Kibbutz Yom Mordechai with the twist that the congregation should be gentiles while those in charge should be jews (a-la the covenant with Yahweh)
That he achieved this basic goal of inserting himself - a-la Orwell's 'Animal Farm' - as being more equal than others in the Ben Israel collective of Minnesota is evidenced by his singular status as their representative thinker and apparent spiritual father.
Katz's hostility to 'conventional Christianity' comes from his association of it with jew-hatred as he makes clear when he sees a vision of the Ku Klux Klan as being representative of gentile Christianity throughout the ages. (29) Further Katz will only listen to other jews - such as the Messianic jewish group he bumped into in Israel - in their Christian faith and pays little heed to what non-jews have to say about it. (30)
Katz sees in Jesus a jew who was rejected by the hide-bound ideologists of his day and in doing so the jews lost control of their mission to lead by example and 'repair the world' (i.e., Tikkun Olam in Judaism). (31) A mission that he now sees himself as divinely selected to fulfil and which he alleges he was told by God directly (literally as 'voice in his head' in Israel of all places). (32) This makes sense of his later behaviour in choosing a gentile rather than a jewish group to insert himself into and then attempt to rule as a mini-Moses.
It is also necessary to remark that Katz in all likelihood used his newly found Christianity to rationalise his earlier conduct as a love rat who used, abused and discarded gentile girls across the European continent. After all was, he not also trying to bring them to love the jews as the chosen of Yahweh much as he was later to see as his mission in Christianity? (33)
This is likely true as far as Katz's diseased mind went and as such it gives us the key to what sort of a man Katz really was. In that he was vain, self-obsessed, bent only on his own success at any cost, had a massive inferiority complex (as pointed out by Inger) (34) and yet maintained a sense of jewish nationalism and superiority throughout all of his ideological shifts and newfound revelations.
Katz is in many ways an ideal example of the ultimate egoism of jews and that they are not a people who care about their fellow jews, but identify primarily as jewish because it suits them to do so. As well as provide them with the belief that they are innately superior to all those around them and that as jews they also get a place they can abscond to should their behaviour earn them the attentions of the law (i.e., Israel) as long as they; quid pro quo, support the Israeli state in the Diaspora (much as Katz did).
After all, how are you meant to deal with the world you feel innately persecuted by and inferior to?
In short: assert you are better than it and try to - as Katz attempted - to dominate it.
References
(1) Arthur Katz, 2000, 'Ben Israel: Odyssey of a Modern Jew', 1st Edition, Burning Bush Publications: Laporte
(2) http://www.benisrael.org/Mission_Statement.html
(3) They present Katz as their primary interpreter and teacher of Christianity as evidenced by the fact that his work is the only intellectual material made available by this community. See http://artkatzministries.org/
(4) Katz, Op. Cit., p. 3
(5) Ibid., p. 1
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ibid., p. 15
(8) Ibid., p. 16
(9) Ibid., p. 20
(10) Ibid., p. 9
(11) Ibid., p. 42
(12) Ibid.
(13) Ibid., pp. 41-42
(14) Ibid., pp. 98-105
(15) I intend to write something on this as it is a pointed metaphor for our own present condition.
(16) Ironically this view derives largely from a literal reading of Plutarch's Spartan Lives and the belief that returning to this heavily idealised state of affairs was possible, because it had been before and so could be again. The irony in the equation is that Plato's 'Republic' is based on a far more realistic interpretation of Spartan society - although still idealised to a point - which the leftist intellectuals tended to ignore in favour of the ideas of Aristotle.
(17) Katz, Op. Cit., p. 98
(18) Ibid., pp. 72-73; 96
(19) Ibid., pp. 68; 99-100; 105
(20) Ibid., p. 49
(21) Ibid., p. 137
(22) Ibid., p. 49
(23) Ibid., pp. 46-47
(24) Ibid., pp. 50; 60-61; 88; 96-97
(25) Ibid., p. 59
(26) Ibid., pp. 16; 47
(27) Ibid., pp. 52; 115
(28) Ibid., pp. 73-74; 78; 81-82
(29) Ibid., pp. 64-65
(30) Ibid., pp. 52; 114-124; 135-136
(31) Ibid., p. 64
(32) Ibid., p. 114
(33) Suggested by Ibid., pp. 95; 139; 141
(34) Ibid., p. 109