Was Dr. William Pierce Right about James Hosmer's 'The Jews'?
When I originally read Dietrich Eckart’s unfinished work ‘Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: A Dialogue Between Adolf Hitler and Me’ I remember being struck by his reference to the ‘jew-worshipping’ book of James Hosmer added in as a translation note by the late William Pierce. Finally having gotten around to reading the book written by Hosmer that Pierce was referring to (i.e. his 1885 work ‘The Jews’).
Before I start looking at Hosmer’s thesis and whether Pierce was merely being rhetorical in his characterization of that work. I should note that this isn’t some trite essay of mere historical interest given that Hosmer’s ‘The Jews’ is still promoted by – and required reading – in some Lutheran congregations in the United States despite being over a century old at this point. (1)
Hosmer’s book despite its extreme philo-Semitism is remarkably well-written and targeted at teenagers and young adults, which makes it particularly insidious in its clever presentation – with lots of art and photograph plates – of an all-but-stated belief that non-jews are meant to be the slaves and servants of the jews.
To avoid charges that I am misrepresenting Hosmer I quote various passages from ‘The Jews’ at length to demonstrate firstly that he believed jews to be a national group with race-based religion who are inherently superior to non-jews.
To wit:
‘In the fiftieth Psalm stands the passage: “Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath shined.” If we understand the word Zion in this sentence to mean, as it is often explained, the Hebrew nation, we find here an enthusiastic utterance by a Jewish poet of his sense of pride in his race: the Hebrew people is chosen out from among the nations of the earth to exhibit the perfection of beauty, - is, in fact an outshining of God himself upon the world.’ (2)
‘Says a rabbi of Cincinnati in a book published within a few years: “Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now.” The Earl of Beaconsfield, glorifying in his Jewish blood, was accustomed to maintain, without qualification, the indomitable superiority of the Hebrews over the most powerful modern races, and alleged in an intellectual sense they had conquered modern Europe. In the immense extent of time which stretches from the singer of Psalms to the Cincinnati rabbi and the marvellous Jew who, a few years ago, superintended the management of the greatest empire of the earth, there is no age in which Israelites have not uttered just as confidently their conviction of Jewish supremacy.’ (3)
‘It is part of the Christian faith, in fact, to believe that the Jews were the chosen people of God, selected from among the races of the earth to be the subjects of a special covenant, guided through ages by successive supernatural revelations from Heaven, their history set with miracles, their poets inspired prophets, the royal house of David at length giving birth to a child in whom the Deity became flesh and dwelt with men.’ (4)
Hosmer also contended that jews were an international nation of unparalleled racial purity who were more or less the same throughout history.
To wit:
‘The Jew of New York, Chicago, St. Louis, is, in body and soul, the Jew of London, of St. Petersburg, of Constantinople, of the fenced cities of Judah in the days of David. There is no other case of a nation dispersed in all parts of the world and yet remaining a nation. Says Mr. E. A. Freeman: “They are very nearly, if not absolutely, a pure race in a sense in which no other human race is pure. Their blood has been untouched by conversion, even by intermarriage.”’ (5)
‘Converts were, however, never admitted to an equal footing with themselves, since none of Gentile birth could stand with Hebrew blood.’ (6)
Hosmer believed that not only was this jewish superiority an evident factor in biology, history and religion, but that in recent years that the Aryan peoples of Europe had firmly become imprisoned in their destined shackles by their benevolent jewish masters.
To wit:
‘Thus spoke the eagle-faced, burning-eyed captive, homeless, broken, humiliated, to his Aryan subduer at his very proudest. Did the Aryan obey? Straightaway the Aryan obeyed. Greek, Roman, Celt, and Teuton pass under the yoke of Jew.’ (7)
This jewish seizure of the ‘Aryan soul’ Hosmer styles as a ‘wonderful’ thing (8) and he also sees a particular genius in the jewish role in the creation of Islam as a counter to the relative intolerance of medieval Christianity towards the jews. (9)
An idea of just how demented Hosmer’s ‘jew worship’ was is given by quoting him on the subject of a medieval anti-gentile attack performed by a jew in Oxford, England in 1272:
‘One reads almost with pleasure of the conduct of a Jew at Oxford, in 1272. The university was going in procession to visit the shrine of St. Frideswide, when an audacious figure started from the Jewish quarter, wrested the cross from the hands of the bearer, and, to the horror of the pious, trampled it with loud execrations into the mire.’ (10)
Regarding this it is hard to see Hosmer as even the most dementedly philo-Semitic of Christians but rather as a Judaizer who was grafting his absolute love of jews - and ardent belief in their racial purity and superiority - onto his ostensible religious faith.
The irony in this however is that Hosmer makes numerous statements that would today be classed as ‘anti-Semitic’ by the very people he sought to defend from ‘anti-Semitism’.
For example he says such things as:
‘In the greedy energy of the Jewish trader smoulders something of the old fie of the Maccabees.’ (11)
‘Nor does the world see elsewhere perhaps such capacity for malevolence. What scorn and scowl has the Hebrew had for the rest of the earth!’ (12)
‘Perhaps avarice never wears its most hideous aspect except in the soul of the Jew.’ (13)
This plays into Hosmer’s theory of anti-Semitism which is exemplified in his statement that:
‘Elsewhere, too, they were favoured, and hence they were everywhere hated; and the hatred assumed a deeper bitterness from the fact, that the Jew always remained a Jew, marked in garb, in feature, in religious faith, always scornfully asserting the claim that he was the chosen of the Lord.’ (14)
Put another way: jewish behaviour and demands to be treated differently/uniquely was the trigger for ‘anti-Semitism’ which in turn led to persecution of the ‘stubborn jews’ by the non-jewish population of the world.
This sounds rather ‘anti-Semitic’ to modern ears, but it is never-the-less the only intellectually feasible interpretation of the ‘oldest hatred’ that never seems to ‘go away’ and about which jews are continually complaining. Pierce was right in that Hosmer did quite literally ‘worship jews’ but Hosmer was at least honest enough to admit that jewish behaviour is heavily linked to ‘anti-Semitism’ rather than ‘completely irrelevant’ to it as is routinely claimed by modern ‘experts on anti-Semitism’ such as Walter Laqueur and Robert Wistrich.
References
(1) https://www.lutheranlibrary.org/pdf/125ln-hosmer-story-of-the-jews.pdf
(2) James Hosmer, 1891, ‘The Jews: Ancient, Medieval and Modern’, 5th Edition, T. Fisher Unwin: London, p. 1
(3) Ibid, pp. 1-2
(4) Ibid, p. 2
(5) Ibid, p. 5
(6) Ibid, p. 79
(7) Ibid, p. 128
(8) Ibid, p. 138
(9) Ibid, p. 7
(10) Ibid, pp. 203-204
(11) Ibid, p. 5
(12) Ibid, p. 6
(13) Ibid.
(14) Ibid, p. 64