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Letters to the Editor

20 January 1981

Dear Lewis:

I was quite fascinated by Dr. Howard Stein’s article on Psychohistory in your Winter 1980 issue. There are two extremely valuable books devoted to this subject: A Psychohistory of Zionism by Jay Gonen (which Stein refers to) and The Israeli Women by Lesley Hazleton. Both books are reviewed in the excellent “Zionism is not Judaism” issue (December 1978) of The Campaigner (304 West 58th Street, New York, NY 10019; $2). (This issue is also significant in that the Editorial of this issue says that the “Six Million” is a lie; page 2).

Hazleton points out that the Hebrew language is brim full of sexual-political fantasies. Gever, the Hebrew word for “man” also means rooster or cock. The word for “weapon” is zayin, which also means penis. The phrase for Israel’s armed forces can therefore be translated as “roosters equipped with penises.” The Hebrew verb “to take up arms” also means “to have sexual intercourse.”

The Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, and the Israeli military use as their code-instructions certain phrases from the Kabbala, the 15th/16th Century book of Jewish Magick. Soldiers are mobilized for war exercises with such phrases as “The Elders' Council … “… Study of the Torah” and “Product of the Soil,” Ashkenazim (Khazar) Jews from Eastern Europe take up adopted Hebrew names in Israel, but almost always using words with virility connotations, such as “antagonist,” “strength … “… towering,” “lightning,” “bear” and “lion.”

Hazleton notes an incestuous overtone in Zionist philosophizing. She quotes a kibbutz leader Meir Yaari, who openly referred to the sexual nature of the kibbutzniks' zeal. The land they tilled, he said, was their bride, and they themselves “the bridegroom who abandons himself in his bride’s bosom … thus we abandon ourselves to the motherly womb of the sanctifying earth.”

Hazelton also refers to the Old Testament writings of Isaiah and Ezekiel. “As a mystical idea, the return to Zion afforded the bond of a future but never-to-be-achieved-in-our-lifetime Redemption. It was imagined, as Isaiah indicates, in terms of the return of son to mother in sexual union.”

Then, citing the prophet Ezekiel’s characterization of “non-Jewish” sovereignty over Jerusalem as tantamount to acts of “multiple harlotry” Hazelton writes:

The sons were to mount Zion in the role of rescuer and sexual claimant, the young groom returning to claim his bride; the son his mother. The result of the intercourse between son and mother would be the rebirth of the son himself, who would give new life to his mother by saving her from the iniquities of suffering under foreign rule, and restore her innocence and light as mother and life-giver.

It would indeed be interesting to gather evidence of a possible relationship between and among the following attitudes among Jews:

Without a doubt there is a rich seam of psychohistorical ore to be mined in this area. Dr. Stein has dug up a fine nugget. Who will have the courage to start strip-mining?

Revisionistically

Sandra Ross
London, England

Sir:

The central point of Dr. Howard F. Stein’s article, “The Holocaust and the Myth of the Past as History,” is, I believe, wholly valid. World Jewry does indeed have a psychic need to believe in the “holocaust” and for that reason, no amount of published empirical research or logical argument will ever shake that belief among the commonality of Jews although some sophisticated Jewish academics and intellectuals (Dr. Stein himself, for example) are at least uneasy with it. It is very similar to the desperate emotional and psychological need of Blacks not to deal with the theories of Jensen, Shockley, Shuey, et a], in a rational or objective way.

But we should not overlook the added element in the perpetuation of the holocaust myth which is stressed by Richard Harwood among others. There is a tremendous enhancement of political power for Jewry in the United States and Western Europe and of virtually unlimited financial gain for Israel in the myth. This factor operates both on the conscious and the unconscious level.

Beyond this, Dr. Stein’s enthusiasm for psycho-history needs to be looked at with some degree of cool objectivity and scepticism. Good historians have always been aware of the psychological — often Freudian- determinants in history. Alexander the Great is only one of the most obvious examples of this: there. is, and can be, almost no dispute about the oedipal factors there. But there is some danger of psycho-history degenerating into a mere fad-or at best a kind of monolithic theory of history which explains all the past. Oddly enough, that particular way of thinking has long seemed to me very characteristic of the intellectual Jew: Marx’s economic determinism, Freud’s libido, Einstein’s Unified Field theory-even Judaic monotheism. Psycho-history has only recently been given a name and it is the latest arrival in the field. Jews might respond by arguing that racialists fall into the same trap and sometimes there is truth in such allegations. Personally, I believe that race is probably the most important single factor in history and I rejoice in the new insights of Sociobiology but, since racial instincts can be perverted and corrupted and become a source of guilt and impotence, it is clear that other factors also play a part.

Sincerely yours,
Wayland D. Smith, Ph.D.
Los Angeles, California
29 December 1980