Christian Identity Movemement

"Lothrop Stoddard, the leading racial theorist of the interwar period, had described two races of Jews, the "aristocratic" Sephardic Jews, who had entered the Mediterranean world, were the the genuine Semites. However, the Ashkenazic Jews were a mixture of diverse bloods, whose features reflected intermarriage with the Hittites. These eastern Jews had migrated into southern Russia, where they then blended with the Khazars, whom Stoddard regarded as a combination of Turkish and Mongoloid peoples. Although Stoddard had no connection with British-Israelism, the movement readily adopted the Khazar identity of the Jews as a further means of invalidating their claim to be descendents of the biblical Hebrews.

By the 1960s, when Christian-Identity was established as a force on the extreme-right, the Khazar ancestry of the Jews was a firm article of faith. Two books, widely read in this milieu, came to exercise a strong influence in this regard.

John Beaty's Iron Curtain Over America (1951) focused especially on the roots of Russian Jewry. He claimed that the reforms of Czar Alexander II gave the "Judaized Khazars", who had converted in the seventh century, the opportunity to infiltrate and corrupt Russia.

Wilmot Robertson's Dispossessed Majority (1972) repeated the Khazar thesis of Stoddard. Christian Identity teachings readily seized on this negative reference to Russian Jewry, but backdated Jewish intermarriage with the Khazars to biblical times.

In A Short History of Esau-Edom in Jewry (1948), the Vancouver writer C. F. Parker had claimed that a tiny remnant of "true Judah" was pitted against Idumean-Hittites who masqueraded as the true seed of Abraham and sought to expel the descendents of Jacob. These Esau-Hittites are the Ashkenazim, concentrated in Eastern and Central Europe and America. The old religious language lent itself to new political contexts. "Edom" meant "red" and Parker hinted that most Russian communist revolutionaries were descendents of Esau-Edom, an association repeated by others, including Howard Rand and Wesley Swift.

The hostility of British-Isralism toward Zionism also worked to associate the Jews with racial impurity. When the British Army invaded Palestine in 1917, the famous Balfour Declaration was issued, promising that the British would facilitate the establishment in Palestine of national home for the Jews. In 1922, British-Israelite prophecy seemed again confirmed when the League of Nations gave Britain a mandate to rule Palestine and secure that objective. However, while Jewish settlement was necessary for divine fulfillment, the concept of a Jewish state was an anathema. Once Zionism articulated its demand for an exclusively Jewish state, the withdrawal or expulsion of the British would imply that Palestine would be left with Judah, but Israel would be absent. The novel When? describes an apocalyptic military climax to the Second World War, set in Palestine. After the British retreat from Jerusalem, the city is captured by the evil forces of Gog, aided by Zionists, none other than those inauthentic Jews who are the descendents of ancient intermarriages with impure races. One of the hero's informants claims that the Sephardim are the true Jews while the Ashkenazim are not. "There was great animosity between the real Semitic Jews and the greater part of the Zionists [who] were usurpers of Gentile blood."

In 1948, the year of the creation of Israel, C. F. Parker repeated the view that there were two races of Jews. He considered the Zionists to be almost exclusively Ashkenazim, and therefore "Esau-Edomites". If the Sephardim were pious and apolitical, the Ashekanzic Zionists shamelessly mobilised the financial and political influence of European and American Jewry to support their campaign for a sovereign state. "The newly declared Jewish state of "Israel" is as ersatz and barren as its predecessor, the Herodian-Jewish nation, for it still rejects Jesus Christ ... the Jews have seized the Holy Land from the rightful owners [Israel-Britain]" .

Howard Rand also fulminated against the new state, branding it the work of "renegade Jews" not "true Israelitish Jews". He described these "renegades" as the same imposters who had led the Russian revolution thirty years earlier. In a later article, he identified the Zionists with "a Great Conspiracy" and "programme of evil" whereby the Jews had deceived Christians, so that Jews appeared to be the rightful heirs of the state of Israel. This grand deception, he argued, had extensive ramifications among the Nihilists, the Illuminati, the Fabians and the House of Rothschild.

Christian Identity doctrine progressively removed the Jews totally from the domain of humanity. As we have seen, from the 1930s onwards, movement writings increasingly called into question the religious authenticity and racial homogeneity of the Jews. Even the originally philosemitic English movement limited the Jews to the tribes of Judah, while the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic tribes of Israel assumed the senior partnership in the quest for Jewish conversion and millennial settlement of All-Israel. Then it was suggested that Jews had intermarried with the offspring of Esau to become Edomites. Canaanite and Hittite blood was supposed to have further comprised their racial identity, until their Semitic inheritance was drowned in the Asiatic gene pool of the Khazars.

As Michael Barkun observed, while the Anglo-Saxons claimed for themselves the biblical role of Israel, the Jews claims were progressively delegitimated. First, they needed the protection of the European Christian tribes of Israel; then they lusted after strange peoples to become carriers of tainted and alien blood; finally, they were mere imposters masquerading as the heirs of biblical people and credited with plots and revolutions compatible with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion." (Goodrick-Clarke, 2003:237-38)

References
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas., 2003, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity, New York, New York University Press.