Posted by: John Phoenix
knowingly or unknowingly, Brother Nathanael Kapner appears to be echoing the ideas proposed by Wilhelm Marr in the nineteenth century.
Brother Nathanael Kapner is someone I regard as a fellow fighter and brother in the cultural war. However, he has recently been making statements that I find deeply problematic for several reasons. It genuinely pains me to voice this disagreement publicly, but I believe it’s necessary. The ideas he’s promoting are not only familiar but also come with serious moral, theological, historical, and philosophical issues. In his podcast called “Episode 46: How Jews Think And Act,” Kapner declared:
“The problem with the Jews is not primarily religious. It’s not primarily cultural: it’s physical, it’s the blood, it’s the Jewish race which covers and intertwined with the religion and then a culture comes forth.”
Whether Brother Kapner realizes it or not, his statements align with the classic definition of real anti-Semitism. In fact, knowingly or unknowingly, he appears to be echoing the ideas proposed by Wilhelm Marr in the nineteenth century. Providing some historical context here might help clarify this connection and explain the roots and implications of such views.
Wilhelm Marr (1819–1904) published his well-known tract The Victory of Jewry over the Germans: Viewed from a Non-Religious Point of View in 1879, asserting that Germans and Jews were engaged in a relentless struggle due to inherent racial differences. Marr’s arguments marked a departure from traditional way of the Jewish question, framing the tension as an unbridgeable racial conflict.
Marr’s life was quite interesting because three of his first four wives were Jewish women, and
“to the end of his days he spoke tenderly of his love for his second wife, who died tragically in childbirth. He had intimate Jewish friends, business partners, and political allies; in the 1840s he was closely associated with a number of Jewish radicals and was attacked for his supposed philo-Semitism. He was a lifelong admirer of the Jewish artists and writers Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Boerne. In the final decade of his life, in the 1890s, he broke with the anti-Semitic movement of the day, describing the anti-Semites as worse than the Jews and requesting pardon of the Jews for what he had earlier written. He declared that it was in reality problems of industrialization and modernization that had provoked him, not the Jews as such.”[1]
Whether Wilhelm Marr was fully sincere when he penned The Victory of Jewry over the Germans or during his later repentance is difficult to ascertain. However, one thing is clear: Marr did express regret for his earlier work toward the end of his life. This important detail is often overlooked in discussions of his legacy. For example, in an article on Marr’s tract, Kevin MacDonald omits mention of Marr’s eventual apology.[2] Given MacDonald’s familiarity with Albert S. Lindemann’s Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews, where Marr’s change of heart is documented, this omission seems deliberate. Ignoring Marr’s later remorse paints an incomplete picture of his life and suggests that his views remained unchanged, which can distort interpretations of his influence.
Marr’s cardinal error was not a lack of observational skill or literary ability. In fact, his observations about the Jewish community were, in some respects, accurate—particularly his claim that Jews often distanced themselves from manual labor and engaged in exploitative economic practices. Albert S. Lindemann, in Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews, notes that Marr’s depiction of Jews as “exploiters” of the labor of others was grounded in a perception of Jews as involved in trade and finance, which were, in his view, disconnected from physical labor.[3] This is not a stereotype; Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed the same thing in Russia.[4]
But Marr, as an atheist, deliberately ignored the theological causes behind the Jewish question and instead focused solely on race as the basis for his ideology. This approach is akin to examining Muslims or Christians without seriously considering their religions or what their founders actually taught and practiced—a task that is both implausible and dubious. Many modern observers, like David Duke and Kevin MacDonald, make similar mistakes, largely because they are intellectually constrained by the Darwinian ideology, which is riddled with inherent contradictions and philosophically dubious premises. This issue is explored in my book Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure.
What we are addressing here is the fallacy that, with the rise of both Darwinism and Marr’s famous tract, the West has come to believe that Jewish behavior is somehow encoded in bad DNA. If someone like Nicholas Donin possessed “wicked DNA,” how did he overcome it? If not, how can we even judge good versus bad DNA? What criteria do we use to distinguish between the two? Do we now assess good or bad DNA based on people’s actions? And, more specifically, how would we categorize people like Gilad Atzmon, Mortimer Adler, and Norman Finkelstein—do they have “good” DNA or “bad” DNA?
To be blunt, how did Brother Nathanael Kapner rid himself of his “Jewish blood” or “wicked DNA”? Did he go to a doctor and undergo some kind of surgery? Does he now have “white blood” in his veins, since he is now advocating for “white identity”? If so, who was the donor? David Duke? Kevin MacDonald? Nick Fuentes? Richard Spencer? Jared Taylor?
In all seriousness, the genetic theorists have never made any serious attempt to answer these questions. As I argue in Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure, this is because those people are building their ideology on a philosophically irrational and morally repugnant foundation. That ideology has been masquerading under the guise of “science,” but the so-called science behind it has been weighed and found wanting
In any event, the fact that some have shifted the nature of the debate—from the rejection of Logos to the concept of Jewish DNA—does not mean that the fundamental issue has been completely vanquished. The Jewish people, like Christians or Muslims, possess a book that categorically and metaphysically attacks, deliberately denies, and even blasphemes Christ, whom Christians have recognized for centuries as the metaphysical sustainer of the universe. This has been the central message of Christianity since its inception, and Brother Nathanael Kapner is well aware of this. The issue of genetics didn’t emerge until the nineteenth century, and figures like Kevin MacDonald, David Duke, and now Brother Nathanael Kapner, have adopted it. However, this approach is metaphysically flawed, a point I address in my recent book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure.
Accepting or rejecting Logos, or practical reason, is a matter of the will, not of DNA. If it were a matter of DNA, Brother Nathanael Kapner could not have become a Christian and rejected the ideology of the Talmud, precisely because such an issue would be ingrained in his blood. Genetic traits are automatic; they happen without conscious choice. There is no way to escape that reality. The fact that Brother Nathanael is now proclaiming a different message suggests that he exercised his free will to reject Talmudic ideology. This supports the idea that everyone possesses free will, a concept that the Darwinian ideology denies or dismisses.
Moreover, if the Jewish problem is truly in the blood, why are people like Brother Nathanael Kapner upset? After all, if it’s in the blood, then Jews can’t do a damn thing about it. We all know that an action is considered free only if the person performing it could have acted otherwise. If someone couldn’t have acted differently, or if they were bound to act in a certain way due to their genetic makeup, then moral responsibility and accountability are called into question. Or, as philosopher Peter van Inwagen puts it, “A person is morally responsible for failing to perform a given act only if he could have performed that act.”[5]
As a corollary, “A person is morally responsible for a certain event-particular only if he could have prevented it.”[6] The very fact that some readers will disagree with this fundamental point only strengthens it. For those who object, were they determined to disagree with the idea of free will? Or did they do so out of their own free will—an idea that has never been disproven by science?[7] If they were determined, then why should we pay attention to anything they have to say?
In short, those who set out to deconstruct the nature of free will ultimately end up copying it in a perverse way. Philosopher John Searle himself has stated that even if a person is convinced that free will is an illusion, he or she must still act on the presupposition of free will. Searle writes in Rationality in Action:
“In order to engage in rational decision making we have to presuppose free will…We have to presuppose free will in any rational activity whatever. We cannot avoid the presupposition. Because even a refusal to engage in rational decision making is only intelligible to us as a refusal if we take it as an exercise of freedom. To see this, consider an example. Suppose you go into a restaurant, and the waiter brings you the menu. You have a choice between, let’s say, veal chops and spaghetti; you cannot say, ‘Look, I’m a determinist, che sara, sara. I will just wait and see what I order! I will wait to see what my beliefs and desires cause.’ This refusal to exercise your freedom is itself only intelligible to you as an exercise of freedom.”[8]
Searle adds that “Kant pointed this out a long time ago: There is no way to think away your own freedom in the process of voluntary action because the process of deliberation itself can only proceed on the presupposition of freedom, on the presupposition that there is a gap between the causes in the form of your beliefs, desires, and other reasons, and the actual decision that you make.”[9] In fact, Kant would have called this an inescapable postulate of practical reason, which he says is “the fulfillment of the moral law.”[10]
For Kant, practical reason and will are generally interchangeable.[11] Kant also shows that if a maxim happens to be internally or inherently contradictory, then it cannot be intellectually viable.[12]
In short, ever since the publication of Marr’s tract, the West has fallen into the fallacy that Jewish behavior is based on some kind of bad DNA. This presents a significant problem for the Church, which has never fallen into this trap throughout history. Moreover, when a Jew becomes a Christian, he is often banned by the state of Israel and sometimes persecuted (even if his family perished in Nazi Germany, as in the case of Oswald Rufeisen). This clearly indicates that something other than DNA is at work here. The story of Oswald Rufeisen is a classic example that clearly creates problems for both Israel and the genetic theorists.
In 1962, Rufeisen, also known as “Brother Daniel,” petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice to be recognized as Jewish by nationality. Born to a Jewish family in Poland in 1922, Rufeisen was active in the Zionist youth movement as a teenager and later fought as a partisan, saving many Jewish lives during the Nazi occupation. While hiding in a monastery, he converted to Christianity and, after the war, studied for the priesthood, eventually becoming a Carmelite monk. In 1958, he traveled to Israel, seeking to join the Jewish destiny he still embraced as a Zionist. Rufeisen applied for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, asserting that while he was a Catholic by faith, his Jewish nationality persisted. When the Ministry of the Interior denied his application, Rufeisen appealed to the High Court, which, by a four-to-one decision, upheld the rejection. Despite this, he was issued an Israeli identity card with his nationality listed ambiguously as “Not clear.”[13]
Israeli historian Shlomo Sand of Tel Aviv University, who offers serious historical insights into the nearly two-thousand-year-old conflict (though I would disagree with him on some issues), comments: “Ultimately, Brother Daniel’s betrayal of Judaism by joining the religion of the Nazarene overcame the deterministic biological imaginary. It was categorically decided that there was no Jewish nationality without its religious shell. Ethnocentric Zionism needed the Halakhic precepts as its principal criteria, and the secular judges understood this national-historical necessity very well.”[14]
But that is not the end of the story:
“In 1968 Major Binyamin Shalit petitioned the High Court of Justice to order the minister of the interior to register his two sons as Jews. Unlike Brother Daniel, the mother of these boys was not a born Jew but a Scottish gentile. Shalit, a well-regarded officer in Israel’s victorious army, argued that his sons were growing up as Jews and wished to be considered full citizens in the state of the Jewish people. By what seemed a miracle, five of the nine judges who heard the petition decided that the boys were Jewish by nationality, if not by religion. But this exceptional decision shook the entire political structure.”[15]
I have addressed this entire issue in a chapter of the book Zionism vs. The West: How Talmudic Ideology Is Undermining Western Culture. Since Brother Nathanael Kapner is an Orthodox Christian, we would challenge him to support his thesis with references from the entire history of the early Church. The only way Kapner could have adopted the ideology about Jewish DNA that he is perpetuating is by implicitly smuggling in either the Darwinian ideology or, more troublingly, the Talmudic ideology that rabbis have perpetuated for centuries. As the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson postulated in 1965.
“The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person stems from the common expression: ‘Let us differentiate.’ Thus, we do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather, we have a case of ‘let us differentiate’ between totally different species. This is what needs to be said about the body: the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world…
“The Jewish body ‘looks as if it were in substance similar to bodies of non-Jews,’ but the meaning…is that the bodies only seem to be similar in material substance, outward look and superficial quality. The difference of the inner quality, however, is so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews] ‘and their bodies are in vain…’
“An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness…The body of a Jewish embryo is on a higher level than is the body of a non-Jew…We therefore ask: Why should a non-Jew be punished if he kills even a non-Jewish embryo while a Jew should not be punished even if he kills a Jewish embryo?
“The answer can be understood by [considering] the general difference between Jews and non-Jews: A Jew was not created as a means for some [other] purpose; he himself is the purpose, since the substance of all [divine] emanations was created only to serve the Jews. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” means that [the heavens and the earth] were created for the sake of the Jews, who are called the ‘beginning.’ This means everything, all developments, all discoveries, the creation, including the heavens and the earth—are vanity compared to the Jews. The important things are the Jews, because they do not exist for any [other] aim; they themselves are [the divine] aim.”[16]
The central question for people like Kapner is simple: Is Schneerson correct in postulating this? Clearly, Kapner would have to answer no. If the answer is no, the next question inevitably arises: Why is Schneerson wrong if his DNA tells him that he and his brethren are special and unique? Furthermore, if Schneerson is wrong, how can Kapner prove it? Can this be demonstrated scientifically, morally, or theologically?
If the answer is DNA, and as Kapner suggests, “physical,” then the only way to solve the problem, logically, would be to eliminate the individual. There is no way around this conclusion. Whether Kapner acknowledges it or not, this idea does not stem from the Christian message but from figures like David Duke, Kevin MacDonald, and historically from Wilhelm Marr, combined with elements of Darwinism. We would challenge Brother Nathanael Kapner to reconsider his views on these issues and thoughtfully examine their implications.
We will be waiting to see if he can address the inherent contradictions we have highlighted here. So far, no one, including David Duke or Kevin MacDonald, has been able to respond to these issues. In fact, when the late Jewish TV host Alan Colmes of Fox News raised similar questions with David Duke in an interview, things got interesting. When Colmes asked Duke his thoughts on Christ, who was, of course, of Jewish origin, Duke surprisingly responded:
“Certainly [Christ] spoke a doctrine that was diametrically opposed to what Judaism was and is…The Talmud is the core of Judaism. It is an extremely racist and ethnocentric religion.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at this point—it was almost too good to be true. Duke abruptly dropped Darwin and invoked the moral law, stating that Christ “spoke a doctrine diametrically opposed to what Judaism was and is.” Wait a minute—if behavior is genetic, how did Christ suddenly articulate a doctrine opposing Judaism? Was that doctrine somehow ingrained in His DNA as well?
The sad irony is that Duke couldn’t see he was undermining his own argument by saying this. It highlights the incoherence of these viewpoints and the intellectual dishonesty required to sidestep such obvious contradictions. When I raised these issues, Duke predictably responded on his show, dismissing my points by saying, “Well, Jonas Alexis is Black, and that’s his way of affirming himself!”
Regarding the question I raised earlier about how someone can supposedly rid themselves of “wicked DNA,” Kapner has provided some hints on how he claims to have achieved this: “I am part of the remnant [of those who have been faithful to God’s covenant]. I was brought up as a Jew who came to God’s new covenant—I’ll always be a racial Jew—and received holy baptism which washed away all the contrariness that the Jews inherit.”
So, did baptism wash away the “bad DNA”? I’d be interested to hear Kevin MacDonald’s answer to that question. It’s fascinating—and ironic—that Brother Kapner doesn’t seem to realize his arguments are firmly planted in midair.
It’s particularly interesting to note that, within just about twenty-one minutes of his episode, Brother Kapner starts contradicting himself by saying things like, “If your mother was a Jew, but your father was not, I don’t think you have the deicidal curse.” Really? What about Lenin? How would Brother Kapner categorize him? Lenin’s mother was Jewish,[17] yet he was responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people. Wasn’t the Leninist ideology deeply satanic or diabolical? It becomes even more ironic that just a few minutes later, Brother Kapner brings up Sonia Sotomayor, whose mother was Jewish, in a disparaging tone—as if she, too, has inherited the “deicidal curse”! In the same episode, Brother Kapner declares that “there is no such thing as a good Jew; it’s an oxymoron.” Which is it, Brother Kapner?
If Brother Nathanael Kapner believes he has a rational and moral solution to reconcile these critical contradictions, we would certainly welcome the opportunity for him to address these issues. However, we wouldn’t be surprised if he finds himself unable to approach them logically, given that proponents of such views have consistently demonstrated an inability to escape the ideological matrix they’ve constructed—a framework that both philosophically and intellectually traps them, along with their fervent followers, in a kind of moral confinement.
To sum up, genetic theorists do not base their views on what Kant would call practical reason, but on an ideology that consistently traps them both philosophically and morally. Once they realize that their views fail on a metaphysical level, they often attempt to find an escape by appealing to moral law and order. Augustine made a similar point in his Confessions: Those who set themselves against Logos inevitably end up mimicking it in a perverse way.
First published on November 10, 2024.
[1] Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
[2] Kevin MacDonald, “Wilhelm Marr’s ‘The Victory of Judaism over Germanism: Viewed from a Nonreligious Point of View,’” The Occidental Observer, October 10, 2010.
[3] Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 128.
[4] See E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008).
[5] Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 165.
[6] Ibid., 167.
[7] See for example Alfred R. Mele, Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[8] John R. Searle, Rationality in Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001 and 2003), 13-14.
[9] Ibid., 14.
[10] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason (New York: Hackett Publishing, 2002), 122.
[11] For further studies on this, see Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
[12] See Paul Guyer, Kant (New York: Routledge, 2006 and 2014).
[13] Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (New York: Verso, 2009), 288-289.
[14] Ibid., 289.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Quoted in Israel Shahak and Norton Mevzinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (New York: Pluto Press, 2004), 59-60.
[17] Victor Sebestyen, “Lenin’s Jewish roots,” The Jewish Chronicle, November 2, 2017.