A decade ago, I saw someone who goes by the moniker Incogman - who now runs a little white nationalist blogging site - (1) post a 'quotation' from Professor Goldwin Smith formerly of University College, Oxford that he suggested had come from 1981 and he further asserted that Goldwin Smith was a 'Jewish Professor'.
I've done some digging into this claim on the odd occasions over the last couple of years and I think it is about time it was formally dissected and thrown on the proverbial garbage pile of history.
Incogman's alleged quotation from Goldwin Smith and his own comments are as follows:
'“We Jews regard our race as superior to all humanity, and look forward, not to its ultimate union with other races, but to its triumph over them.”
— Goldwin Smith, Jewish Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, October, 1981' (2)
This is mis transcribed version of the same quotation in 1982 by Colonel Gordon Mohr who was at this time a prolific Christian Identity pamphleteer and essayist. To quote Mohr:
'Listen to the Jew, Goldwin Smith, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, October 1881, “We regard our race as superior to humanity, and look forward not to its ultimate union with other races, but its triumph over them.”' (3)
As I said there are several errors of transcription when compared to Mohr's version: namely the addition of 'Jews' at the start, the addition of 'all' before the word 'humanity', a 'to' before 'its triumph' in addition to an extra comma. Possibly the worst error of transcription however is the change of the historically plausible 1881 to 1981, which suggests that where-ever Incogman is getting his version of the quote it has either been the victim of an uncorrected typo or the source (or Incog) has changed the date to make the quote more 'relevant' by bringing it forward a century or so.
Now as afore-stated there are numerous issues with this quotation not least is the fact that Goldwin Smith wasn't jewish but was in fact one of the most important Anglophone critics of jews of the nineteenth century. In actual fact the 'quotation' is an apparently maliciously altered passage from an article entitled 'The Jewish Question' in 'The Nineteenth Century' in 1881 in which Smith was defending the recent Russian actions (including the famous pogroms) against their jewish population.
The actual quote is:
'The Jew alone regards his race as superior to humanity, and looks forward not to its ultimate union with other races, but to its triumph over them all and to its final ascendancy under the leadership of a tribal Messiah.' (4)
An academic liberal and an opponent of slavery Smith may have been, but jewish he was not (he was actually English). (5) Smith further not only not a jew, but a prolific opponent of jews who famously called jews 'parasites' and openly defended the pogroms of the Russian and Ukrainian peasantry against the jews while also using official Russian documentation to brutally demolish jewish claims - most notably those of Lucien Wolf - of a 'Holocaust' and 'conspiratorial genocide' enacted against the jews of Eastern Europe by the Imperial Russian authorities. (6)
I would add that not only has history vindicated Smith's arguments (rather than those of his opponents) but has rather done him an injustice in claiming that the jewish intellectual response to the pogroms was somehow justified despite it being wrong and quite frankly libellous. (7)
In responding to a female critic of his position on the jews and the pogroms in Imperial Russia Smith wrote:
'My Dear Mrs. Winkworth,
I thank you very heartily for the kind feeling which prompted your letter. But what is the object to save my reputation for religious tolerance, or to do good to the Jews and help the solution of the Jewish question?
I am content that my reputation for religious tolerance should take care of itself. I have stated my principles in the Nineteenth Century with all the breadth and clearness that I can command. If your friends do not believe the statement to be sincere, I cannot help it. Probably they are strong Agnostics, who would fix the imputation of bigotry on me what-ever I might say.
I do not think that any good can be done by joining in what has now become an attack on the Russian Government. That Government has a desperate problem on its hands, and is apparently trying to solve it in the only way which, if the Jews persist in their attitude and habits, can be effectual by the separation of the races. I see no other mode of escape from these hideous conflicts. Set on foot a movement to give the Jews back their own country, and I will take part in it with all my heart.
Yours most truly,
(Signed) Goldwin Smith,' (8)
Smith's intellectual war against all things jewish (9) reminds me an awful lot of Dr. Thomas Arnold's - who occupied Smith's chair of Regis Professor of Modern History two generations before - when he wrote on the pernicious nature of jews and Judaism (as well as that the jews could simply not be forgiven for all they had done to the gentiles). (10)
Indeed Smith's intellectual war against the jews was absolutely lethal for jewish interests in Canada as he spread the relatively new German anti-jewish intellectual fashion of anti-Semitism - as opposed to mere opposition to Judaism - to the English-speaking world to the extent that he comes in for a highly prejudiced attack in the Canadian Encyclopedia's article on anti-Semitism, which I quote:
'A major exponent of anti-Semitism in the 19th century was the prominent writer and critic Goldwin Smith. A pathological anti-Semite, Smith disseminated his hatred in dozens of books, articles and letters. Jews, he charged, were "parasites," "dangerous" to their host country and "enemies of civilization." His bilious anti-Jewish tirades helped set the tone of a still unmoulded Canadian society and had a profound impact on such young Canadians as W.L. Mackenzie King, Henri Bourassa and scores of others. Indeed in 1905 in the most vituperative anti-Jewish speech in the history of the House of Commons, borrowing heavily from Smith, Bourassa urged Canada to keep its gates shut to Jewish immigrants.' (11)
It is hardly decent after all to call one of the greatest anti-jewish critics of the nineteenth century a 'jewish professor' now is it?
References
(1) http://incogman.net/
(2) http://incogman.net/revealing-quotes-2/ (2nd quote down)
(3) Gordon Mohr, 1982, 'The Satanic Counterfeit', 1st Edition, CPA: Boring, p. 63
(4) Goldwin Smith, 1881, 'The Jewish Question', The Nineteenth Century, October, Vol. 140, p. 1114
(5) Isaac Besht Ben David, 1891, 'Goldwin Smith and the Jews', North American Review, Vol. 418, p. 257
(6) Ibid, pp. 259-260
(7) On this see John Doyle Klier, Shlomo Lambroza (Eds.), 1992, 'Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York; John Doyle Klier, 2011, 'Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-1882', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York.
(8) Arnold Haultain (Ed.), n.d. (1910-1911), 'A Selection from Goldwin Smith's Correspondence', 1st Edition, Werner Laurie: London, pp. 73-74
(9) Another example unrelated to the pogroms is: Goldwin Smith, 1881, 'The Great Duel of the Seventeenth Century', p. 43 in Goldwin Smith, 1881, 'Lectures and Essays', 1st Edition, MacMillan: New York
(10) Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, 1898, [1868], 'The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D.', 1st Edition, Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, p. 273
(11) http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/antisemitism