Maryashe Antin, better known by the anglicized version of her name Mary Antin, was a turn of the twentieth century immigration reformer in the United States. That she isn’t some obscure figure can be seen from the fact that she was associated with the prominent Lazarus family (a-la the famous Emma Lazarus), (1) was friends with the prominent Zionist writer Israel Zangwill, (2) that she had numerous speaking engagements around the United States (3) as well as that her autobiography ‘The Promised Land’ sold a whopping 85,000 copies. (4)
Antin is interesting precisely because she is a prototype of the common modern jewish belief that jews should have their own country. While non-jewish countries should have open borders and allow anyone to immigrate who wants to come in.
We can see this when we read Antin’s three books ‘From Plotzk to Boston’ (1899), ‘The Promised Land’ (1912) (5) and ‘They Who Knock at Our Gates’ (1914). (6)
In ‘From Plotzk to Boston’ we are told that immigrants are ‘lured’ by the promise of freedom to the United States. This finds further expression in ‘The Promised Land’ in Antin's assertion that immigrants, and jews in particular, are coming to America with ‘high ideals’ in regards to religious and personal liberty.
The concept of liberty was central Antin’s argument, such as it is, with her avowal that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution advocate unlimited immigration and that any restrictions in regard to immigration are therefore unconstitutional. Naturally Antin claims there would be some small limitations, but typically doesn’t explain what these actually are or how they should be implemented.
This type of unreasoned emotional argument is typical of Antin. Since for example she also declares that we should have the ‘loftiest interpretation of the constitution’, but doesn’t explain why her interpretation of the constitution is correct or why she would assign such moral and intellectual value to said interpretation.
Another example is the fact that she rather prosaically refers, in her ‘They Who Knock at Our Gates’, to opponents of unlimited immigration into the United States as selfish beings looking to scapegoat immigrants for America's domestic problems. In addition to this Antin claims in the same work that it is part of America’s duty to ‘spread the gospel of liberty around the world’, while claiming that the victory of the Union forces in the American civil war has ‘washed away’ any objection to the ‘brotherhood of man’ (a-la modern neo-Conservatism).
Antin also asserts that (White) Americans are simply ‘squatters’ on Indian land who arose from a ‘mixed racial stock' in Europe and therefore there is no racial purity or single origin of the people of Europe. She necessarily implies in the course of her arguments that everyone is the same and as such the ‘gospel of liberty’ applies to all no matter what their racial origin or religion.
This universal egalitarianism must however be contrasted to Antin’s constant nationalistic references to have own people: the jews. In her work ‘The Promised Land’ she presents the jewish people as being the doctors, teachers and lawyers of the America of the future.
Indeed in ‘They Who Knock at Our Gates’ she makes the oft-repeated but completely fatuous assertion that the idea of the ‘dignity of man’ derives from the thought of jews (when actually it comes from the Greeks and Europeans more broadly). In addition to the idea, suggested in her ‘The Promised Land’, that only jews give ‘true judgement’ in courts of law and Christians never do (specifically Russians in this case, but her implication is necessarily wider).
Antin is here propounding the sort of Judeocentric world view encapsulated by historical figures like Josephus or Philo. In which view everything positive in the world derives from a jewish source or prototype, while everything bad derives from a non-jewish source or prototype.
This can be seen when in ‘They Who Knock at Our Gates’ Antin lauds the bloodthirsty jewish religious fanatic Simon bar Kochba – who incidentally desired to murder non-jews wholesale – as being a representative of the ‘jewish spirit of liberty’.
In a similar vein in said work Antin asserts that jewish involvement in the equally bloodthirsty 1905 revolt against the Russian government is a demonstration of the devotion of the jews to the concept of liberty.
That both of the examples Antin uses involve jews ordering or carrying out the murder of non-jews hardly augurs well for the integrity of her claims to be opposed to nationalism and racial chauvinism.
After all you can’t very well say that nation and racial requirements should be abolished and that what motivates people is the spirit of liberty, but then turn around claim that the people you want to let in are superior in every way to everyone else and use examples where they order or carry out the murder of the 'lesser beings' as proof of such.
Well you can, but it suggests that Antin’s advocacy of liberty is done not out of belief in it per se, but rather as a means to 'rescue' her fellow jews from repression caused by ‘medieval superstition’ in the Russian Empire.
Antin also happens to mention the famous ‘six million jews suffering’ claim in her work ‘They Who Knock at Our Gates’ when she refers the ‘continual bloodless martyrdom of the six million jews in Russia’. In other words Antin is here referring to another Shoah type event using the famous ‘six million’ figure, which would later be recycled to become the totemic casualty figure thirty years later in the so-called Nazi ‘Holocaust’.
This reference to the ‘six million’ adds further evidence of Antin’s jewish nationalism given that the figure was frequently brought up jewish nationalists and Zionists in relation to Russia at the time. (7) It was less of an issue, although still a significant one, to traditionally religious and assimilationist jews who contented themselves with trying to influence American foreign policy against the Russian Empire with some success.
To give some perspective; the figure as a Russian population statistic began to be widely used from the 1880s in regard to jews. However as I have argued elsewhere; its origins lie forty years early during the 1840 ritual murder trial in Damascus. (8)
All this gives us a picture of Antin not as an advocate of what we would now call a one world globalist philosophy, but rather as a partisan jewish nationalist bent on making American immigration laws as lax as possible in order to benefit her fellow jews.
In addition to her stated belief in the superiority of the jewish people over all other peoples, and specifically those of European origin, with the necessary result being jewish domination over the United States and its acquisition as a jewish homeland-cum-nirvana of sorts.
Doesn’t it all sound remarkably familiar like the ideas of neo-Conservatives and liberals in America today?
Both these groups expound the belief in the eminent superiority and ingenuity of the nation of Israel as well as the jewish people more broadly, but then claim that America and Europe have no indigenous inhabitants and are proposition/idea-based nations.
And what is the common point of convergence between someone like Antin and today’s neo-Conservatives and liberal intellectuals?
They are disproportionately of jewish origin.
What a strange coincidence!
References
(1) http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/antin-mary
(2) Cf. Mary Antin, 1899, ‘From Plotzk to Boston’, 2nd Edition, W. B. Clarke: Boston, p. 9
(3) http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/antin-mary
(4) Ibid.
(5) Mary Antin, 1912, ‘The Promised Land’, 1st Edition, Houghton Mifflin: Boston
(6) Mary Antin, 1914, ‘They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration’, 1st Edition, Houghton Mifflin: Boston
(7) Cf. Don Heddesheimer, 2003, 'The First Holocaust: Jewish Fund Raising Campaigns with Holocaust Claims During and After World War One', 1st Edition, Theses & Dissertations Press: Chicago
(8) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-origin-of-the-6-million-jews