Jews Will Not Replace Us!

Replacement Theory

I never understood why the demonstrators in Charlotte chanted,” Jews will not replace us”. The last thing I would ever want to do is replace these people. I didn’t spend my youth and early 20’s studying as hard as I could to get into college and then graduate school at the Seminary, just so I could replace a neanderthal, bigoted, undeveloped, inferiority driven, loser, Nazi follower.

Trust me I aimed quite a bit higher.

For me at the time the real focus on that event was the comment by Trump that, “there were good people on both sides”. It only confirmed for me that we were in for a rocky ride with this man as President. It is only recently that this issue has resurfaced for me as I have been reading about “Replacement Theory”.

Like Critical Race Theory, ideas exist in our society lurking in the shadows, often in the fringes of society waiting for a time to emerge into the greater population. Like a virus that has been here for a while that only doctors and a segment of the population are even aware of it, it waits for a receptive population and then explodes into the mainstream, and we realize that we are surrounded by a new infection.

Replacement Theory is a white nationalist movement that began in France as Le Grand Replacement. It is a white nationalist conspiracy developed by Renaud Camus, that states that with the help of “replacist elites” the white French population is being demographically and culturally replaced with non-European people specifically Muslim immigrants, as well as a much lower white European birth rate. It is also important to note that they believe that this process is directed by global and liberal elites and describe it as a “genocide by substitution”. They also fear that these outsiders will become a fifth column within the population.

“Great Replacement” is a later development of a larger and older “white genocide” conspiracy theory, popularized in the US by neo-Nazi David Lane where he asserted that governments in Western countries were intending to turn white people into “extinct species”.

To perpetuate his theory, Camus removed the Jewish content and replaced it with Islamophobia to make it more palatable to the French population. He was so successful that one of the leading challengers for the upcoming French presidential election is a Jew, Eric Zemmour, who is a major perpetuator of this theory, and has been called a Jewish Nazi. But do not fear, by the time the theory made it to the United States, Jews were back in the mix, especially since George Soros was now “underwriting “the movement.

The recent state laws on abortion, now being debated in the Supreme Court are not unrelated by some to this very fear. In May 2019, Florida State Senator Dennis Baxley was reported to use the replacement theory in relation to the abortion debate in the United States. Speaking of Western European birthrates as a warning to Americans, he said: “When you get a birth rate less than 2 percent, that society is disappearing, and it’s being replaced by folks that come behind them and immigrate, don’t wish to assimilate into that society and they do believe in having children.”

The following month, Nick Isgro, deputy leader of the Maine Republican Party endorsed the conspiracy theory after claiming financial subsidies were promoted for abortions in the U.S. to “kill our own people”, and that asylum seekers were “human pawns who are being played in a game by global elites and their partners here in Augusta”.

On September 22, 2021, America’s “greatest patriot” Tucker Carlson promoted the conspiracy theory on a segment of his show. When commenting on Biden’s immigration policy, he stated:

“Nothing about it is an accident, obviously. It is intentional. Biden did it on purpose. But why? Why would a president do this to his own country? No sane, first-world nation opens its borders to the world,” Carlson said.
He went on to say, “There’s only one plausible answer … To reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the third world … In political terms, this policy is sometimes called the great replacement — the replacement of legacy Americans, with more obedient people from faraway countries”.

This is not harmless commentary. The gunman who killed 11 people and injured 6 in an attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, believed Jews were deliberately importing non-white immigrants into the United States as part of a conspiracy against the white race.

As I continued to research the replacement theory, I realized the seeds for these ideas go back much farther than I could have imagined.

There is something called Replacement Theology in Christianity. While seemingly having nothing directly to do with the cultural and racist ideas of Replacement Theory, it laid the foundation for a divide between Christians and non-Christians. Its origins go back to the 2nd century of the Common Era if not earlier and it teaches that the church is the replacement for Israel and that the many promises made to Israel in the Bible are fulfilled in the Christian Church, not in Israel. The Jews were the Chosen People, but now the Church has replaced them and is God’s chosen.

This should have led to the disappearance of the Jews and their mere presence is an insult to God’s plans. If you wonder why some Christians have hated Jews, this is a partial explanation.

I mentioned before the fear that exists about foreigners not integrating into the country but remain outsiders. They would be a fifth column meaning a force within the country that would ally itself with an external enemy who in an invasion would be a military threat from within, while a war was being waged with the invader outside. This concept takes the Replacement Theory all the way back to Pharoah in Egypt.

This week’s Torah portion Vayechi, finishes the Genesis cycle and ends with the death of Jacob and Joseph. Meanwhile, the entire Jewish people are living as outsiders in Goshen Egypt so as not to mix in with the population who detest their way of life as shepherds. Next week’s portion, Shemot, introduces us to the oldest record of Replacement Theory.

There is a new Pharoah, “who did not know Joseph”. (As likely as a newly elected president of the US who did not know Abraham Lincoln). The Torah says, “look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise, in the event of war they may join our enemies and fight against us… (Ex 1:9,10). There you have it, as old as time and ripped from the headlines. People have always been suspicious of the “strangers” in their midst, even when they are legal immigrants and even when they are many generations born in the country, but are of a different religion or lifestyle. As Ecclesiastics said, “There is nothing new under the sun” …( Ecclesiastes 1:9).

Why do the seemingly strong and entrenched fear the outsider? Could it be that in their privilege, they are insecure and filled with self-doubt? They are not the generations that built their country and society. They inherited it and unlike their pioneering ancestors they have grown soft even as they have grown comfortable in assuming their rank and privileges.

Why were so many black slaves lynched for allegedly having sexual relations with white women, even when many times the suspicions were false? Was it the insecurity of the lynchers in their own sexual prowess? Was sexual potency just a cover for their internalized fears of lack of total potency?

Were Jews historically attacked and discriminated because their many successes, from survival to disproportionately great accomplishments in so many fields, was a challenge to the fat and soft establishment?

Is the mounting antipathy to immigration in this country the fear of the white Christian population that they will be outworked by hungrier immigrants; outstudied by the children of immigrants; and passed over on the ladder of success by those who earned rewards rather than inherited them?

In this, Jewish history has something to teach those who advocate Replacement Theory to hold onto their privilege. Jews were the consummate outsiders and the consummate overachievers. For this reason, whenever it suited the powers that be, they were exiled from the country. That country inevitably entered a serious decline.

The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. In less than 100 years the Spanish Armada was defeated, and Spain never recovered its former glory.

Growing countries welcomed the Jews and other immigrants who brought their expertise and effort that both raised their standard of life but also helped the country prosper. The key to the US success for much of its history was that it welcomed immigration. If our population continues to produce less than replacement numbers and we limit immigration, especially of the world’s best and brightest, we won’t have to worry about Replacement Theory in our country, because the whole world will in the end replace us.

Much of the data used here can be seen in greater detail and with footnotes in the Wikipedia page on Replacement Theory.

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