Jews don't want to replace you!

We love you just the way you are.

Alt-right members preparing to enter Emancipation Park holding Nazi, Confederate, and libertarian flags at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” Rally in 2017 (photo: Anthony Crider/Wikipedia)

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This is a guest essay written by Ben Koan of the newsletter, “The Thousand-Year View.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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When I first saw footage of white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us!” at a 2017 “Unite the Right” Rally in Charlottesville, Virgina, I admittedly wondered, “How many Jews do they think there are?”

Outside of Israel and a few major cities, Jews barely have the numbers to make a minyan, let alone replace non-Jews through mass migration.

Of course, upon further research, I discovered that the chant was ever so slightly more grounded in reality. Rather than literally seeking to “replace us,” the argument goes, Jews are masterminding a plot to replace Western populations with non-white migrants.

The 2018 mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue was explicitly motivated by this Judeo-Replacist theory. My initial question, then, was: Cui bono?¹ How exactly are Jews supposed to benefit from a demographic “Great Replacement” of the Western world? And more fundamentally, why attribute this supposed anti-white plot to the Elders of Zion in the first place?

First, it should be noted that the term’s inventor, French author Renaud Camus, does not attribute the Great Replacement to the Jews, or even to any organized group. Instead, he blames the implicit ideology of “replacism.” As described by UnHerd editor Mary Harrington in her summary of Camus’ thoughts, replacism results from “a structural blind spot across the Western world concerning the nature and meaning of human culture, predicated on the idea that peoples have no collective attributes, only individual ones.”²

This blind spot, in turn, “produces a universal petit-bourgeoisie devoid of cultural inheritance, willing to accept in principle the notion that peoples are interchangeable, and thus defenceless against demographic change.”

For Camus, although individuals can join a people (and thus peoplehood is not synonymous with race), “peoples who remain peoples cannot join other peoples. They can only conquer them, submerge them, replace them.”

In Harrington’s reading of Camus, the answer to Cui bono? is “a spirit of technicity, motivated in moral terms by a desire to eliminate the political (with its implication of conflict, hierarchy, and exclusion) in favour of a pacific universalism,” represented most strongly by America.

But the “spirit of technicity” is itself a rather technical, depoliticized name for an enemy. Claiming that America embodies technocracy enlivens the narrative, but obviously doesn’t play well in America itself. Nor, as Harrington acknowledges, does a merely anti-American reading account for the ideological vastness of a continental nation that contains multitudes.

Harrington cites Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger in her explication of “replacism.” And while these two thinkers are trenchant critics of modernity, with insights that transcend their politics, it is worth noting that they were both actual Nazis.

Certainly, critiques of replacism and its intellectual antecedents are not intrinsically antisemitic. To claim otherwise would, in a curious way, itself be antisemitic; to tacitly admit to some intrinsic link between Judaism and materialism, deracination, globalism, anomie, and the other bête noires of our modern age.

Camus renders the Charlottesville chant as “You will not replace us!” in the title of a 2018 book. But the readiness of his theory’s adherents to swap in a classic scapegoat reflects anti-modernity’s dance with demonology. How tempting to paint a faceless enemy with an old familiar nose.

An irony of the antisemitic interpretation of replacism is that, if we extend the concept back far and wide enough, Jews were its first victims. Starting in the first millennium CE, Christian supersessionists proclaimed that legacy Jews, or “carnal Israel,” had been replaced in God’s eyes by the “true Israel” of the Church.

Per theological replacism, lineal descent from Abraham and covenantal acceptance of Jewish tradition, as symbolized by circumcision, were unnecessary for spiritual peoplehood.

Instead, baptism functioned as a quick asylum claim to divine election; a way for Gentiles to jump the border without undergoing a rigorous naturalization process. Saint Paul, who declared that, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” was thus an early prophet of the reduction of identity — traditionally defined by ethnicity, class, and sex — to what Camus calls “undifferentiated human matter.”

Of course, ethnic, class, and sexual differences have continued well into the Christian era; but replacism may be the latest heretical attempt to fulfill Paul’s millennial promise without a divine mediator.

Another irony is that antisemites are accusing Jews of importing antisemitic Muslims. But the safest country for Jews in Europe is Hungary³, precisely because Viktor Orbán’s government opposes mass migration. Perhaps Jews are engaged in a vast, self-destructive conspiracy to make Amsterdam unsafe for Israeli soccer fans.

Or, more likely, Jews are subject to the same arguments and ideologies, whether for or against immigration, as everyone else. Some Jews are certainly sympathetic to refugees because Jews themselves descend from exiles. Others, especially after October 7th, are aware that many Muslim migrants would happily drive the Jews into exile again.

Before, during, and even after the Holocaust, the world largely shut its doors to Jewish victims of Nazism. Perhaps the lesson here is that countries should welcome persecuted minorities. Or perhaps the lesson is that persecuted minorities should have countries of their own.

But since most migrants are now seeking economic opportunity, rather than fleeing persecution, neither lesson is very relevant today. Yes, there is a moral case for the West to welcome Yazidi victims of the Islamic State. But 5,000 “Europeans”⁴ actually went to Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State. Was the West morally obligated to have welcomed the persecutors of the Yazidis, too?

In a report on the stabbing of a “carnal French” teenager by Muslim migrants, Christopher Caldwell quotes a TikTok by one Karim N.:

“Personally, I like this country. You need a doctor? Free. You need a dentist? Free. I like France. It’s the French I don’t like. It’s the racist French I don’t like. Kind of the way I like the Jews but don’t like the Zionists.”⁵

Here is replacism not as grand conspiracy or theory of modernity, yet as vulgar attitude of the would-be replacements: Keep the French social safety net, but get rid of the French. For the Karim’s of l'état islamique de France, anti-Zionism functions as de facto antisemitism, while anti-racism justifies anti-French racism.

Yet in fairness, not all immigrants are Karim’s. Notably, in the United States, nearly half of Latinos — who are largely immigrants or descendants of recent immigrants — voted for a presidential candidate who promised border security and mass deportations.

Ironically, believers in the Great Replacement Theory themselves take a replacist attitude toward migrants. Catholic Mexicans seeking integration in America are not interchangeable with Muslim Algerians seeking the Islamification of France. If the goal of replacism was to diversify America’s nativists, then it seems to have succeeded.

Mass migration results from a worldview that denies the validity of group differences. If you take in a significant population of Somalis, you may also import the problems that caused them to leave Somalia in the first place. That this banal observation is controversial supports the theory of replacism as implicit ideology.

But if replacism reflects a flawed understanding of peoples, so too does group essentialism reflect a flawed understanding of individuals. Not all migrants wish to re-create their homelands abroad with better social services. In the case of Somalis, consider the fiercely pro-Western Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian-born Dutch-American writer, activist, former politician, and ex-Muslim.

And “Jews will not replace us!” reduces an ideologically diverse population — from George Soros to Stephen Miller — into a singular, hydra-headed bogeyman. The damage caused by such essentialist thinking contributed in no small measure to the rise of its replacist opposite.

Can’t we simultaneously acknowledge differences between groups and differences between individuals within groups? Can’t we integrate carefully selected people instead of carelessly accepting hostile peoples?

If so, then a sensible immigration policy, one that bypasses the Scylla of demographic denialism and the Charybdis of conspiratorial hysteria, may yet be possible.

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1. Latin for “Who stands to gain?”

2. “Are We Replaceable? Part One.” Mary Harrington.

3. “Why Hungary’s Jews Are the Safest in Europe.” The American Conservative.

4. “Factbox: Europeans who joined Islamic State.” Reuters.

5. “How a Stabbing Changed France.” Compact.