Tucker’s controversial claim divides Mizrahi Jews as legitimate to Israel while dismissing Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews—many with European ancestry—as outsiders, echoing Herzl’s 1895 diary fantasy of Jewish mass conversion to Catholicism. Herzl’s Fantasie Echo Vienna reveals assimilationist impulses clashing with his later nationalist push for a separate Jewish state, exposing Zionism’s paradoxical roots in both rejection and belonging. This tension underscores how racial and cultural identity debates shaped Israel’s founding narrative. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm sure Benjamin Yatna Netanyahu has a lot of Aryan DNA.
And I am almost positive that he has a lot of Semitic DNA that if you look on a 23andMe chart would like place him in that area.
Well, is it Israel for Mizrahi Jews only?
Yeah, you could make that argument according to Tucker's logic, which is the only Jews who have a right are the ones that have just been there forever.
And they're the ones that are actually like indistinguishable from Palestinians and Arabs.
But it's basically the Ashkenazi Jews and the Sephardic Jews that are the straw that stirs the drink.
They've got some Aryan DNA.
A lot of them seem to have like 100% Aryan DNA.
Blonde hair and blue eyes.
You could find plenty of Jews like that.
The very least, they look very white and they sort of are white.
And they want to do stuff like Zionism, which is many things, but in the original or a base conception, a basic conception by Herzl is like part of the nationalist wave of the 19th century leading into the 20th century.
Every population should have a homeland.
We Jews, I wish we could assimilate, but we just can't.
And it's become embarrassing.
We've become a joke.
We're ghettoized.
We hate our neighbors.
We're weird, etc.
So we need our own homeland where we can ironically become more Aryan.
Like we're not going to be bankers or playwrights like Herzl.
We're going to be farmers.
We're going to be badass.
This is the kind of contradictory impulse within Zionism.
And it is admirable in many ways.
It's understandable at the very least.
I mean, I think I mentioned this, this Carl Shorsky, Shorsky, I believe.
Yeah.
I haven't read this book in a while.
I should revisit it.
But he has a book on Fantasie Echo Vienna.
Yeah.
And he has a number of different chapters.
It's kind of an elliptical book.
And he talked about this diary entry from Herzl that he listened to, I forgot which one, which opera it was.
It might have been like, I think he might have listened to Tannhuizer.
Yeah, it's Tannhuizer by Wagner.
And he had an image of this march of Jews through Vienna, and they would go to Stefan's Dome, and they would all do a mass conversion to Catholicism.
And it would just basically be like, we give up.
Like, we're no longer Jews.
We are fully assimilated here.
We're just giving over an identity to embrace this Christian, Catholic, Germanic, European identity.
And that was one, again, this is an unpublished thing, but it's a kind of fantasy of Jews of just total assimilation that even Herzl would flirt with.
And he obviously, you know, in his explicit work, went in a totally different direction, the opposite direction.
Almost See Us Give Up00:00:24
But you can almost like see that of, you know, like an internet atheist who writes in his journal, like, I just want to, ah, this is too hard.
I just want to give it up and just be like, Christ, take me.
I get it.
It's very human.
Anyway, these are the contradictory emotional and intellectual currents at the heart of Zionism.