Fatal Gift, Jewish Intelligente and Western Civilization is the third and final volume of Seymour Itzkoffs highly praised series, Who Are the Jews?
The theme of this book involves the Holocaust, perhaps the most searing event in the history of the Jews. Itzkoffs main concern is to understand and explain this event in the context of Jewish history and the unfolding meaning of the Western Civilizational experience.
Itzkoff views the rationale for the destruction of the European Jews as arising from the anti-Semitic hatred of burgeoning Jewish intelligente and achievements in the West, this amidst the pseudo-egalitarianism that was invested in the ideological demonization of achievement in the social dynamics of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Holocaust was enabled because the Jews had become a vulnerable minority in Europe, attempting to assimilate, but carrying with them their unalterable heritage of religious and ethnic uniqueness. This they could not shed.
ltzkoff traces this atypical intellectual endowment of the Jews to their Biblical and Talmudic disciplines, ultimately to their vulnerability and self-protection, and to the hope for political toleration by their governing masters.
Itzkoff argues that Ashkenazic Judaism, by its classless cultivation of a universal internal, if impoverished intellectual elite, mirrors the best of the Western Civilizational heritage. The Ashkenazim never placed their own people under the yoke of the feudal oppression of serfdom and slavery, as did their daughter religions, Christianity and Islam.
As such, the Ashkenazim became the inheritors of the great Western and Eur-Asian achievements of the ancient Cro-Magnon Upper Paleolithic peoples. Also, consider the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, who gave us literacy and urbanism, the Hellenes, who perhaps inspired the highest intellectual and creative civilization in human history.
Fatal Gift is a plea to understand the place of the Jews in modern Western Civilization, to treasure the EurAsian intellectual and creative gifts which the Jews protected and cultivated, and for which they were sacrificed by a modern ideological barbarism.
