8
The Demonization of the Jews, 2

Children of Cain

The most distinctive doctrine associated with Christian Identity is the belief that Jews are the direct biological offspring of the Devil. This belief is the final extension of a process of dele-gitimation described in the preceding chapter, according to which Jews became progressively more racially contaminated through marriages with forbidden heathen peoples. This view, saturated though it was with anti-Semitism, accepted that Jews were human beings who had sprung from the stock of Abraham. Hence, the obsessive concern with out-marriages was premised on the notion that no matter how impressive the religious pedigree of Jews, it had been forfeited by their own misconduct. Although British-Israelism manifested increasingly anti-Semitic reactions to Zionism, it never adopted the view that Jews were nonhuman, demonic creatures. Christian Identity, while it accepts the theory of Jewish out-marriage, seeks to demonstrate that the Jews were never human beings, a position fundamentally different from that of their Anglo-Israel parent.

The theory of satanic origins differs not only from the position of British-Israelism but from that of the most ferocious period of Christian anti-Semitism, the Middle Ages. Late medieval popular religious culture, as well as the writings of theologians, associated Jews closely with the Devil. They were represented as having horns and tails, and were believed capable of summoning the Devil, as well as being an intermediary for those anxious to sell their souls to him. Jews were alleged to be allies of the Devil in continuing warfare against Christ, and they were even thought to teach in the Talmud that the Devil was their parent. Yet ultimately these charges could all be reduced to affiliations with the Devil and metaphors of demonic paternity but not to assertions of actual biological descent. They constituted variations upon volatile New Testament phraseology: “they [Jews] are of their father the Devil,” and “the synagogue of Satan.” But obsessed though late medieval Christians were with the Devil as a real force, they in the end shrank from advancing the demonic descent of Jews with the literalness Christian Identity was to adopt. In other words, Christian Identity might associate itself with ancient strands of anti-Semitic belief—the Jew as the Devil’s ally—but more was clearly required in order to carry that belief to the point of asserting a biological link.¹

The theory of the Jews as the Devil’s seed may be summarized as follows, although, as the succeeding chapter demonstrates, there are small variations among Identity writers. According to the theory, either the Devil himself or one of his underlings had intercourse with Eve in the Garden of Eden. Cain was the product of this illicit union. Hence Cain and all his progeny, by virtue of satanic paternity, carry the Devil’s unchanging capacity to work evil. These descendants of Cain became known in time as “Jews.” This theory, with no real precedents in either medieval anti-Semitism or British-Israelism, did not in fact emerge out of a vacuum, nor was it purely the product of some anti-Semitic writer’s inventiveness. The ideas themselves—Eve’s seduction, Cain’s satanic paternity, and the demonic origin of the Jews, for example—may be found in Gnostic writings from the early centuries of the Christian era. This Gnostic literature was almost certainly unknown to the Identity writers who put this anti-Semitic theology together, since they tended to be either auto-didacts or the graduates of small Bible colleges. There is no evidence that they knew of or used these ancient sources. To the extent that Gnostic precursors had any influence at all, it was in highly mediated form, through untraceable layers of intervening texts.²

What can be traced with some accuracy are the more immediate sources, although even some of these go back several centuries. Identity’s anti-Semitism was synthesized from a number of separate elements. Most were in existence by the end of the nineteenth century, and all were in place by the end of the 1920s. There were five such elements. Sometimes two or three might be found together, but the five were not fully fused until the mid-1940s, and it was not until about 1960 that the full-blown Devil’s seed theory began to circulate widely in Christian Identity circles.

The five elements of the theory were these:

A significant and interesting attribute of these beliefs is that none refers to the Jews. The utilization of these elements in Christian Identity’s theology of anti-Semitism was a comparatively late development. Only with the synthesis of the five into a single theory were they clearly associated with anti-Semitism. This chapter is concerned with explicating the five original elements, whose presence was necessary before such a synthesis could take place, while the synthesis itself will be described in the following chapter.

The Pre-Adamites

The oldest of the five elements is the belief that Adam was not the ancestor of all human beings. While bibliocentric religions regularly asserted a common ancestry for all people, in a line that led back to Adam, doubts were frequently expressed concerning its validity. This skepticism in fact predated the much-better-known debate that occurred over scientific accounts of human origins. Pre-Adamism can occasionally be found in ancient Jewish scriptural exegesis. It was developed in tenth-century Islam by al-Maqdisi, and began to appear in Christianity by the fourteenth century. During the Renaissance it was advanced tentatively by Paracelsus and directly by Giordano Bruno, whose views were adopted by Christopher Marlowe. But its most systematic exposition was by Isaac de la Peyrère in 1655. La Peyrère (1594-1676) was a Calvinist who may have been of Jewish descent. Indeed, Léon Poliakov and Richard Popkin suggest that he may have been a Marrano, a crypto-Jew who professed Christianity while secretly retaining his Jewish identity. Be that as it may, his advocacy of Pre-Adamism brought immediate retaliation from civil and ecclesiastical authorities. In Paris, his book was burned by the public hangman. Its author was imprisoned and subsequently recanted both his opinions and Protestantism. He appears to have remained at least nominally a Catholic convert from the late 1650s until his death.³

According to La Peyrère, there had been two creations, the first to create the Gentiles, and the second, beginning with Adam, to father the Jews. La Peyrère also found Pre-Adamites convenient in order to explain the life of Cain after Abel’s murder. Since the account in Genesis mentions Cain taking a wife and building a city, La Peyrère, like many after him, wondered from what stock Cain’s wife came and who the inhabitants of Cain’s city were. Postulating Pre-Adamites appeared to solve the problem. Despite attempts to suppress La Peyrère ‘s writings, his work was widely and often favorably noted by contemporaries in France and England. His arguments, if not direct knowledge of his books, survived into the Enlightenment among deists, all the way down to Voltaire. By the eighteenth century, the body of writing that challenged the traditional account of human origins was sufficiently large that one can discern separate “monogenetic” and “polygenetic” accounts, the former continuing to trace human origins back to Adam, the latter arguing for two or more separate creations. While polygenesis remained a minority opinion, its ranks were growing. In the first place, voyages of exploration demonstrated the multiplicity of different human societies and made it increasingly difficult to believe that all peoples had diffused from one couple in Eden and subsequently differentiated themselves by race and culture. In the second place, unlike La Peyrère, eighteenth-century polygenists could speculate without incurring the same risks of prosecution.⁴

By the nineteenth century, polygenesis and Pre-Adamism were even more attractive; acquaintance with non-Western peoples had developed in Europeans not only an intellectual curiosity about where they had come from, but an increasingly acute desire to demonstrate their racial inferiority. While differences were often explained environmentally, those more attuned to racial theories found it unpleasant to contemplate a common ancestry with nonwhites. This was especially the case in America, where Charles Caldwell, Josiah C. Nott, and Samuel G. Morton rejected the view that nonwhites were descendants of Adam and Noah. Morton, the most influential, combined Pre-Adamism with cranial measurements to construct a theory of racial differences, which especially appealed to defenders of Southern slavery. Indeed, as Reginald Horsman observes, “by the early 1850s the inherent inequality of races was simply accepted as a scientific fact in America, and most of the discussion now concerned the religious problem of accepting polygenesis as an explanation of racial differences or the problem of exactly defining the different races.”⁵

In such an intellectual atmosphere, Pre-Adamism appeared in two different but not wholly incompatible forms. Religious writers continued to be attracted to the theory both because it appeared to solve certain exegetical problems (where did Cain’s wife come from?) and exalted the spiritual status of Adam’s descendants. Those of a more scientific bent found it equally attractive but for different reasons, connected with a desire to formulate theories of racial difference that retained a place for Adam while accepting evidence that many cultures were far older than the few thousand years humanity had existed, according to biblical chronology. The two varieties differed primarily in the evidence they used, the one relying principally upon scriptural texts and the latter on what passed at the time for physical anthropology.

Among the religious treatises, Dominick M’Causland’s Adam and the Adamite, first published in London in 1864, was among the most influential. He took as the fundamental problem a reconciliation of the biblical Creation account with the fact that among known human societies of his time, “there are many gradations of civilization.” He attempted to resolve the problem by positing ancient races that had long been in existence at the time of Adam’s creation, and “that must have ever remained in that low state [of civilization] without some .. . special interposition of the Almighty.” Hence by the time of Adam’s creation, all the races save one were already in existence. That one, with Adam as its progenitor, M’Causland called the “Adamic race,” a term that was to assume particular importance in Christian Identity.⁶

If M’Causland was representative of those anxious to preserve the traditional biblical account, the scientific position had its own advocates, some, such as Louis Agassiz, of considerable eminence. However, one of the most sustained scientific arguments came from the American geologist Alexander Winchell, a Methodist minister as well as a scientist. Winchell dismissed M’Causland’s work as unsupported speculation. He also found M’Causland’s polygenism too extreme, for Winchell believed it was possible to simultaneously accept the existence of Pre-Adamites and to believe that at some point of infinite remoteness, all human beings did in fact have a common ancestor. Winchell divided all human beings into three groups, the “White Race,” the “Brown Races,” and the “Black Races.” He regarded Adam and the other figures in the early chapters of Genesis as historical latecomers, who branched off of nonwhite stock long after the latter had been created. Hence, instead of asserting “the descent of Negroes and Australians from Noah and Adam”— something he viewed with repugnance—Winchell reversed the traditional ordering, so that the White Race came into existence last. As far as Adam was concerned, he “was the progenitor of the Mediterranean race in its Blonde and Brunette and Sun-burnt subdivisions, and of other peoples descended from Seth or Cain, or other sons, who have constituted other races,—swarthy tribes of the Mongoloids and Dravidians; or still other types of ruddy complexion, who have been displaced from existence before our times.” These biblical figures, then, collectively brought the White Race into existence in a previously nonwhite world. The Pre-Adamites among whom they emerged were closely related physiologically, yet in comparison to them, Adam “may have represented a decided and even a sudden step in organic improvement… a noble and superior specimen.”⁷

Pre-Adamites and Racial Inferiority

Despite their differences, both M’Causland and Winchell agreed that the Pre-Adamites were nonwhites and the Adamites were whites. Their concern was less in demonstrating the harmony of the biblical text or in resolving contradictions between religion and science as it was in lending scriptural authority to doctrines of racial superiority. M’Causland considered the view that Adam was the common ancestor of all humanity repugnant, for it compelled him to see himself and blacks as related through a common ancestor. The Adamic origin of humanity was equally pernicious in WinchelFs view, for it placed a specimen of the most “advanced” race temporally earlier than the less advanced and thereby threatened a Victorian article of faith, inevitable progress.

Like La Peyrère, M’Causland was perplexed by Cain’s ability to marry and found a city after his expulsion from the home of Adam and Eve. But La Peyrère had conjured up Pre-Adamites to give Cain a wife and subjects without suggesting what these people might have been like. M’Causland believed that he knew. They were members of “inferior tribes,” over whom Cain “gained that ascendancy… that a strong-minded resolute man, endowed with capacity and attainments superior to those of his new associates, might naturally obtain under such circumstances.” These tribesmen were not whites but were rather nonwhite “Mongols” and thus the more easily dominated by the Adamite, Cain. As far as M’Causland was concerned, the evidence was “conclusive” that “the paternity of the Mongol or Negro races [is] wholly different from Adam.”⁸

Winchell was equally concerned to emphasize racial separation. This was particularly so for the division between “Black Races” and others. The “Black Races” comprised the “Negro Race,” “Hottentot Race,” “Papuan Race,” and “Australian Race.” As far as the “Negro Race” was concerned, Winchell wrote, it is “an inferior race” based upon “anatomical, physiological, psychical and historical facts.” To make them Adam’s descendants would be to assert that “the world has witnessed a general scene of degradation and retrogression.” Only by making Adam a recent creation could Wincheirs conception of progress remain undisturbed. “Preadamitism means simply that Adam was descended from a Black race, not the Black races from Adam.”⁹

The views of M’Causland and Winchell were thus deeply rooted in a nineteenth-century racialism that demanded that the inferiority of nonwhites be blessed by Scripture and ratified by science. It is important to recognize, however, that no matter how archaic such a view may seem now, it continued to be transmitted well into the twentieth century. When, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, Pre-Adamism appears in contemporary Christian Identity, its presence does not require a century-long leap. Rather, the worldview out of which M’Causland and Winchell came continued to be espoused, albeit in more and more marginal ways.

As far as Christian Identity is concerned, the channel of greatest influence was a curious book, Sargon the Magnificent, published in 1927 by Mrs. Sydney Bristowe. Bristowe’s Pre-Adamism might have been lifted unaltered from a work of M’Causland’s time, although she subsequently claimed to have been unacquainted with his work. In her version, too, Cain arrives among Pre-Adamites to “become the leader, teacher and absolute lord and master of an inferior race.” The Pre-Adamites were blacks.

Thus a racialism that may seem incomparably remote from us continued to appear virtually unaltered in the twentieth century.¹⁰

The “Adamic Race’ and the Aryan Myth

If M’Causland, Winchell, and other believers in the Pre-Adamite theory were certain Pre-Adamites were nonwhites, the corollary was that Adam and his descendants—the “Adamic race”—were whites, and that the sacred history recorded in the Bible was therefore best understood as neither universal nor tribal, but as racial. Adam was “the first of the Caucasian race.” and the Bible is his history, M’Causland writes. For Winchell, “Adam was a ruddy white man, possessed of the higher range of faculties of the Mediterranean race.” The American antiblack author Charles Carroll, writing at the turn of the century, assures his readers not only of Adam’s and their whiteness but of the closeness to God that racial ancestry implies: “Adam was as literally and truly the son of God as was Isaac the son of Abraham. And the descendants of Adam, of pure Adamic stock, are sons and daughters of God, throughout all time.” This strong link between Adam and the Caucasian race was not merely a general feature of racialist writing; it also rapidly passed into the work of individuals within the British-Israel fold.¹¹

The myth of an Adamite people racially distinct from Pre-Adamites found its way into the work of perhaps the twentieth century’s most influential British-Israelite, David Davidson. This may seem an odd point of contact between Pre-Adamism and British-Israelism, for Davidson’s primary interest was to prove the divine character of the Great Pyramid at Gizeh. This enterprise, however, quickly ramified into a far stranger and more ambitious effort to reconfigure the entire history of the ancient Near East, including all of the accounts in Genesis. The effect was to project British-Israel into the patriarchal age and beyond, to the time of Adam himself. Concerned as British-Israelites always were with lines of descent, Davidson took the lineage back to the primal man.

Davidson accepted both the racial distinctiveness of Adam and the racial character of the biblical account. Genesis described not the creation of the human species but rather only a part of it, “the special creative selection or election of the First Adam and his seed—the Adamic race.” This “elect race” was, in Davidson’s view, indisputably white, and by virtue of its whiteness possessed physical and spiritual faculties absent in the nonwhite races around it. Even after the Deluge, the surviving descendants of Adam continued to manifest these characteristics:

Although Davidson’s work was to embed in British-Israelism the Pre-Adamite thesis and the identification of the Adamites with the white race, the introduction of these ideas apparently encountered some initial resistance in British-Israelite quarters. This is evident less from Davidson’s work than from Bris-towe’s, published about the same time. Although her book on Cain contained no distinctively British-Israel material, it was issued by the English movement’s publishing house, the Covenant Publishing Company. She found it necessary to state in the introduction that the British-Israel World Federation “does not associate itself with my views about the preadamites and the deluge.” Nonetheless, largely because of the enormous prestige that attached to Davidson’s pyramid studies, these and related doctrines came to be intimately interwoven in the doctrinal fabric of the movement.¹²

Davidson’s fascination with Adam and his descendants was part of a more general interest in human origins that had developed in the nineteenth century. Those more religiously inclined sought to infuse Adam and the other figures of biblical antiquity with historical reality, the better to defend scriptural accounts in an age when the prestige of both the natural sciences and of critical historical scholarship were rising. Thus, like a Renaissance geographer, Dominick M’Causland wrote with assurance that the river of Paradise “must be the Shat-el-Arab,” and that Paradise itself had been located just west of the waterway, “yet not quite extending down to the Persian Gulf.” But Adam had of course been expelled from Paradise, sent “to the East of Eden,” and it fell to Victorian scholars to try to locate the new home of the antediluvian Adamites.¹³

This search for some locale east of present-day Iraq was strongly reinforced by the simultaneous efforts of European linguistic scholars to trace the origin of European languages. As early as the eighteenth century, it had become common to trace the human race to a birthplace between the Indus and the Ganges. By the mid-nineteenth century, the tracking of linguistic relationships had given rise to the belief that Europeans had indeed had an Asian origin, not in the Indian river valleys but rather in “the high plateau of Asia.” The inhabitants of this elevated hinterland were the “Aryans,” the putative invaders of India and the ancestors of Europeans. M’Causland himself was clearly touched by this influential myth, for he places the Adamites before the Flood as “elements of expanding civilization … active in Central Asia,” the nodal point from which in post-Deluge years Noah’s descendants dispersed.¹⁴

The principal channel for bringing the Aryan myth into British-Israelism was, again, the writings of David Davidson. In Davidson’s reconstruction of Genesis as a historical narrative, Adam and his family left the Euphrates Valley to migrate east into Asia. Davidson then searched for a region that he believed would fulfill the geographical requirements of the biblical account of the post-Edenic world: a mountain-ringed basin sufficiently unstable geologically to make possible later flooding (the Deluge) from subterranean water sources. He discovered it to his own satisfaction in the Tarim Basin in eastern Turkestan, the region of the Takla Makan Desert in westernmost China. In view of the tendency of nineteenth-century racial theorists to make central Asia the original home of the white Adamic race, Davidson’s choice hardly seems accidental. Rather, it emerges as simply another indication of the overlap between British-Israelism’s racial interpretation of Adam’s ancestry and the tendency of Victorian science to ground racial beliefs in specious scholarship.¹⁵

Race Mixing and the Flood

This racialist interpretation of the Bible extended from Adam to his descendants. As we have already seen, Cain was deemed to have established dominion over a Pre-Adamite race of nonwhites. At a later point in the biblical narrative, the story of the Deluge underwent a similar racial reinterpretation. The Pre-Adamite literature sought to make two major points about the Flood: first, that it was geographically localized rather than universal and was directed against the wickedness of the Adamites; and, second, that this wickedness, far from merely being some generalized will to do evil, was a much more specific transgression: the sin of race mixing. To M’Causland, “it is plain that the moving cause of the destruction of the Adamites, with the exception of Noah’s family, was that their race had become corrupted by the admixture of non-Adamite blood.” Like many later writers in this tradition, M’Causland fastened upon the obscure reference in the sixth chapter of Genesis to marriages between the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men,” a legend that now became the prototypical example of miscegenation. The “sons of God” were no longer supernatural beings but were nonwhite Pre-Adamites with whom Adamite women illicitly cohabited. In America, Charles Carroll advanced a somewhat similar thesis in even more overtly racialist terms: “The sons of God’ were the white males who traced their pedigree through a line of pure-blooded ancestors to Adam; and … ‘the daughters of men’ were mixed-blood females who traced their pedigree to men, on the paternal side, and to négresses on the maternal side. Their fathers were men, but their mothers were négresses—apes—beasts.” The Deluge was their punishment.¹⁶

Charles Fox Parham, the founder of Pentecostalism, provided yet another variation that linked Pre-Adamism, race mixing, and the Deluge. In Parham’s version, God had created two races. On the sixth day of Creation he had made a race “having everlasting human life, and [bearing] the stamp and attributes of divinity.” Two days later, he created Adam. The sixth-day race “had dominion and authority,” while “the Adamic race of the eighth day” had been formed from the earth and was meant to tend the Garden of Eden. The sixth-day race, however, was “sensual” and expressed its lust by marrying Adamic daughters. The Flood obliterated the earlier race as punishment for their sins, but God, “having made a promise to Adam of a Savior, was compelled to preserve the Adamic race.” Parham’s version was clearly of a far less virulent sort than Carroll’s, but both they and M’Causland before them agreed on three points: that no matter how the biblical narrative had been traditionally read, it sanctioned the view that at least one race had been created before Adam’s; that this primeval multiracialism created temptations for sexual relationships across racial lines; and that God would punish such liaisons in the severest fashion. These views too passed into British-Israelism through Davidson. The “sons of God” now became fallen angels, malevolent spirits that took possession of the souls of Adamic men, who “were compelled by the lust of the spirits possessing them to seek wives of the daughters of the gentile races.” Although the Adamic world was ringed with mountains, its isolation was not total, and the Adamites could find women from the Pre-Adamite peoples outside the Tarim Basin. Initially, only “outcasts and renegades” did so, but in time more and more wives were chosen from inferior, external races, “resulting in a raising of the physical standard [presumably because the Pre-Adamites possessed bestial strength] and the lowering of the spiritual standard.” When spirituality fell to an intolerably low level, God destroyed the sinning Adamites, with the sole exception of Noah’s family.¹⁷

The Two Seedlines

The existence of Pre-Adamites bearing the taint of race mixing would later become part of Christian Identity’s myth of satanic Jews, when these animalistic Pre-Adamites became connected to the progeny of Cain. Cain functions in the myth as the link between the Devil, the representative of primal evil and chaos, and the Pre-Adamites, who will carry the Devil’s work and message into the world. In order for Cain to fulfill this mythic function, he had to be linked to Satan in a way not evident in the biblical text itself. Here, too, a racialist gloss was required, in this case through a radical reinterpretation of the story of the Fall.

Satan enters Eden, as one might expect, by a circuitous path. This consisted of a redefinition of the nature of the “serpent.” If the serpent were not a snake, he might have capabilities that even the biblical snake did not have and could go beyond merely conversing with Eve about the fruit of the tree in the center of the Garden. Indeed, if he could be changed into something resembling a man, he could not merely converse but have sexual intercourse, which would push miscegenation back in time from the days before the Flood to the period just before the Fall. A significant step was taken in this direction by the early nineteenth-century Scottish exegete, Adam Clarke. Clarke, by a combination of ingenious speculations on the text itself and searches for words in Arabic that might be related to the Hebrew, reached a number of conclusions. In Clarke’s view, the “serpent” (Hebrew, nachash) walked erect, had the capacity to reason and speak, and was most probably “a creature of the ape or ouran outang kind,” which Satan then employed as “the most proper instrument for the accomplishment of his murderous purpose against the life and soul of man. ¹⁸

In the full flood of racial anthropology that followed the publication of Clarke’s commentary, it became commonplace to seek links between human races and primates. Comparative anatomists suggested that different primates were affiliated with different races. The orang-outang was variously linked to Malays, Europeans, Mongols, and the “yellow races” in general. What matters here is not the precise racial linkage, but the suggestion of sufficient affinities so that those with a desire to do so could argue that an apelike nachash could function not only as a tempter of Eve but as a sexual seducer.¹⁹

The concept of a humanoid “serpent” who cohabited with Eve makes an appearance in Charles Carroll’s antiblack diatribe in 1900. Carroll’s views enjoyed some popularity among less educated southerners. He asserted that “the tempter of Eve was a beast—a negro.” Explicitly utilizing Clarke’s commentary, Carroll, who regarded all blacks as biblical “beasts of the field,” saw the black seducer of Eve as the first in a continuing line of nonwhite adversaries of the Adamic race. Stripped of the racist associations Carroll gave it, the serpent-as-seducer maintained an existence in fringe evangelical circles into the present.²⁰

Its most significant modern exponent, outside the Identity fold, was Indiana Pentecostalist William Branham (1909-65). Branham saw the serpent as a creature occupying a niche somewhere between animals and humans, “a beast,” to be sure, but with unspecified human characteristics. As he put it in a 1959 sermon, “The serpent was a—like a prehistoric man, something next to God—or next to man…. This animal that will mix the seed is complete—it’s extinct. God turned him to a snake.” According to Branham, the creature had sexual relations with Eve and fathered Cain, a connection particularly significant to the development of Identity’s view of the Jews as the seed of the Devil through Cain. Branham, however, was careful to distinguish between serpent paternity and the Devil. When a follower asked him about “your theory that Eve conceived Cain of the devil,” Branham responded, “I never said that; I said Eve conceived Cain of the serpent.” Yet the fact that his listeners could regard the Devil and the serpent as interchangeable suggests that the conception of the serpent as a quasi-human sexual predator could easily lend itself to associations with Satan. This was particularly so in the context of the story of the Fall, since the serpent’s act of seduction now became the basis for Original Sin and the introduction of death, transgression, and divine curse into the world.²¹

The human characteristics that were imputed to the serpent became plausible not simply because Adam Clarke had suggested that the serpent was more likely to have been a primate than a reptile; the idea had the further attraction of interlocking with a deviant doctrine of human sinfulness which had been in existence in conservative Protestant circles in America since the early 1800s: the “two seeds” doctrine of Daniel Parker. Parker (1781-1844), born in the South but active most of his career in Illinois, was a Baptist preacher of a distinctively predestinarian cast. In his 1826 pamphlet, Views of the Two Seeds, he argued that Eve contained two kinds of “seed,” later to be transmitted to her descendants. One was good and had been implanted by God, the other by Satan in the form of the serpent. Hence, from Eve two “seedlines” descended, one good and elect, the other evil and nonelect, the former the offspring of the Woman, the latter the offspring of the Devil/ Serpent. No action by man could alter this primal division. Those who were of the serpent seedline could not be brought into the domain of the saved, so missionary activity among them was fruitless. Parker’s views were reflected in the sect of Old Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists, who numbered almost thirteen thousand in 1890 but fell to scarcely two hundred by the end of the Second World War.²²

Although it is not clear whether William Branham was directly influenced by Parker’s views, he grew up in Baptist circles where the two-seed theory was well known. While Branham attempted to maintain the position that the Serpent rather than the Devil copulated with Eve, he clearly regarded the humanoid, prereptilian “serpent” as the medium through which Satan’s seed passed: “What did Satan pregnate Eve with? To disbelieve the Word.” Bran-ham either embellished Parkerite views or developed them himself, but in either case, he implied the existence of two genetic strains in humanity, such that one could trace the descendants of the two seedlines through history. The seed of the Woman had produced Seth, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and Jesus. That of Satan had produced Cain, Ham, Ahab, and Judas Iscariot. But Branham became a good deal more vague when it came to contemporary manifestations of the Devil’s seed. To the extent that he tried to identify them, he regarded them as those persons with a dangerous proclivity to learning and reasoned thought: “Through Cain came all the smart, educated people down to the antediluvian flood.” After that, they were the “intellectuals,” a category in which he grouped Bible colleges and other institutions of higher education: “They know all their creeds. .. but know nothing about God.”²³

Parker and Branham thus added to speculations about the sexual prowess of the serpent by concluding that out of his dalliance with Eve had come vast numbers of people who carried in their very nature the bestial, God-defying tendencies of their ancestral sire. But both Parker and Branham stopped short at identifying the children of Satan and the serpent with any distinctive group; certainly, they never suggested that they were Jews. But the idea of a sexually potent agent of the Devil, through whom the latter’s seed could have continuing human expression, opened up new channels of speculation. It is also tempting to speculate that the prevalence of British-Israel ideas among some Pentecostalists, a tendency that goes back to Pentecostalism’s founder, Charles Fox Parham, may have favored the introduction of Branham’s ideas into Christian Identity. Branham first spoke about the serpent seed in about 1958-59, the point at which the full statement of the demonic origin of the Jews began to appear in Christian Identity.

Cain and History

However, the attachment of two-seed theology to anti-Semitism was not possible without connecting links, most specifically in the form of a vastly increased role for the figure of Cain. Cain becomes the means by which the concept of the serpent seedline can be linked first to the Pre-Adamites and then to the Jews, and in the process, the evolving British-Israel belief that Jewish blood had been corrupted by sexual contacts with forbidden peoples was incorporated.

Cain comes to loom over Identity interpretations of Genesis in a manner that is seemingly disproportionate to the role he plays in the biblical text. The apparently excessive attention paid to a figure who quite literally is expelled from the narrative stems from a peculiar bias of the pseudo-scholarship engaged in by British-Israel writers. Just as British-Israelites sought to document empirically the meanderings of the Israelite tribes from Middle Eastern exile to European sanctuary, so their concern for establishing lineage and pedigree caused them to push the genre backward in time. The identification of the Israelites with European nations in the recent period had its counterpart in the identification of them with the “Adamic race” in the more distant past. Thus, “Israel” was deemed to be in some sense hidden both after and before the collapse of the kingdom of the ten northern tribes. For the postcollapse period it was necessary to separate the Israelites’ true “identity” from what British-Israelites insisted was only the apparent and much less important identity of nationality. This had, of course, been the main thrust of the movement from its beginnings. But it also became concerned with the period before the kingdom collapsed—indeed, with the period before Israel entered Palestine— and pushed bloodlines ever farther back. If purity of blood was all, then purity had to be established all the way back to the source, Adam and his children. To this problem, British-Israel writers applied the same style they had applied to establishing the Israel identity of the British peoples, namely, by mimicking techniques of historical scholarship so that conclusions might be advanced not merely as statements of faith but as intersubjectively testable knowledge. Hence, there arose a literature that treats the pre-Abrahamic figures in Genesis neither as religious icons nor as revelation, but as historic figures. Adam and Noah were deemed to be as objectively real as any Egyptian pharaoh. This, of course, continued a practice already well established among the Victorian writers on Pre-Adamites, for whom Adam’s and Noah’s families possessed a palpable reality that in principle was amenable to scientific analysis as well as scriptural exegesis. Cain, consequently, became merely a particularly conspicuous object of this approach.

The genre found its master practitioner in Davidson, who set his pyramid studies within the context of a reconfiguration of ancient history. In more specific terms, Davidson sought to establish a connection between the chronology that could be teased out of Genesis and “the chronological system of the ancient Egyptian king lists.” Figures such as Seth and Enoch, who had been customarily treated as inhabiting a domain of legend, took their places with the pharaohs, for whom both written and monumental evidence were often abundant, in a single, synoptic account. Indeed, he came to believe that a similar synthesis could be effected between Genesis, on the one hand, and Babylonian and Chinese records on the other, yielding a single, bibliocentric chronological system covering all of Asia from remote antiquity: “The Book of Genesis,” he wrote, “is a true statement of the history of the Adamic race and of the origin of the people of Israel.”²⁴

The role Cain was to play had been foreshadowed by the Pre-Adamite writers. They had found Cain a figure of special interest for two reasons. First, because he had been expelled from Eden for the murder of his brother, Abel, he was the first of the Adamites compelled to mingle on a continuing basis with the Pre-Adamites. Second, because advocates of Pre-Adamism clearly saw Pre-Adamites as nonwhite and Adamites as white, they regarded Cain as the earliest representative of a particularly sinister figure, the race mixer, who did not simply move among nonwhites but became involved with them sexually as well, tainting the offspring.

M’Causland has Cain moving to a Pre-Adamite area of Asia, where his natural superiority permitted him to easily assume dominance. According to M’Causland, since the Deluge affected only the area of Adamite settlement, which Cain had been compelled to leave, the “Cainites” survived the Flood and in time moved ever farther eastward from “the land of Nod” to eventually settle China. There, their superior knowledge and skill, albeit by now diluted through racial intermarriage, served as the foundation of Chinese civilization. While Alexander Wincheirs self-proclaimed allegiance to science rendered his account somewhat less deferential to the Bible, Cain played a significant role in it. The Pre-Adamites among whom Cain dwelled were, Winchell speculated, possibly one of “the Black races,” but were more likely “primitive Dravidians, or primitive Mongoloids,” both segments of “the Brown Races.” While Winchell speculated that Cain may have taken a black wife (a theory we shall return to shortly), he eventually dismissed it as “not sustained by anthropological evidence.” His wife instead came from one of the brown peoples, “a daughter of the preadamite race.” This was, however, a forbidden marriage, the first of many associated in the Cain literature with his line. Here Winchell picks up a strand other nineteenth-century writers had associated with the period immediately before the Deluge, namely the passage in Genesis 6:1–2 concerning the marriages of “sons of God” and “daughters of men.” Cain was the archetypical case, “violating the law of caste … a mark of primeval wickedness.” Having settled among such people, Cain not only married but “built up a city and developed a secular civilization.”²⁵

While Winchell was reluctant to give Cain a black wife, the southern racialist Charles Carroll had no such qualms. Indeed, the union of Cain with a black woman was central to Carroll’s contention that “the Bible is simply a history of the long conflict which has raged between God and man, as the result of man’s criminal relations with the negro.” Carroll implies that Cain’s first sexual experience with a black woman occurred before the murder of Abel, indeed, that it provided the motive for the murder, since an outraged God reacted by compelling Cain to marry “his paramour of strange flesh,” while providing Abel with a “beautiful Adamic woman [of] virginal loveliness.” Furious at his brother’s good fortune, Cain slew him. In this version, therefore, Cain does not secure a wife from among Pre-Adamites in the land of Nod but from among Pre-Adamites in Eden itself. As a result of the forced marriage, Cain’s offspring were “mixed-bloods,” and therefore, his descendants “were thrust out of the line of descent from Adam to the Saviour.” Carroll’s most audacious suggestion is that Cain’s new father-in-law was none other than the “serpent” that had seduced his mother, Eve, the black man who had made possible the primal sin before Cain’s birth and had been cursed for it. The serpent’s curse was now “fulfilled in Cain’s ultimate banishment from the Adamic family.” Cain was now linked both to the Pre-Adamites and to the serpent, the representative or embodiment of Satan. While Carroll’s identification of the serpent with Cain’s father-in-law was not reflected in other speculations about the Pre-Adamites, Carroll was not alone in regarding Cain’s wife as nonwhite. Charles Parham regarded Cain’s marriage to a woman from the land of Nod as the first step in “the woeful intermarriage of races for which cause the flood was sent in punishment.”²⁶

In keeping with his desire to fuse sacred and secular history, Davidson treats Cain’s journey to the land of Nod as a literal movement that can be mapped in terms of conventional geographical coordinates. Since Davidson believed that Eden had been located in present-day Iraq, and that the post-Fall “Adamic earth” was in eastern Turkestan, he concluded that Cain traveled to some point between the two. The “land of Nod,” therefore, occupied an “isolated land-locked area somewhere East of the Tigris.” This supposition was to serve as the basis for a fancifully detailed “history” of Cain by Mrs. Sydney Bristowe which, along with Davidson’s own work, was to have enormous influence upon the development of Christian Identity theology.²⁷

Ellen Bristowe’s 1927 life of Cain, Sargon the Magnificent, was not, strictly speaking, a British-Israel work. Since, however, it was issued by the movement publishing house, it was guaranteed an audience among Anglo-Israel believers. Bristowe attempted, through an examination of Near Eastern inscriptions and artifacts, to reconstruct Cain’s life after he arrived in the land of Nod. She concluded that in this post-Edenic phase of his life, he was identical to “the great Babylonian monarch Sargon of Akkad.” Sargon was a Mesopotamian king who reigned about 2300 B.C. Bristowe proceeded to superimpose upon this historical figure the characteristics she regarded as quintessentially Cain’s.²⁸

According to Bristowe, the history and features of Babylonian life could now be explained as a result of the arrival of the fugitive murderer. Babylonian civilization advanced rapidly, she said, because Cain was, after all, an Adamite and possessed the “super-human knowledge” that such ancestry conferred. Since the early Babylonians were nonwhite Pre-Adamites, in her view, they could scarcely have become civilized without the promptings and innovations brought by a white visitor. In keeping with others, such as Davidson, Bristowe had no qualms about simultaneously accepting archaeological dating for secular societies while continuing to regard Bishop Ussher’s chronology of the Bible as valid. She thus satisfied herself that Cain could have lived during Sargon’s time. So extraordinary were Sargon-Cain’s “powers of body and mind,” the inheritance from his divine parents, that he not only transformed Babylonia but was responsible for prehistoric monuments in Crete, Cyprus, Greece, and “possibly” Britain, “since the monuments seem to show that Sargon travelled to all these places.” Like other writers on Pre-Adamism and British-Israelism, Bristowe was intrigued by the possibility of links between biblical characters and the peoples of the Orient. In part perhaps because of her racial views, she was less disposed than others to make East Asians descendants of either Israel or Abraham. Instead, she traced “the Yellow race” to a mixture of “Cain’s race with a black race,” suggesting further that Cain himself might have journeyed to China.²⁹

This bizarre view of history might be dismissed as no more than eccentricity were it not for the fact that it was widely cited by British-Israelites and by their Christian Identity offspring, who invariably have regarded it as an authoritative source on the early Near East. The American British-Israelite Frederick Haberman so regarded it in the early 1930s, and a decade later the When? author in Canada included a lengthy synopsis of Sargon in his book, treating its conclusions as established facts. Christian Identity writers from 1960 on have similarly deferred to Bristowe. No less a figure than Wesley Swift incorporated her views wholesale, although, as was his custom when dealing with the ideas of others, he neglects to mention her name. Conrad Gaard, more generous in his treatment of the writing of others, acknowledged Sargon as the source of “a great deal of evidence from secular sources that Cain not only founded … a hybrid serpent race, but also that he established the first Super World government.” As late as 1980, the Christian Vanguard, published by the New Christian Crusade Church in Louisiana, was offering one of Bristowe’s other books, The Man Who Built the Great Pyramid, as a premium to new subscribers.³⁰

The attraction of Sargon lay not merely in its author’s belief that Cain was a historic personage but in her insistence that his role in history had made him one of the greatest, if not the greatest, sources of human evil, an instrument of the Devil himself. At the Devil’s instigation, Cain had originated idolatry, presumably as revenge against the God that had expelled him from his home. This led Bristowe to suggest, in language Christian Identity was quick to appropriate later, that Cain’s innovation led to “a great conspiracy cunningly devised to catch the souls of men.” The introduction of death having destroyed physical immortality, the “great conspiracy” built on idolatry would now cause human beings to sacrifice their spiritual immortality as well. In support of idolatry, Cain was believed to have established a peculiarly evil Babylonian cultic apparatus built upon cannibalism. Although Bristowe’s book is notably free of anti-Semitism, her preoccupation with the alleged cannibalistic rites practiced in ancient Babylon fitted with disturbing neatness the medieval ritual-murder libels. Hence, Cain was the origin of a continuing plot to undermine human spiritual integrity, and for that purpose had had his Babylonian minions construct an evil priesthood based upon the worship of false gods and the eating of human flesh.³¹

All of this Bristowe traced back to the Devil. The “Prince of Darkness” was only too happy to utilize Cain as a way of revenging himself upon God. Indeed, Bristowe went so far as to suggest that in the furtherance of the demonic plot, Cain himself created Babylonian deities based upon Adam, Eve, the Devil, his deceased brother, Abel, and himself, the latter in the form of Marduk. The Devil consequently served Cain “as his advisor,” so that Cain might more effectively dominate the Pre-Adamites who served his, and the Devil’s, will. Thus, between Cain and the Devil there was a kind of contract, in which the former received power while the latter gained instruments for the conquest of the earth. The Devil’s ultimate contribution to Cain’s evil regime lay in having gotten Cain to institute cannibalism, for “who but Cain, who was ‘of that evil one,’ could have invented it.” As Frederick Haberman later paraphrased Bristowe’s thesis, Cain brought to the Euphrates Valley “the Devil worship, as he was of that Evil One, the Devil.” Nothing in Sargon suggests that its author knew anything of the two-seed theology discussed earlier; indeed, she considered herself a historian of sorts, not a theologian. Nonetheless, while not declaring Cain to have been the offspring of anyone but Adam and Eve, she so closely associated him with the Devil that a biological connection was a relatively easy step to take for those already familiar with the concept of a “serpent seedline.”³²

Ellen Bristowe was in fact plowing a field others had worked before her. While substantively different in its emphasis upon Cain, Sargon the Magnificent strongly resembled an anti-Catholic tract, The Two Babylons, published in Edinburgh in the 1850s. Its author, Alexander Hislop (1807-65), believed, as did Bristowe, that he had unlocked the origins of human evil by fusing biblical narrative with an assortment of archaeology, myth, and folklore. In Hislop’s case, his point of biblical reference was not Cain but the equally obscure Nimrod and Nimrod’s father, Cush. Cush, according to Hislop, had founded Babylon, and Nimrod had built up the city. With his consort, the licentious Semiramis, Nimrod organized a cult based upon idolatry, prostitution, and human sacrifice. When the evil Nimrod was finally slain by Noah’s son, Shem, Hislop went on, he became a deity in the Babylonian pantheon, and the cult he had founded was forced underground. Its obscene rituals continued out of public view until in time the entire Babylonian system reemerged to public view in the form of the Catholic church. The church was to Hislop none other than the “Mystery Babylon” of the Book of Revelation. The church was the “Beast,” and while the pope was its “visible head,” its invisible head was none other than Satan, using the church as “one vast system of Devil-worship.” Hislop’s book continued to be reprinted well into the twentieth century and is still occasionally cited in right-wing conspiratorial literature, although not on the Identity right; for there it seemed far more appealing to accept Bristowe’s idea that Cain had founded the Babylonian cult, the better to link it with Jews.³³

Although Bristowe clearly believed that she had stumbled upon some great truth missed by others, her eccentric work stands in a long line of speculation about Cainite evil. Popular religion had long associated Cain with the invention of sorcery. The notion that Cain was the mastermind of “a secret demonic religion” had been advanced in 1869 by Gougenot des Mousseaux, who suggested, as Christian Identity would a century later, that Cain’s malevolent and esoteric cult was eventually passed down to the Jews, “as ‘the representatives on earth of the spirit of darkness.” Similarly, there had been earlier suggestions of an intimate association between Cain and blacks. A 1733 essay by Father August Malfert, derived from La Peyrère’s original discussion of the Pre-Adamites, suggested that the “mark of Cain” was black skin, and that from him all nonwhites with the exception of the American Indians had descended. This, of course, prefigures elements of one of the most sustained discussions of Cainite evil, which developed in nineteenth-century Mormonism.³⁴

Early Mormon doctrine associated Cain with conspiracy, diabolical evil, and nonwhite races. He obeyed Satan’s order to make an offering to God, an offering whose rejection eventually led to Abel’s murder. This relationship with Satan led in time to a Cainite conspiratorial tradition. In Joseph Smith’s Pearl of Great Price, Cain entered a covenant with Satan, “a secret combination, and their works were in the dark.” Cain’s lineage survived the Flood, because Ham married one of Cain’s descendants. Cain became the first person to whom Satan revealed diabolical skills for doing evil, in the form of “oaths, vows, and secret combinations.” He was also the first person to take an oath to Satan and to form a secret society in his service. In subsequent generations, others whose nature was malevolent (but who were not necessarily Cain’s descendants) imitated his behavior. The result was a series of secret societies tied to the Devil and directed against the righteous. While this teaching did not assert a blood link among the conspirators, it did claim the existence of “an organization founded anciently by Satan (with Cain), periodically renewed in ancient times by Satanic revelation, internally protected by covenants of the blackest sorcery, and established for the express purpose of murdering and plunder.” D. Michael Quinn suggests that Smith may have tapped into currents of popular religion referred to earlier, in which Cain had been identified as the first sorcerer, thus recasting a much older folk tradition.³⁵

In addition to Cain’s link with conspiracy, he was also tied to the possession of a black skin. Joseph Smith appears to have first characterized blacks as “sons of Cain” in 1842. After Smith’s murder, Orson Hyde linked blackness with events in the préexistence, humanity’s “first estate,” when individuals possessed a spiritual existence prior to their physical embodiment on earth. Lucifer’s rebellion in heaven occurred in this premortal condition, and Hyde suggested that those later born with dark skin had been premortai spirits who were insufficiently vigilant in defending God’s cause during the revolt. Brig-ham Young rejected Hyde’s theory, and instead linked blackness to the fact that blacks’ ancestor, Cain, had been the first murderer.³⁶

There is no evidence that Bristowe knew anything about the place of Cain in early Mormon doctrine, nor is there any direct evidence of Mormon influence on Christian Identity, despite the presence within it of a significant number of former orthodox and schismatic Mormons. What is more likely is that both Mormon and non-Mormon writers about Cain reflected legendary associations of him with evil, sorcery, and conspiracy, and that the “mark” he wore (interpreted by Bristowe as a talisman) was easily converted into darkness of skin. The particular manifestation of the Cain legends in Christian Identity was shaped more decisively by Bristowe than by anyone else, but given the similarities of theme, Christian Identity’s version, in which Cain is the offspring rather than merely the partner of the Devil, must resonate with the views of some Mormons. Hence, Mormon doctrine is less a shaper of Christian Identity than it is a factor predisposing some believers to regard Christian Identity’s myth of evil as plausible.

Jews and Cain

The only element remaining to give completeness to the synthesis was a more explicit link between Jews and Cain. This was ready at hand through the mechanism described in the previous chapter. Jews had already come to be regarded in late British-Israelism as a mélange of different racial stocks, most of them considered impure. While much of this speculation had centered on connections with the Edomites, the putative descendants of Esau, there were also alleged connections with other ancient peoples, including the Canaan-ites, putative descendants of Cain. Sometimes the connection took the form of random patterns of intermarriage. More frequently, the linkage was in the form of Judah’s liaison with a Canaanite woman, from which came a son, Shelah (Gen. 38). As the elements of the myth coalesced, the Canaanite connection began to become dominant, overshadowing links to the Edomites or Hittites. If the Satan/Serpent had had intercourse with Eve; and if Cain had been the offspring of the relationship; and if Cain’s birth inaugurated a human “seedline” linking descendants with satanic paternity; and if Cain’s sojourn in Nod had equipped his followers with knowledge of the Devil’s plan for earthly dominion—then an intersection of Cain’s line of descent with the tribe of Judah was sufficient to link the Jews irrevocably with the Devil.

As it turns out, this became in fact the weak version of the myth, since it locates the point of contact between Jews and Cain at a relatively late point, after the separation of the northern and southern kingdoms. As the myth became further developed and embroidered upon in Christian Identity, the point of contact was pressed ever farther back, until in some versions Cain himself became “the first Jew.” In the weak version, Jews were dangerous because they were related to Cain. In the strong version, Cain was a Jew because he was dangerous, for to be associated with evil and the Devil was, ipso facto, to be a Jew.

An ancient body of folklore connected Cain with satanic conspiracies. Bristowe gave these motifs a gloss of pseudo-scholarship by claiming to demonstrate through archaeological evidence that Cain had founded a satanic religion in Babylon. Hence, Cain could function not merely as a symbol of evil, the first malefactor on earth, but as the organizer of an ongoing plot against God, the Devil’s emissary. When this reinterpretation of Cain was combined with the other elements described earlier in this chapter, a fullblown anti-Semitic theology became possible.

This worldview began with the radical separation of a white, Aryan “Adamic race” from evil and inferior Pre-Adamites. The Adamic race itself, however, was endangered from two sources. In the first place, the Devil, having taken human form through the creature referred to as the “serpent,” sexually seduced Eve. This primal sin was responsible not only for Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden but for the creation of a hybrid creature, Cain, part devil and part human; or rather, like his father, a devil in human form. His descendants, superficially indistinguishable from those whose father was Adam, continued to manifest Cain’s own quintessentially diabolical character. In addition, Cain had institutionalized his plot against God and the Adamic race in a secret organization, to which his descendants belonged and gave loyalty. These descendants Christian Identity understands to be Jews, although Identity writers sometimes differ in making the connection with Cain from the very beginning or adding Cain’s blood to the Jewish line through Judah and Shelah. The result, in any case, ties Jews to the Devil through links of paternity and biological descent, and casts Jews in the role of God’s adversaries on earth.

The attraction of this fabric of legend, deviant exegesis, and racialism is that it was compatible with existing secular conspiracy theories about Jews. One could accept the notion of the Jews as “the Devil’s spawn” without rejecting beliefs about cabals of international Jewish bankers, Jewish Bolsheviks, or the Elders of Zion meeting to plot world conquest. All could be assimilated to the belief in satanic paternity, which created a kind of superconspiracy—what Conrad Gaard called “the great conspiracy”—of which all the smaller plots were elements. The grand conspiracy had existed from the creation of the world, and all the other clandestine arrangements could take their places as components or manifestations of this demonic master plan. To people who tend to think of history in terms of conspiratorial machinations, this was doubly comforting, for it meant that all conspiracy theories retained their validity, since they were all derived from a single source; and it imposed a common scheme upon both sacred and secular history, which allowed both to be read as expressing the same struggle between forces of light and darkness, since the primary conspiracy ran from the outset of the biblical narrative to contemporary politics and economics. Since the essence of conspiracy theories is their claim to parsimony—explaining all evil through single causes—the incorporation of satanic paternity into already existing theories of a world Jewish conspiracy gave to the theory ultimate parsimony: everything that was or is undesirable in the world has come from a single source. If that source is destroyed, the world will be perfected and the millennium will begin. Further, as with all conspiracy theories, this one defies falsification. A plot of such cunning is presumed to be able to mislead those who would try to detect it, so that any evidence that appears to contradict the theory must necessarily have been fabricated by the conspirators themselves. Paradoxically, as far as conspiracy theorists are concerned, the more innocent the putative conspirators appear to be, the more clearly they are implicated, for their apparent innocence is taken to be proof of their complicity. Thus the theory becomes a closed system of self-referential ideas, from which all contradictory information has been excluded.