“Satan’s Spawn”
The individual elements that were to make up the theory of the satanic origins of the Jews were already in place by the 1920s. Indeed, as we have seen, some of them, such as the belief in Pre-Adamite races, extended back to the seventeenth century. Many of the components—not only Pre-Adamism, but the linking of the Flood with race mixing and the elaboration of a secular history for Cain—had appeared in British-Israel literature, either in works devoted to British-Israel themes, such as Davidson’s pyramid studies, or in books that, while not explicitly Anglo-Israelite, were issued by British-Israel publishers, such as Ellen Bristowe’s influential essay on Cain. Those elements of the satanic origins thesis that had not appeared in British-Israel venues circulated widely in the conservative Protestant religious culture to which many in Christian Identity were already atuned. This was particularly true of the so-called two-seed theory that gave to the Serpent/Devil an earthly seedline.
What remained to turn these disparate elements into the satanic thesis was a synthesis that would place them within a logical structure. Such a synthesis was approximated as early as the mid-1940s, but the first full versions began to appear about 1960. They came from the first generation of Christian Identity preachers associated with Gerald L. K. Smith: Conrad Gaard, Bertrand Comparet, William Potter Gale, and Wesley Swift. Gale and Swift produced particularly elaborate versions, engrafting onto earlier elements ideas not previously found in the British-Israelite milieu. Thus they gave to the Adamic race a spiritual existence that preceded its life on earth (reminiscent of the Mormon concept of the “préexistence.”) and, especially in the case of Swift, superimposed upon the warfare between God and the Devil the imagery of spaceships and flying saucers that circulated widely in the 1950s. The ideas of Gaard, Compared Gale, and Swift were taken over largely intact by such succeeding individuals and groups as the Identity Bible commentator Jarah Crawford, the Church of Jesus Christ Christian/Aryan Nations, Pastor Dan Gayman and his Church of Israel, and the communal group the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord (CSA). These more recent statements of the diabolical origin of the Jews were shorn of some earlier aspects, such as Wesley Swift’s fascination with flying saucers, and other elements were given new prominence, such as the CSA’s fixation upon the Illuminati. Nonetheless, the positions developed by the older generation of Identity figures in the 1960s became Identity orthodoxy by the 1980s.
Curiously missing from this roster was Howard Rand. Rand, at the center of American British-Israelism in the 1930s, continued to publish throughout the period of Christian Identity’s maturation. Nonetheless, while Rand’s anti-Semitism had been in evidence throughout his public career, he shrank from acceptance of the satanic theory. While accepting certain of its elements concerning Cain and the Pre-Adamites, Rand made clear during the 1960s that he found unacceptable the notion that Satan had fathered a race of earth-lings to fulfill his designs. Rand’s explicit rejection of what had become mainstream Identity doctrine not only confirmed the marginal role he had come to occupy in a religious tradition he once dominated, but also confirmed the increasingly explicit separation between British-Israelism and Christian Identity. Rand, as Anglo-Israelism’s chief spokesperson in America, saw himself as the representative of an international movement, whereas Swift and the other Identity figures had no formal ties with the British movement and spoke from within an American religious subculture.
In 1934, when Frederick Haberman published his influential and much reprinted tract, Tracing Our Ancestors, he did little more than combine ideas of David Davidson and Ellen Bristowe to produce an account of the lives of Adam and his descendants. According to this synthetic narrative, Cain and “the later sons of Adam” married “wom[e]n of the Turanian or Mongolian race,” that is, Pre-Adamites, and, as Davidson had earlier asserted, the result was offspring of prodigious physical size and strength but diminished spiritual capacities. The Adamites had been living in the “Forty Cities of Takla Makan,” in the Turkestan desert, where their sins were overtaken by a localized Deluge, again following Davidson. Cain, however, was condemned to wander and had “migrated into the valley of the Euphrates as early as 3800 B.C.” Here, Haberman adopts Bristowe’s account, according to which Cain created the first civilization and introduced worship of his patron, the Devil. However, Haberman, like other British-Israel writers of the time, does not expand the Devil’s role further, and certainly does not imply that Cain’s father was anyone other than Adam. As to the Jews, they were corrupted physically and morally by marriages to idolaters, but as we saw in chapter 7, that had become a steady Anglo-Israel motif that prepared the way for the theory of satanic origins but certainly did not imply it. However, at about the same time that Haberman was writing, another author incorporated other features of the satanic theory.1
The satanic theory was more closely approximated in a tract by Philip E. J. Monson. Monson, it will be remembered, was Howard Rand’s top man in the West, in charge of the Anglo-Saxon Federation’s Pacific Coast operations. He also was closely associated with the Kingdom Bible College in Los Angeles, from which Wesley Swift graduated. Monson’s thesis appeared first in 1928, was republished in 1936, and issued in a third, expanded version, undated but almost certainly from the late 1930s. Monson had some but not all of the theory’s elements. He argued the two-seedline position, one (“the Satan line”) stemming from Cain, and the other (“the God line”) from Abel. The two had to be kept separate and “the blood stream pure.” Many of the “Satan line” had been killed in the Flood, Monson reports, but enough survived to be a continuing threat. But here he invokes not Bristowe, whose work he was apparently unfamiliar with, but her precursor, Alexander Hislop. The “Satan line” was Nimrod’s religion, preserved in the Catholic church. The pope was “Prime Minister of the Devil,” and it was against him that British-Israelites had to be vigilant.2
About a decade after Haberman and Monson, another series of publications appeared—this time in Vancouver—that even more closely approximated the full Identity position. Their authorship is unknown. The author is referred to here as the When? author, after the title of his/her major work. The works are tied together by style, subject matter, place of publication, and the presence in each of an unusual “Chart of Racial Origins from Biblical Sources.” The first two pamphlets appeared anonymously. The first, The Morning Cometh, was issued in Vancouver in June 1941, and successively revised in October 1941 and February 1942. It was filled with apocalyptic expectations but had little to say about Jews. Its “Chart of Racial Origins” placed Jews in a line of corrupted descendants of the House of Judah without conspicuously linking them with Cain.3
A greatly enlarged version of The Morning Cometh appeared in January 1944, reprinted in June, under a new title, When Gog Attacks. Its author was clearly familiar not only with Hislop but with Bristowe and found Bristowe the more persuasive. Reviewing the position Bristowe took in Sargon the Magnificent, the author concluded that “it was Cain (Sargon) who founded the ‘synagogue of Satan/ and not his descendant Nimrod.” When Gog Attacks cited Lothrop Stoddard’s article on Jewish racial types approvingly, noting especially the Asiatic origins of Ashkenazim. As to the biblical account of Jewish origins, Satan’s fallen angels had had children by Canaanite women, and this “Canaanite blood” had survived the Deluge and was passed on by Canaan himself to “the Jewish remnant.” As to more modern events, When Gog Attacks regarded The Protocols as a factual account of Jewish plans and viewed Zionists as Ashkenazim “of Turko-Mongol blood.” “The cry of’anti-Semitism’ raised by the Zionists… is purely propaganda, and has no basis of fact, as the Ashkenazim are neither Jews nor Semitic by blood or race.”4
The final step was a book-length work, When?: A Prophetical Novel of the Very Near Future, also published in Vancouver in 1944. It is ascribed, clearly pseudonymously, to one “H. Ben Judah.” When? incorporated much of the material in When Gog Attacks, set in the context of a novel. Although When? begins in a clearly imperfect society, its author adopts the conventions of the Utopian novel. A naïve but curious visitor finds himself in a strange land, where he is taken in hand by knowledgeable natives who serve as his guides. These guides enlighten the visitor about the true meaning of human life through a series of didactic monologues and responses to his questions. In this case, however, the locale is Palestine, not some mythic “no-place.” The visitor, Brian Benjamin, is a Sephardic Jew converted to Christianity. A retired army officer, he has been sent to Palestine on a mission for British Intelligence. His cousin, Samuel Josephus, equips Benjamin with a letter of introduction to Amos Ben Jacob, a “Semitic” (as opposed to an “Asiatic”) Jew. Together, Josephus and Ben Jacob educate the neophyte in British-Israelism and the sins of the Zionists. Benjamin’s education takes place against the backdrop of End-time events, for When?, published during World War II, incorporated the apocalyptic scenario current in Anglo-Israel circles: Gog has attacked Palestine, but a sulphur-producing earthquake destroys much of Gog’s forces. A tank battle follows at Megiddo, where a second earthquake, together with storm, sulphurous fire, and hailstones, destroys Gog’s remaining troops, so that Christ can return and usher in the millennial kingdom.
Before this climax occurs, however, Benjamin learns the real nature of Ashkenazic Jews and their relationship to Cain. Cain, it seems, founded a secret society to do the Devil’s work on earth and had in fact been so successful in this endeavor that everyone on earth with the exception of Noah and his family, “appears to have come under the control of Satan.” Unfortunately, Noah’s line was poisoned when Ham married a descendant of Cain’s, “and thus the contaminated blood was brought through the Flood.” Cain’s conspiracy continued on through history, controlled “by certain of the Ashkenazim Jews.” On the matter of Cain’s paternity, however, the When? author was ambivalent. Adam “may have been” Cain’s physical father, “but he certainly was not his spiritual father.” Indeed, Ben Judah accepts the existence of the serpent’s seed on earth without specifying how such people might be identified. Ben Judah, too, followed Bristowe’s account of Cain’s life as Sargon the Devil-worshipper, who had made a Faustian bargain. Through the Fall, the earth had been delivered into the hands of Cain and the serpent’s seed. When? carefully notes that Cain’s descendants, the Canaanites, intermarried with Judah, and the children of that union were “those Jewish leaders who continually opposed Messiah.” Ben Judah shrank from the final steps, which would have involved acknowledging Satan as Cain’s physical father, and the Jews as the Devil’s descendants. Nonetheless, his reference to Cain’s “contaminated blood” and his willingness to consider the Devil as Cain’s “spiritual father” places When? in the direct line of Identity development, with its conspiracy of Ashkenazic Jews doing the Devil’s bidding.5
It is unclear who cobbled together the first complete account of the alleged diabolical origin of the Jewish people, in part because the writings of Comparet are often undated and those of Swift are often transcripts of undated sermons. Conrad Gaard had published a full version of the theory by 1960, and William Potter Gale by 1963. Since Gaard’s appears to be the earliest complete version to which a specific date can be assigned, it is best to begin with it.
Gaard considers the “serpent” a Pre-Adamite “beast of the field,” who, acting as “Satan’s agent,” fathered Cain. He accepts the idea of a liaison between the serpent and Eve on “considerable evidence of a circumstantial nature … [but] it makes little difference whether or not he [Cain] was actually the son of the serpent,” since in any case Cain married a Pre-Adamite. Hence, Cain’s descendants constituted a “mongrel, hybrid race,” whether because of copulation with the serpent or with Pre-Adamites. This line of “mongrel” offspring makes up the “serpent race,” set in eternal opposition to “the pure seed . .. of the Woman.” With the addition of Ham to the serpent line, Cain’s race survived the Flood. Cain himself had (and here Gaard too cites Bristowe) previously set the conspiracy moving by establishing “the first Super World government” to accomplish Satan’s purposes, an enterprise continued by his descendants to the present day: “Satan has controlled his Kingdoms of this world through earthly Masters, who received their orders occultly from Secret Hidden Masters, and … he controls his Kingdom today, including even Communist Russia and Red China, in the same way.” Central to this Cainite conspiracy are the Jews. While there are some genuine Jews from the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, most are “Babylonian pseudo-Jews,” who became part of “the Serpent Seed Race” when Judah had offspring by a Canaanite woman. When Judah’s corrupted offspring were carried into Babylonian exile, according to Gaard, they joined with “the various Edomite-Amalekite Shelanite-Canaanite elements of the serpent race … and under Satanic inspiration they were united in one Conspiratorial group, which became known as the ‘Diaspora,’ or Dispersion, of the ‘Jews.’” By fraudulently posing as God’s chosen people, these “pseudo-Jews” have disguised their true origin and design. Gaard gives Satan not one but two conspiracies, the second of which, “Great Babylon,” brought with it “a counterfeit King-Priest Order” and a diabolical “Babylonian Financial System” built on gold and usury. The two conspiracies cooperate, so that Jews can use the financial system for their own benefit. Gaard implied that at the top of the conspiratorial pyramid, the otherwise unidentified “Secret Hidden Masters” keep the cabals in tune with Satan’s master plan.6
Gaard’s convoluted theory allowed him to incorporate not only the elements of the Devil theory but more familiar right-wing motifs as well. Thus, he utilized variant meanings of nachash to convert the serpent into a human-oid “beast of the field” capable of having intercourse with Eve. He accepted Bristowe’s life of Cain, as well as C. F. Parker’s attempt to demonstrate that the Jews, rather than the Turks, are Edom. He found room for an approving citation of Lothrop Stoddard’s discussion of the Jews’ alleged Khazar ancestry as well. But in addition to these authorities, familiar in both British-Israel and Identity literature, he accommodated themes neither specifically Anglo-Israelite nor Identity. The Illuminati, an alleged force for evil ever since early nineteenth-century nativism, reappear as an instrument “directed occultly by hidden masters.” “Great Babylon” becomes the origin of the hatred of gold and the fixation upon monetary conspiracies that fed Populist fears of Jews and cities. Thus, Identity theology is readily linked to the fears of economic conspiracy that Richard Hofstadter identified with the “paranoid political style.”7
Bertrand Comparet wielded great influence in the Identity movement, in part because he appeared better able than such contemporaries as Gale and Swift to avoid factional conflict. He rarely wrote at length, however, and his positions must be stitched together from published sermons and brief articles. He outlined a by-now-familiar position: there were races before Adam and Eve, and hence, all people on earth are not their descendants. However, in discussing the Pre-Adamites, Comparet gave older views a somewhat novel twist in suggesting that a satanic race was among them. The “serpent race” did not begin with Cain; rather, the serpent himself was one of its members. This position resembles that of Charles Carroll and some other earlier racists, who believed the serpent was a black Pre-Adamite. Like other writers, Comparet tries to tease new meanings from the Hebrew word translated as serpent, although, like them, his ignorance of Hebrew betrays his reliance on the commentaries of others: “The word mistranslated ‘serpent’ is the Hebrew word ‘naw-khash,’ which literally means ‘enchanter’ or ‘magician’—and, no doubt Satan, still possessing angelic powers, was able to be an enchanter or magician.” As the passage indicates, Comparet suggested at some points that the serpent was merely a member of the satanic race but at other times that it was Satan himself who seduced Eve.8
Although casual in citing the work of others, Comparet so precisely paraphrased Davidson’s revisionist history of the Near East that his debt is clear. He had the post-Fall Adam migrating east “into what was formerly called Chinese Turkestan,” where Adam, Eve, and their descendants take up residence in “the Tarim Basin … identified as the site of Noah’s flood.” His reliance upon Bristowe seems equally clear when he asserted that “Yes, Cain is a well-known historical character, not found only in the Bible (but he is known in history under another name). He established an empire which extended from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, and even took in some of the larger islands in the Mediterranean Sea.” As to the Jews, they are “the children of Satan,” Canaanites and the offspring of Canaanite-Israelite intermarriage, augmented by Edomites, who took over the territory of Judah when the latter were deported to Babylon.9
While Comparet was prone to sketch out the Devil theory in brief sermonic statements, William Potter Gale sought to make a more systematic exposition in his 1963 booklet, The Faith of Our Fathers, as well as in essays and articles. Gale predictably traced sacred history from the Pre-Adamites through the Fall, the rise of Cain and his descendants, and the Jewish conspiracy. Adam and Eve were preceded by other races, “Asiatics and Negroes,” who had been created “hundreds of thousands of years and possibly millions of years before the two children of the Creator were placed in Eden.” By contrast, Adam and Eve, and therefore the white race, were created in 5500 B.C. But in fact, for Gale the “Adamic race” had a far older ancestry. The placement of Adam and Eve in Eden merely marked the point when they were “born into the flesh body on earth.” Here Gale overlaid the biblical narrative with a quasi-Gnostic myth of preearthly origins. In this preearthly era, Lucifer and his fallen angels fought a “great and mighty space battle” through the reaches of the universe with the forces of God, led by the archangel Michael. The battle between opposing spaceships led, of course, to Lucifer’s defeat, and when he and the other rebels had been defeated, they were “cast down,” falling from space to the planet Earth. These fallen angels deposited on a planet not their own were the nonwhite Pre-Adamites. Hence, Pre-Adamites are distinguished not merely by a general racial inferiority but by a primal association with Lucifer and complicity in rebellion against God, a heritage of criminality that predates the existence of humanity of earth.10
As to the Adamites themselves, Gale—like Davidson and such “Aryanists” as Renan—placed them in central Asia. Davidson, however, had distinguished between Eden, located in present-day Iraq, and the land “east of Eden,” to which Adam and Eve were forced to migrate. Thus Davidson had them travel eastward from the Euphrates Valley to the Tarim Basin, which would be the Adamite/Aryan home until the Flood. Gale passed over any distinction between the locus of Adamic activity before and after the Flood. “All circumstances,” he wrote, “point to the Tarim Basin, lying just east of the Great Pamirs, as the home land of the Adamites,” simultaneously identifying it as Eden and as the land the Adamites occupied subsequent to the Fall.11
But the Adamites were destined to a life of sin and retribution, for their Asiatic home was placed in the midst of Pre-Adamite peoples. Satan, seeking to thwart God’s purposes, caused the Adamites to “mongrelize … with the fallen angel line of people [i.e., the Pre-Adamites] who had lost their first estate.” The Flood, submerging only the land in which the Adamites lived, was the punishment for racial sin. Only those few—Enoch, Methusaleh, Lamech, and Noah—who refused the invitation to racial mixing would survive the Flood.12
But evil was present not merely in the person of the Pre-Adamites but more intimately in the form of Cain. As might be expected at this point in the evolution of Identity doctrine, Gale unambiguously attributed Cain’s paternity to the Devil: “Satan seduced Eve and she had a son by him who was named Cain.” Because “Cain was evil and not acceptable to the Creator,” he left his mother and foster father after the murder of Abel “and joined Satan’s hosts,” that is, became a member of the Pre-Adamite society formed by the fallen angels. Gale’s conception of a universe divided between the warring powers of God and Satan pushed him toward an anti-Semitism even more radical than that of his predecessors. Cain is the first “white Jew,” but even before Cain’s birth, “Satan had .. . mixed his seed with the pre-Adamic races, thus producing Asiatic Jews and black Jews.” “Jews” for Gale, in other words, are any people who contain the Devil’s seed, regardless of racial characteristics or religious beliefs. Nonwhites are therefore “Jews” by definition, the descendants of Lucifer’s minions with whom Satan intermingled his seed prior to the creation of Adam and Eve. Notwithstanding this expansive conception of the satanic “Jew,” Gale also understood “Jew” in a more restricted, quasi-biblical sense to mean a people who lived in Palestine during scriptural times.13
In his restricted, biblical meaning, Gale considered “Jews” Cain’s descendants who intermarried with Judah. Cain and his offspring were prolific “because they married often and had no morals.” Judah’s son by a Canaanite woman produced Shelah, who “was of the Mongrelized seed, some white from Judah and the balance of Negro and Asiatic mixture.” These so-called Shelahites were subsequently known as Edomites when “they were joined with the mongrelized descendants of Esau.” This group, clustered in southern Judea, was, in Gale’s view, the Jews as they first entered history. Gale distinguished them from the generic “Jews” (who included nonwhites) through the term “Yehudi.” In time, these Yehudi, following the bidding of Satan, “gained control of the money and wealth of most of the nations they had invaded.” From bases in Holland and Switzerland, they utilized financial leverage to infiltrate other European countries for the purpose of dominating “Adam’s family.”
The evening is slowly approaching as many children of Ad-am [sic] leave their original nations and come across to the new Jerusalem [America]. The new nation of God’s Kingdom and His people is to be founded during the evening hours with darkness slowly approaching. It will flounder in darkness for the period of time ordained by the Creator of the Universe. Then there will be a new dawn and a new day.
In Gale’s hands, the theory of satanic ancestry became the basis for a conception of the world and history that teeters uneasily between hope and despair but ultimately anticipates a millenarian salvation in which the war between God and the Devil, now transposed into a conflict between the children of Adam and the children of Cain, finally produces divine victory.14
Gale was not one to cite his sources, but he occasionally made respectful gestures toward “Professor Davidson.” But Davidson saw himself as a student of history, however bizarre his account might seem to academic historians. While Gale was perfectly willing to incorporate the work of Davidson, Parker, and others in the British-Israel tradition, he operated at the level of myth, where eternal forces battle with spaceships in a cosmic void and defeated angels take on earthly bodies. Then, when this evil multitude grows to fill the earth, the “Creator” sends his own children, “celestial beings,” to recapture the earth, initiating a new round in the war between good and evil. The figure of the Jew in this mythic portrayal is now totally dehumanized, a literal devil in human form, taking on a variety of racial complexions, infiltrating nations and institutions in a nearly successful attempt to undo Lucifer’s original defeat. So described, it is an adversary to whom no quarter can be given.15
William Potter Gale saw Wesley Swift both as a mentor and rival, toward whom he directed a stream of vilification and accusations (much of it after the latter’s death), most having to do with alleged financial improprieties and unfair competitive tactics. Nonetheless, Swift’s views were closely parallel to Gale’s own. Indeed, before their falling-out in the mid-1960s, they were close associates. Swift, however, was destined to have the greater influence. After his death in 1970, his widow and followers disseminated his sermons widely in pamphlets, cassettes, and as articles in the Identity press, which gave Swift’s message a distribution Gale’s never had. Swift also had the advantage of having been a member of Gerald L. K. Smith’s inner circle, which brought Swift to the attention of many rightists who were otherwise not inclined to patronize religious services. Since Swift eschewed systematic exposition, his doctrinal positions must be reconstructed from the fragments contained in his innumerable sermons and short articles. However, since so much of what Swift asserted closely resembled Gale’s ideas, we may move through Swift’s system more rapidly.
Wesley Swift’s view of Genesis differed only marginally from that of Gale and other Identity writers. Far from beginning with the creation of humanity, it is a racial text, as indeed is the Bible as a whole, “the Book of the Adamic race’ “written to the white people who constitute Christian civilization.” This white Adamic race was not, however, created on earth, but consists of the direct, spiritual offspring of God, who were created “before the creation of the solar system” and subsequently sent to earth, where they were physically embodied as the Adamic race, “the vessels for our arrival.” As to nonwhites, the blacks were “brought … in from other planets in the Milky Way” by Lucifer in the great angelic rebellion, so that the battle with God could be continued on Earth.16
The Pre-Adamites consequently had a nonearthly origin. They were allies of Lucifer, who originally lived elsewhere in the galaxy. Swift, like Gale, placed the Pre-Adamites within the context of Lucifer’s rebellion. The forces of Lucifer deployed “vast space crafts” against the space fleets of the archangel Michael. Lucifer’s crews were made up of the newly recruited blacks. Lucifer’s defeated fleet was driven into the solar system, where the surviving ships eventually crashed into Earth. This had the twofold consequence of introducing the Pre-Adamites and of transferring the cosmic conflict between Lucifer and God from the cosmos to the earth.17
The Adamites whom God embodied on earth to battle the Luciferians began as the Aryans of central Asia. Swift, somewhat more careful with geography than Gale, distinguished Eden, which he located on the Pamir Plateau in southeast Turkestan, from the area to which Adam and Eve were driven after the Fall, the Tarim Basin. There, before the Flood, the Adamites performed scientific wonders based on celestial knowledge. But much of “their knowledge, their wisdom, and their science” was to vanish in the Deluge, the price paid for race mixing with the Pre-Adamites. Far from the Flood ending the battle between good and evil, it simply shifted the struggle to a postdiluvian world in which the Adamites would be confronted not simply with the Pre-Adamites but with Pre-Adamites in combination with Jews.18
In furtherance of his designs, Lucifer seduced Eve, who begat Cain: “The moment that Lucifer brought about the seduction of Eve, the AURA or light emanation that surrounded this physical body departed from Eve, and later from Adam, and the very day the Aura departed, the processes which would maintain permanently, the structure of the physical body, and maintain Immortality, at that very moment when the Aura that connects the power of Spirit to sustain the physical body, passes off it.” Cain’s own children, “the sons and daughters of Lucifer,” “are the people you know today as Jews.” In general Swift asserted that Lucifer seduced Eve, destroying the primal couple’s immortality at the same time as he insured himself an earthly confederate. But he occasionally entertained another idea, namely, that when Satan’s minions fell to earth, they “intermingled” with its inhabitants to produce “un-assimilable” demonic offspring, a notion similar to Gale’s concept of white, black, and yellow “Jews.” Swift then designated Cain “the white one [i.e., devil],” who, however, would have been produced by Eve having had intercourse with one of the shipwrecked fallen angels rather than with Lucifer himself. At still other points, Swift combined the two ideas to declare that the Jews “are the offspring of Lucifer and the fallen angels which came with Lucifer.” Swift’s Jews, too, like Gale’s, are shape-changers, a generic form of evil with multiple manifestations: “The jews are Hittites and Amalekites and Canaanites. They are red, black, yellow, and brown, as well as off-colored white.”19
Notwithstanding the bewildering varieties of evil in Swift’s universe, he was still able to maintain a special place for Cain and his descendants. When Cain fled his homeland, he settled among the Akkadians, “a pre-Adamic race of people,” and “mongrelized himself” with them. Without explicitly referring to Bristowe, Swift nonetheless appropriates her notion that Cain “may well have become Sargon the Magnificent.” Cain’s followers and descendants—the Canaanites—become a major vehicle for “Jewish” infiltration of Israel. All Swift’s strands now come together in his version of the “Great Conspiracy.” Swift’s conspiracy is “Mystery Babylon,” the “great harlot” revealed by the angel in the seventeenth chapter of Revelation, with seven heads and ten horns: “And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stone and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations, even the unclean things of her fornication, and upon her forehead a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF THE HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.” Earlier generations of chiliasts, including Alexander Hislop, had identified the image with the pope, but Swift, like Conrad Gaard, linked it to Jews and their alleged financial manipulations. “Jewry has been the head and the manipulating force behind the system of Mystery Babylon .. . controlled and run by these descendants of Lucifer.” This cabal, wrote Swift, has used its financial cunning and power to control and enslave by economic means, but he foresaw an apocalyptic time when “the uprising of the peoples of the world” will destroy the conspiracy and “organized world Jewry” with it. “When Mighty Babylon falls, it will be the falling of the symbolic mystery system that controls all pagan religions and false theology, and philosophies, and economic manipulation—all parts of the Lu-ciferian kingdom, Great will be the fall of that kingdom” Immersed in the apocalyptic imagery of gold, abominations, and Lucifer, Swift, like the writer of Revelation itself, lapsed into an incantatory style in which words lose connections with their referents, and the very act of employing language appears to be an act of violence against a phantom enemy, an enemy the more feared for its very invisibility.20
In fact, little of substance separated Swift from his protégé, Gale. Their style suggests, however, something of why Swift emerged as the more influential figure. Gale, reflecting perhaps his military background, plods through tedious exposition, so that every nook and cranny of doctrine is illuminated. Swift, by contrast, races breathlessly although not always logically through a tangle of images. As has already been mentioned, neither was scrupulous about citing sources. But there is ample contextual evidence for their joint reliance upon Bristowe’s idiosyncratic account of Cain’s life as a Near Eastern potentate, and more concrete evidence that both were familiar with Davidson, even if neither cited him nearly as often as the occasions warranted. To Gale, he is “Professor Davidson,” whose pyramid studies establish biblical chronology as “authentic history.” Swift’s evocation of the Adamic cities of Takla Makan might have been lifted directly from Davidson but for a few changes of wording.21
There is circumstantial evidence of other influences upon Gale and Swift from outside the circumscribed domain of British-Israelism. Both Gale and Swift placed considerable emphasis on the nonearthly origins of the Adamic race, which was originally made up of purely spiritual “celestial beings” who were the direct offspring of God. Thus the physical form that “Aryans” presently take is deemed to reflect a relatively recent embodiment rather than their “true” nature, spiritual rather than material. Pre-Adamic, nonwhite peoples, by contrast, are “created beings,” brought into existence by God as a creative act, but not his offspring. In any case, their association with Lucifer’s rebellion has rendered them morally unfit. By utilizing these myths of origins, Gale and Swift added a strongly Manichaean aspect to the conception of Jewish diabolism, for the warfare between Jews and Aryans must now be set within a far larger struggle between God and Lucifer that began before the creation of the earth and will end only with Lucifer’s final defeat in the Last Days. While this concern with preearthly history is not in conflict with the British-Israel sources on which their theology mainly rests, it is a motif not found among Anglo-Israel writers. What might be its source?
One possible source lies in Mormon doctrine. The relationship between Mormonism and Identity is complex. On the one hand, Mormons also see themselves as Israel. Joseph Smith believed that many who converted to Mormonism were, unknown to themselves, blood Israelites, for some of the lost tribes had so intermingled with other populations that their descendants were scattered over the earth. As James E. Talmage, an apostle of the church, put it, “many of those belonging to the Ten Tribes were diffused among the nations.” Nonetheless, Smith and those who followed believed that the bulk of the ten tribes remained intact, somewhere in “the north,” and that in the latter days they would reemerge: “And then shall the work of the Father commence at that day, even when this gospel shall be preached among the remnant of this people. Verily I say unto you, at that day shall the work of the Father commence among all the dispersed of my people, yea, even the tribes which have been lost, which the Father hath led away out of Jerusalem.” “The leading of the ten tribes from the land of the north” would be a hallmark of the end of history. Smith’s teaching was consolidated before the development of British-Israelism, although he, like the Anglo-Israelites, followed the clues to the ten tribes laid out in the Apocrypha.22
Like Anglo-Israelites, Mormons place great emphasis upon the dispersion and eventual reemergence of the ten tribes. Where British-Israelites concentrated upon tracing migrations to Europe, the Book of Mormon described the journey of members of the tribes to the Western Hemisphere. Others of the tribes, however, had been dispersed, their Israelite origins obscured. Like British-Israelism, Mormonism too gives centrality to Ephraim and Manasseh, and many Mormons believe themselves to be lineal descendants of Ephraim, either by blood relationship or subsequent adoption.23
Mormonism, however, is free of virulent anti-Semitism. Jews suffered the penalty of exile as punishment for rejection of Jesus, but Mormons regard Jesus as a Jew and consider Jews to be part of Israel. Their preservation is considered essential and miraculous, so that the creation of the state of Israel became a demonstration of God’s action in history, “a harbinger of the great gathering which will involve the ultimate conversion and sanctification of the chosen of Judah.” This doctrinal framework has led James Aho to suggest that Mormons are resistant to Identity, despite the latterà similarity to Mormon beliefs about the lost tribes. Thus in Aho’s sample of 384 Idaho “Christian patriots” for whom religious data was available, 159 were “Christian constitutionalists,” whose right-wing philosophy omitted mention of a Jewish conspiracy, while 185 were considered adherents of Christian Identity. Sixty-five percent of the Christian constitutionalist group had been raised, and in most cases continued, as Mormons. By contrast, those of Mormon background comprised only 9 percent of the Christian Identity group. This finding was reinforced by the fact that Christian Identity respondents resided overwhelmingly in Idaho’s northern and western counties, rather than in the southeastern counties with large Mormon concentrations. Nonetheless, while Mormons figured less prominently than those of Fundamentalist background among Aho’s Identity respondents, individuals raised as Mormons seem far more likely to affiliate with Identity than is true of the American population in general.24
The possibility of Mormon doctrinal influence cannot be rejected out of hand. No direct evidence links either Wesley Swift or William Potter Gale to Mormonism. However, both lived in southern California, which had a significant Mormon population, including pockets of Mormon doctrinal schismatics. They may well have picked up and selectively appropriated some Mormon teachings or interpretations and, as non-Mormons, would have been unconstrained by the discipline of the church. Intriguing doctrinal parallels suggest that this may have been the case, particularly for the concept of the préexistence.
In Mormon teaching, every form of earthly life had a prior, nonphysical existence. In a revelation Joseph Smith received in 1830, God said, “And I, the Lord God, formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;… nevertheless, all things were before created; but spiritually were they created and made according to my word.” In one of Joseph Smith’s papyrus translations, God showed Abraham “the intelligences that were organized before the world was.” This nonphysical “first estate” of human existence came to be called the “préexistence of spirits,” in which “the souls of mankind passed through a stage of existence prior to their earthly probation.” The concept of the préexistence is echoed in later Identity sources.25
Wesley Swift’s very language strongly suggests some exposure, however partial and distorted: “Being born of incorruptible seed, is a process of the Father, by which you were begotten in the beginning, before even these worlds were framed.” Dan Gayman, pastor of the Church of Israel, asserted that major biblical figures in the Adamic line had had earlier spiritual lives, including Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and Sarah: “Our Christian Fathers were strangers to this terrestrial plane, having existed in spirit essence before time, to take on a flesh body in time” Significantly, the Church of Israel is an offshoot of a schismatic Mormon group, the Church of Christ (Temple Lot), with which Gayman’s father was involved. As Gayman moved closer to British-Israel and Identity teachings, direct Mormon associations were dropped, including the Book of Mormon, but it is reasonable to suppose that Gayman’s belief in the préexistence reflects his and the church’s origins. A slightly different conception of the préexistence appeared in the Aryan Nations’ journal, Calling Our Nation. Here, God decides to “manifest” a family of his made up of “Elohim” by giving them physical form. While these materialized divine beings may reproduce with one another, they cannot be born of unions with human beings of nondivine origin (i.e., interracial unions).26
By placing white origins in a purely spiritual préexistence, Identity establishes yet another contrast between Aryans and Jews. As the latter are considered lineal offspring of the Devil, so the former are the literal children of God. As the latter are trapped in the corruption of material existence, so the former are presumed to have a spiritual essence that remains even though they have taken on physical form. Indeed, once Identity had committed itself to the doctrine that Jews were not simply “of the Devil” in some metaphorical sense but were “of the Devil” biologically, it was essential to provide a doctrinally symmetrical account of Aryan origins. Consequently, the Adamites are conceived to be not simply “in the image of God” but to be his literal children. Not only did the belief in Aryan préexistence give whites a status as exalted as that of Jews was degraded; it also provided a theological basis for the link between two episodes of conflict between God and the Devil. In the first episode, which took place in the préexistence, Lucifer and his minions rebelled against God and the loyal angels, led by Michael. In the second episode, on earth during historic time, Satan continued the war against God and his people through the instrumentality of a Jewish conspiracy. Hence, Identity Christians can see themselves as participants in a struggle that began before the creation of the world and will end only at the end of time. This allows them to integrate their own racist and anti-Semitic activities into a conception of the cosmic struggle between the forces of light and darkness, elevating what might otherwise seem petty to a level of ultimate significance.
The satanic theory had been hammered together by the first generation of Identity leaders, principally Conrad Gaard, Bertrand Comparet, William Potter Gale, and Wesley Swift. By the 1970s, a second generation appeared, and while they generally acknowledged the contributions of their elders, they were prepared to offer their own elaborations and modifications. In light of Identity’s fragmented structure—made up of independent congregations, organizations, and publications—second-generation figures were free to chart their own courses. In this segmented religious milieu, what is surprising is not the degree of dispute but the extent of consensus. The number of Identity groups and writers is so large that it is impossible to fully describe the doctrinal positions of them all. Instead, the remainder of the chapter will be devoted to an explication of the positions of five representative organizations and individuals: Richard Girnt Butler’s Aryan Nations and the Church of Jesus Christ Christian; Jarah Crawford, an influential Identity Bible exegete; Dan Gay-man’s Church of Israel; the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, the religious communal settlement led by James Ellison; and, finally, by way of contrast, Howard Rand. The first four offer statements of the theory of Jewish origins that closely resemble the position first systematically articulated by Comparet, Gale, and Swift. Rand’s strong dissent reflects the now unbridgeable gap between organized British-Israelism (or what was left of it), and Identity.
In its creedal statement, Aryan Nations and the Church of Jesus Christ Christian state the Satanic theory in clear and unmistakable terms:
WE BELIEVE that there are literal children of Satan in the world today. These children are the descendants of Cain, who was a result of Eve’s original sin, her physical seduction by Satan. We know that because of this sin, there is a battle and a natural enmity between the children of Satan and the Children of The Most High God….
WE BELIEVE that there is a battle being fought this day between the children of darkness (today known as Jews) and the children of light (God), the Aryan race, the true Israel of the Bible.
From this acceptance of “serpent seedline” anti-Semitism, Aryan Nations writers have elaborated descriptions of the satanic conspiracy and its operations. George Stout, the Aryan Nations leader in Texas, attributed to the conspiracy control over “the world’s political movements through the Babylon system of banking, finances, and economics.” The Aryan Nations periodical, Calling Our Nation, has also offered frequent descriptions of alleged Jewish human sacrifice. These articles, often written by members of other extreme right-wing organizations, derive not only from the medieval literature of ritual murder but from Ellen Bristowe’s contention that when Cain organized his kingdom in Babylon as Sargon, he introduced a human sacrificial cult at Satan’s urging. Although Bristowe never suggested any association between Cain and Jews, the fact that so many British-Israel and Identity writers did has made it possible to assimilate her speculations to the older ritual-murder theme in anti-Semitic literature. Michael Hudson, director of the Christian Nationalist White People’s party, wrote in Calling Our Nation that ritual murder had been “originated in Babylon,” adopted by the Cainite priesthood, and “carried out continuously by the Jews for more than 2500 years … in the name of … Satan.” Calling Our Nation also reprinted an article that originally appeared in the periodical of the Lord’s Covenant church suggesting that Jewish ritual murder had begun in biblical times and was continuing into the present.27
Jarah B. Crawford, a former Assembly of God minister, is the foremost contemporary Identity Bible interpreter. His work, Last Battle Cry, is cast in the form of a “racial interpretation” of the books of the Old and New Testaments. Crawford found that all but five of the books—Letter of Paul to Philemon, Job, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah—have a hitherto unexpli-cated racial character, and in seeking to derive a “racial understanding” of the texts, Crawford found biblical warrant for the satanic theory. While his conclusions purportedly derive from scriptural passages, they in fact simply restate positions contained in the literature reviewed in this and the preceding chapters. However, since Crawford desired to link Identity beliefs with specific biblical passages, he regarded the idea of Satan’s seduction of Eve as based on circumstantial evidence. Nevertheless, “we are led to believe [by the text] that Satan seduced Eve. Eve then introduced sexual intercourse to Adam.” However circumstantial the evidence might be, Crawford has no doubts about Cain’s paternity: aCain was the Son of Satani Satan had seduced Eve and impregnated her with his evil seed.” In reaching this conclusion, he respectfully cited the writings of Conrad Gaard, not only on the matter of Cain’s father but to support his belief in the existence of the Pre-Adamites. Similarly, he explicitly relied on Bristowe’s account to settle the matter of the Pre-Adamites’ race (black) and the fact that Cain married one of their number. The Jews are “half-breed, race-mixed, polluted people not of God…. They are not God’s creation” Instead, they are “the children of Satan,” “the serpent seed line” that derived from Cain.28
Although Dan Gayman adopted positions close to those of many other Identity figures, his writings present perhaps the most elaborate theological discussions to be found in the movement. The Church of Israel’s Articles of Faith and Doctrine assert that a multiplicity of races was created at different times, with Adam as “the father of only one race on this earth, that is the caucasion race.” The law of God requires that races “remain segregated in the habitat given each of them by the Eternal God.” Satan placed his offspring on earth through the instrumentality of the serpent. Gayman has elaborated the notion of a serpent seedline in greater detail than has any other Identity writer. In a series of essays on the third and fourth chapters of Genesis, Gayman argued that Cain and Abel were fraternal twins sharing a mother but having different fathers. Because Eve had been “beguiled and deceived by Satan,” she did not realize that Satan had seduced her. She had released two ova, one of which had been fertilized by Satan and one by Adam. This, then, was the origin of the two seedlines. In support of the two-seedlines theory, Gayman went so far as to find medical evidence for its physical possibility, arguing that the different paternities claimed for Cain and Abel rest on a scientific basis. Specifically, he grounded the two-seedlines idea in cases where two eggs have been released or “a true ovum divides into identical halves,” each of which is then fertilized by sperm from a different father and develops separately but simultaneously in the womb.29
The consequence of the two seedlines is a relationship of continuing conflict between the satanic offspring of Cain and the Adamic descendants of Abel. More than most Identity writers, Gayman used indirection to identify the Jews with the serpent seedline. This may reflect difficulty in rejecting the Mormon position on Jews. In any case, Gayman’s conclusions are unmistakable. Thus, among the scriptural passages he cited as devices for tracing the seedline of Satan is the passage in Revelation 2:9 identifying Jews with “the synagogue of Satan.” He asks rhetorically, “If Cain were not the offspring of Satan, there is no basis for the age old conflict between Jews and Christians. Moreover, there are no reasonable grounds for the Jews themselves claiming to be from Cain. Why is the snake chosen as the symbol of the serpent’s seed in The Protocols of the Learned Elders ofZion.” In a like vein, he concluded that the Crucifixion proves that Jews are not Adamites, a position he regarded as having been conclusively demonstrated by the fact that a Jewish film company produced The Last Temptation of Christ.30
If Gayman occasionally utilized indirection in his argument, there is nothing approaching subtlety in the writings published by the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord. The CSA was best known for its communal settlement, Zarephath-Horeb, in southern Missouri, the most heavily militarized of all Identity communes. Its utilization of the theory of satanic origins is noteworthy primarily for the intricacy with which it was interwoven with a conspiratorial view of politics and history. As we have seen, most Identity writers who accept the belief in the Devil as progenitor of the Jews link this myth with a concept of the “great conspiracy,” a largely Jewish cabal dedicated to realizing the Devil’s designs. Nowhere has this linkage been more elaborately explicated than in CSA’s book, Witchcraft and the Illuminati, published without indication of authorship in 1981, but most likely attributable to the CSA’s leader, James Ellison.
CSA identified the serpent of Genesis not only with the Devil but with a Pre-Adamite black. The emphasis on an etymology for the Hebrew word nachash, linking it to “the Arabic words AKHNAS, KHANASA, and KHANOOS, all of which mean ‘Ape’” connects the exegesis firmly with Adam Clarke’s nineteenth-century Bible commentary. By making the serpent simultaneously diabolical and nonwhite, CSA made Cain both “serpent’s seed” and a black man. Cain also takes a black wife once he reaches the land of Nod. Since the “mixing of races always produces evil and chaos,” Cain is defined here as “the first JEW,” and the remainder of Cain’s line Jewish.31
To this point, there is little in the CSA view of the Bible to differentiate it from other Identity writings. However, a new note entered when the author linked the diabolical origin of the Jews to a theme favored in American nativist and right-wing circles since the beginning of the Republic, an Illuminatist conspiracy. Despite the fact that the liberal, Masonic order of the Illuminati had had an existence in Europe only between 1776 and 1787, it lived on in the minds of some Americans as a continuing conspiratorial threat to American institutions. This view of an atheistic, foreign fifth column enjoyed initial success among some New England Federalists in 1798-99, only to reemerge periodically among those in search of secret enemies. In the CSA’s version of the Illuminatist conspiracy, the plot is hatched not only by Adam Weishaupt, the Bavarian law professor who founded the actual Illuminati, but by the Rothschilds, who were seeking an instrument for Jewish conquest of the world. As the nineteenth century rolled on, according to the CSA, the Illuminati founded communism, worked out advance plans for the world wars, assassinated Lincoln and John Kennedy, and defeated the Mafia. This complex Illuminatist plot is heavily dependent upon the writings of a contemporary non-Identity conspiracy theorist, Des Griffin, who in Fourth Reich of the Rich outlined what he called (always in capital letters) “the MASTER PLAN”: “THE MEN WHO CONCEIVED THE DIABOLICAL CONSPIRACY AS LAID OUT IN THE PROTOCOLS, WERE NOT ATHEISTS. THEY WERE MEMBERS OF THE ILLUMINATI, FOLLOWERS OF THE ORIGINAL ‘LIGHT BEARER,’ SATAN THE DEVIL. THEY WERE WORSHIPPERS OF SATAN. THIS IS THE PLAN OF SATAN.” Although most recent authors have favored Bristowe over Alexander Hislop, Griffin relied upon the nineteenth-century account of Nimrod’s satanic cult that Hislop included in The Two Babylons. As a result, the Covenant, Sword and the Arm of the Lord adopts an interpretation of the Bible that has room for both Cain’s and Nimrod’s plots. Cain is the first Jew, but in some obscure way that is never clearly described, Cain’s machinations are reinforced by the Babylonian perversions of Nimrod and Samiramis as Satan’s plot continues to unfold.32
Witchcraft and the Illuminati can scarcely contain its excitement about all of this secret knowledge: “Only about 5000 people in the entire world know the true purpose of the Illuminati and its conspiracy to.rule the earth.” They know because they possess the key that allows them to unveil the true meaning of the encoded text of Illuminati plans, which turns out to be Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. Much of the rest of the CSA volume purports to be a decoding of the sinister plans allegedly contained in Rand’s best-seller. Among them is to be a plan code-named “Helter Skelter,” in which the government will stop all nonmilitary transportation while “an army of some 200,00 [sic] white prisoners and motorcycle gang members will create mass insanity in the streets by bombing church buildings, raping, murdering, and other fear tactics.” CSA reported that.”90% of the conspiracy plan has been fulfilled on schedule.” The components of the conspiracy include the “House of Rothschild,” a thirteen-member “Grand Druid Council,” “the 33 highest Masons in the world,” and the world’s five hundred richest families, all coordinated by a gigantic computer in Brussels. It is scarcely surprising that, having this view of the world, the members of the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord retreated behind their fortifications in the Ozarks.33
The Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord represents the furthest extension of the Devil theory of the Jews, with the most highly elaborated version of the “great conspiracy.” While all Identity writers do not, as we have seen, reach so paranoid a set of conclusions, they share a perspective in which evil is ultimately attributable to Satan’s seduction of Eve in the Garden, not in the sense of having introduced sin into the world, but by the act of fathering a demonic race. Only one figure, Howard Rand, dissented strongly from this view. Rand’s rejection did not stem from any philo-Semitism—indeed, his writings had been anti-Semitic for decades. Rather, it results from the fact that Rand was always more closely linked to British-Israelism than to Identity.
Rand rejected the idea that Cain had been fathered by the Devil. His periodical, Destiny, began to publish such views in the early 1960s, when Gaard, Comparet, Gale, and Swift were all active, and it is doubtless they whom Rand had in mind when he wrote that “there are those who undertake to suggest that when Eve succumbed to the serpent’s temptation, Satan became the father of Cain.” In addition to an essay by Rand himself in 1961, Destiny gave prominence to an anonymous two-part article in 1966 that purported to present “the undeniable truth” of the inferiority of “the colored races.” This material together constitutes a systematic statement of Rand’s position.34
The 1966 articles both cite and follow Charles Carroll’s antiblack tract of 1900, “The Negro a Beast” already discussed in previous chapters. While Adam and Eve lived a sinless life in Eden, “progenitors of the purebred Negroes … followed the chase in the Land of Nod.” Adam employed these “beasts of the field” to perform manual labor. As Carroll had speculated, the “serpent” might have been a black overseer Adam employed to supervise his nonwhite laborers. Like other authors who deal with this material, the unnamed writer of the 1966 articles struggles with the Hebrew nachash. He knows and cites Adam Clarke’s Commentary but concludes (as Clarke did not) that nachash was not a word for serpent but merely the name of “a highly intelligent beast of the field … a pure bred Negro.” Nachash became “a willing tool” of Satan’s in the latter’s “diabolical scheme to corrupt mankind.” As others had already suggested, Cain is made to take a Pre-Adamite black “paramour,” and the author strongly intimates that this “shameless crime,” rather than the slaying of Abel, was the reason for Cain’s expulsion and wanderings. The narrative follows Carroll in asserting that Cain was also punished by being made to remain with and marry his black mistress, and thus to father “humanoids,” “a mixed breed among the races of mankind.” Yet despite its ferociously antiblack tone, there is no suggestion that Satan’s role was anything but that of a corrupter, and no suggestion that Cain’s father had been anyone but Adam.35
This was in line with Rand’s own statement of a few years before that “the entire speculation about Eve’s seduction by Satan is preposterous and contrary to all known facts.” Rand too speculates on the meaning of the serpent’s Hebrew name, which he renders as nasha, and concludes that it means merely to seduce or deceive, implying mental rather than physical defilement. He accepts that Cain and Abel had the same father. Just as Satan was not the father of Cain, so his relationship with the Jews, wrote Rand, was “not… physical fatherhood but… spiritual fatherhood [by] the Evil One.” A virtually identical view was published two years after Rand’s article, in 1963, in the periodical of the Anglo-Saxon Christian Association of the United States of America, based in Portland, Oregon, which was probably an offshoot of the organization Rand had founded in the late 1920s, the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America. But by the 1960s, Rand’s formerly central role in the formation of an American Anglo-Israelism had given way to marginality, as he was displaced by the post-World War II generation of Identity preachers described in chapter 4. Rand continued to hew to the line that Jews had been corrupted by intermarriage with heathen peoples, had been cursed for rejecting Christ, and had taken on all manner of unsavory personal and communal traits, but nonetheless had origins that originally went back to the tribe of Judah. Unrelenting in his anti-Semitism, Rand nonetheless saw the Devil theory of the Jews as an outgrowth of invalid scriptural interpretation.36
While Rand attempted to maintain British-Israel orthodoxy, Identity had meantime passed into the hands of younger men who saw the British movement as an effete exercise in half-measures. For them, the Jews were necessarily evil incarnate, and the struggle against them, a cosmic battle begun “before the world was made” and destined to end only in the coming final struggle between good and evil.
To those like Rand who rejected the Satan theory, Identity—now with a firm sense of its own distinctiveness—was prepared to respond in kind. While few were willing, as one correspondent to an Identity publication put it, to condemn British-Israelism as “tied in with Anti-Christ forces,” many were convinced that it was shot through with theological errors. Gordon “Jack” Mohr called it “misleading,” while William Potter Gale charged it with “serious theological errors.” Most important of these was Anglo-Israelism’s identification of Jews with the tribe of Judah, when in fact, Gale argued, “ALL of the white-Christian nations make up the ‘House of Israel.” He cautions, however, against blanket condemnation of British-Israelites, since “they are all anti-communist, opposed to the United Nations and are classified by the Jews as being anti-Jewish.”37
Others in Identity were not so charitable. Notwithstanding Gale’s suggestion that British-Israelism was considered “anti-Jewish,” an Aryan Nations leader warned that “those who follow after British-Israelism are generally pro-Jewish.” Tom Metzger, an Identity minister associated with James K. Warner before he joined forces with David Duke, labeled British-Israelism as “Kosher-Identity,” and warned that “our people must shun British Israel as the plague,” since it promotes a sense of common heritage among Jews and Gentiles.38
While some in Identity regarded British-Israelism as a partial truth, now outgrown, others viewed it as a rival. The latter were not fearful of the small coteries associated with the British-Israel World Federation; rather, the rivalry was with the one British-Israel-derived group that took sectarian form in America, Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God, a proselytizing sect free of anti-Semitism. Indeed, the End Time Revelation Newsletter warned that “Armstrong is reported to have Jewish blood and look at the lies he spread about the Anti-Christ Jews being Judah.” With the full demonization of the Jews within Identity theology, British-Israelism had come to be regarded as at best a quaint relic, at worst a source of error and competition designed to lead the faithful astray.39