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