We are proud to present the first translation ever of 'Tre Aspetti del Problema Ebraico', Evola's very first work on the problem of race, into English (1). As a matter of fact, it is the first translation of a racial work by Evola into English.

Outside Italy, and not solely by the Anglo-Saxon public, Evola is considered above all as a metaphysician, a philosopher, a traditional thinker, an esotericist, for famous works such as 'Rivolta Contro il Mondo Moderno', 'Cavalcare la Tigre', 'Gli Uomini e le Rovine', 'La Dottrina del Risveglio' and 'Introduzione alla Magia', all translated into most of the major Indo-European languages. In Italy, on the other hand, and to quote Evola himself in what may be called, for lack of a better word, his autobiography, 'Il Cammino del Cinabro' (Scheiwiller, Milan, 1963) ('The Road of Cinnabar') (2), things appear in a different light: "Many people in Italy came to know me only as the author of a book on race and the label of racist, not easy to shake off, was given to me, as if I hadn't turned my attention to anything else (...). In reality, I endeavoured to apply to the problems of race principles of a higher and spiritual nature ; this field, to me, was completely subordinate (...). Even in this field, I was consistent in my behaviour, and, in the context of the whole of my work, there is nothing that I wrote then that I would now deny". What those 'principles of a higher and spiritual nature' were, we shall see later on.

Evola's racial writing stretches over five years, from 1936 to 1941, and yet it should not be assumed that his interest in the problem in question suddenly began in 1936 to vanish just as suddenly in 1941. Traces of an Evolian racial doctrine can be found in his numerous collaborations with the paper Vita Nuova (from 1927) and with Giovani Preziosi's paper La Vita Italiana (from 1931), and, as early as 1928, Il Lavoro d'Italia published an article by him in which, while refuting the Darwinian evolutionist theory, he denied beforehand all the solutions that Rosenberg was to propose to the problem of race for his own country two years later in 'The Myth of the XXth Century'. Evola's interest in the problem of race can even be detected in some of the articles he wrote for the 'Ur e Krur' group, through his focusing on the concepts of elite, of hierarchy, of aristocratic nature and of Imperium. In 'Revolt Against the Modern World' (1934), to which the reader of 'Indirizzi per una Educazione Razziale' ('Elements for a Racial Education') and of 'Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza' ('Synthesis of Racial Doctrine') will be constantly referred, the spiritual categories put forward by Evola ('Olympian' or 'solar' race, 'Demetrian' or 'lunar' race, and so on), based on Bachofen's morphology of cultures (Patriarchal society/Matriarchal society ; Solar spirituality/Lunar spirituality ; aristocratic ethic/collectivist ideal) are imbued with racial considerations that are closely linked to a metaphysic of history, and, in 'The Doctrine of Awakening' (1943), the Aryan nature of the earliest and purest Buddhist teaching is the subject of a whole chapter, and the 'spiritual, aristocratic and racial meaning' of the word 'Arya' itself is repeatedly stressed.

Evola wrote four books on the problem of race, whose titles are all explicit; 'Tre Aspetti del Problema Ebraico' (Mediterranee, Roma, 1936 ; Ar, Padova, 1978, 1994) is the first of them ; it was published at the end of 1936, but it should be pointed out that its three chapters had previously appeared, over a period of a few weeks, several months earlier, in an Italian paper called Corporatismo Fascisto ; there followed in 1937 'Il Mito del Sangue' ('The Myth of Blood'), a work commissioned by the publisher Hoepli ('revised and expanded', again by Hoepli, in 1942, with thirty pages or so more ; Ar Padova, 1978 ; SeaR, Borzano, 1995), whose German edition, 'Der Mythos des Blutes', was published the same year by Mailand. Subsequently, Evola was asked to write the preface of the second Italian edition of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion', published by Giovani Preziosi in 1938, a year that saw the promulgation of racial laws by Mussolini, justified and made necessary by the ceaseless attitude of hostility, which can be evidenced by many documents, of various Jewish international organisations against Europe and the European peoples, and dictated, to quote Evola, by "the will to brace the sense of race and of racial dignity in the relationships with the indigenes in the new empire", as well as by "problems of inner, selective, cultural and ethnic nature" ('Mussolini e il Razzismo', in Il Meridiano d'Italia, December 1951).

Following these first Italian racist laws, two Offices of Race were created, one in the Ministry of the Interior, the other in the Ministry of Popular Culture, "which, to explain and define essential aspects of the problems of race, (proposed) to develop a programme of research and propaganda, whose aim is to reveal to all Italian citizens the features of the Italian race and exalt its millennial virtue", and, to this end, committed a small number of Italian academics to the task of determining the policy of Fascism on racial questions. The 'Manifesto del Razzismo Italiano' ('The Manifesto of Italian Racism') that emerged from this group the same year was published in the very first issue of La Difesa della Razza, edited by Telesio Interlandi, who, according to a scholar who studied Mussolini's views on the Jewish problem, was commissioned by the Duce, in early 1937, to launch a racial and, later on, also an anti-Jewish campaign through this paper. Evola started to collaborate from January 1939, with articles such as 'Metodologia Razzista - I Tre Gradi del Problema della Razza' ('Racial Methodology - The Three Degrees of the Problem of Race') and 'Razzismo di Secondo Grado - La Razza dell'Anima' ('Racism of the Second Degree - The Race of the Soul'), whose content prefigured that of some chapters of Evola's first organic work on the problem of race: 'Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza', which was published in 1941, again by Hoepli (Ar, Padova, 1978, 1994) ; finally, the same year, a collective lampoon, 'Gli Ebrei Hanno Voluto la Guerra' ('The Jews Wanted War'), to which Evola contributed a text called 'La Civilta Occidentale e l'Intelligenza Ebraica' ('The Western Civilisation and Jewish Intelligence') appeared, as did 'Indirizzi per una Educazione Razziale' (Conte, Napoli, 1941 ; Ar, Padova, 1994). Before going any further, we would like to emphasise that the term 'racism' in Evola's work must be understood as 'racial theory', as a theory of the hierarchy of races, not as an attitude of violent hostility against any given racial group.

After Mussolini read 'Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza', he not only explicitly authorised Evola to call the German edition 'Grundrisse der Faschistischen Rassenlehre' (E. Runge, Berlin, 1943) ('Synthesis of Fascist Racial Doctrine'), and, therefore, to present Evola's formulations as official Fascist positions, but also he invited him to collaborate with the Italian authorities to rectify some ambiguous positions assumed and spread by other Italian racial theorists, while supporting, to a certain extent, the initiatives taken by Evola himself abroad, initiatives that consisted in creating in Germany and, in general, in the Austro-German world, an aristocratic traditional front, which, in collaboration with the best elements of Fascist Italy, would have endeavoured to halt and neutralise the corrosive action of the forces of subversion, all of which, from their democratic and liberal to their Marxist components, were known to be organised and ruled by a secret and unitary Jewish and Masonic conspiracy. For this purpose, Evola reckoned it was necessary to awake consciences by unmasking the tactics used by the forces of worldwide subversion to achieve their goals and by drawing people's attention to the necessity of restoring as fundamental points of reference the root ideas and the myths related to the culture and the values of the ancient Roman Aryan and Nordic Aryan worlds: themes that he was to set out, analyse and explain during a set of lectures he gave in Germany and in Hungary in 1938, at the invitation of very exclusive German aristocratic circles to which he belonged and of representatives of the Conservative-Revolutionary movement with which he had spiritual affinities. He had already lectured in Germany, though, back in 1934, at a university in Berlin, at the second Nordisches Thing in Bremen and at the Herrenklub of Heinrich von Gleichen, an aristocrat with whom he was to establish a 'cordial and fruitful ' friendship, and it is most likely at that time that Himmler first heard of him.

It seemed, for a while, that this tour had borne fruit, since, from 1939 to 1941, much was said about a collaboration between Fascist Italy and the Third Reich in the field of political and racial policy, under the care of the director of the Ufficio per lo Studio del Problema Razziale nel Ministero della Cultura Populare and the head of the Ahnenerbe, Walter Gross, whom Evola met at that time, along with Rosenberg. Further developments in this area were thwarted, mainly, according to Evola himself, because of pressures exerted by Catholic Italian circles on Mussolini and representatives of the 'zoological' Italian racism. Specifically, this German-Italian collaboration should have given birth to a bilingual periodical (both in German and in Italian) publication meant to overcome the biological materialist reductionism linked with the Darwinian evolutionist theory : Sangue e Spirito (Blood and Spirit).

Let us permit Evola himself to sum up, still in 'Mussolini e il Razzismo', the situation in Italy at that time in this field, and, in doing so let us allow him to draw attention to one of his main reasons for focusing as he did on the one main point: "(...) The whole thing presented few satisfactory features. As a matter of fact, for such purposes, in Italy, there was a lack of previous serious preparation and specific studies, and racial theory was completely unknown to Italian 'intellectuals'. This is how the group that had drafted the 'Manifesto', and even the group of the contributors to La Difesa della Razza, came to seem so incoherent and unprepared. It was a mixture of some anthropologists of the old positivist school and opportunistic journalists and scholars who had turned into racists overnight. That is why the general impression was that of a dilettantism in which mere controversy and the slogan too often held the place of a serious and homogeneous doctrine: doctrine that would not have got bogged down either in biological specialisation or in gross anti-Semitism, but would have appeared in the form of a general vision of life, and acted as a politically and ethically formative idea. To a large extent, it was the not very favourable judgments heard abroad on the racial revolution within Fascism that induced me to devote myself to such material".

Modern forms of the theory of race, be they based on history, philology, biology, philosophy, anthropology or religion, were, as Evola pointed out repeatedly, filled with confusions, misinterpretations and ambiguities, so that, before he was able to reformulate them from a traditional point of view, he had to specify the true meaning of race, from first principles: "There are three ways to understand the theory and the very concept of the race: with reference to a reality, to a certain order of scientific knowledge and, finally, to a 'myth'. According to the first way, the awareness of the value of the race already shows in a set of norms that are discernible in the ancient civilisations, particularly wherever the system of caste and the law of endogamy were in use, norms that in part were continued until relatively recent times in the specifically aristocratic traditions. This was an un-theorised but practical racism. This is why the word 'race' can be very seldom found in the ancient world: people did not feel the need to speak about race in the modern sense, because people had it. People were mainly interested, if ever they expressed interest at all, in the mystical forces that appeared behind those of the blood and the gens: for instance, in the Roman Patrician and, in general, Aryan cults related to the Lares, the Penates, and the archetypal heroes. But the necessity of preserving the blood, of maintaining and transmitting in its integrity a precious and irreplaceable inheritance linked to the blood, was distinctly perceived. That is why, in several cases, the contamination of a given blood appeared to the ancient, traditional, man, less as an offense of a social nature than as a true sacrilege (...). The word 'anthropology' originally meant science of man in general, considered both from physical and spiritual points of view. It was with such a meaning that the term was used in the ancient world, for example, by Aristotle, and it retained this meaning also in some Western philosophical schools, until Kant. But in the development of Western culture a shifting of point of view gradually took place. People became more and more accustomed to considering man not as a unique being within the created world, to be essentially understood on the basis of his supernatural origin and essence, but as one natural species among many others. Anthropology thus ended up assuming a new meaning: it was not a science of man as such any longer, but of man as a natural being, to which classificatory methods similar to those of zoology and botany could be applied: it was a natural science of man.

"In this way, attention was to be more and more turned towards the corporeal and physical differences between human beings and the idea of there being several races of mankind gradually emerged, so that the idea of race became familiar and more and more definite in modern anthropology through various elements supplied by biology and genetics. Race, therefore, became a scientific concept, not to say scientistic: it came to be based on a knowledge of 'positive' nature obtained with the classificatory and experimental method.

"In the third place, we have race as a 'myth' - it is essentially in these terms that the idea of race took shape in Europe in the last quarter of the XIXth century, before it came to be part of renovating political movements, at first of National Socialism and then of Fascism. By 'myth', we do not mean a simple fiction, an arbitrary part of the imagination, but an idea that draws its force of persuasion mainly from elements that are not rational, an idea that is valuable above all for the evocative force that it condenses and, therefore, for its capacity to be expressed, finally, in action" ('Il Mito del Sangue').

In 'Il Mito del Sangue', Evola attempts "to show the genesis of racial theory, or more precisely, of the various themes in it, after having stated very precisely its meaning ; (...) the sources that have fueled the 'myth', the influences that have gradually contributed to its formation and assertion in contemporary history", while "sticking to the principle of the greatest objectivity". In the first place, the antecedents of racial theory in the ancient traditions, such as the polygenist theory and the Biblical monogenist theory, are mentioned ; in the second place, the doctrine of de Gobineau, as well as the three main components of modern racial theory (first, philosophical ; second, anthropological ; and third, philological) that were to be synthesised by this 'ancestor of racial theory', are examined ; in the third place, besides the theory of heredity, racial typology and the arctic myth, Chamberlain's theses are considered, in connection with the politicisation of racial theory and the part it had in post-war pan-German ideologies. Finally, the racial conception of history and the racial conception of law are presented, as well as the Jewish question, Rosenberg's 'new myth of blood' and Hitler's racism.

And, as Evola himself mentions in the introduction to 'Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza' three years later, "the general opinion is that this account is one of the most comprehensive ever written so far on the matter in Italy". 'Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza' will be "the second part, both critical and constructive, of 'The Myth of Blood'". In the introduction to it, Evola specifies the two main reasons that led him to conceive it. They are complementary: in the first place, the official incorporation of the concept of race into Fascism - and, in this connection, it must be be borne in mind that Evola considers racial theory as an 'instrument', a 'power' of Fascism, to be looked upon, not as a contingent element in the Fascist ideology and spirit, but as inherent to it ; in the second place, there is the fragmentation of the concept of race in a vast number of theories, all more or less biologically and materialistically orientated, their controversial and propagandist use, which, by inviting the critique of the adversaries of racial thought, weakens fascism. Hence the imperative of a  'comprehensive and coherent', 'really totalistic formulation of the doctrine of race', if Fascism is to be fulfilled. By 'totalistic', Evola meant that "'morality' had to rely on an active will, that is to say that, once the 'revolutionary' duty of integrating the Fascist doctrine has been entrusted to the 'idea of race', racial theory should rise above the level of a 'particular discipline' (of scientific nature) to the more general level of a 'mentality', thus penetrating 'all the cultural manifestations of a time" (Gian Franco Lami). More than this, 'totalitarianism' can represent a positive political system to Evola, depending on which type of state it refers to: "As a matter of fact, the total state is not only a creature of necessity of modern times. Any traditional state was total, dogmatic, authoritarian. But there are two different ways to organise in a totalistic fashion, in the name of spirit and in the name of matter, in the name of what is superior to man and in the name of what, as mere collectivity, is inferior to him and subrational. Such is the difference between the great Supra-States of solar and traditional antiquity and the Bolshevik ideal" ('Sulle Premesse di un Antibolscevismo Positivo' - 'About the Premises of a 'Positive Anti-Bolshevism', in La Vita Italiana, January 1937). Specifically, Evola shows, in the first chapter of 'Sintesi', that the doctrine of race is a 'revolutionary' instrument, in that, by reinvigorating national feeling and racial pride, it opposes universalism ; by substituting the organic value of personality for the Promethean ambitions of the individual, it fights individualism ; by going, through these values, beyond the paralysing antithesis of 'nature' and 'culture', it makes rationalism irrational ; by considering history, not as an evolutionary process of material nature, but as a spiritual involution, it invalidates evolutionism ; it undermines materialism and the 'zoological' racism it gave birth to, by showing that there is no pure race in the modern world and that 'the mysticism of  blood' is a product of a purely biological conception of race.

In the same way, the doctrine of race conceived by Evola is to be considered as 'totalistic' ('totalitario'): " The central thesis that I defended was, in short, the following one ", Evola explains in 'Mussolini e il Razzismo': "for man, the problem of race cannot be posed in the same terms, nor can it have the same meaning, as it can for a cat or for a thoroughbred horse. The real man, in addition to the biological and somatic part, is soul and spirit. Therefore, a comprehensive racial theory must consider all these three terms: body, soul and spirit. There will thus be a racism of the first degree, which addresses the strictly biological, anthropological and eugenic problems ; then, a racism of the second degree, which addresses the 'race of the soul', that is to say the form of the character and the affective reactions ; finally, as a crowning-piece, the consideration of the 'race of the spirit', which addresses the highest elements of the personality which, in regard to the general vision of the world and the beyond, destiny, life, action, in short, the 'highest values', differentiate and make men unequal. The classical ideal, racially interpreted, is the harmony and the unity of these three racial aspects in a higher type". To characterise these three racial aspects will be the subject of the second and third chapters of 'Sintesi', which in addition deal with questions such as those of natural races and superior races, of the race of the spirit as formative force, of the Hyperborean race and its ramifications, of the group of the Aryan races, of the superior race in the Nordic man and in the Mediterranean race, of the inner race and heredity, of the sexes and race, which last leads Evola to put forth the audacious concept of the 'race of man' and the 'race of woman', and, as a preamble to the exposition of the principles of a racial theory of the spirit, enlightening observations on the problem of birth are made in the light of the Buddhist doctrines of karma and dharma. To define and distinguish the race of men and the race of women is in fact the first of the prerequisites that Evola, when he proceeds from the theory to its practical applications, adopts as the principle of effective racial reform ; "to acknowledge the reality of something super-biological, super-corporal, super-rational" is the second prerequisite. If Evola fully subscribes to the prophylactic and defensive measures meant for protecting the race of the body from alterations caused by racial mixing, he goes further and speaks of an 'intraracial discrimination'. The idea is that a race comprises several bloods, that one of them is higher than the others and that a time comes when this race must commit itself to this blood, choose the spiritual orientation that corresponds to its vocation, while, within this race, each individual must also make this choice, for, just as, among races, there are individuals whose higher nature predisposes them to occupy a central and leading part in history, there are, in a people, on the one hand, the elite, spiritual leaders, models of racial perfection, and, on the other hand, the people, in which race fulfills itself to a greater or lesser extent according to the individuals.

Three main elements are to contribute to this decisive vital choice and to support this harmonious organic process of racial rectification: the myth and the symbol, conceived of in a traditional fashion as the reflection of a supernatural reality, are 'to galvanize and give shape to the emotional forces of a community' ; an 'austere' mysticism ; finally, a 'liturgy of power'. It must be borne in mind, however, that these conditions can only be met if an elite worthy of this name is in office ; to Evola, and this is a fundamental point, only a traditional state is able to provide the people with the means and the disciplines likely to spiritualise it, to lead it to a spiritual realisation according to the nature and the possibilities of each of its members. This elite Evola sees as an institutionalised one, as an Order.

'Indirizzi per una Educazione Razziale', which was published, right in the middle of a 'racial campaign', in a collection of pedagogic and didactic studies, develops and specifies even further the points of reference given in 'Sintesi' to achieve such a goal. As the title of the book shows, it is primarily meant for educators: "our duty in this small volume is of a very special nature: it is not a matter of abstract expositions as bases of a general 'instruction' or 'information', nor of exploring the doctrine in greater depth and detail, but of being more specific about the ideas - and even the 'key ideas' - needed by an educator to achieve, in the field of racism as in other fields, his true goal. Simple notions, but clear and saturated with suggestive forces, likely to act on the soul of the youngsters rather than on their intellect alone, so as to promote a certain formation of their will and a certain orientation of their highest vocations. The educator must always be fully aware, on this point, of the essentially political and ethical value that the theory of race must have in Fascism as well as in the Fascist school. He must fully realise the race in question is something very different from the one biology and anthropology could speak of until recently (...). True racial philosophy, more than a special discipline, is a mentality". Opposed to the narrow and distorted naturalist and biological points of view on race, Evola criticises and goes beyond them, referring in this connection to Clauss' 'psychanthropy': race, to him, is a specific mentality, a hereditary style, a differentiated way of being. A race must be judged, not from its physical exteriority, its somatic features, but from its psychic interiority. The body, that is to say the racial features, is the means and ground of expression of a psycho-spiritual reality.

Because Clauss thought that the psycho-spiritual dimension of man does not belong to the same level as that of his corporeal, somatic and biological features, he was accused of reintroducing the Christian dualism between body and soul, as opposed to the traditional tripartite conception of man as spirit (in the supra-rational sense), body and soul, which was precisely the conception revived by Evola within the framework of the racial theory he put forward. As Renato del Ponte rightly notes, "if however Clauss, keeping his examination on the psychological level, could avoid establishing a hierarchy of the various races, Evola, who begins to consider the spiritual values of each race and tries to delineate a typology of the races of the spirit, must necessarily place each spiritual type along the degrees of a hierarchical scale. Just as Clauss was right to assert that 'the objective value of a race could only be known by a man who would be beyond every race', Evola is right to assert the superiority of the 'solar race' over the 'titanic', of the 'heroic race' over the 'telluric': there is no contradiction between the positions of these two authors, since each of them applies his research to a different level. The level to which Evola's is applied, or, to express it better, what is new in it in relation to that of other scholars in this field, allows the human being to know the objective hierarchical differences between the various 'races of the spirit', for the simple reason that it is in the spiritual element of man that the universal principle lies, able to place him 'beyond every race' and to make him foresee the real hierarchy of the spiritual types. Such an objective judgment, obviously, psychanthropy could not give, because the soul, the psyche lacks an element that transcends the individual subjectivity".

In this connection, 'Indirizzi per una Educazione Razziale' contains as an appendix an essay on 'The Problem of the Supremacy of the White Race', in which some have claimed to see an anticipation of differentialist views on the grounds that, since, to Evola, the conformity or not to one's own tradition is the only valid criterion of superiority or inferiority for a given race or people, it follows that 'any race can only be superior or inferior in relation to itself'. Those who will have fully understood and integrated the premises of the doctrine of race built by Evola from a traditional standpoint will immediately realise that this relativistic view leads to an absurdity. Since the 'heroic race' as such is superior to the 'telluric race' as such, it follows, for instance, that, if, at a given point in a given historical cycle, a given relatively fallen 'heroic race' can be objectively considered as inferior to a 'telluric race' still consonant with its own traditional form, the fact is that nevertheless a given 'heroic race' still consonant with its own archetype will still be objectively superior to a given 'telluric race' that shows the same degree of purity towards its own archetype. In short, 'ethnic' differentialism just forgets about hierarchy, which, whether one likes it or not, exists, and, in this, it is the victim of modern egalitarian prejudices.

However, the fact that the Jews occupy so many key positions in both public and private sectors in most Western countries, to the point of being in real effective control of their economies and, through them, their social, cultural and political policies, not to mention their mass media, cannot but lead any serious lucid person, of whichever party, to wonder whether this could nevertheless be a sign of the inferiority of the white race, a fundamental question to which Evola brings a clear, straightforward, uncompromising answer in 'Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem', a work that condenses most of the considerations set out by him in fifty articles or so published, from 1936 to 1941, in several Italian papers on the Jewish problem, most of which an Italian publisher was astute enough to compile, in 1994 in 'Il 'Genio d'Israele'' (''Israel's Genius''). In this, the most accomplished text he ever wrote as regards Judaism, Evola considers the effects that ensue from this reality in the spiritual world, in the cultural world and in the economic and social worlds. In addition to this there is, in the articles, an examination of the destructive action of the Jewish people throughout history, the part it has played in the attack upon the Aryan traditional world, and, therefore, in the construction of the modern world. In fact, Evola knew how to outline a comprehensive framework for the Jewish problem, which he analysed from all possible points of view. He avoids lingering over anthropological and biological analyses and focuses on the spiritual dimension, from which any historical manifestation proceeds.

Evola notes and emphasises the fact that the Jewish Law and tradition is based on a unity, a unity that remains despite the composite and heterogeneous nature of the human materia prima."It is the Jewish Law that extracted from a chaos of ethnic waste the Jewish type and gave shape to it, essentially as a spiritual type" ('Sulla Genesi dell'Ebraismo come Forza Distruttrice', La Vita Italiana, 1941 - 'On the Genesis of Judaism as a Destructive Force'). This formative force, this common spiritual legacy guarantees the unity of Israel, despite its dispersion in time and space, as well as the persistence of Jewishness as a set of stable hereditary tendencies, as an indestructible specific instinct, whether the Jew remains faithful to the Law or grows away from it.

The Jewish Law is centered on the 'Promise' that Israel would be God's chosen people and would dominate all other peoples and possess their goods. Such a belief, which can already be found in the Old Testament, became even more pronounced in the Talmud, the Jewish oral tradition as interpretation of the Torah, whose violent expressions against the non-Jews are famous. The encounter with a world that denies the fundamental themes of the Jewish Law only reinforces the resentment of the Jew against peoples he sees as unjust and unfair. The Jewish Law thus only intensifies and legitimates the aversion to any non-Jewish people. "The Jew will sense in any society, in any regime, in any political organisation, an injustice, and, with respect to it, will always assert himself as a subversive, revolutionary or, at least, reforming element (...). Hence the high percentage of Jews, on the one hand, in movements with democratic, Masonic, humanitarian and liberal ideologies, and, on the other hand, in movements of Marxist, Communist and anarchist revolutionary subversion" (ibidem). And, on this antitraditional front, the secularised Jew, grown away from his Law and left to himself, meets with the religious Jew. As a matter of fact, the typical features of the Jewish people, far from diminishing in a Jew that has separated from his Law, become even more marked and his activity thus becomes even more corrosive for Aryan values, for, without law, he has no more norms. Those who pretend to criticise anti-Semitism by asserting that most Jews have no connection with their Law in the modern society are thus on the wrong track. The proof is that it is precisely the Jews with a non-religious background who are the most efficient representatives and propagators of internationalism, Communism, rationalism, and of any other ideology that constitutes an attack against form, difference, hierarchy and traditional spirit.

In addition to this there is the dualism between body and soul, a distinctive feature of the Jew, whether secularized or not -  a dualism that, as the preface writer of 'Il 'Genio d'Israele'' remarks, was passed on to a large extent to Christianity, to become even more pronounced in Calvinism and Protestantism, all 'lunar' beliefs, and that can be referred, in the last analysis, to a specific aspect of the feminine psyche. The incapacity to overcome this sterile and destructive dualism produces imbalances and contradictions of every kind, and, at the end of the day, it is the body, the flesh that prevails, leading to an abstract spirituality and a gross sensualism. Hence the taste for the assertion of the omnipotence of the law of flesh, of earth, of sex, of matter and gold. "To understand this inner situation means also to uncover the origins and causes of the nature that, almost without exception, is common to any sort of modern Jewish 'creation', be it in science or in economics, in literature or in music, in science of the religions or in psychoanalysis, in criminology or in anthropology, in law or in theatre, and so forth" (ibidem).

While the Jew faithful to the Law resents and cannot but resent the peoples, the non-Jewish peoples, who do not recognise Israel as the 'chosen people', and, for this reason, tends to do everything he can, consciously or not, to subvert their values and the social and political organisation based on them, the secularised Jew, again more or less consciously, driven as he is by race-old specific instincts, sees in the Messianic myth and the expectation of the Regnum an effective domination over every people. Israel offered all its faith to Yahveh and, as a reward, expects Yahveh to supply it with all the wealth of the earth, and this is how mercantilist principles get applied to the religious field. The second 'column' of Judaism is Jewish capitalism and the Jewish financial International, that found in the solidification, the materialisation of the modern world, to which it contributed by giving more and more power to economic factors and faceless and stateless capital, the ideal ground to develop its own instinct and to achieve its own goals.

Such were the premises assumed by Evola to analyse the undeniable Jewish problem in the larger context of racial thought in the 30's in Fascist Italy, taking advantage of a political situation that lent itself to such analysis. The spiritual climate, however, was not as favourable in later years to the development of racial philosophy and, within it, of anti-Semitism as set out by Evola, not to mention the fact that the war declared on 24 March 1933 by 'Judea' on Germany, the ally of Italy, did not precisely help to create a climate in which racial philosophy and anti-Semitism could have been examined in an objective and serene way, and that the course of war and, even more, its outcome were to frustrate any solution of the Jewish problem. Evola, throughout this process, remained always faithful to the Aryan traditional principles he fully endorsed, without ever lapsing into that gross racism and anti-Semitism he was the first to condemn: "On the plane of historical forces, I did not fail to show, not only the one-sidedness, but also the danger of a fanatical and visionary racism, even in the introduction I wrote for the new edition by Preziosi of the famous and most controversial 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion'. I thus indicated how dangerous it was to think that Judaism alone is the enemy to fight: I was even led to see in this tendency the effect of one of the tactics of this war that I called the 'occult war' ; to ensure that all attention gets focused on a part of the whole is the best way to divert it from other parts and to keep on acting without being disturbed".

We shall not go through the various critiques presented against the racial doctrine set out by Evola, both in the racist camp and in the anti-racist camp, at that time or since ; to the best of our knowledge, interestingly enough, they are mostly very similar to one another, and proceed, at best, from a selective reading, as it would not be difficult to prove, even as regards the so-called 'enthusiasm' that Evola supposedly showed in using the word 'Aryan' and as regards his supposedly mistaken use of the term 'anti-Semitism'. Let us acknowledge, however, that this use of the term 'anti-Semitism' as synonymous with 'anti-Judaism' can be ambiguous when one has not read Evola's racial work thoroughly or has not read it carefully enough. There is no question that the term 'anti-Semitism' should not be used as a synonym for 'anti-Judaism', since, if Jews are a Semitic people, not all Semitic people are Jews, obviously, as witness Babylonians, Assyrians and Arabs. Now, we do not think we are going too far if we say that Evola was fully aware of this, and maybe more so than those who accuse him of being guilty of an ambiguity in this connection, and not only a lexical ambiguity at that. To support this view, there is an article called 'Guerra Occulta nella Antichita - i Libri 'Sibillini' e il Giudaismo, La Vita Italiana, September 1939 ('Occult War in Antiquity - the Sibylline Books and Judaism'), in which Evola focuses on the ill-fated influence exerted by those Sibylline books throughout Rome's history, and, in particular, on the subversive occult action exercised by the various 'Asiatic-Semitic' Telluric and infernal goddesses and gods that were to be introduced into Rome under the pressure of the Sibylline oracles from 399 to 205 B.C.. "What was specifically Aryan in Rome took shape through a relentless struggle of the virile and solar principle of the Imperium against an obscure substratum of ethnic, religious and mystic elements in which a strong Semitic-Pelasgic component is undeniable and the Telluric lunar cult of the great mother goddesses of nature played a very large part" (ibidem), and the kind of influences coming from the Sybilline books were a product of this pre-Aryan substratum. Now, and this cannot be stressed enough in this connection, the fact is that Evola also refers to this substratum as being 'Semitic-Jewish'. What is more, and we have saved it for the end of this demonstration which is mainly intended to show how most of the critiques made of Evola's work are based on a superficial reading of it, Evola makes it clear right at the beginning of 'Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem' that, although "the term 'Semitic', as everyone knows, implies a far broader concept than the mere term 'Jewish'(...), we will deliberately be using it here because we believe that the 'Jewish' element cannot be, purely and simply, separated from the general type of civilisation that formerly spread through the area of the Eastern Mediterranean from Asia Minor to the borders of Arabia - noteworthy though the differences between Semitic peoples may be". A word to the wise is enough.

Anyone seriously interested in this question should take this into account, if they wish to even begin to understand what is going on at the moment in terms of occult war, especially when most people seem not to be able to resist the temptation to take refuge in all sorts of false antitheses, each one more sterile and paralysing than the last. To break free of them, to go beyond them, Evola's work gives the right points of reference, the accurate orientations, which are becoming more and more valid as time goes by and, to use an Hegelian expression he liked to quote to define the current situation, the night in which all cows are black deepens.

Now, it could be objected that Evola says in 'Il Cammino del Cinabro' that "after the second world war, (he) was to state the absurdity of stressing the 'Jewish' or 'Aryan' problem, from a higher point of view, precisely for the simple reason that the negative attitude attributed to Jews is now shown by the majority of 'Aryans', without the latter having the former's excuse of a hereditary predisposition". It is to the remaining minority that a text such as 'Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem' is addressed. Obviously, "it would be completely absurd to take up again today similar problems on the practical plane" (ibidem). 'On the practical plane', but not on the theoretical.

  "To react against one's own racial awareness, to feel in oneself a revolt against one's own ideas, means to prove oneself not to be in harmony with one's race ; to think that there is something ridiculous and 'scientifically' untenable about the Aryan and Nordic-Aryan myth means to create an alibi for a non-Aryan and non-Nordic vocation, that cannot but be related to the substratum of a corresponding race of the body, or, at least, race of the soul, in the person in question".

BK

(1) A Hungarian translation of 'Tre Aspetti del Problemaebraico' (Azsidókérdésrôl) was published in three parts in 2001, in issues 34, 35, and 36 of a magazine called 'Pannon'http://www.geocities.com/pannon_front/34/08evola.htm).

(2) 'Cammino" means 'walk', 'path' or 'way' in English, 'walk' in a sense of 'journey, the act of traveling from one place to another', 'path' in a sense of 'line or route along which someone travels', 'way' in a sense of 'itinerary, direction, journey', all of which, used figuratively, are able to assume a spiritual meaning. 'Il Cammino del Cinabro' could thus be translated either as 'The Path of Cinnabar' or as 'The Way of Cinnabar' or as 'The Road of Cinnabar'. It is the latter that we have chosen, for the following reason, which we see as decisive. In the entire work of Evola, when it comes to designating a spiritual behaviour, a series of spiritual acts turned towards an end and considered as a way that one wants to follow, that is to say, a path in the spiritual sense of the term, Evola always uses the Italian term 'via', rightly translated as 'way' or 'path'. The translators do this, for  example, in 'The Doctrine of Awakening' or in 'The Yoga of Power' ' ; i.e. 'the path of the right hand' ('La via della mano destra'), 'The path of the left hand' ('La via della mano sinistra'), 'the Buddhist path' ('la via buddista') and so on. The term 'cammino' is never used by him in such a context. Besides, the fact is that, while 'the path of the right hand' and 'the path of the left hand' are traditional terms for given spiritual paths, there is no such term as 'cammino del cinabro': the term 'cinnabar ('cinabro') simply designates the conclusion of the alchemical work, the marriage of sulphur and mercury, the elixir of immortality. This, with respect to what Evola said in 'Il Cammino del Cinabro' about having had 'to open a way on his own', leads us to a much more important question, closely related to the one of the translation of the title of this book into English: was this a new road that Evola endeavoured to tread ('cammino' also implies the idea of a constant sustained  effort)? Let us clarify this point: it is generally assumed that Evola followed the path of the left hand or the 'humid path', on the basis of 'Cavalcare la Tigre' and its largely autobiographical content. This is true only to a certain extent. In 'Il Cammino del Cinabro', Evola mentions that, in his youth, he reached a point where there seemed no other course open to him than suicide, before an early Buddhist text (Majjhimanikayo, I, 1) put him 'on the right track', and it was most likely tantric practices that led him for a while to consider suicide. By 'on the right track', we only mean: 'right' in his case, true as it it is that, according to Aryan Buddhism, nothing is negative or positive as such, but what can be positive for certain people can turn out to be negative for others and vice-versa. The reading of this Buddhist text acted on him as a revelation, and, from then on, he was to follow the 'dry path' practices, that, so to speak, came to balance his previous tantric experiences. In fact, Evola practiced both ways, and, if 'Cavalcare la tigre' may 'reflect my own way' ("The maxims and the orientations indicated in it are those that I endeavoured to follow in my life"), this does not mean that these are exclusively related to the path of the left hand, as any attentive reader of this book will have noticed. What he did follow, as he pointed out himself, was rather, if we may put it this way, a synthesis of both paths.

While we are at it, we would like to draw people's attention to the fact that there are two different editions of 'Il Cammino del Cinabro'. The first edition dates from 1963 (Scheiwiller). The second edition, enlarged, from 1972, still by Scheiwiller. The French edition of it, 'Le Chemin du Cinabre' (Arche Milano, 1982), appears to be based on the second edition.

Copyright © 2003 Thompkins & Cariou