An Alternate Form of British-Israelism at Ambassador College, Big Sandy, Texas in the late Seventies
By Neotherm
(April 20, 2008)
“The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky, seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”
-- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Introduction
One bright, hot afternoon on the University of Texas at Austin campus, I drifted over to the Perry-Castañeda Library. This was during the late Seventies and, at that time, I was a dedicated Armstrongist and believed fully in the Armstrongist version of British-Israelism, a belief that I now regard to be complete pseudo-history. I enjoyed looking, in air conditioned comfort, through the large collection of journals shelved at this extensive university library. As I scanned the racks, I was attracted by a teaser on the cover of a small magazine. The teaser had a familiar ring. I do not remember the exact wording of the teaser but it dealt with the subject of the identity of the Jewish people. I picked the magazine up and flipped through it and saw many more similar article titles. I thought I had found an information source that supported many ideas that I had recently been hearing within my church, the Worldwide Church of God, ideas that had not fully taken shape in my mind.
These ideas, that I had not fully processed, about the Jewish people came to me from a prominent employee at Ambassador College, Big Sandy, Texas. Because I had been thoroughly indoctrinated to believe that such people as this employee were in unquestionable and God-backed authority, I believed that he had originated a new approach to interpreting history and Biblical prophecy. I was surprised to find so many of his ideas already in print and felt, in my naiveté, that I needed to copy some of the articles and show them to him.
This pleasant discovery quickly turned to dismay. I only scanned the magazine and did not read anything in detail. But then I noticed something disturbing. Among these articles on the Jewish people was an article advocating Nazi philosophy. Also there was an article advocating certain practices among Native Americans. I knew that the Nazis had been enamored of the Native American warrior culture. I was appalled.
The magazine was entitled “The American Mercury”. It was originally created by H.L. Mencken and was a respectable magazine featuring important authors for years, but then veered off in the direction of anti-Semitism in the Fifties.
The magazine is now defunct but the crisis I confronted at that time is still with me, though now after all the years in a moderated form. What I discovered then was that a respected employee with a large student following at Ambassador College was advocating some ideas that I discovered to have connections with commonplace anti-Semitism. But Armstrongism, the religious philosophy that underpinned Ambassador College, was enamored with all things Jewish. Armstrongists carried forward significant amounts of Hebrew practice from the Old Testament into the New Testament. Armstrongists believed that Northwest European peoples were brothers to the Jews. Herbert Armstrong, the college Chancellor, had visited Israel and made donations to various Israeli causes. And Herbert Armstrong’s principal advisor, Stanley Rader, was a Jew.
The Proponents
I began to hear these ideas concerning the Jewish people, not from the pulpit, but in private conversations on the Ambassador College campus. Many fellow Ambassador College employees knew about these ideas and knew who the proponents were but were discreet in any discussion of this phenomenon. One employee I spoke with about this viewpoint and the men who held it, characterized the whole event, good-naturedly, as an innocuous eccentricity among otherwise people of good stature.
The principal advocate of these ideas was a respected and influential employee of Ambassador College. Most of the information I will relate in this article I obtained directly from him in private conversation. He will be referred to as “the proponent” throughout this article. A close associate of his in these beliefs was another well respected though sometimes controversial employee. Both of these men had roots in the South. I knew these men but will not reveal their identities because it not germane to the substance of this article. But there were other adherents whose identities I do not know. And I do not know how many of these people there were in total.
I believe that this viewpoint, had it become known to leaders at the Pasadena headquarters of the Worldwide Church of God, would have resulted in disciplinary action against these men. It is odd that leaders in Pasadena did not find out about this considering how efficiently and quickly truth and rumor were communicated through the organization of the Worldwide Church of God. Somehow this idea was effectively held covert. An alternative theory is that this idea was actually known in some quarters in Pasadena but its proponents in Big Sandy were shielded for whatever reasons. Researching this issue is beyond the scope of this article.
The Belief: A Variation on Armstrongist British-Israelism
A foundational work that supported this hypothesis about the Jews, for this small group of Armstrongists, was Arthur Koestler’s book entitled Thirteenth Tribe.[1] In this Koestler presented the idea that the Eastern European Jews stem principally from a people of Gentile origin called the Khazars, a people of Turkic origin. Wikipedia states the following about Koestler’s work:
“The theory gained further support when the novelist Arthur Koestler devoted his popular book The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) to the topic. Koestler's historiography has been attacked as highly questionable by many historians; it has also been pointed out that his discussion of theories about Ashkenazi descent is largely unsupported; to the extent that Koestler referred to place-names and documentary evidence his analysis has been described as a mixture of flawed etymologies and misinterpreted primary sources. Commentators have also noted that Koestler mischaracterized the sources he cited, particularly D.M. Dunlop's History of the Jewish Khazars (1954).”
The passage that reads “a mixture of flawed etymologies and misinterpreted primary sources” could be a description of the historicity of many articles published by the Worldwide Church of God at that time.
I learned of Koestler's book from the proponent, purchased a copy and read it. The idea behind the book, I recently discovered, had been around for a while and has an extensive documented history. Some British-Israelites had already appropriated this idea by the time I became acquainted with it in the late Seventies, and Wikipedia says this about them:
This theory was adopted by British Israelites, who saw it as a means of invalidating the claims of Jews (rather than themselves) to be the true descendants of the ancient Israelites, and was supported by early anti-Zionists.”
DNA studies have indicated that that the Ashkenazi Jews possess the genetic markers that show they are a part of the larger worldwide community of Jews. A larger Euro-Asiatic Jewish population may well have absorbed the smaller Khazar population. But the Eastern European Jews remained Jews. Contemporary accounts describe the Khazars as having red hair, light skin and blue eyes. I will not discuss the Khazar Theory since there is an easily accessible literature on this topic and because the claim the Eastern European Jewry is essentially Khazar ethnically is false based on DNA studies.
At one point and in my presence, the proponent asserted to an audience that he believed the Eastern European Jews to be descended from Ashkenaz because they referred to themselves as Ashkenazi Jews or the Ashkenazim. His proof was in this statement he made: “I believe that who you are is what you call yourself” or similar words. This overlooks the history of how Ashkenazi Jews acquired this name. The Jewish community actually regarded the people of Scandinavia and north Germany to be descendants of Ashkenaz and acquired this name from their association with these north European peoples. Yiddish is a variety of High German and it originated with this early association.
The proponent did not go into detail about this and at no point did he claim that the Eastern European Jews were really Gentiles in front of this audience. This conclusion would have to be deduced from what he said. There was no indication from the audience that anybody thought his statement was unusual or even understood what he was talking about or made such a deduction. But since I had already heard these ideas under discussion, I easily understood the subtext.
For the proponent, one of the pivotal concepts in his view was the Synagogue of Satan mentioned twice in the Book of Revelation. This group is described as being those who were false Jews – people who claimed to be Jews but were not. This group of false Jews was to be influential in the Last Days and was to have some connection with the true church. Specifically, these false Jews would be brought before the resurrected saints to worship before them as an act of vindication on the part of God. So we have a group that claims to be Jewish but is not, will be around in the last days and, importantly, will be associated with the church.
Taken as a whole, this represents a new version of British-Israelism. The orthodox Armstrongists version recognized the Jews as one of the tribes of Israel. Other tribes were scattered throughout northwest Europe and were to be identified with the Celtic and Scandinavian peoples and some Germanic peoples. In this model, the Jews were highly esteemed as one of the most important tribes in Israel.
This new version of British-Israelism regarded many Jews, the Eastern European Jews in particular, as Gentile. I asked the proponent about this. He thought that the Sephardic Jews were real Jews. Other branches of the Jewish people were not discussed. I also asked where the tribe of Judah was located in modern times. Most of the Jews I had ever met were of Eastern European origin. If the large population of Eastern European Jews was really Gentile, who were the “real” Jews? He stated that the tribe of Judah was located somewhere on the North American continent but what population segment could be identified as the true tribe of Judah was not discernible. In other words, the tribe of Judah was not comprised of the Mediterranean people we commonly identified as Jews but, rather, the Jews were a component of the settlers who came to North America from northwest European countries.
This view essentially removed the status that the Jews held before God and ascribed that status to the Northwest European peoples of North America. The people commonly known as Jews then were excluded from the House of Israel by this theory. It emerged in our discussion that this explained the difference in physical appearance between the Eastern European Jews and the rest of the “Israelites” of Celtic, Scandinavian and Germanic ancestry. The Jewish physiognomy was really a “Gentile physiognomy”.
The Khazar Theory could be put forward as a refutation of the current DNA evidence that indicates that the Northwest European peoples are not related to the Jews. According to the Khazar Theory, that would be an expected result, since the DNA for comparison was taken from people who were not really Jews. And the genetic profile of the Northwest European people would then become the standard for comparison for “Israelites.”
The Disconnect Between Belief and Practice among Armstrongists
There is a disconnect between what Armstrongists believe and, fortunately, what they actually do in some cases. When I was in high school, there was a student who went around threatening to beat up almost everyone he came into contact with. One of our coaches took him aside one day and said, “If you did even a fraction of the things that you threaten to do, you wouldn’t be in school for a minute.” There was a disconnect between what this student threatened and what he actually did and since he was a big, strong teenager, that was to the benefit of the student body. Likewise, there was a disconnect between what Armstrongists have spoken and what they have done and that is to the benefit of society. Some Armstrongists have advocated the extermination of indigenous peoples in North America, South Africa, Australia, Canada, Scandinavia and New Zealand. Yet they have not banded together with rifles and pistols and gone out to do what their White ancestors failed to do. Some Armstrongists believed that African Americans should be legitimately held in slavery. This is based on the idea that West African Blacks are descended from Canaan and were cursed to be forever a servant class. But these Armstrongists have not engaged in a concerted effort to reinstitute slavery. Armstrongists have espoused very hawkish and warlike American foreign policies but have never entered the arena of implementation by voting in political elections. In some cases, Armstrongist beliefs, even very strongly held beliefs, did not lead to action.
So was the Khazar Theory, as presented by the proponent, an example of this kind of disconnect between belief and action? Was the Khazar Theory ever actualized as genuine anti-Semitic behavior? Arthur Koestler made the sophomoric argument that such a theory could not be anti-Semitic because the Eastern European Jews were not Semites but Gentiles. A similar sophomoric argument would be made by the Armstrongists who hold this theory. They would assert that this was not anti-Semitic but rather the truth as revealed by the word of God and the annals of history. No doubt, none of the men who held this belief at Ambassador College would describe themselves as anti-Semites. Moreover, what is anti-Semitic and what is not is difficult to identify. The doctrine of British-Israelism officially published by the Armstrongist press could be viewed as anti-Semitic even though it implements a highly favorable view towards the Jews. But it might be regarded by Jews as anti-Semitic because it disperses the Israelitish identity among many peoples traditionally regarded as Gentile. It violates and undermines the boundaries of Jewish identity.
So this question will remain unanswered here. But it is easy to understand that, by some, the Khazar Theory would be regarded as intrinsically anti-Semitic. Others might argue that the theory must lead to action or it is just “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
The Political Milieu
An idea that I often heard espoused by many employees was that the Ambassador College campus in Big Sandy, Texas was always considered a favorite, among three Ambassador College campuses, of Garner Ted Armstrong. It is not clear if this was really so. In my years of association with the Worldwide Church of God, I never heard Garner Ted Armstrong make statements that would affirm this viewpoint in public. I only once heard him make a brief comment, laden with sarcasm, about another campus and that was the Bricket Wood of campus of Ambassador College north of London.
The view from Big Sandy, at the time that this idea about the Jews began to gain momentum, was that Garner Ted Armstrong was being challenged by Stanley Rader for the leadership of the Worldwide Church of God. The principal reasons for this belief are documented elsewhere. But what is relevant to this historical account is that Stanley Rader, judging from his Germanic surname, was an Ashkenazi Jew. Stanley Rader was felt, by many at Big Sandy, to have an inordinate influence on the policies and activities of the Worldwide Church of God through his close association with Herbert W. Armstrong.
So this new form of British-Israelism had current, political relevance. But at no time did I hear the proponent make an explicit connection between Stanley Rader and the theorized Synagogue of Satan. But I did hear him express dismay at the favorable inclinations that Herbert W. Armstrong had towards the Jewish people.
The Game of Constructing Theories
Constructing a theory is an interesting and imaginative exercise. It is armchair work. Demonstrating validity is what imparts significance and substance to the theory. And validation is the most challenging requirement and, in some cases, never seems complete. Albert Einstein pointed out, in effect, that a mountain of supporting evidence can be accumulated but a single, incontrovertible exception can cause the mountain to collapse. The DNA evidence for the Ashkenazi Jews is this single, incontrovertible exception to the Khazar Theory and invalidates this alternative construction of British-Israelism advocated by the proponent and his adherents.
One can demonstrate how easily a theory may be constructed. Let us theorize that the adherents of Armstrongist British-Israelism actually constitute the Synagogue of Satan. They are those who say they are Jews but are not. (The Jews regard all the tribes of Israel to be Jewish. Jewish genetic markers are not to be found among the English, Irish, Scandinavians and others who are “Israelites” as defined by Armstrongist British-Israelism.) They are Galatianizers. They have adopted many of the attributes of Judaism from the Old Testament. Like the Samaritans, who may have been the Old Testament archetype of the Synagogue of Satan, they advocate a mixed religion, a mix of Christianity and Judaism. They stand in opposition to true Christianity, referring to it as pagan. This small collection of facts is enough to construct a believable theory that Armstrongists constitute the Synagogue of Satan. The only fact that makes this concocted theory difficult to believe is that Armstrongism, with its waning influence in all quarters, would hardly have made it into print in the Book of Revelation.
Conclusion
There are a number of conclusions that can be drawn and observations that can be made based on this historical incident:
First, in an environment where the academic standards for what constitutes credible history are low, new and unusual interpretations of history may be easily constructed and introduced. Ambassador College was steeped in the pseudo-history of the Compendium of World History authored by Herman Hoeh, an early Ambassador College student. The Compendium was essentially a historical apologia for Armstrongist British-Israelism. But accepted pseudo-history does not form an effective bastion against the introduction of new, and sometimes alarming, pseudo-history. The doctrine of British-Israelism in the Worldwide Church of God of that day was not underpinned academically. So an alternative form of British-Israelism could easily be constructed and covertly espoused.
Second, the monolithic doctrine of British-Israelism, the essential pillar on which Armstrongism rests, seems unassailable within the Armstrongist domain. Indeed, it is difficult to see how this doctrine might be constructively modified from an Armstrongist perspective. But, in fact, it has been challenged sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly. Greg Doudna when he was a student at Ambassador College overtly proposed a modification to traditional Armstrongist British-Israelism but met with little success in getting the idea accepted.[2] In the case of the Khazar Theory, we have a collection of influential Ambassador College employees who covertly believed in a quite differently constructed form of British-Israelism. So the doctrine of British-Israelism, while never under formal review, was under informal review by some.
Thirdly, I would term this alternative view “strong” British-Israelism, as opposed to the “weak” traditional form of British-Israelism accepted by most Armstrongists. This is because strong British-Israelism accounts for issues that the weak form does not. The strong form, for instance, accounts for the difference in physical appearance between the Jews and Northwest Europeans. It also accounts for the DNA evidence indicating a lack of genetic connection between the Jews and the Northwest Europeans. Finally, it is racially much more focused and exclusivist. It focuses on Northwest Europeans as the only chosen people in history. In the spectrum of views on this topic, this view rests very closely to the views of White Supremacists who believe that the real Jews and, hence, Christ were Aryans.
Fourthly, is this revisionist viewpoint on British-Israelism still present or permitted in some Armstrongist circles? Is it regarded as a sufficient departure from accepted doctrine to constitute heresy? Is it regarded as anti-Semitic or something much more innocuous? Perhaps, this idea became extinct after it lost its political usefulness. On the other hand it may be perpetuated by its proponents as an alternative to traditional Armstrongist British-Israelism. This can only be established through further discreet research. It is unlikely that those who espouse this approach would do so openly.
Lastly, the idea that Armstrongist beliefs existed in a pure state is a mythology. New viewpoints on established beliefs originated within the Worldwide Church of God but there was no forum available for considering and assessing these viewpoints. A powerful criterion for considering any view on beliefs to be valid was that the view originate at the top of the church governmental hierarchy. Anything originating at lower levels was categorically wrong. So such viewpoints, when they developed, tended to be held clandestinely. Everyone with experience with the Worldwide Church of God understands that many small schisms and acts of dissent have occurred over the history of the organization. The Armstrongist leadership sought to crush these problems as quickly as they occurred. But here we have proponents of an alternate form of British-Israelism who were Armstrongists in good standing, influential and respected employees of Ambassador College, who formed a community of divergent belief. The question left hanging is how many other such communities of belief existed covertly then and now under the Armstrongist hegemony.
Notes:
1. Koestler, Arthur, The Thirteenth Tribe. Random House, 1976.
2. Doudna, Greg, Showdown at Big Sandy: Youthful Creativity Confronts Bureaucratic Inertia at an Unconventional Bible College in East Texas. The Scrollery, 2006, pp. 173-257.
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