Status Updates From Capitalism and the Jews

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Their new book portrayed the Hungarian revolution as a Jewish conspiracy, with some non-Jew figureheads…Interspersed w/ accounts of the confiscation of wealth by the revolutionaries & the replacement of Christian professors by Jewish intellectuals were reflections like: "A New Jerusalem was growing up on the Danube. It emanated from Marx's Jew brain, and was built by Jews upon a foundation of very ancient ideas."

If Jews were highly visible in the revolutions in Russia and Germany, in Hungary they seemed omnipresent.

Virtually forgotten today but widely resonant in its time was the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

Why is it forgotten today? Béla Kun's 133 day reign of terror with 31/49 commissars being Jews was no mere footnote. Might this have something to do with the ethnic makeup of the media?

…the pattern of Jew engagement w/ Bolshevism became dangerously skewed…Jews moved into important & sensitive positions in administration & bureaucracy. As a result, for many Russians, their first encounter w/ the new regime was likely a commissar, tax officer, or secret-police official of Jew origin..Their anti-Semitism confirmed, they now conflated the Jew-as-commissar w/ the age-old image of the Jew-as-deicide.

With so many Bolsheviks of Jewish origin in positions of leadership, it was easy to consider Bolshevism a "Jewish" phenomenon. And if Churchill, who was not anti-Semitic, could regard Bolshevism as a disease of the Jewish body politic, those who had long conceived of Jews as the enemies of Christian civilization quickly concluded that Bolshevism was little more than a transmutation of the essence of the Jewish soul.

From a society with a large agrarian sector in its early years, [the Jewish state of Israel] moved toward an industrial society and then to one in which services dominated. Manual labor, always a minority taste, lost its mystique. After 1967, it was increasingly performed by Arabs from the occupied territories; and after the first Intifada, by foreign guestworkers.

[To antisemites] the Jews' economic profile was not only atypical, but pathological. This view was not confined to Europe. In the USA of the 1920s, Henry Ford published his series on "The International Jew" in his Dearborn Independent, explaining that he was "only trying to awake the Gentile world to an understanding of what is going on. The Jew is a mere huckster, a trader who doesn't want to produce (…)"

If Jewish economic performance in central Europe in the late 19th & early 20th centuries was striking, Jewish economic success in the USA would eventually become equally remarkable..By the early 1980s, when Forbes magazine began to compile its annual list of the 400 richest Americans, Jews were conspicuously overrepresented. While comprising about 3% of the population, they made up 1/4 of the names on the list

Jews famously played a key role in 19th-century banking. Foremost among merchant banks was the house of Rothschild, with branches in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Vienna, & Naples. [Also] were the Bleichröders in Berlin & Oppenheim in Cologne. Perhaps more important was the role of Jews in founding commercial banks…Jews helped establish 2 of the 3 largest German banks of this sort, as well as their French counterpart.

[Some] Jews applied their entrepreneurism to vice…In late 19th & early 20th cent., extreme poverty of eastern European Jewry + international migration led to substantial networks of Jews in sex commerce (pimps, prostitutes, & brothel owners)…During Prohibition, Jews were disproportionately active in illicit booze..Jew gangsters then invested their profits in gambling & played seminal role in [creating] Las Vegas.

Still, some broad generalizations seem valid enough. Talmudic law — which educated Jews continued to study and refine through the ages — was replete with debates about economic matters, including contracts, torts, and prices…Talmudic and halachic legal debates concerning commercial activity shaped the minds of generations of Jewish men, all of whom were expected to study the Talmud to the extent possible.

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Sombart's identification of the Jews with the elements of capitalism that he most deplored provided a scholarly patina for what was already one of the most frequent motifs of anti-Semites in Germany, as in Britain and France, who held the Jews responsible for everything they despised about capitalism and the modern world.

In his writings & in historical references scattered through his works, Voltaire not only characterized contemporary Jews as avaricious usurers, but attributed these characteristics to Jews through the ages, beginning w/ the biblical Hebrews..Jewish greed & usury appeared as ongoing, racial characteristics..In addition to picturing Jews as usurers, he frequently portrayed them as dishonest in their economic dealings.

So closely was the reviled practice of usury identified w/ the Jews that St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the leader of the Cistercians, in the mid-12th century referred to the taking of usury as "Jewing", & chastised Christian moneylenders as "baptized Jews."..In central Europe, Christian moneylenders were disparaged as Kristen-Juden, and in the 16th century were chastised as wielders of the "Jews' skewer" of usury.

Of all forms of commerce, none was so reviled as finance, making money from money. Aristotle regarded the lending of money for sake of earning interest as unnatural. He argued "usury is most reasonably hated bc one's possessions derive from money itself & not from that for which it was supplied. Money was intended to be used in exchange, not to increase at interest…this type of business is most contrary to nature."

For liberals, the reality of differential group achievement under conditions of legal equality is something of a scandal, an affront to egalitarian assumptions.

For Jews, Jewish economic success has long been a source of both pride & embarrassment. For centuries, Jewish economic success led anti-Semites to condemn capitalism as Jewish domination & exploitation, or to attribute Jewish success to unsavory qualities of Jews themselves. The anti-Semitic context of such discussions led Jews to downplay the reality of their economic achievement - except in internal conversations.