Arthur Read’s Reviews > Capitalism and the Jews > Status Update

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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

[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.