Jerry Z. Muller: Antisemitism and This Recession: The Dog That Didn’t Bark
[Jerry Z. Muller is a professor of history at The Catholic University of America in Washington, and author of the recently published “Capitalism and the Jews” (Princeton University Press).]
It was late 2008, and if ever the country seemed primed for a revived outbreak of the populist formula equating Wall Street with Jews and both of these with evil, this was a moment when the stars were aligned in malignant confluence....
Jewish anxiety was only heightened when, around the same time, the wave of publicity hit regarding mega-Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff. Here was a truly malevolent figure, a handy poster child for the abuse and fraud now seen as characterizing his era. Madoff seemed to have walked out of the pages of Der Stürmer, a personification of antisemitic stereotypes — avaricious, manipulative and deceitful....
But this time, the dog has failed to bark....
One can point to the fact that so many of the people who work on Wall Street today, from analysts to CEOs, are not Jewish. When the congressionally mandated Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission met last January and grilled the heads of the four largest (surviving) Wall Street firms, there was only one Jew among the interrogated: Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (The others, for the record, were John Mack, a descendant of Lebanese Christians; Jamie Dimon, a descendant of Greek immigrants, and Brian Moynihan, who one assumes is of Irish-Catholic stock.) Moreover, a random walk down Wall Street will confirm that an increasing percentage of its denizens are of Asian origin....
Despite these facts, Jews had good historical reasons to worry. The symbolic connection between Jews and finance has deep roots in the culture of Western Christendom.
In the Middle Ages, the lending of money for interest was regarded as abhorrent and parasitic — a set of associations based upon biblical verses combined with Aristotle’s condemnation of money lending as unnatural. Nevertheless, money lending was recognized as a necessary function, and one in which people were not likely to engage without receiving returns. So, the odious activity of money lending was left to the Jews. They were a people already stigmatized in Christianity for the moral blindness inherent (as the church saw it) in their failure to recognize Jesus as the messiah.
Western Christendom’s condemnation of usury — the lending of money at interest — jibed with the popular perception of peasants and laborers that only those whose work produced sweat were truly productive. This, of course, ignored the role of mental activity in economic production, activities such as the calculation of risk, or resourcefulness in discovering economic opportunity in overlooked tastes and markets....
To be sure, many Americans suspect that Jews are richer and more professionally successful, on average, than non-Jewish Americans. And they are right. But unlike some national cultures, Americans today tend to value professional and economic success. Cultures that tend to resent the economically successful, either as an affront to equality or on the implicit assumption that the economic gains of some must be at the expense of others, tend to be more hostile toward Jews, and given to conspiratorial theories to explain their economic success. But envy and resentment — the bane of democratic capitalist societies — are less powerful in the United States than in most nations....
And that, for those with a consciousness of history, is something quite noteworthy.
Read entire article at The Jewish Daily Forward
It was late 2008, and if ever the country seemed primed for a revived outbreak of the populist formula equating Wall Street with Jews and both of these with evil, this was a moment when the stars were aligned in malignant confluence....
Jewish anxiety was only heightened when, around the same time, the wave of publicity hit regarding mega-Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff. Here was a truly malevolent figure, a handy poster child for the abuse and fraud now seen as characterizing his era. Madoff seemed to have walked out of the pages of Der Stürmer, a personification of antisemitic stereotypes — avaricious, manipulative and deceitful....
But this time, the dog has failed to bark....
One can point to the fact that so many of the people who work on Wall Street today, from analysts to CEOs, are not Jewish. When the congressionally mandated Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission met last January and grilled the heads of the four largest (surviving) Wall Street firms, there was only one Jew among the interrogated: Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (The others, for the record, were John Mack, a descendant of Lebanese Christians; Jamie Dimon, a descendant of Greek immigrants, and Brian Moynihan, who one assumes is of Irish-Catholic stock.) Moreover, a random walk down Wall Street will confirm that an increasing percentage of its denizens are of Asian origin....
Despite these facts, Jews had good historical reasons to worry. The symbolic connection between Jews and finance has deep roots in the culture of Western Christendom.
In the Middle Ages, the lending of money for interest was regarded as abhorrent and parasitic — a set of associations based upon biblical verses combined with Aristotle’s condemnation of money lending as unnatural. Nevertheless, money lending was recognized as a necessary function, and one in which people were not likely to engage without receiving returns. So, the odious activity of money lending was left to the Jews. They were a people already stigmatized in Christianity for the moral blindness inherent (as the church saw it) in their failure to recognize Jesus as the messiah.
Western Christendom’s condemnation of usury — the lending of money at interest — jibed with the popular perception of peasants and laborers that only those whose work produced sweat were truly productive. This, of course, ignored the role of mental activity in economic production, activities such as the calculation of risk, or resourcefulness in discovering economic opportunity in overlooked tastes and markets....
To be sure, many Americans suspect that Jews are richer and more professionally successful, on average, than non-Jewish Americans. And they are right. But unlike some national cultures, Americans today tend to value professional and economic success. Cultures that tend to resent the economically successful, either as an affront to equality or on the implicit assumption that the economic gains of some must be at the expense of others, tend to be more hostile toward Jews, and given to conspiratorial theories to explain their economic success. But envy and resentment — the bane of democratic capitalist societies — are less powerful in the United States than in most nations....
And that, for those with a consciousness of history, is something quite noteworthy.