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September 17, 2010
Between a rock and a hard place
Some thoughts on Capitalism and the Jews, a recent book of four essays by Jerry Z. Muller.
EUGENE KAELLIS
Anti-Israelism has today become the leading expression of antisemitism the world over. Indeed, it is “respectable” enough to attract a significant number of (almost entirely radical leftist) Jews, who provide the ultimate “proof” that anti-Israelism is not, in fact, antisemitism.
While the earliest form of antisemitism was religious, based on alleged Jewish responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus and subsequent obstinacy to accepting him as “Redeemer,” times change – and so does antisemitism. With the growth of secularism in the West, the prevalence of this particular mode has significantly declined. Moreover, the Christian fundamentalist scenario now “favors” the Jews and Israel, whose survivors are scripted, after Armageddon of course, to convert en masse to Christianity.
In modern history, antisemitism has appeared in two major modalities: the Jew as cunning, exploitative capitalist and/or the Jew as scheming Bolshevik. These apparently contradictory approaches can nonetheless work in tandem or, defying logic, simultaneously. Capitalism and the Jews (2010) by Jerry Z. Muller of the Catholic University of America, discusses the relationship between the two and in doing so also provides an overview of the changing “styles” of antisemitism throughout the ages.
There is no doubt that Jews were, at least in the West, among the earliest practitioners of what has become the lifeblood of capitalism: credit. Scattered widely over Europe, excluded from occupations and the military and unable to own land, Jews settled in the cities where they had a community sufficient for such an elementary requirement as a minyan. And cities became the seedbeds of capitalism. Jews also flocked to more tolerant societies, which were also in the forefront of rising capitalism.
Jews benefited from widely separated contacts in other cities, sharing prescribed ethics and a common language, Hebrew, and were permitted to charge interest on loans to Christians. Moreover, they sought to acquire concentrated and transportable forms of wealth – gold and jewels, for example – in case they faced, with little notice, expulsion from an area, a frequent experience that favored local debtors.
Some historians attributed the actual invention of capitalism to Jews. Among them was Werner Sombart (1863-1941), a German economist and sociologist who disliked capitalism because he believed that it broke down traditional volkisch values (and its attendant mythical-racial movement). Sombart later became a Nazi, probably because, although Adolf Hitler maintained the capitalist system, he also supported a revival of medieval appurtenances, quite evident, for example, in the Nuremberg youth rallies and the emphasis on Gothic calligraphy.
Capitalism and the Jews attributes much of the early involvement of Jews with capitalism to their uniquely facilitating culture that was never scornful of wealth and pleasure, as long as the fundamental moral precepts of Judaism prevailed. In contrast to Christianity, most Jews avoid asceticism and accept – and embrace – their own corporeality, sexuality and life in the material world. However, at the time of the Judges, there were Nazirites, a monastic community of Jews who “signed up” for asceticism for a finite period (one month to seven years). During that time, they were abstemious and celibate, after which, they were required to re-join the broader community and resume normal lives. Later, there were the Essenes, who more resembled a community of monks but who never played a predominant role in Jewish religious life.
Judaism, moreover, imposes obligations on wealth; it explicitly prescribes philanthropy, and Jews have been among the foremost of the world’s patrons for public purposes. “And, if I am only for myself,” Hillel stated, “what am I?”
Judaism promoted knowledge and reason, as reflected in the talmudic method of posing questions and receiving not one, but many, often contentious, replies. This analytical and literate culture naturally favored the development of logical and perceptive thinking, which contributed to Jewish involvement in mercantile and monetary systems. Both require abstract reasoning: the ability to identify and evaluate suppositions in any business venture and then calculate the presumed degree of success.
While Muller doesn’t comment on them, it is useful to consider two cultural essentials for Jewish engagement in commerce and finance. The unfathomable nature of God provides the ground for thinking abstractly. Another essential factor in finance is assertiveness (not aggressiveness) in making deals. One can trace the thread of assertiveness at least as far back as Roman-occupied Judea, when Jews revolted twice, while early Christians were exhorted to “honor what is Caesar’s” and turn the other cheek.
Muller also treats the now-declining identification of Jews with communism. Certainly Jews were communists, often in inordinate numbers and in high positions, far in excess of their proportion in the population, but never forming a significant part of Jewish communities, whose members were, by and large, non- or anti-communist. Jews, because of their fervor, their education and their additional motivation, that is to say, fear of the lethal antisemitism practised by many of the vigorous opponents of communism, occupied top positions in the Bolshevik apparatus. They attracted a great deal of attention, particularly in the period following the First World War, when communist-led governments existed, albeit briefly, in Bavaria, Vienna and Hungary, and when German “Spartacists” attempted a Bolshevik-type putsch in Berlin. Jews were leaders in all these circumstances, an involvement that has to be seen as deriving, in large measure, from the overt and brutal antisemitism of such rightist political movements as the Russian Whites, German Stahlhelm, Hungarian Cross and Arrow, and the Romanian Iron Guard.
After the Second Word War, Jews, prominent in many Iron Curtain governments and eager to get back at rightist antisemites, unduly filled posts in the repressive apparatus of these regimes, thereby attracting still more hatred. After the USSR had consolidated its eastern European satellites and particularly after the state of Israel was established, Josef Stalin and, subsequently, of course, all the communist parties of eastern Europe, openly turned against Jews. Purges removed them from leading positions and, in some cases, were followed by imprisonment or death.
During this process, Soviet propagandists increasingly used code words like “cosmopolitanism” and “Zionism” for outright Jew-hatred, just as, today, anti-Israelism is a “respectable” cover for antisemitism. The month before Stalin died, he arrested nine Kremlin doctors, including seven Jews, and charged them with an organized attempt to poison him and other top Soviet officials. In an earlier analogue of anti-Israel Jews, at a large meeting of communist Jews in New York City, the speakers, some from the communist Yiddish press, were troubled, not by the antisemitism of Stalin and the Soviets, but by the alleged perfidy of the Jews. History soon showed their error and just how trumped up the charges were – a month later, after Stalin’s death, all the doctors were freed. This episode provided a dramatic instance in which Jews, in that instance, communist Jews, comparable to today’s anti-Israel Jews, internalized antisemitism and gleefully ran with the Red wolves.
Muller’s book provides a good overview of the changing “styles” of antisemitism, although his “capitalist-communist” approach touches on anti-Israelism only by the reader’s extrapolation. Anti-Israelism has become the new barometer for demonstrating “sensitivity” and “concern.” Ideologically, it has all the depth of a “style statement,” like blue jeans and Birkenstocks, and participation in the obligatory demonstrations against the G-8 or the G-20, or “who cares, man, as long as we’re out there doin’ our thing.” Today, antisemitism based on anti-Bolshevism has practically disappeared and prominent American Jews are now criticized for their (neo)conservatism.
It seems obvious that Jews should not have to keep looking over their shoulders to establish an identity and position for themselves favorable to demonstrably unsympathetic non-Jews. Racial minorities in North America and women now insist on defining themselves for themselves. Some Jews, prone to apologism or worse, can learn a lesson from them.
Eugene Kaellis is completing a novel, Purge, based on Josef Stalin’s systematic destruction of countless hapless victims in the 1930s. It will be available from lulu.com.
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