Jews: This Is About YOU

[jordan179]

This is sort of an open letter to all the Jews in the world -- including those who were born Jewish but became something else (usually atheists) as in my own case.

When you see those mobs of demonstrators, in Western countries, condemning Israel's recent war in the Gaza, full of hate and (increasingly) willing to become violent toward anyone who

Comments

[jordan179]

Because the Jews stubbornly-adhered to their religion when caught between two great forces -- Christianity and Islam -- each of which defined itself in terms of its religion. Nowadays, Christianity has become tolerant, and it is Islam which mostly hates the Jews -- while many Christians, fearing Muslim violence and foolishly imagining that pretense to sympathy with Islam will save them, join in the Jew-hatred.

Modern Muslim anti-Semitism is the creation of barbaric hatred; modern Western anti-Semitism of despicable cowardice.

[superversive]

Don’t forget the economic motive. Like the most nearly analogous diaspora, the overseas Chinese, the Jews have been generally successful wherever they have gone; they had to be, for they knew that some men profess to worship Christ, some profess to worship Allah, some profess to worship Brahma or Buddha, or Moloch for that matter; but all reserve a fair share of worship for the Golden Calf, and prosperity is the best protection against a multitude of afflictions.

In particular, mediaeval Christians hobbled themselves by adopting the Aristotelian prohibition against levying interest on loans; they also inherited the Roman contempt for trade, the idea that the best people were landowners with no other business but owning land, and that those who knew how to manage money were vulgar and inferior. So when they wanted to borrow money, they frequently had to borrow from Jews. It is sadly easy to whip up a fury of ‘religious’ hatred against persons to whom you owe money.

Thank you!

[baron_waste]

prosperity is the best protection against a multitude of afflictions

- and THAT'S why I'm a Republican, stated in a nutshell.

[jordan179]

That's a very good point. And one affecting both the modern Right and Left when it comes to their attitude toward Jews -- both the populist Right and the entire Left hates Jews because they are bankers. And this hatred of bankers stems from a lack of understanding of time-preference in economics and hence of the function of a banking system. You see this in Vox on the right, when he rants about the international banking conspiracy; and in pretty much the whole Left.

[superversive]

Yup. And you see exactly the same attitude towards the Chinese, which is why I consider religion a relatively minor contributing factor. Vox has delivered himself of some rants against the Chinese that are on a par with the anti-Jewish tirade excerpted by our mutual interlocutor above.

[jordan179]

(*nods*) Sowell's pointed this out, and uses the term "middleman minority" to describe the Jews of the Diaspora and the Overseas Chinese. One can point to other groups, such as non-Jewish Syrians in the Classical Greco-Roman World, which occupied similar positions.

Ironically, Vox's hatred of Israel means that he hates the one country in which the Jews aren't a middleman minority, but are also the primary producers.

[superversive]

I am indebted to Dr. Sowell for his analysis of this matter, yes.

[gothelittle]

My father told me that Jews were greatly restricted in their means of trade and employment in Medieval Europe, but one of the few things they were allowed to do was to loan at interest. Fellow Christians couldn't loan with interest, so they just didn't loan at all.

So if you had a little money, you could loan it and make more, and you could make yourself rich.

If you didn't, you stayed poor.

My paternal great-grandfather was from a family so poor that his neighborhood was practically *where* the word "ghetto" came from, and my paternal great-grandmother was so rich that her family was said to transact and deal with the Imperial family itself. Both Jews.

Medieval usury

[ilion7]

"Fellow Christians couldn't loan with interest, so they just didn't loan at all."

Sure they did, they just did it hypocritically - this is where the mortgage (“death grip”) originates.

It worked like this: religious institutions - which, being outside the taxation systems, and constantly receiving fresh donations from wealthy persons hoping to buy favor with God, tended to be wealthy - wanted, as all rational beings and institutions do, to increase their wealth. But, they couldn’t openly loan their existing capital at interest. So, instead, they lent an aristocrat the money to buy a new property/manor … and until the loan was repaid (by other means than the income of that property), all the new income generated by the property was paid back to the lending institution.

Re: Medieval usury

[gothelittle]

Point is, the reason why Jews are known as bankers is that, for a long time, they could be either bankers or starving. It isn't because Jews actually necessarily have some deep and abiding need to handle lots of money. :)

Re: Medieval usury

[headnoises]

IIRC, there's also the way that Jewish communities usually had really good communication, and literacy. That meant you could do like the Templars (probably the other way around, but...) and be a chain of banks, not just the guy in ONE town who could loan money.