When Victims Rule (pdf)

JEWISH MONEY AND ECONOMIC INFLUENCE
country in 1296, Jews were expelled from a number of cities, including
[BARON, Ancient, p. 243]
From the 15th century to the late 19th century Jews were also banned from
most of Russia as an inassimilable “alien people,” limited to living in an area
(with large numbers of other ethnic peoples) commonly referred to as the Pale
of Settlement. Jews consisted of about 12% of the total population of this area.
Joachim Prinz notes the difficulties faced by the French attempt to ban Jews
from all of France:
“In 1683, the French government insisted upon a general expulsion of
the Jews from France. Special instructions were sent to the authorities of
Bordeaux, which had a considerable community of Marranos [secret
Jews], warning them ‘not to expel more than a dozen Conversos [Marranos]
every year because if they are forced to leave Bordeaux, it would
ruin the city’s economy as the commerce is almost entirely in the hands
of that sort of persons.’” [PRINZ, J., 1973, p. 129]
Although modern Jewish apologists tend to stress Christian religious persecution
of Jewry, the much more vital reason for non-Jewish animosity, wherever
Jews were, was that Jews often formed strangleholds on important parts of
local economies, thanks to their centuries-old domination in commerce and
often “unsavory” business practices, as well as their clannishness and transnational
loyalties and allegiances to each other, always at the expense of non-Jews.
As Deborah Hertz writes, concerning Germany,
“Across the German-speaking territories, city councils, princes, and
emperors were besieged by complaints from gentile craftsmen and merchants
that Jewish business practices already had or would soon undermine
their livelihood.” [HERTZ, p. 37]
In Strasbourg, notes Howard Sachar, in 1806, Napoleon “was inundated
with anti-Jewish grievances, with accounts of the ‘ruination’ of the peasantry by
Jewish moneylenders. The petitioners begged the emperor to take special measures
against Jewish foreclosures.” [SACHAR, p. 44] Jews are often portrayed in
history as having been “forced into” their usurious paths. “It is self-evident,”
counters Abram Leon, “that the claim, as do most historians, that the Jews
began to engage in lending only after their elimination from trades is a vulgar
error. Usurious capital is the brother of commercial capital … The eviction of
Jews from commerce had as a consequence their entrenchment in one of the
professions which they had already practiced previously.” [LEON, p. 138]
The periodic consequences for Jewish exploitation of the impoverished
could be violent. The Jewish Polish scholar Yitzak Schipper believed that “by
the thirteenth century … the Jewish moneylender became the creditor of the
poor classes of feudal society. He came face to face with those who could least
140
1190 - Bury St. Edmund 1236 - Southampton
1231 - Leicester 1242 - Berkhamsted
1234 - Newcastle 1244 - Newbury
1235 - Wycombe 1263 - Derby