41845358-Antisemitism

120 ANTISEMITISM
with the international Jewish Bolsheviks to destroy, enslave, and dominate by the
techniques of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The peculiar role of Jews
in the European economy and the historic myths that evolved regarding this role
ultimately sprang from the theological anti-Judaism promulgated by Christian
thinkers; these myths contributed decisively to the virulence of modern antisemitism,
which remains rooted in theology. Over the centuries since the earliest
Christian commentators, the image of Jesus’ “cleansing of the Temple” and the
expulsion of the money changers (Mark 11:15–19) have been used to condemn
Jewish business activity, contrasting the crass materialist mentality of Judaism to
the spirituality of Jesus and Christianity. The belief that the Temple worship was
desecrated by sordid trade and profiteering and that purity was restored by the expulsion
of the money changers became a leitmotif of our culture. 4
Without the theological reprobation, the Jew would have been a merchant,
banker, or property owner, normal and respectable, rather than wicked moneygrubber,
usurer, bloodsucker, and the like. “Historically,” wrote the French historian
of antisemitism Léon Poliakov, “the Jew’s theological function [as
deicide, and the like] preceded and determined his economic specialization.” 5
Condemnation of the Jews as economic exploiters followed from their theological
condemnation as a criminal people. Excluded from owning land and barred
from the crafts, medieval Jews first entered trade and then finance, economic
callings then considered repugnant. Reflecting on these developments, Heinrich
Heine, the nineteenth-century German Jewish poet, wrote: “In this way
the Jews were legally condemned to be rich, hated, and murdered.” 6
It has to be understood, however, as the great scholar of Jewish antiquity
Jacob Neusner has argued, that there is no such thing as the economic history
of the Jews, since Jews never constituted a single society and distinct economy.
Jewish history is too disjunctive to present it as having anything even resembling
unified, continuous developments that could possibly be presented as
economic history. 7 There are, however, what Neusner calls “the economics of
Judaism,” ideas about how economic activities should be conducted, technically
as well as morally, and these have great importance in general economic
history; of even greater significance is the role that has fallen to Jews as economic
factors, agents, and middlemen. Both categories—Jewish conceptions
of economic theory and practice and the Jews as economic actors—have given
rise to a plethora of myths and fantasies that are the subject of this chapter.
THE MIDDLE AGES
Jewish prominence or dominance in certain economic callings, at certain times
and places, has its origin in the Christian Middle Ages, when, as the great