41845358-Antisemitism

HOMO JUDAICUS ECONOMICUS
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“judaizers”; it enforced the limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) racial laws, by
which Marranos were excluded from the professions, guilds, public office, and
the like—a severe blow to the Spanish and Portuguese economies that compounded
itself generation by generation. 31 The Spanish Jews who had been
expelled but remained Jewish and the Marranos wrote one of the most remarkable
chapters in economic history. Initially they fled mostly to the Ottoman
Empire, moving all over the eastern Mediterranean, to Istanbul,
Salonika and the Balkans, the Levant, and North Africa. With the establishment
of the Marranos in Amsterdam, the Dutch Republic became the center
of an interdependent commercial and industrial web meshing together those
areas, Poland, northern Germany and in particular Hamburg, England, and
such ports as Bayonne and Bordeaux in France, Italy and especially Venice and
Leghorn, the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, India and the Far
East, and, not least, the Dutch colonial empire. Almost everywhere they went
the Marranos and Spanish expellees rose to prominence in foreign trade, manufacturing,
and finance. Their geographical dispersion, common culture, and
ties of kinship enabled them to build up an efficient, close-knit, cosmopolitan
trading network, a kind of common market that afforded them credit, protection,
hospitality, local political news and market information, and the like.
Without fear of the Inquisition in tolerant Amsterdam, some of the Marranos,
who had been living secretly as Jews, shed their Catholic disguise and returned
to the Jewish fold. However, most Marrano families, particularly those living
in Catholic lands with the ominous presence of the Inquisition, lost all contact
with their Jewish heritage. Nevertheless, for many generations Marranos were
detested as crypto-Jews masquerading as Christians. Moreover, merchants and
craftsmen, resenting them as enterprising competitors, often castigated them
with antisemitic aspersions. The commercial success of former Iberian Jews
contributed to the myth, born in the Middle Ages, that Jews operated by deceit
and were taught to swindle Christians.
As of the thirteenth century Polish kings invited Jews to settle as an urban,
commercial middle class in a Poland that was and long remained an agrarian
society of nobles and peasants. The arenda (from medieval Latin, meaning “to
rent”) system enabled Jews to diversify beyond moneylending (initially their
main function and the primary motive of the kings in inviting them) to leasing
real estate. The Jewish arendar (lessee) had made his debut in the service of the
kings as collectors of revenues, taxes, tolls, customs duties, operating mines,
the mint, and other royal monopolies leased out to him. The agricultural
arendar managed land, forests, tolls, inns and taverns, breweries, distilleries,
tanneries, and the like for the king, municipalities, ecclesiastics, but especially