41845358-Antisemitism

HOMO JUDAICUS ECONOMICUS
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story is one of poverty, famine, and pogroms; the tsars’ government, with its
official policy of antisemitism and economic discrimination, was a mortal
enemy bent, at its most benign, on the conversion of the Jews, whose only real
recourse was massive emigration, especially to the United States.* Typifying
the Russian situation, a “moderate” government commission reported in 1888
that Jews “shirk state obligations” and dodge “physical manual labor”; “[t]he
passion for acquisition and money-grubbing is inherent in the Jew from the
day of his birth; it is characteristic of the Semitic race, manifest from almost
the first pages of the Bible.” 45 Some 650 laws, repealed in 1917 when the provisional
government emancipated the Jews, hampered their civic rights in the
Russia of the tsars.
Space limitations preclude an extensive account of Jewish economic activities
in the several countries of modern Europe. We focus on Austria-Hungary
and Germany, because it was in those countries that Jewish entrepreneurial
dynamism and creativity most distinguished themselves; and in those countries
also Jewish economic success was most thoroughly vitiated by antisemitic
myths and chimeras.
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY
Jews thrived in major cities of the Habsburg Empire, Vienna, Prague, and Budapest.
By 1850 they were preeminent in much of Vienna’s commercial and financial
life, including banking, railroad promotion and management, and stock
market brokerage. In 1859 the guilds were abolished, which, by extinguishing
* Jews fleeing the Russian pogroms 1880 to 1914 made their way far and wide and often
afford the historian striking examples of economic pioneering. One remarkable group
from shtetls (hamlets) in Lithuania escaped to British South Africa, where they settled in
Oudtshoorn, the center of the ostrich feather trade. Jewish enterprise began in the familiar
way as peddlers, “feather buyers,” trudging from farm to farm selling the usual
list of items in exchange for ostrich feathers. If fortunate, the peddler soon acquired a
donkey or a bicycle to carry the load, then a one-horse cart, a two-horse cart, an automobile,
then renting and finally buying his own ostrich ranch, then additional ranches.
Such was the story of “the ostrich king,” Max Rose, who arrived as a teenager in 1890
and, having improved productivity by irrigation and growing alfalfa, in a dozen years or
so became Rothschild-rich and built one of the huge, extravagant “feather palaces” in
Oudtshoorn, the “Jerusalem of Africa.” But with World War I, Ford’s Model T, and the
debut of the flapper, women’s styles and high fashion had no use for the flouncy “boas”
and extravagant hats decorated with the resplendent plumes. The ostrich ranches went
bankrupt, the “feather palaces” were abandoned, and most of these “Litvaks” (Lithuanian
Jews), by the third or fourth generation, migrated away, perhaps to pioneer other
ways of earning a living. See Rob Nixon, Dreambirds (1999).