41845358-Antisemitism

166 ANTISEMITISM
Philippines. The Chinese who are scattered about Southeast Asia and elsewhere
fall into the same socioeconomic category and sometimes are called “the
Jews of the East”; they, too, are often calumniated as being “aggressive” and
“materialistic” as if they were all “rich middlemen” or “film magnates” of “unlimited
acquisitiveness” who displace the natives in a conspiratorial “silent invasion.”
The massacre of ethnic Chinese and pillaging of their places of business,
which accompanied the seizure of power in 1965 by General Suharto and his
ouster in 1998 in Indonesia, are reminders of the age-old hatred and envy of a
minority that is perceived as foreign and unduly privileged and prosperous.
Other examples of dynamic minorities include the Banians, a Hindu caste of
merchants and brokers in India for whom the Indian Ocean was what the
Mediterranean was for medieval Jews; the Parsees of India, who fled from their
native Persia when the Islamic Arabs conquered it and were renowned for a
thousand years in the East for their commercial sagacity and spirit of enterprise;
the Indians—until they were expelled in 1972 by Idi Amin—from
Uganda; and the Nestorian Christians in Egypt and Asia.
Each of these communities had several things in common: literacy, better
education than the host society, and links with the outside world. What appears
to be the key to the whole issue is education, or simply literacy, that fitted them
to perform economic functions that the host society could not, initially, perform
for itself. Until modern times most people, including some medieval kings, were
illiterate. Since the first century B.C.E., when a system of mandatory elementary
education was instituted in Judaea, Jews, in fulfillment of a religious obligation,
normally were educated. A medieval Christian exegete who sought to refute
Jewish interpretations of scripture nevertheless recognized that they prized education:
“The Jews, out of zeal for God and love of the law, put as many sons as
they have to letters, that each may understand God’s law. A Jew, however poor, if
he had ten sons would put them all to letters, not for [material] advantage as the
Christians do, but for the understanding of God’s law, and not only his sons, but
his daughters.” 109 Such education—he who “prays through study”—made Jews
profound students of Torah, Mishnah, and Talmud, but also sharpened their faculties
and equipped them to carry on economic operations. This tradition of respect
for education was put to great advantage in the nineteenth century by Jews
newly emancipated from the ghetto.
A related issue, implicit in Sombart but one that he was unlikely to pursue,
over which much mythmaking ink has flown, is Jewish intelligence. According
to the German publicist and diplomat Friedrich von Gentz
(1764–1832), “Intelligence—that is the mortal sin of the Jews.” The issue of
the “the smart Jews” was raised anew by The Bell Curve furor—that controver-