Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

232 Laurence S. Mossvoiced popular concern about the unnecessary destruction of personal property ofthis helpless minority. According to Goldhagen, the published German reaction toKristallnacht regretted the “damage in the hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks” tostorefronts, inventories, and buildings that might otherwise have been redistri -buted to the “racially pure.” After 1938, the “unfolding eliminationist enterprise”took the form of brutal rituals of painful and humiliating deaths inflicted onEuropean Jewry by the Nazi party and their many willing civilian collaborators.The war against Europe’s Jews is the most startling and coherent effort of thiscentury to “ward off the calamitous influence of one race [the Jews] on the nationalcommunity [of Germans]” (Goldhagen 1996: 115).Goldhagen’s controversial thesis is that the culture of Jew-hatred was longestablished in Germany and permeated all aspects of German culture and thoughtprocesses years in advance of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. It was not Hitler andGoebbels that produced anti-Semitism; it was anti-Semitism that produced Hitlerand Goebbels. Of special interest for our purpose here is the claim that trading withthe Jewish population had the unintended effect of aiding a conspiracy that wouldsome day reduce the gentile population to economic ruin. This was certainly part ofthe so-called Rabbi’s Speech, which was first published in Russia in 1905 as part ofa larger work entitled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This book was a forgery,pretending to be written by a Jewish den of co-conspirators planning to dethronethe Czar and foreclose on the non-Jewish farms. The Czar’s supporters needed it toturn the peasants against the Jewish ethnic minority and divert attention away fromRussia’s economic problems and military defeats. It was a fabrication adaptedalmost paragraph by paragraph from an earlier French book published in 1864having nothing to do with Jews. In the 1905 Russian version, the Jewish conspiratorswere trying to undermine Russia by taking control of the economy. During the1920s, the fabrication was translated into several languages including French,German, and English. These publications fueled the anti-semitism that was socharacteristic of the times and culminated in the German Holocaust. At this writing(2005), new editions of the Protocols have sprung up in the United States, Japan,and the Middle East. It would all be laughable except that so many in everygeneration insist that this is evidence of the overall Jewish plan to take over themeans of production and enslave all others (see Cohn 1996: 42–3; Eisner 2005).The Protocols and the Rabbi’s Speech are actively consulted today by hate groupsaround the world. A recent republication of that tract in Japanese has roused upsuspicions about the Jews in regions of Asia where Jews had never settled (TheWeekly Post 1999: 1–4). In that infamous speech, the Rabbi supposedly instructs hisfellow Jews that:trade and speculation, two branches so fertile in profits, must never leave Jewishhands, and once we have become proprietors we shall be able, thanks to theobsequiousness and the shrewdness of our agents, to penetrate to the first sourceof real influence and real power. . . . The people of Israel must direct its ambitiontowards that height of power which brings esteem and honors. The surest meansof attaining it is to have supreme control over all the industrial, financial, and