Mick Hartley

In the Middle Ages, Christian doctrine proclaimed finance and usury to be unsuitable pursuits for decent god-fearing people. Unfortunately, however, an increasingly mercantile society couldn't function without them. The solution? Bring in the Jews. They were already damned, and were largely unable to pursue other lines of work. Perfect. So began the saga of Jewish finance, and the roots of the antisemitic tradition of greedy bankers, the Rothschilds, honest workers against the shady money men, and all the rest.

Elyse Wien – When Finance becomes a code word for Jewish:

Not only were Jews the designated moneylenders of medieval Europe, many regions of Europe explicitly banned Jewish land ownership and craftsmanship. Such bans were prominent in Western and Central Europe, particularly from around the end of the First Crusade until the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when Napoleon extended citizenship to Jews in France. In many areas of Europe, including regions of modern-day France, Germany, Italy, and others, the Jewish populations were confined to living in ghettos, segregated Jewish quarters in urban areas, and were barred from living on arable land. While Jews were at times permitted to practice certain crafts, they were largely excluded from the powerful crafts guilds.  In many instances, the ban on Jews learning manual skills extended so far that Jews could not even be their own carpenters and architects. For example, the 16th- and 17th-century Jews of the Venice ghetto had to hire Venetian Christian architects to build their synagogues. Thus, Jews were prevented from engaging in what natural law adherents called productive labor and then castigated and penalized for not participating in such fields. Confined only to hated professions, Jews were then hated for practicing those professions.

The distinction between the honest toiling worker and the exploitative money men who steal the value of their labour received its badge of intellectual respectability with the writings of Karl Marx:

In his infamous essay, “On the Jewish Question,” Marx wrote: “The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner … because money has become a world power. … The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.” That is, in so far as Jewish people had found social or political acceptance, it was only because the world had become more perverse. The world was becoming one in which finance was less and less considered an unmentionable occupation for designated outcasts, than a standard, accepted profession. Finance was still a long way from the prestige that it would gain in the 20th century, but its growing normalization kindled fear and anger, much of which was directed into a growing body of anti-Semitic conspiracies. People whose lives were destabilized and impoverished by unscrupulous labor practices and unregulated technological change could pin their hardships on the twinned evils of finance and the Jews….

Throughout American history, key figures and political movements have divided the U.S. between two classes of people: rural farmers who support a decentralized government, and urbanites working in commercial and financial professions who favor a stronger national government. The hardworking lone agriculturalist known as the “yeoman farmer” has been an esteemed cultural figure since the days of Thomas Jefferson. Likewise, the Hamiltonian supporters of strong government and administrative professions are often cast as the “evil bankers in New York,” smeared in populist rhetoric as villainous manipulators of land and currency, corrupting a pure way of life and preventing “honest, hardworking” folks from making a living. The trope that there are essentially two forms of professions: honest ones that cause a person to break a sweat, and dishonest ones that exploit true labor, has not only survived since Aristotle, but remains a powerful force in popular culture and political thought, animating deep resentments while obscuring the more complicated, and less starkly moral, nature of work and economic production.  […]

Politicians who shy away from the politics of outrage can lack the emotional magnetism of a candidate like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, whose anger over injustices, real or perceived, is felt by voters as much-needed empathy.  But we must be wary of the populist style of paranoid political outrage because too often riling up a hatred of the “elites,” deployed as an emotional charge rather than a specific critique, leads to the demonization of Jews.

Hmm. Wien is writing in an American context, but I wonder if there are any lessons here for the UK, as Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party sits grimly within reach of power. The Palestinian anti-Zionist narrative isn't the only driving force behind left-wing antisemitism, after all. There are deeper roots…