The moneyed class wanted a way to collect interest for their moneylending, but as “good Christians/Catholics” usury was Biblically forbidden. ‘Do good unto your brother in faith’ etc
Jews provided a convenient workaround for that restriction. And bigots spun that into a global conspiracy.
“Its not usury, if we call it interest because our God is a moron.”
Christians apparently.
All the Abrahamic religions have these hilarious workarounds, like just leaving your oven on all Sabbath to avoid using a machine
Yeah, that’s the part I never understood.
“Let’s make Jews only merchants and bankers”
“Why are so many rich persons jewish???”
It just shows again: being hateful disables your cognitive functions.
Sadly, one of the big takeaways here is that “christians cannot be trusted”. The catholics did it to them, and so did the protestants and I’d even say the russian orthodoxes, disguised as some twisted mockery of an atheist government that was the Soviet Union.
EDIT: anyone remember how Stalin studied to be a priest in the orthodox church?
This is not how it works. There is no much Jewish people being billionaire than from white or Christians communities. The medieval assignation to moneylender was not a privilege : this was a convenient way for Christians to get rid of their debt in killing every jews in town. This how big project have been financed, like cathedrals.
Furthermore, money is not influence or power, army and means or productions are. And Jewish were precisely forbidden to have both. So they could be threat by force or discriminate by laws.
Jewish are note the exception, the large majority of us are part of the work force. In the beginning of the 20th century, lots of the jewish proletariat is organized as such (like in the Bund) or in another organization (Anarchist, Bolschevik, Social-democrats). Not because there is “a plan” but because of the rise of nationalism (and the threat of pogroms) and because there more precarious than the majority of the workers (sometimes because of discrimination, like in the Yiddishland, or because their family have been dispossessed).
After WWII, the part of proletariat in the Jewisch communities plummet, because their where in first line during the extermination. Even before nazis, other movement attack our people, organization and struggles, like the Endeck in Polonia.
I understand that those posts are made to refute antisemitism, but those premises are wrong, and is part of the antisemitic propaganda
Did you just say the reason Jewish people are wealthy is because the holocaust killed the poor ones?
Paragraphs don’t make what you just wrote true.
Trying to make anti-semitism about workers rights is you trying to co-opt the very real persecution of a people for your own aims and it’s fucking gross.
I think he means the pogroms that used to happen when everyone owed the jewish bankers a bunch of money. Easiest thing was to drive them out of town or kill them instead of paying them back.
His comment seems mostly true, just bad english has his conclusion a bit muddled.
Please do not over interpret if you have not understand. I’m sorry if my English is not enough.
I began my post in saying that it’s wrong to said that Jewish peoples are wealthy.
I may not have underline enough how much the precarity threat Jewish communities before this period. In the Yiddishland (where Jews were forced to live in the Russian Empire ), workers earn the third of the wage of workers in France or Germany. 20% of people have to rely on charity to live. Saying that there is less precarity after the extermination is not saying that people are wealthy, or that this is a good thing.
It wasn’t that they were forced to work as money lenders, it was that their religion did not prohibit it whereas Muslims and early Christians were not allowed to charge interest on loaned money.
I mean, Jews were legally barred from most professions in much of Europe. If you can’t be an artisan, a retainer, or a peasant farmer, not sure how many more viable options there are for making a Medieval living.
So, you ban a group of people from most professions. You exclusively allow them to work in another profession. And, it’s a group of people that share a religion, so they intermarry and attend religious services together.
It’s a real mystery why so many of them work in the same profession, isn’t it!
Incidentally, this also explains why there are so many jews in Hollywood. Being a populist entertainer (like vaudeville) was one of the careers you could pursue as a jew in the late 1800s / early 1900s. When radio and movies first started, there were no incumbents who could refuse to allow jews into the business. Hollywood itself existed because it was a way to try to get out of the range of people trying to enforce Thomas Edison’s patents. I’d imagine it wasn’t just Edison’s patents that they got away from, but all the existing power structures that kept jews out of jobs.
You can be forced into a role by society and use that position to leverage privilege. Just look at the Irish becoming cops in the US
Doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive 🤷🏽♂️
