Anti-semitic, anti-immigrant

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri Nov 19 17:16:49 PST 1999


James F. wrote:
>Therefore, the dawn of capitalism was
>accompanied by the growth of anti-Semitism as the Christian
>bourgeoisie sought to eliminate the Jewish competition from
>occupations that had formerly been closed to Christians.

I think it is important to keep in mind how the emergence of capitalism transformed the character of pre-existing ideologies. I agree with Jim that competition is at the root of modern anti-Semitism. Thinking in this fashion allows us to explain anti-Semitism in, for instance, Japan & Malaysia. The pre-modern Japanese probably didn't even know that there existed a people called Jews (at least I'm not aware of any document suggesting such knowledge). During the 80s, I momentarily thought that the Japanese might replace Jews to a certain extent as a menacing face of foreign capital (e.g. Michael Chricton, _Rising Sun_), but this fear seems to have gone out of fashion after the beginning of deflation (except its goofy twin seems still stuck somewhere in the hard disk of Dennis R's computer).

Yoshie



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