On Fri Jan 12 2001, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Max, the critique of finance as parasitic has very often been
> associated with anti-Semitic politics. Why is that?
I think it's because it's been sanctified by history. At the dawn of capitalism, when finance just meant lending at interest and notes in hand, and speculation meant getting information ahead of the others about disasters, being part of far flung diaspora that shared a secret language and bonds of trust was often a distinct advantage and other people resented it. (Mind you, this was a period when everyone thought ethnically about everything.) The Chinese in Southeast Asia were in the same position during a similar period, used it to similar advantage, and today suffer prejudice that is almost identical to anti-semitism in Europe. And more violent -- they suffer what Jews used to suffer before the holocaust changed the European mind.
I think the locus classicus of the theoretical association of Jewish character with finance is Werner Sombart's _The Jews and Modern Capitalism_ of 1911. But one of the interesting things about this book is that it was not considered anti-semitic at the time, either by the author (who at that time was still a socialist philosemite) nor by the Jews. A new English translation was made in 1951 by M. Epstein, who was a interestingly dissident Zionist. Zionism, as everyone knows, was highly influenced by voelkisch thought. The Nazis said every people is attached to a soil, and has the character of that soil -- hence the Germans, deep and dark like their forests, hence the Jews, rootless and rolling like desert plants, and well adapted to concrete cities. But philosemites like the younger Sombart turned this on its head and said, in essence, that Jews were the first cosmopolitans -- and that this was a good thing. And their attachment to money, as opposed to soil, was a sign of their ability to live anywhere and melt into any culture. Not being rooted meant not being stuck in the past.
And I think that in essence is what connects Jews and money in the antisemitic mindset. "Pure money reasoning" is invoked in many milieus when some familiar place completely changes for non-local reasons. And Jews are the ultimate non-locals, who the antisemite thinks of as against locality per se. From this angle, antisemitism is essentially a beef against too much change too fast, and against foreignness and foreign control. Or in other words, against cosmopolitanism, and against people who seem proud to be cosmopolitan. Like those fast talking Jews from New York, the financial capital of the world.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com