From Amazon.com:
The unique historical relationship between capitalism and the Jews is crucial to understanding modern European and Jewish history. But the subject has been addressed less often by mainstream historians than by anti-Semites or apologists. In this book Jerry Muller, a leading historian of capitalism, separates myth from reality to explain why the Jewish experience with capitalism has been so important and complex–and so ambivalent.
Drawing on economic, social, political, and intellectual history from medieval Europe through contemporary America and Israel, Capitalism and the Jews examines the ways in which thinking about capitalism and thinking about the Jews have gone hand in hand in European thought, and why anticapitalism and anti-Semitism have frequently been linked. The book explains why Jews have tended to be disproportionately successful in capitalist societies, but also why Jews have numbered among the fiercest anticapitalists and Communists. The book shows how the ancient idea that money was unproductive led from the stigmatization of usury and the Jews to the stigmatization of finance and, ultimately, in Marxism, the stigmatization of capitalism itself. Finally, the book traces how the traditional status of the Jews as a diasporic merchant minority both encouraged their economic success and made them particularly vulnerable to the ethnic nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Providing a fresh look at an important but frequently misunderstood subject, Capitalism and the Jews will interest anyone who wants to understand the Jewish role in the development of capitalism, the role of capitalism in the modern fate of the Jews, or the ways in which the story of capitalism and the Jews has affected the history of Europe and beyond, from the medieval period to our own.
From Publishers Weekly: “In four fascinating essays, Muller (The Mind and the Market) sensitively examines how centuries of nomadism and diaspora have shaped Jewish financial life. Particularly intriguing is his essay The Long Shadow of Usury, which traces the roots of Jewish financial life to the time when Christians were banned from lending at interest, but Jews, following the law in Deuteronomy, were allowed to charge interest to gentiles (but not each other). Farmers and laborers could not understand the value—economic or social—of gathering and analyzing information, and Jewish usurers were cast as suspicious and parasitic figures. Muller explores why Jewish populations have been both disproportionately successful in capitalist societies and the system’s loudest critics. Of paramount interest is his portrait of a people driven by exile and oppression to emphasize strong social networks, self-sufficiency, and higher education. Muller backs up his bold assertion—that capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world—with elegance and care.”
“In his slim essay collection Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Z. Muller presents a provocative and accessible survey of how Jewish culture and historical accident ripened Jews for commercial success and why that success has earned them so much misfortune. . . . While this book is ostensibly about ‘the Jews,’ Muller’s most chilling insights are about their enemies, and the creative, almost supernatural, malleability of anti-Semitism itself. For centuries, poverty, paranoia and financial illiteracy have combined into a dangerous brew–one that has made economic virtuosity look suspiciously like social vice.”–Catherine Rampell, New York Times Book Review
“In four fascinating essays, Muller sensitively examines how centuries of nomadism and diaspora have shaped Jewish financial life. . . . Muller backs up his bold assertion–that capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world–with elegance and care.”–Publishers Weekly
“It’s a subject rarely given its due in respectable circles. Yet an appreciation for market economics does run deep in Judaic tradition and helps explain the prominence of Jewish bankers, from Mayer Amschel Rothschild to Lloyd Blankfein. In concise prose free of academic jargon, Muller ticks off factors that gave Jews what he calls ‘behavioral traits conducive to success in capitalist society.'”–Calev Ben-David, Bloomberg
“Muller, a noted historian, takes a fascinating look at how Jews have shaped capitalism and how capitalism has shaped the Jewish experience from medieval times to today.”–Fareed Zakaria GPS
“Muller is keen to rescue from apologists, ideologues, and anti-Semites the exploration of what he describes as the Jews’ ‘special relationship’ with capitalism. . . . This book is both scholarly and speculative, analysing the sociology and the anti-Semitic pseudo-sociology of the Jews’ participation in capitalism. It will not be the last word on the subject, but it is a genuine contribution to it.”–Anthony Julius, New Statesman
“A work of intellectual history. . . . Muller is acutely aware of the irony that Jews have been attacked sometimes for being the quintessence of capitalism and sometimes for being the quintessence of anticapitalism. The merit of his book is that it takes seriously the need to understand how historical circumstances bring this about.”–Robert Solow, Moment Magazine
“According to Jerry Z. Muller, professor of history at Catholic University, capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world. . . . Muller focuses squarely on the relation between them in four interlocking essays that explore, respectively, Western thinking about Jews and capitalism, the Jews’ own responses to capitalism, Jewish involvement in Communist movements, and the rise of ethnic nationalism that came about as a response to capitalism’s relentless march in the 19th century and onward.”–Steven Menashi, Commentary
“A model of clear thinking and useful information about how accurately to understand the long and complicated relationship between Jews, capitalism, and anti-Semitism. A valuable read.”–Ira Stoll, The Future of Capitalism blog
“In a 1972 lecture, ‘Capitalism and the Jews,’ Nobel laureate Milton Friedman presented a paradox: Jews ‘owe an enormous debt to free enterprise and competitive capitalism,’ he said, but ‘for at least the past century the Jews have been consistently opposed to capitalism and have done much on an ideological level to undermine it.’ According to historian Jerry Muller, Friedman’s paradox may make for a great headline, but it cannot be substantiated. Only the first premise is true–there is little doubt that capitalism has benefited Jews. And as Muller shows, there is equally little doubt that Jews have excelled at developing capitalism in the West.”–Guy Sorman, City Journal
“Taboos can’t last–and now, a real historian has broken this one. Jerry Muller, himself Jewish and a professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, has published a book of four essays, Capitalism and the Jews, that sets out to explain why Jews have enjoyed such exceptional success in modern capitalist societies such as ours.”–Tim Colebatch, The Age
“Muller, a historian at Catholic University, has given us four lectures on economics aspects of Jewish life in the modern world. . . . [T]hey are thoughtful and occasionally insightful.”–Peter Temin, EH.net
“Capitalism and the Jews is a work of scholarship, but it’s an especially accessible and illuminating one. It is a book that every Jewish capitalist, actual or aspiring, out to read and ponder.”–Jonathan Kirsch, Jewish Journal of Greater L.A.
“Muller (history, Catholic Univ.; Adam Smith in His Time and Ours), a well established historian of capitalism, is brave to tackle this subject, laden as much with the place of Jewish people in the markets as with the trappings and traps of anti-Semitism. . . . Stimulating.”–Scott H. Silverman, Library Journal
“A stellar work of intellectual history.”–Sheldon Kirshner, Canadian Jewish News
“A well-documented, historical investigation into an often hidden subject that the author makes easily accessible.”–Abe Novick, Baltimore Jewish Times
“If you want to understand why Jews have done phenomenally well in capitalist societies and at the same time have been some of capitalism’s harshest critics, this history will help you understand.”–Nick Schulz, National Review
“A great book.”–William Easterly, Aid Watch blog
“Jerry Z. Muller’s recent book is neither a polemic nor a setup for a bad lounge joke but is instead a compelling, sober essay about an elephant that has been sitting in the middle of Western history for the past two centuries at least: Jews have been inextricably woven into the history and evolution of capitalism. . . . A fascinating history.”–Zachary Karabell, Truthdig.com
“[T]his book introduces some basic issues and ideas about Jewish economic history and can serve as a provocative starting point for learning more about the subject.”–Choice
“[A] short book, which could be said to provide the economic background of the Jewish catastrophe of the 20th century. Muller’s work, though focused on cultural and not environmental differences, might remind some readers of Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’ (1997), which explains the basis for the gaps in material success among regions around the world. In both books, the authors, in laying bare the historical processes, help to disabuse readers of their prejudices.”–Steven Silber, Haaretz
“In the meantime, in a lean and compact volume, Muller has offered a rich and valuable history filled with insights about the character of capitalism and the sources of anti-Semitism–both of which could hardly be more timely subjects.”–Yuval Levin, Jewish Review of Books
“Muller provides a refreshingly frank account of the major role of Jews on both sides of capitalism’s ideological barricades. His brisk and lively book is a welcome sign that historians are moving beyond a stale preoccupation with challenging stereotypes, and are now more willing to engage candidly and directly with the economic dimension of Jewish history.”–Adam Sutcliffe, Jewish Quarterly
“Although Muller examines mostly European areas, he occasionally cites examples from the United States. His book can be thus read as an attempt to deepen the mutual understanding of historical realities in Europe and North America. The strongest point of Capitalism and the Jews lies in Muller’s multifocal perspective and interdisciplinary erudition.”–Pnina M. Rubesh, European Legacy
“[T]his small book is filled with interesting material and presents its subject in a clear and lively fashion.”–Marty Roth, Outlook on Books
“The book offers an interesting and new perspective into the economic history of the Jews, which is a by-product of their religious and cultural history.”–R. Balashankar, Organiser
“Capitalism and the Jews is an important study that affords readers a lucid and extremely accessible analysis of what is no doubt a central topic in Jewish and western history. It is a welcome addition that joins recent efforts to make us more aware of the significance of the economy for our understanding of the modern Jewish experience.”–Gideon Reuveni, Enterprise and Society
“Providing a fresh look at an important but frequently misunderstood subject, this book will interest anyone who wants to understand the Jewish role in the development of capitalism, the role of capitalism in the modem fate of the Jews, or the ways in which the story of capitalism and the Jews has affected the history of Europe and beyond, from the medieval period to our own.”–World Book Industry
“Muller’s book can be highly recommended. Stylistically polished, accessible, informative and provocative–it is a little gem.”–Jeremy Leaman, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies
“Capitalism and the Jews is a must book for our times.”–Betty Mohr, Le Bon Travel & Culture
“[P]rovocative and inspiring essays. . . . Muller’s approach is far reaching.”–Franziskus von Boeselager, Moving the Social
Amazon reviews:
* With columnists for major newspapers denouncing banks as “blood-sucking,” the financial industry as “parasitic,” and one big bank as a “vampire squid” – well, what exquisite timing for the release of the book Capitalism and the Jews.
Mr. Muller’s work is, on the whole, a model of clear thinking and useful information about how accurately to understand the long and complicated relationship between Jews, capitalism, and anti-Semitism. It’s a valuable read for anyone who wants to understand why all the talk about the difference between the “Wall Street” economy and the “Main Street” economy isn’t necessarily as benign as it might seem.
The book by Mr. Muller, a professor of history at Catholic University, consists of a short introduction and four chapters. It’s the first chapter, “The Long Shadow of Usury,” that’s the most enlightening.
“Usury was an important concept with a long shadow. It was significant because the condemnation of lending money at interest was based on the presumptive illegitimacy of all economic gain not derived from physical labor. That way of conceiving of economic activity led to a failure to recognize the role of knowledge and the evaluation of risk in economic life,” he writes. “So closely was the reviled practice of usury identified with the Jews that St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the leader of the Cistercian Order, in the middle of the twelfth century referred to the taking of usury as ‘Jewing'” says Mr. Muller, noting that the interest rates charged by Jews, “in keeping with the scarcity of capital in the medieval economy and the high risks incurred by Jewish moneylenders, whose loans were often canceled under public pressure, and whose assets were frequently confiscated,” ranged from 33% to 60% a year.
It was Karl Marx, who was converted to Lutheranism as a child by his parents, who managed to combine the old blood libel against the Jews with an attack on capitalism. “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” Mr. Muller quotes Marx as saying in Capital. Mr. Muller goes on, “When Lenin later referred to the necessity of eliminating capitalists because they were ‘bloodsuckers,’ he was merely heightening Marx’s own metaphor.”
It is a short leap from this to the work of the Nazi economic theorist Gottfried Feder, who, Mr. Muller writes, “distinguished between Aryan and Jewish forms of capitalism, the former industrial and creative, the latter financial and parasitic.”
In subsequent chapters, Mr. Muller describes Jewish contributions to capitalism and speculates about some of the reasons for Jewish prominence and success. Americans may know that Jews founded Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, but Mr. Muller reports that Jews helped to establish Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank in Germany, as well as Credit Mobilier in France. Some of this is because of values contained in the religion of Judaism itself. “Unlike Christianity, Judaism considered poverty anything but ennobling,” Mr. Muller writes.
Mr. Muller rejects the claim made by Milton Friedman in 1972 that “for at least the past century the Jews have been consistently opposed to capitalism and have done much on an ideological level to undermine it.” Mr. Muller calls that “at best a half-truth.” In fact, he writes, “many of the foremost theorists of capitalist activity have been Jews,” or of Jewish origin, pointing to Milton Friedman himself, Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand, Ludwig Von Mises, Irving Kristol, and Margaret Thatcher’s advisers including Keith Joseph, Leon Brittan, and Nigel Lawson.
The author does not flinch, though, from describing Jewish involvement in Bolshevism.
Mr. Muller gets out onto the thinnest ice when he blames Jewish involvement in revolutionary activity and communism for inflaming European anti-Semitism. Sometimes, he frames this claim cautiously: “To be sure, in much of eastern Europe anti-Semitism long antedated the Bolshevik Revolution, and would have been a substantial factor in interwar politics even without the prominence of Jews in the Communist movement.”
Other times he is more assertive: “In Germany, where political anti-Semitism had been on the Wane before 1914, the role of the Jews in the postwar revolutions was the key element in the revival of anti-Semitism on the right.”
That the Jews were being denounced as greedy capitalists at just the same time as they were being denounced as dangerous Communists suggests to me that the denunciations were, at bottom, more about hating Jews than about hating either capitalists or communists.
For most of this book, though, Mr. Muller is a sensible guide to the way that views of capitalism and views of the Jews do have a way of overlapping and influencing each other. As he puts it, “An affirmative approach toward capitalism often went together with a measure of sympathy toward the Jews, while antipathy to commerce and antipathy to the Jews typically went hand in hand.” Mr. Muller mostly leaves it to readers to think about how these precedents apply to the debates of the present day, but there is plenty to think about.
* Professor Jerry Muller makes a compelling case in showing that the attitude of Jews towards capitalism was overshadowed by the contemptuous view that Christianity held about trade and commerce for a long time (pp. 33; 158). Until the 19th century C.E., anti-Semitism was predominantly religious in nature, grounded in the sympathy that the Christian churches had for peasants and artisans, the sources of “sweat” labor (pp. 18; 28; 54; 70; 116).
At the same time, these churches failed to understand the economic value of gathering and analyzing information (pp. 19; 116; 205-206). Christianity officially regarded trade and money lending as “unproductive,” “parasitic,” and “usurious” best left to those outside the community of the faithful, i.e., the Jews (pp. 8; 15; 23-25; 27; 37-38; 43; 116-117).
The “cultural capital” of Jews positioned them well to play a disproportional role in (early) modern capitalism for the following reasons (pp. 4; 9; 209; 213):
1. Judaism was more favorably disposed toward commerce than Christianity which was inclined to glorify poverty (pp. 5; 77; 81-85; 110-115).
2. Jewish culture prized “religious intellectualism” which was easily transferred from religious to secular learning (pp. 70; 87-89).
3. Judaism favored a lifestyle based on discipline, the conscious planning of action, and the avoidance of intoxication (p. 88).
4. Jewish success in the market was based upon longer time horizons. Success for those Jews starting at the low end of commercial life required a willingness to work long and hard and to save in order to accumulate capital (pp. 58-59; 61; 88-89).
5. The propensity to develop social networks was due, in part, to the exclusion of Jews from the larger, gentile society, which provided both a form of collective self-policing and a proto-social security system (pp. 7; 53; 91-92).
6. Jewish culture put much emphasis on high familial investment in children (pp. 92-93).
With the industrial revolution firing on all cylinders, anti-Semitism shifted its emphasis by attacking the Jews as capitalists bent on destroying and despoiling the traditional society (pp. 41; 44; 56-57; 158). The social and economic stratification in which Jews were placed made many of them economically successful, which created resentment among social losers in a given capitalist society (pp. 65-66; 129; 189; 204-205; 213-214). To reduce the resentment created by their success, Jews supported 1) tzedakah (= philanthropy) whose beneficiaries also included non-Jews and 2) income redistribution through governmental income transfers (pp. 126; 130-131).
After WWI, anti-Semites came to the outlandish realization that Jewish capitalists would participate in their own destruction by cooperating with their communist counterparts to topple Christian civilization (p. 161)!
To his credit, Professor Muller brilliantly shows why Milton Friedman’s argument, that Jews played a prominent role in disparaging capitalism while profiting from it enormously, clearly lacks nuance (pp. 73; 124). To come to this conclusion, Professor Muller looks at the range of Jewish political responses to capitalism that he labels integrationist, isolationist, socialist, and nationalist, respectively (pp. 10-12; 104; 190).
1. The majority of Jews in Europe and North America opted for integrating themselves into the broader capitalist economy without repudiating their distinct Jewish identity (pp. 39; 104; 109; 115; 215).
2. The isolationist (or Orthodox) Jews found niches in the capitalist economy that would reduce, to the strict minimum, their social interactions with gentiles and less orthodox Jews (p. 105).
3. The socialist Jews believed in the substitution of the untried communism to the failing capitalist system for the same reasons that non-Jews espoused this ideology (pp. 35; 80; 105-107). Furthermore, these Jews naively hoped that abolishing capitalism would take care of anti-Semitism which was often linked to anti-capitalism (pp. 42; 133). The disastrous role that some Central and Eastern European Jews played in different communist revolutions in the wake of both WWI and WWII, reinforced the prevalent anti-Semitism that did not need additional oil to burn brightly in the hearts of anti-Semites (pp. 124; 140-141; 151; 158; 165-170; 174; 183; 188). The identification of Jews with communism was based upon a distortion similar to the exaggeration of the reality that Jews were more successful capitalists (pp. 135; 147; 152-153; 163; 175-177). Most Jews did not embrace communism because of its atheism and its economic policy (pp. 140; 174). Most communists were not Jews (p. 160). To their credit, these socialist Jews, however, debunked the stereotype of the Jews as “greedy” and “materialistic” (pp. 126; 137).
4. The nationalist (or Zionist) Jews emphasized first and foremost the need for a homeland over which Jews would exercise sovereign power without coming to an agreement on the prevailing economic system (p. 106). Zionism was a reaction to the rise of ethnic nationalism that had a basis in the politics of capitalist economic transformation of others (pp. 190-191; 194-199; 202; 208-210). These nationalist Jews faced two unique and formidable obstacles compared to most other ethnic groups: 1. Re-(acquire) a territorial base on which to form a nation-state and 2. Transform themselves from an economically and socially specialized stratum into a combination of “peoplehood” and “statehood” needed to re-(acquire) sovereignty over a distinct territory (pp. 215-218). Professor Muller observes on this subject that the Israeli economy transitioned much faster from its agrarian, socialist beginnings to its present-day highly commercial nature than older Western capitalist economies did (pp. 122-123). The recently published book “Start-Up Nation” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer is illuminating on this subject.
Professor Muller acknowledges that the high representation of Jews in intellectual professions makes them stand out as standard bearers of almost any political ideology (p. 125). The concept of “tikkun olam” (= repairing the world) in Judaism is not alien to this development.
In summary, Professor Muller realizes a tour de force in remaining as objective as possible in his examination of the multidimensional relationship that Jews have had with capitalism.
* Professional historian Jerry Z. Muller’s new book on Capitalism and the Jews is a collection of four essays covering four various topics concerning capitalism and Jewish and European history. The first essay covers medieval European history into modern European history. Ever since the Middle Ages in Western Europe, Jews were associated with the handling of money. It was more than just money lending, however, Jews were lenders of money with interest: a practice that was seen as sinful and “blood-sucking”.
Usury was considered a base practice for several reasons. For one, writers from classical antiquity saw no justification for deriving money from money; “Money does not beget money,” the old proverb went. The most influential of these classical writers was Aristotle, whose works were disseminated to the Christian West in the High Middle Ages, and whose philosophy worked its way into the thought of Catholic theologians. Interpreting the passage on interest from Deuteronomy (Deut. 23: “You may lend with interest to foreigners, but to your brother you may not lend with interest”) liberally such that “brother” meant all people, usury became sinful in Catholic lands in the 12th century. Indeed, the Second Lateran Council expressly forbade the practice in 1139, and Dante’s Inferno would place usurers along with murderers and blasphemers in the seventh ring of hell.
Yet from about 1050 to 1300 “new agricultural surpluses in Europe made greater commerce and urbanization possible, and that made the economic function of lending money more important”. As the Italian wit Benvenudi de Rambaldis da Imola put it, “those who engage in usury go to hell; those who fail to engage in usury fall into poverty”. The church solved this dilemma in the early 12th century by allowing Jews to practice the sinful activity, since, they reasoned, Jews were not subject to canon law and were condemned to hell anyway because of their repudiation of Jesus Christ. Medieval Kings saw benefits to this rule, since they were able to exact heavy taxes from Jewish usurers (essentially) in exchange for their existence. Thus the rigid connection of Jews with usury began.
Loaning money at interest was indeed a most ignoble profession. Yet in most cases many Jews had no suitable alternative. In the words of Rabbi Eliezer ben Nathan of Mainz (died c. 1170), the Jews had to loan money at interest because they “own[ed] no fields or vineyards whereby they could live, [therefore] lending money to non-Jews [was] necessary and therefore permitted” (quoted in Anti-Semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present). Jews in Western Christendom thus served as a “metaphor-turned-flesh” for money lending, usury, and proto-capitalism. Muller writes, the image of usury “was closely connected to that of the Jew, who was regarded as avaricious, and as an outsider and wanderer, able to engage in so reviled an activity as money lending because he was beyond the community of shared faith”.
The second essay focuses on Milton Friedman’s lecture “Capitalism and the Jews” and challenges Friedman’s main presumptions and conclusions. In this lecture (Muller tells us) Friedman said that Jews have historically benefited from capitalism, yet they (modern and contemporary Jews) have tended to oppose capitalism. Muller responds by showing that although many prominent communist/socialist leaders were Jewish (e.g. Trotsky, Luxemburg, Kamenev, Zinoviev), it is simply a false oversimplification to say that most Jews have opposed capitalism.
The third essay titled “Radical Anti-Capitalism” examines Jews that indeed have opposed capitalism. In the same vein as Friedman’s observation, popular imagination saw European Jewry as supporters of communist and socialist parties in post-WWI Europe. This had some truth, but, Muller shows, it was not as if most or even a large plurality of European Jews supported communist revolution. Rather, many communist parties had Jewish members in prominent roles. Moreover, the promise of anti-nationalism and equality led many young Jews to join communist parties; this caused fascists, conservatives, and other right-wingers to conclude through a jaundiced eye that “Judeo-Bolshevism” was a real spectre that was infiltrating their respective societies. One cannot help but think of the most menacing case of anti-Jewish sentiment: the Nazis.
After WWII the trend seemed to continue as many Jews held high positions in post-WWII Eastern Europe under the shadow of the Soviet Union. This was because many Jews saw the soviets as liberators in Poland and elsewhere, and wanted to help the battle against nationalism–a nationalism(s) that had often relegated Jews as second-class citizens, or denied Jews citizenship entirely. Interestingly, Muller suggests that this (Jews joining the communist cause after WWII) was nourished because Stalin and the Kremlin feared the possible spread of Titoism and felt that communist Jews were unlikely to go the way of the nationalist-communism of Tito after what the Jews experienced in WWII. Muller writes, “communists of Jewish origin seemed the least likely to form an alliance with the local populace against the hegemony of the Soviets.”
Yet Jewish communists were later to be persecuted and purged in Eastern European communist politics. The “Doctors’ Plot” was one prominent example of the embodiment of anti-Jewish sentiment in post-WWII politics, as were purgings of Jews from the governments of Czechoslovakia and Poland and elsewhere.
The final essay in this volume summarizes Ernest Gellner’s thesis on nationalism and applies it to Jewish nationalism: nationalism developed when agrarian society transformed into industrial society because the state/government needed to teach potential industrial workers how to read and communicate in a standard national language. Some communities were of course outside of the newfound nationhood-ness (for example Greeks, overseas Chinese and Indians, Armenians, Parsees, and Jews). These stateless nations could assimilate or create their own nations, which is what Jews did in time.
Muller’s short volume on capitalism and the Jews was a pleasure to read, and contained many insightful observations. I found the first and third essays to be very valuable, and the truly interested reader will find the entire volume valuable as well. Muller necessarily paints with a broad brush, but the end product is neither blurred nor affronting. I highly recommend this book to readers of both Jewish and European history.
BRENTON SANDERSON WRITES:
While asserting that German hostility toward Jews has its origins in a pathological “envy,” as a fervent leftist Aly would never extend this line of reasoning to account for the hostility of American Blacks or other non-White groups toward Whites. Aly can safely posit that “intellectually inferior” Germans who “lacked confidence in their identity” had an envy-driven hatred for “intellectually superior” and upwardly mobile Jews, yet never assert that intellectually inferior Blacks have an envy-driven hatred for intellectually superior and upwardly mobile Whites. Instead he would doubtless affirm the bogus narrative that Black hostility to Whites is a legitimate response to an insidious White “racism” that has impeded their social and economic advancement. This, of course, is despite that fact that this supposedly ubiquitous and malign force has somehow failed to hinder the social and economic advancement of East Asians in Western societies.
A National Socialist poster: “Bolshevism is Jewry”
Nor would Aly extrapolate his pathological envy thesis of intergroup hostility to explain the vastly disproportionate Jewish participation in the Bolshevik Revolution and the other oppressive communist regimes of Eastern Europe. This despite that fact that, in response to legal restrictions in Tsarist Russia that limited their economic and educational opportunities, millions of Jews gravitated to Zionism and Communism. That envy and resentment were key factors behind the overwhelming Jewish attraction to radical left was obvious to Norman Cantor who noted:
The Bolshevik Revolution and some of its aftermath represented, from one perspective, Jewish revenge. During the heyday of the Cold War, American Jewish publicists spent a lot of time denying that—as 1930s anti-Semites claimed—Jews played a disproportionately important role in Soviet and world Communism. The truth is until the early 1950s Jews did play such a role, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. In time Jews will learn to take pride in the record of the Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It was a species of striking back.[i]
Indeed a huge weakness of Why the Germans? Why the Jews? is the total neglect of the Jewish-Communist symbiosis and how this contributed (independently of envy at Jewish social advancement) to rising support for the NSDAP and other “anti-Semitic” political parties in Germany. It is common knowledge that when, after the chaos of World War I, revolutions erupted all over Europe, Jews were everywhere at the helm. One of Hitler’s most oft-repeated themes in the 1920s was the deadly threat that a “bloody Bolshevization” posed to Germany. In 1928 Hitler wrote:
The goal is the destruction of the inherently anti-Semitic Russia as well as the destruction of the German Reich, whose administration and army still provide resistance to the Jews. A further goal is the overthrow of those dynasties that have not yet been made subordinate to a Jewish-dependent and led democracy.
This goal in the Jewish struggle has at least to some degree been completely achieved. Tsarism and Kaiserism in Germany have been eliminated. With the help of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian upper class and also the national intelligentsia were — with inhuman torture and barbarity — murdered and completely eradicated. The victims of this Jewish fight for dominance in Russia totaled twenty-eight to thirty million dead among the Russian people. Fifteen times as many as the Great War cost Germany. After the successful Revolution he [further] tore away all the ties of orderliness, morality, custom, and so on, abolished marriage as a higher institution, and proclaimed in its place universal licentiousness with the goal that through this disorderly bastardy, to breed a generally inferior human mush which itself is incapable of leadership and ultimately will no longer be able to do without the Jews as its only intellectual element.[ii]
Another National Socialist source noted that: “Only those who have experienced that period of Jewish terror and slaughter, the murder of hostages, plundering and acts of arson [in the Munich communist uprisings of 1918–1919], are able to realize why Munich became the birthplace of National Socialism, whence the movement spread to other parts of Germany, and finally put an end to Jewish domination.”
Despite the centrality of the threat of “Jewish-Bolshevism” as part of the National Socialist platform, Aly completely ignores the whole topic because it simply doesn’t fit into his “pathological envy” theory of German “anti-Semitism.” In a work of some 304 pages purporting to analyze the origins Hitler’s popularity, the word “communism” rates a mere three mentions.
No mention of Jewish ethnic networking
In addition to his lack of consideration of how the very real fear of communism contributed to support for the National Socialists, another key weakness of Why the Germans? Why the Jews? is the lack of any discussion of the role of Jewish ethnic networking in the rapid social and economic advancement of Jews at the time. Jewish historian Jerry Muller acknowledged in his book Capitalism and the Jews the importance of Jewish ethnic networking contributing to Jewish upward social mobility, observing that “the obligation to look after fellow Jews was deeply embedded in Jewish law and culture, and it existed not just in theory but in practice.”[iii] A recurrent theme in Germany throughout the nineteenth century was how, if unchecked by the state, Jewish ethnic networking invariably led to their monopolization of entire industries and professions, and how this harmed German interests.
In 1819, for instance, the German writer Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky noted that the anti-Jewish “Hep Hep” riots that year in southern Germany were precipitated by “the rights granted to Israelites in many states” which led “to the poverty and malnourishment that prevails in many regions since the Jews choke off all the trade and industry of the Christian populace.” He noted that the success that Jews recorded “in all profitable businesses ever since several states, guided by a misunderstood humanism, accorded them the freedom to choose their own trades, which is also a license to plunge Christians into misery.”[iv]
Around the same time the German academic Jakob Friedrich Fries likewise warned of the dangers that Jewish ethnic networking and nepotism presented for the native population, pointing out that “the Christian merchant, who stands alone, has no hope of competing.” Citing the example of Jews in the city of Frankfurt, who had been released from the ghetto in 1796 and had risen rapidly up in society, he warned: “Allow them to continue for a mere forty years or more, and the sons of the best Christian houses will have to hire on as their manservants.”[v]
The economist Friedrich List argued in 1820 that the state had the right and duty to protect the native German majority from Jewish economic domination and exploitation.[vi] Legal restrictions on Jews were lifted in the Grand Duchy of Posen in 1833, a region with a significant Jewish population. Soon thereafter a citizens’ committee on Jewish affairs noted that following the easing of restrictions it had not taken long for Jews “to take over high roads and market squares and dominate commerce and industry.” If they were given full citizenship rights, the committee argued, “almost all the towns and villages in the Grand Duchy would come under the exclusive administration of Jews.”[vii]
In the Kingdom of Saxony the general populace pressured the royal family to maintain anti-Jewish restrictions on certain types of economic activity. Dresden allowed “at most” four Jewish merchants, lest commercial streets “swarm with Jewish salesmen and trade fall into Jewish hands” Local civic leaders warned that any easing of restrictions would result in “Jews inundating the entire country so that soon farmers wouldn’t be able to sell a single calf without Jewish involvement.”[viii]
Kevin MacDonald notes in A People That Shall Dwell Alone that from “the standpoint of the group, it was always more important to maximize the resource flow from the gentile community to the Jewish community, rather than to allow individual Jews to maximize their interests at the expense of the Jewish community.”[ix] He makes the point that the propensity of Jews to engage in “tribal economics” involving high levels of within-group economic cooperation and patronage confers on these groups “an extraordinarily powerful competitive advantage against individual strategies.”[x] The power of this strategy was evident by 1914 when Jews earned five times the income of the average German.[xi]
In 1924, the German economist Gustav Schmoller argued in favor of only admitting small numbers of Jews to the higher ranks of the military or civil service. Otherwise, he feared, “they would swiftly develop into an intolerant dictator of the state and its administration. … How many cases have proved the truth of the prophecy that once you admit the first Jewish full professor, you’ll have five of them or more in ten years’ time.”[xii] In the same year, a delegate to the Bavarian parliament, Ottmar Rutz, noting this tendency and how it had resulted in the Jewish domination of the faculties of Bavarian universities, pointed out that “every Jewish professor and every Jewish civil servant keeps down a descendant of the German people. This sort of exclusion is what’s really at stake. It’s not a matter of insulting or attacking one or another descendant of the Jewish people. This has nothing to do with all of that, and nor do my petitions. This is solely about productively promoting the descendants of the German people and protecting them from exclusion.”[xiii]
Jewish overrepresentation among the learned professions was then, and is now, of such a magnitude that it cannot be accounted for solely on the basis of higher IQ and cultural differences alone — but was and is massively a product of Jewish nepotism. The role of Jewish ethnic networking in the vast overrepresentation of Jews at elite universities in the United States has been revealed by recent studies which have proved that Jews are represented at the Ivy League far beyond what would be predicted by IQ, whereas Whites of European descent are correspondingly underrepresented. For any given level of high IQ, non-Jews far outnumber Jews in America. For example, there are around 7 times as many non-Jews as Jews with an IQ greater than 130 (an IQ typical of successful professionals), and 4.5 times as many with IQ greater than 145. Obviously, there are not seven times as many non-Jews as Jews among elites in the elite sectors of the U.S. — quite the opposite. Would the situation, given the strength of Jewish ethnocentrism, have been any different in Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
Virtually no mention of Jewish cultural subversion as a cause of “anti-Semitism”
As well as completely ignoring the crucially important phenomenon of Jewish ethnic networking, Aly fails to acknowledge the link between disproportionate wealth and disproportionate political, legislative, media and cultural influence, and how this influence was wielded by Jewish elites to reengineer German society in their own interests. Ethnic competition doesn’t only exist in the economic realm but in the cultural and political realms. Resentment fuelled by wealth disparities is only a part (albeit a highly significant part) of a multifaceted picture.
Kevin MacDonald has often noted that it wouldn’t matter if Jews were an economic elite if they were not hostile to the traditional people and culture of the West. The unfortunate reality is that they are hostile, and this hostility has existed for millennia. In Separation and Its Discontents he notes that the heightened level of resource competition between Germans and Jews, especially after 1870, “resulted in very large Jewish overrepresentation in all the markers of economic and professional success as well as the production of culture, the latter viewed as a highly deleterious influence.”[xiv] In his German Genius, Peter Watson observes that after 1880, and especially after the Dreyfus trial in France in 1893, “the Jews were increasingly identified as Europe’s leading ‘degenerates.’”[xv]
A National Socialist source from 1938 points out how “the disintegration and decay of German intellectual life under Jewish supremacy was most apparent and assumed their crudest aspects in the sphere of light entertainment art.” When, in the unstable political aftermath of Germany’s defeat in 1918, at a time when all barriers of law and order had broken down, “a veritable storm of Jewish immoral literature, obscene films and plays then broke over Germany.” The Berlin Revue proprietors who “were Jews without a single exception” offered the public “veritable orgies of sexuality and licentiousness. All realities of life were regarded from the one and only aspect of erotic desire and its satisfaction.” Berlin quickly assumed the mantle of “the most immoral town in the world.” The increasing spread of indecency and immorality forced the government in 1926 to “take constitutional steps for the suppression of filthy or otherwise low-grade literature.”
Revue poster from the Weimar Republic
The themes of Jewish moral, cultural and political subversion permeate the speeches and writings of Hitler and other leading National Socialist figuress. In Mein Kampf Hitler argued that the Jewish influence on German cultural life largely consisted in “dragging the people to the level of his own low mentality.” Likewise he recalls how he once asked himself whether “there was any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate?” and later discovered that “On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess, one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light.”[xvi]
In a brief departure from his “envy” theory, Aly himself acknowledges the prevalence of the belief that Jews, through the insidious political and cultural influence they exerted, were destroying mainstream German culture, and that this belief, which spread through all social strata “became a mass phenomenon and paved the way for the racial anti-Semitism at the core of the National Socialist worldview.”[xvii] According to this worldview, “At the close of the emancipation era in Germany, the Jews enjoyed a practical monopoly of all the professions exerting intellectual and political influence. This enabled them to stamp their entirely alien features on the whole public life of the country.”
One of the ways that racial and ethnic groups do battle for position is through controlling the thought and ideas that go into the minds of their competitors. That explains the invariable push by Jews to exercise domination and control over the media and entertainment industries. They realize that media influence is an incredibly important aspect of ethnic competition in the modern world: filling the heads of your ethnic competitors with things that are not true or which are inimical to family life or other adaptive behavior among non-Jews but which help your group to thrive. Those non-Jews who are aware of what is going on naturally resent this waging of ethnic warfare through controlling the public flow of information — and the Germans were no exception.
The German media in the years before 1933 was almost entirely in Jewish hands. The largest circulation newspapers, the Berliner Morgenpost, the Vossische Zeitung, and the Berliner Tageblatt, were owned by the Jewish Ullmann and Mosse companies, and were overwhelmingly staffed by Jewish editors and journalists. The Marxist press, most prominently including newspapers like Vorwärts, Rote Fahne, and Freiheit was likewise under Jewish control. The Jewish essayist Moritz Goldstein observed in 1912 that: “Nobody actually questions the powers the Jews exercise in the press. Criticism, in particular, at least as far as the larger towns and their influential newspapers are concerned, seems to be becoming a Jewish monopoly.”
Even Germans opposed to Hitler, like the Hamburg philosopher and women’s rights activist Margarethe Adam, acknowledged the reality of Jewish media control. In a 1929 discussion on the Jewish Question that she conducted with the Jewish historian and sociologist Eva Reichmann-Jungmann, she noted that “The Jew in his very nature is perceived by the Aryan as a different type of human being.” The hostility of many Europeans towards Jews was, she argued, an almost reflexive response to the “teeth gnashing disdain that Jews felt for Christians.” As evidence for her claim, Adam cited the mighty Jewish press, which was “rife with insults and scorn hurled at the great personages of the German past.” She explained that “this press is what causes people to speak repeatedly of ‘Jewish solidarity’ in the worse sense.”[xviii]
Misrepresenting Heinrich von Treitschke
To buttress his “envy” theory of German “anti-Semitism,” Aly cites the 1879 publication of renowned German historian Heinrich von Treitschke’s article “Our Prospects” in the prestigious journal Preussische Jahrbücher. This article was, Aly claims, addressed by the famous historian “to the sons of the rapidly declining artisan and merchant class,” a group that were “fearful for their future.” In his article, Treitschke raised the idea that “in recent times a dangerous spirit of arrogance has been awakened in Jewish circles,” and he demanded that Jews show more “tolerance and humility,” noting that: “The instincts of the masses have recognized in Jews a pressing danger, a deeply troubling source of damage to our new German life.” The most knowledgeable Germans, he proclaimed, were calling out with one voice: “The Jews are our misfortune.”[xix] According to Aly,
Treitschke’s “Our Prospects” polemic characterized Jewish immigrants to Germany from Eastern Europe as “an invasion of young ambitious trouser salesmen” who aimed to see their “children and grandchildren dominate Germany’s financial markets and newspapers.” The nationalist historian pilloried the “scornfulness of the busy hordes of third-rate Semitic talents” and their “obdurate contempt” for Christian Germans, noting how “tightly this swarm kept to itself.” The holder of four professorships in his lifetime, Treitschke worked himself into a veritable frenzy over “the new Jewish nature,” whose tendencies and attributes included “vulgar contempt,” “addition to scorn,” facile cleverness and agility,” “insistent presumption,” and “offensive self-overestimation.” All of these qualities, Treitschke claimed, worked to the detriment of the Christian majority, with its “humble piety” and “old-fashioned, good-humored love of work.” If Jews continued to insist on their separate identity and refused to be integrated into the German (which to Treitschke, meant Protestant) culture of the nation, the historian threatened that “the only answer would be for them to emigrate and found a Jewish state somewhere abroad.”[xx]
Aly takes Treitschke’s article out of its historical and intellectual context, and claims that the hostility toward Jews in Treitschke’s article, which Aly views as completely baseless, was “symptomatic of Germany as a whole,” and was grounded in pathological envy. However, the actual context of Treitschke’s famous article was explicated in Albert Lindemann’s book Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews. Lindemann, noting how this context is “often neglected or ignored in accounts of the period,” observes that the real catalyst for Treitschke adding his voice to complaints about Jews in Germany was the nature of the work of the leading Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz and its enthusiastic reception among German Jews. Lindemann notes:
Although his History of the Jews is still lauded by twentieth-century Jewish historians as one of the great nineteenth-century histories of the Jews, there is little question that the sense of Jewish superiority expressed in it, especially in the eleventh volume, which had first appeared in 1868, was at times narrow and excessive. Indeed compared with it, Treitschke’s history of the Germans may be described as generous in spirit, especially in its treatment of the relationships of Jews and non-Jews, their relative merits and defects.[xxi]
Lindemann points outs that Graetz harbored a “deep contempt for the ancient Greeks and a special derision for Christians in the Middle Ages.” Presaging Freud and the Frankfurt School, Graetz considered contemporary European civilization to be “morally and physically sick.” Lindemann observes that “Graetz had written much that was stunningly offensive to German sensibilities of the time” and that it was hardly surprising that Treitschke responded with “such fury.” Celebrating deceit and guile as highly effective forms of ethnic warfare, Graetz had written that the Jewish writers Boerne and Heine had “renounced Judaism, but only like combatants who, putting on the uniform of the enemy, can all the more easily strike and annihilate him.” Moreover, in his private correspondence, Graetz “expressed his destructive contempt for German values and Christianity more forthrightly.” In a letter to Moses Hess, written in 1868, for instance, he wrote that “we must above all work to shatter Christianity.”
Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz
On becoming aware of such views, Treitschke angrily observed that “the man shakes with glee every time he can say something downright nasty against the Germans.”[xxii] It was reading Graetz and noting how his brand of history was so highly esteemed by Jews that prompted Treitschke to echo the reactions of many Germans to having their people, culture and religion derided by members of an alien race living in their midst, noting that:
What deadly hatred of the purist and most powerful exponents of German character, from Luther to Goethe and Fichte! And what hollow, offensive self-glorification! Here it is proved with continuous satirical invective that the nation of Kant was really educated to humanity by Jews only, that the language of Lessing and Goethe became sensitive to beauty, spirit and wit only through [the Jews] Boerne and Heine! … And this stubborn contempt for the German goyim is not at all the attitude of a single fanatic.[xxiii]
Graetz found his counterpart in the Weimar Republic in the figure of the Jewish intellectual and journalist Kurt Tucholsky who, using a variety of pseudonyms, “scoffed at the ideals of the German nation: he flung his biting sarcasm and venomous mockery at every religious and national sentiment.” By deliberately excluding the historical and intellectual context of Treitschke’s famous article, Aly perpetuates the false narrative that German hostility towards Jews had absolutely nothing whatever to do with Jewish behavior. This deliberate distortion enables Aly to blithely dismiss Treitschke as an “intellectual agitator” and producer of “anti-Jewish polemics.”
The author also gives the German composer Richard Wagner this kind of shabby treatment, dismissing him as “a paradigmatic example of the way that resentment provoked hatred for Jews among German intellectuals and artists.” As I have previously noted, there is a great deal of validity in the opinions Wagner expressed with regard to the Jewish Question. Aly is unwilling, however to subject Wagner’s writing to any detailed and fair-minded analysis, simply arguing that “none of Wagner’s assorted justifications could disguise the personal economic interest that clearly lay behind his animosity.”[xxiv] According to Aly, anti-Jewish statements are never rational, but always the product of a warped mind, while Jewish critiques of Europeans always have a thoroughly rational basis.
Conclusion
Aly concludes his book by claiming that “Today’s generations of Germans owe a lot to their ancestors’ desires to get ahead in the world. Precisely for that reason, there is no way for them to divorce anti-Semitism from their family histories.” Reinforcing the toxic culture of the Holocaust that is today leading Germany to destruction, he argues that today’s Germans have a moral obligation to come to terms with and atone for “the murderous anti-Semitism of their forefathers.”[xxv]
Despite its many shortcomings (in truth because of them) Why the Germans? Why the Jews? has been lauded by establishment critics. Christopher Browning, writing for the New York Review of Books, described Aly’s book as: “A remarkably fresh look at an old problem. … Aly is one of the most innovative and resourceful scholars working in the field of Holocaust studies. Time and again he has demonstrated an uncanny ability to find hitherto untapped sources, frame insightful questions, and articulate clear if often challenging and controversial arguments.”
The majority of Jewish critics have been similarly admiring. Dagmar Herzog, writing for the New York Times, maintained that “the lavish evidence Aly heaps on — from both self-revealing anti-Semites and acutely prescient Jewish writers — is incredible in its own right and makes for gripping reading.” The Jewish Daily Forward called the book “Consistently absorbing. … A penetrating and provocative study [that] offers shrewd insight into the German mindset over the last two centuries.” Misha Brumlik, writing for the German publication Die Zeit, labelled Aly’s work “Brilliant, passionate, provocative” and according to Michael Blumenthal, once Jimmy Carter’s Treasury secretary and now director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, claimed that Aly’s “analysis of a profound social malady has made the incomprehensible comprehensible.”[xxvi]
However, for some, Aly’s pathological envy thesis — despite his assiduous efforts to locate the sources of this envy exclusively in the pathologies and malformations of the German mind — is unsatisfactory because it fails to fully capture the truly “evil” nature of the “anti-Semitism” that once pervaded German society. Writing for Commentary magazine the Jewish writer Daniel Johnson dismissed Aly’s underlying message as “a more scholarly version of Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ thesis.” According to Johnson, “What made the evil of the Shoah ‘radical’ is that it had no social or economic rationale. Because it had no motive or purpose beyond its own insane internal logic, its cruelty also had no limits, no proportionality, no humanity. It was literally inhuman.” He claims that “envy is too mild a motivation” to account for “truly evil” depths of German Jew-hatred. In his view,