THE SOURCE OF THE INFECTION

All across Europe and for millennia, Jews were considered an infection in the body politic not because of race (antisemitism), since there are and there were plenty of Jews with not a drop of Semitic blood in them, and not because of ideology (anti-Zionism), since that is a very recent political concept (born in the late 19th century). The reason of that negative predication upon the body of European Jewry was theological. Indeed, the Catholic Church considered the lending of money at interest a wicked act and a very serious sin. This official policy was maintained by the Church all the way up to the Code of Canon Law of 1917, although the Church in several countries still considered moneylending and usury serious sins long after the aforementioned Canon was promulgated. With respect to the Lutheran Reformation and the Protestant denominations that followed, it is certainly a complicated story, but generally the Catholic uncompromising approach to moneylending at interest was tempered to different degrees, although it was still considered sinful.

Aristotle once said, out of all the ways of making a living, lending money at interest is the most “unnatural” of them all, since “money does not breed”. Although his political economy was not that sophisticated, here as in so many other instances, Aristotle’s instincts were right. I explain what money is and is not, the difference between interest-bearing banknotes and Treasury notes (fiat money), the real meaning of interest and debt and much more in Beyond the Kakotopias of The Liberal State and its Nemeses.

But going back to the source of the collective disgust, the European Jewry was for many centuries particularly inclined to make money out of money, i.e., to engage in moneylending. That was already problematic in the eyes of the faithful (just about everyone through the mid-20th century), but it got only worse as the gentiles progressively found out that the Jews also considered usury a sin, but only when the victim was another Jew. In other words, predation on the goyim was just fine. Once the people got wind of this attitude the reaction to it eventually became enshrined in the ethos of the different nations in the form of hatred and mistrust. These feelings and beliefs were reinforced by tangential observations like the apparent antipathy that many Jews seemed to have for honest labor. However, it is important to note that these observations were in many cases born out of prejudice and without regard for the rejection that the Jews were experimenting already in countless fields of economic activity.

This is the 300-word historical explanation of a phenomenon that 300 million Americans call “antisemitism” because their favorite talking head on tv said so. However, there is a logic to the madness of letting strangers think for you: division of labor (specialization) is a byproduct of capitalism, isn’t it? And we all know that capitalism is “freedom”, so they are just becoming freer when they do not think….