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USURY, ROBBERY, BURGLARY OF GENTILES PERMITTED-1
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When Victims Rule. A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America From the beginning of their tenure in Europe (and elsewhere), many Jews were merchants. This provided a base as they began expanding into money lending activities, including usury. Usury is defined most simply as money lending for profit. In medieval times it was universally condemned as a heinous and immoral act by the Christian church. The act of usury was deemed a mortal sin, and its practitioner's path of greed was understood to end in eternal damnation in Hell. The idea of profiteering from someone else's' need -- possibly desperate -- for money was believed by medieval Christianity to be the antithesis of compassion, generosity, and charity. Christ was upheld as an example of poverty, non-materialism, and abstinence. Common wisdom asserted that those who had surplus money to lend in the first place were obsessed with greed and avarice and needed no more -- certainly by usury -- for their coffers. And making money for doing absolutely nothing (except having the money available) went against Christian medieval understandings of decency, justice, honest work, and morality. In essence, usury was perceived as a crass system of exponential exploitation by which the already wealthy could get increasingly wealthier for little more than the fact of their wealth in the first place. (In the nineteenth century, notes Abram Leon, Karl Marx argued that "usury centralized money wealth, where the means of production are disjointed. It does not alter the modes of production but attaches itself to it as a parasite, and makes it miserable. It sucks blood, kills its nerve and compels production to proceed under even more disheartening conditions." [LEON, p. 150] As George Eaton Simpson and J. Milton Yinger observed:
The vast gap between Christian and Jewish moral perspectives, per materialist self-aggrandizement, is evidenced everywhere in their respective traditions. In the Christian New Testament, for instance, Jesus enjoined values of humility and modesty to his followers, teaching that "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of heaven." [LUKE 18-25] Jewish religious tradition stands in drastic opposition. The [Talmudic] Mishnah, for instance, proclaims, "Who is rich? He who enjoys his wealth." Likewise, there is no equivilant in Jewish mainstream tradition to Christian vows of poverty and material abstinence, [SHAPIRO, p. 12] as epitimized in recent times by Mother Teresa. As the Talmud says: "Poverty in the home is more painful than fifty lashes." [KOTKIN, p. 46] "Judaism is a this-world religion," says Joshua Halberstam, "and making money is considered a natural human endeavor. Unlike Christianity, Judaism never considered poverty a virtue; the idea that the meek shall inherit the earth is a New Testament doctrine, not a Jewish one." [HALBERSTAM, p. 25] "Judaism does not consider poverty noble," says Maurice Lamm, "... The Jew prays for parnassah, a respectable income." [LAMM, p. 108] As famed sociologist Max Weber wrote, "Pharisaic [i.e., rabbinic] Judaism was also far from rejecting wealth or from thinking that it be dangerous, or that its unqualified enjoyment endangers salvation. Wealth was, indeed, considered prerequisite to certain priestly functions." [POLL, S., 1969, p. vii] The Jews were not forbidden in medieval Europe to become usurers. Because they refused to convert en masse to the dominant religious faith and, to Christian belief, be spiritually saved, Jews were considered outsiders. Whatever its continuously decried immoral atmosphere, usury was an economic opportunity and the Jewish community gravitated to it. In historical perspective, this niche they were afforded was a great economic privilege and a springboard for Jewish economic expansion to our own day. (In the Islamic world too, where usury was religiously prohibited to Muslims, Jews again gravitated towards that generally regarded repugnant activity). Of course there were, religious and legal injunctions or not, small numbers of Christian usurers too. But Jews had a distinct advantage in that they could be completely open in their profit-making activities. "The picture of the Jew," says Jacob Katz, "waiting at home for the Gentile to come to borrow money or pay a debt is a realistic one ... [but] many Jews also had also to call at the house of the Gentile to offer their services as traders or money-lenders." [KATZ, Ex, p. 38] Christian usurers, who were despised at least as much by their co-religionists as Jews, usually had to be more discrete in their dealings. The gravity in which all usurers were violently hated by the general European population may be measured in the following passage by Jacques Le Goff: "The
persecution and slaughter of Italian usurers, in particular in
The exploitive nature of Jewish usury invariably alienated the Christian populace. The Cortes of Portugal, for instance, complained in 1361 that Jewish usury was becoming "an unbearable yoke upon the population." [LEON, p. 165] Guido Kisch, in a probable understatement, notes that "the continual complaints against Jewish moneylenders, coming from all classes of the medieval population, particularly in the 14th and 15th centuries, necessarily made the Jew an unpopular figure." [KISCH, p. 328] Usurious Jews who did no physical labor, who were segregated in their own communities, who did not serve in the local military, and who were agents of the hated aristocracy, were commonly accused of parasitism by local non-Jewish populaces. "Jewish money lending," says Salo Baron, "[was a] lucrative business ... For the most part, the accepted rate ranged between 33 and 43 per cent, although sometimes they went up to double and treble those percentages, or more ... When the European economy entered a period of deceleration in the late thirteenth century, further aggravated by recurrent famine and pestilence, such exorbitant charges, though economically doubly justified because of the increased risks, created widespread hostility." [BARON, EHoJ, p. 45] Money lending was not usually for a borrower's business expenses or expansion, but for subsistence survival. [MACDONALD, p. 263] We are talking about desperate people who often enough stood to perish from their web of increasing debt. "It was not luxury needs," says Abram Leon, "but the direct distress which forced the peasant or the artisan to borrow from the Jewish usurer. They pawned their working tools which were often indispensable to assure their livelihood. It is easy to understand the hatred that the man of the people must have felt for the Jew in whom he saw the direct cause of his ruin ... [LEON, p. 171] In this role as petty usurers exploiting the people, [Jews] were often victims of bloody uprisings..." [LEON, p. 83] [uprisings that were] "first and foremost efforts to destroy the letters of credit which were in [Jewish] possession." [LEON, p. 171] In 1431, for instance, armed peasants demanded that the city of Worms surrender its Jews to them, "in view of the fact that they had ruined [the peasants] and taken away their last shirt." [LEON, p. 172] Usury was in fact considered immoral by Jews too. The great Jewish theologian, Maimonides, wrote "why is [usury] called nesek [biting]? Because he who takes it bites his fellow, causes pain to him, and eats his flesh." [MINKIN, p. 362] Usury was forbidden to Jews, as well as Christians, in the Old Testament. (The Islamic Qu'ran also expressly states its prohibition of "interest.") But there was a qualifier. Jews conjured a double moral standard; usury upon others in their own community was prohibited, but usury upon non-Jews was acceptable. The Torah states that one cannot practice usury upon a brother, but can to a stranger. [DEUTERONOMY, 23:20] Who is a brother and who is a stranger? "Brother," in Jewish religious teachings means "Jew." "Stranger" is anyone else. St. Ambrose (339-397), the bishop of Milan and writer whose works influenced later medieval Christian thinking, "considered lending to a stranger a legitimate hostile act against an enemy." [BARON, p. 53] St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), a well-known Christian theologian of his time, sounded an idealized, universalized Christian ethic about the Deutoronomic double standard:
"All Jewish converts [to Christianity] of early sixteenth century Germany," says R. Po-Chia Hsia, "attacked the practice of Jewish money lending." One convert, Johannes Pfefferkorn, argued that profits from usury was the main reason that Jews remained Jews, that they were reluctant to become Christians and do "honest work." Another, Anton Margaritha, argued that such "honest work by Jews would humble them." [HSIA, p. 172] (Conversely, in England, the Jewish "monopoly of usury brought them such wealth that some Christians undoubtedly went over to Judaism in order to participate in the Jewish monopoly in lending.") [LEON, p. 140, quoting BRENTANO] A double standard ethic was endemic to traditional Jewish teachings. The Old Testament laws were for the benefit of Jews, and it always aggravated relations with their non-Jewish neighbors. The medieval Christian world held open doors to Jewish converts to the purported universality of their own faith, but most Jews opted for their own perception of themselves as an elite group -- God's special Chosen People -- despite the inevitable hazards that such a self-perception engendered from the surrounding non-Jewish communities. The old adage to avoid trouble, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do," was studiously dismissed by Jews to the extreme. They were even permitted Talmudic (religiously-founded) self-governance by Christian authorities and were only called to the greater laws of the state for extraordinary transgressions. This situation provided Jews the uninhibited capacity to act within favorable, double-standard, self-aggrandizing laws created for themselves against the wider society. As Jacob Katz notes:
Israeli professor Ehud Sprinzak notes traditional Jewish perspective on the surrounding Gentile "law of the land" in Eastern Europe:
Or, as James Yaffe puts it:
The combination of insular self-governance, their languages of Hebrew and/or Yiddish, and self-imposed isolation, also inferred (and was in fact understood by Jews to be) a Jewish "sub-nationality" within the broader Christian state. This too was much resented by the indigenous European populace. It was a politically volatile situation. Each faith, the majority Christian and minority Judaic, was entrenched in its respective belief system, each implicitly hostile to the other, with the only significant intercourse between them being the world of commerce, a field in which Jews were rapidly building, despite their small numbers -- through trade and the hated usury -- a profound advantage. In this context of mutual hostility, Jacob Katz paraphrases the sociologist Max Weber with regards to the Jewish community's "extreme" use of its moral double standard in its treatment of non-Jews, commercially or otherwise:
Bearing in mind that the only interaction Jews really had with Christians in this era was in the realm of commerce, this double standard -- ethically treating Jews one way, and Gentiles the other -- is again highlighted by Katz:
For the Jewish part, Katz's referral to "the letter of the law" is their sacred Talmud, and other Jewish teachings which "are far from forming the elements of a universalistic ethic. They took social duality for granted," [KATZ, Ex, p. 63] which is a delicate way of saying that Jewish religious teachings were commonly interpreted to sanction the exploitation of non-Jews. It is hard to miss the intention of the Talmud, or misinterpret its noble meaning, or "pilpul" it into something other than what it is, when it says:
This is to be found in Jewish religious texts. Likewise, this:
"The economic behavior of the Jew," wrote the great sociologist Max Weber, "simply moved in the direction of the least resistance which was permitted them by [their] legalistic ethical norms. This means in practice that the acquisitive drive, which is found in varying degrees in all groups and nations, was here directed primarily to trade with strangers [i.e., non-Jews], who were usually regarded as enemies." [WEBER, p. 254] In medieval Poland, "the limitations upon non-Jews [by Jewish law and culture] were ... stringent," notes Bernard Weinryb,
In an overview of Polish history, another Jewish scholar, Eva Hoffman, notes
Strict adherence to Jewish laws and values by even the most corrupt of Jewry was typical of the Jewish underclass of Europe's Middle Ages who found in their religious beliefs sanction for their predations on Gentiles. "Despite all their depravity," says Mordechai Breuer, "members of the Jewish robber bands lived as Jews and generally adhered to traditional Jewish lifestyles and customs. As a rule, they did not undertake any expedition on the Sabbath [Saturday] and kept the dietary laws." [BREUER, in MAYER, p. 249] "Jewish bandits stole almost exclusively from Christians," notes Otto Ulbrichtl, "No breaking into houses of Court Jews or representatives of the Jewish community or synagogues (in contrast to the many burglarized churches) were reported." [ULBRICHT, p. 62] Florike Egmond's historical work about organized crime in the Netherlands (1650-1800) notes the following:
In pre-Holocaust Poland and Russia, notes Yiddish expert Abraham Brumberg, Jewish thieves, pimps, and prostitutes developed a rich folklore of hundreds of songs, mostly in this tenor:
Such a worldview that callously preys upon surrounding Gentile society was apparently not considered to be incongruous with the fundamental tenets of Judaism. As Brumberg notes, 'Many who subscribed to these [thieving] values considered themselves God-fearing and had their own synagogues." [LESTER, p. 36] [This we shall run across again] There is a tradition of Yiddish criminal songs in Eastern Europe:
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