Economic antisemitism is

antisemitism Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism. Antis ...

that uses

stereotypes In social psychology, a stereotype is a generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. The type of expectation can vary; it can be, for example ...

and canards that are based on negative perceptions or assertions of the economic status, occupations or economic behaviour of Jews, at times leading to various governmental policies and laws that target or which disproportionately impact the economic status, occupations or behaviour of Jews.

Relationship to religious antisemitism

Leon Poliakov Leon, Léon (French) or León (Spanish) may refer to: Places Europe * León, Spain, capital city of the Province of León * Province of León, Spain * Kingdom of León, an independent state in the Iberian Peninsula from 910 to 1230 and again fro ...

writes that economic antisemitism is not a distinct form of antisemitism but merely a manifestation of theological antisemitism (without the theological causes of economic antisemitism, there would be no economic antisemitism). On the other hand,

Derek Penslar Derek Jonathan Penslar, (born 1958) is an American-Canadian comparative historian with interests in the relationship between modern Israel and diaspora Jewish societies, global nationalist movements, European colonialism, and post-colonial states. ...

contends that in the modern era, economic antisemitism is "distinct and nearly constant" but theological antisemitism is "often subdued".

Stereotypes and canards

Derek Penslar describes modern economic antisemitism as a "double helix of intersecting paradigms, the first associating the Jew with paupers and savages and the second conceiving of Jews as conspirators, leaders of a financial cabal seeking global domination". Throughout history, stereotypes of Jews as being connected to greed, money-lending and

usury Usury () is the practice of making unethical or immoral monetary loans that unfairly enrich the lender. The term may be used in a moral sense—condemning taking advantage of others' misfortunes—or in a legal sense, where an interest rate is ch ...

have stoked anti-Jewish sentiments and still, to a large extent, influence the perception of Jews today. Reuveni and Wobick-segev suggest that we are still haunted by the image of "the mighty, greedy Jew". Allegations on the relationship of Jews and money have been characterised as underpinning the most damaging and lasting

antisemitic canards Antisemitic tropes, canards, or myths are " sensational reports, misrepresentations, or fabrications" that are defamatory towards Judaism as a religion or defamatory towards Jews as an ethnic or religious group. Since the Middle Ages, such rep ...

Antisemite Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism. Antis ...

s have often promulgated myths related to money, such as the canard that Jews control the world finances, first promoted in the ''

Protocols of the Elders of Zion ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'' () or ''The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion'' is a fabricated antisemitic text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. The hoax was plagiarized from several ...

'', and later repeated by

Henry Ford Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was an American industrialist, business magnate, founder of the Ford Motor Company, and chief developer of the assembly line technique of mass production. By creating the first automobile that mi ...

and his ''

Dearborn Independent ''The Dearborn Independent'', also known as ''The Ford International Weekly'', was a weekly newspaper established in 1901, and published by Henry Ford from 1919 through 1927. The paper reached a circulation of 900,000 by 1925, second only to the ...

''. Many such myths are still widespread in the

Islamic world The terms Muslim world and Islamic world commonly refer to the Islamic community, which is also known as the Ummah. This consists of all those who adhere to the religious beliefs and laws of Islam or to societies in which Islam is practiced. In ...

such as in books like ''

The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews ''The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews'' is a three-volume work of pseudo-scholarship, published by the Nation of Islam. The first volume, which was released in 1991, asserts that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade. ''The Secret ...

'', published by the

Nation of Islam The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a religious and political organization founded in the United States by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930. A black nationalist organization, the NOI focuses its attention on the African diaspora, especially on African ...

, as well as on the internet.

Abraham Foxman Abraham Henry Foxman (born May 1, 1940) is an American lawyer and activist. He served as the national director of the Anti-Defamation League from 1987 to 2015, and is currently the League's national director emeritus. From 2016 to 2021 he served a ...

cites examples of economic antisemitism found around the world, particularly in the United Kingdom, Germany, Argentina, and Spain. He also cites many modern instances of money-related antisemitism that are found on the Internet.

Gerald Krefetz Gerald Krefetz (died 27 January 2006)
''The New York Times.'' January 29, 2006. Retrieved 23 August 2012. was an

Jewish Emancipation Jewish emancipation was the process in various nations in Europe of eliminating Jewish disabilities, e.g. Jewish quotas, to which European Jews were then subject, and the recognition of Jews as entitled to equality and citizenship rights. It incl ...

and the rise of Jews to the middle and upper classes in Europe the myths evolved and began to assert that Jews were "clever, devious, and manipulative financiers out to dominate" world finances. Foxman describes six facets of canards used by proponents of economic antisemitism: #All Jews are wealthy. #Jews are stingy and greedy. #Powerful Jews control the business world. #

Judaism Judaism ( he, ''Yahăḏūṯ'') is an Abrahamic, monotheistic, and ethnic religion comprising the collective religious, cultural, and legal tradition and civilization of the Jewish people. It has its roots as an organized religion in the ...

emphasizes profit and materialismFoxman, p. 98 #Jews may cheat

non-Jews Gentile () is a word that usually means "someone who is not a Jews, Jew". Other Groups claiming affiliation with Israelites, groups that claim Israelite heritage, notably Mormons, sometimes use the term ''gentile'' to describe outsiders. More ra ...

#Jews use their power to benefit "their own kind."

Statistics

The

Anti Defamation League The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), formerly known as the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, is an international Jewish non-governmental organization based in the United States specializing in civil rights law. It was founded in late Septe ...

conducted a poll in Europe in 2007 that asked respondents if they agreed with the statement that "Jews have too much power in international financial markets". Polling data showed that respondents agreed with that statement as follows: 61% in Hungary, 43% in Austria, 40% in Switzerland, 40% in Belgium, 21% in the United Kingdom and 13% in the Netherlands. Another poll conducted by the ADL in 2009 found that 31% of Europeans surveyed blamed Jews for the global financial crisis that began in 2008.

Motivations

Allegations of unethical business practices

William I. Brustein William I. Brustein is Professor Emeritus at West Virginia University, having recently stepped down as Vice President for Global Strategies and International Affairs and Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of History. Previously, he was the Vic ...

describes popular economic antisemitism in Europe before the 19th century as based on accusations of Jews using alleged unethical business practices in second-hand trade, petty commerce and money-lending. In the 17th and the 18th centuries, anecdotal remarks from Christian merchants and traders show that there were negative feelings towards Jewish business people, who were sometimes regarded as liars or cheats. Werner Sombart hypothesized that the perceptions of cheating or dishonesty were simply a manifestation of Christian frustration at innovative commercial practices of Jews, which were contrary to the customs and traditions of the Christian merchants but were otherwise ethical.

Restrictions on occupations and professions

One form of economic antisemitism in the Middle Ages was a mass of legal restrictions imposed on the occupations and professions of Jews. Local rulers and church officials closed many professions to the Jews, pushing them into marginal occupations considered repugnant, such as tax- and rent-collecting and

money-lending In finance, a loan is the lending of money by one or more individuals, organizations, or other entities to other individuals, organizations, etc. The recipient (i.e., the borrower) incurs a debt and is usually liable to pay interest on that de ...

, but tolerated them as a "

necessary evil A necessary evil is an evil that someone believes must be done or accepted because it is necessary to achieve a better outcome—especially because possible alternative courses of action or inaction are expected to be worse. It is the "lesser evi ...

". Catholic doctrine then held that lending money for interest was a

sin In a religious context, sin is a transgression against divine law. Each culture has its own interpretation of what it means to commit a sin. While sins are generally considered actions, any thought, word, or act considered immoral, selfish, s ...

and forbade it to Christians. Not being subject to that restriction, Jews dominated this business. The

Torah The Torah (; hbo, ''Tōrā'', "Instruction", "Teaching" or "Law") is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In that sense, Torah means the s ...

and the later sections of the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. Hebrew: ''Tān ...

criticise

, but interpretations of the Biblical prohibition vary. Since few other occupations were open to them, Jews were motivated to take up money-lending. That was said to show Jews were usurers, which then led to many negative stereotypes and propaganda. Natural tensions between creditors, typically Jews, and debtors, typically Christians were added to social, political, religious and economic strains. More dangerous was lending to the monarchs of Europe, which enabled them to finance their endless wars and projects. Some monarchs would renege on repayments, often accusing their Jewish money lenders of various crimes. The nobility would also borrow large sums to maintain their lavish lifestyles. On numerous occasions the monarchs would cancel loans made by Jewish lenders, and some would also expel Jews from their realms. Peasants who were forced to pay their taxes to Jews could personify them as the people taking their earnings and remain loyal to the lords on whose behalf the Jews worked. Also present in the Middle Ages was the insistence by European sovereigns that "the Jews belonged to them in a peculiar way, different from that of their other subjects", which was evident in examples from the English legal code ''

Leges Edwardi Confessoris The title ''Leges Edwardi Confessoris'', or ''Laws of Edward the Confessor'', refers to a collection of laws, purporting to represent English law in the time of Edward the Confessor (reigned 1042–1066), as recited to the Norman invader king Wil ...

'', which portrayed the king as "tutor" and "defender" of the Jews, and of the Jews as his "possessions"; writing that "for those Jews, and all that they possess, belong to the kind, ��as if they were his private property". Similar depictions were presented by legal scholars working for King Alfonso II of Aragon.

Occupational preferences

Throughout history, the economic status and occupations of Jews have been the subject of antisemitic stereotypes and canards. Some of the stereotypes and canards are based on economic and social restrictions placed on the Jews. Writing about 130, the Roman satirist

Juvenal Decimus Junius Juvenalis (), known in English as Juvenal ( ), was a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century CE. He is the author of the collection of satirical poems known as the ''Satires''. The details of Juvenal's life ...

mockingly depicted Jews as grotesquely poor. Another aspect of economic antisemitism is the assertion that Jews do not produce anything of value but instead tend to serve as middlemen, acting as "parasites in the production line" of non-Jews, who are doing the real work. Krefetz lists middlemen occupations subject to that canard as distributors, shoppers, wholesalers, brokers, financiers, and retailers and writes that they are "all notably Jewish occupations". Since the Middle Ages, Diaspora Jews have been characterised by a real or perceived "inverted occupational pyramid": they were perceived to be more prevalent in the

tertiary sector The tertiary sector of the economy, generally known as the service sector, is the third of the three economic sectors in the three-sector model (also known as the economic cycle). The others are the primary sector (raw materials) and the second ...

, working in service jobs such as accounting, finance, medicine, law or commerce, than in the

secondary Secondary may refer to: Science and nature * Secondary emission, of particles ** Secondary electrons, electrons generated as ionization products * The secondary winding, or the electrical or electronic circuit connected to the secondary winding i ...

and

primary Primary or primaries may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music Groups and labels * Primary (band), from Australia * Primary (musician), hip hop musician and record producer from South Korea * Primary Music, Israeli record label Works * ...

sectors. Perceptions that Jews are more prevalent in certain occupations or in the professions (medicine or law) have been the target of antisemitic sentiment at different periods in history. Jews have been the targets of antisemitic criticism for their occupational preferences. For example,

Robert von Mohl Robert von Mohl (17 August 1799 – 4 November 1875) was a German jurist. Father of diplomat Ottmar von Mohl and salonnière Anna von Helmholtz. Brother of Hugo von Mohl, Moritz Mohl and Julius von Mohl. From 1824 to 1845 he was professor of poli ...

characterised European Jews of the 19th century as being concentrated in trade and finance, with some representation in the artistic and intellectual fields. Perceptions of overrepresentation of Jews in certain occupations have driven antisemitic sentiment in the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

. There have been a number of theories for the reason for the "inverted occupational pyramid". Gerald Krefetz writes that the livelihood of Jews, particularly their business activities, has been influenced by religious, cultural, social and historical factors. Krefetz asserts that those factors have led to a predisposition for occupations marked by independence, professionalism and scholarship. Jews have tended to show an "entrepreneurial spirit" and "capacity for risk-taking", which lead them to innovate financial concepts like negotiable instruments of credit, international syndicates, department stores, holding companies and investment banks. Krefetz suggests that Jews have frequently chosen professions that are "portable" or involve duties as a middleman, because of their long historical background, based on trading and "heightened awareness of continual persecution". In a similar vein, Foxman argues that many medieval Jews were especially well suited for commerce because the Jewish diaspora caused many Jews to have far-flung networks of friends and family, which facilitated trade:Foxman, p. 58: :"This ommercewas a business to which the Jews were well suited for historical reasons ��many Jews had friends and family members spread out over a large part of the then-known world, which became the basis of trading networks �� Zvi Eckstein and Maristella Botticini argue that widespread literacy and a focus on education are primary factors in Jewish occupational tendencies. During the first century, high priest Joshua ben Gamala made it mandatory for all young Jewish boys to get a primary education. Mandatory primary education was not a common practice during this time and did not become so for the rest of the world till well over a millennium later. Another factor in widespread literacy among Jews was the focus on study and interpretation of the Torah, Mishna, and Talmud. This led to the acquisition of basic literacy and argumentative skills. These cultural and religious developments caused many Jews to adopt a skill set that was well adept for urbanization and modernization. According to Werner Sombart, one complaint of Christian businesses was that Jews did not limit themselves to one particular trade or market but were often "jack of all trades" or "ubiquitous" and "paid no heed to the demarcation of all economic activities into separate categories". When Jews entered trades or business areas in Europe, that frequently resulted in complaints from Christian competitors that the Jews were depriving them of customers and profit. Sombart, analysing 17th- and 18th-century Christian views of Jewish merchants, concluded that Jewish merchants were considered to pursue profit blatantly, openly and aggressively in contrast to the Christian approach, which was willing to seek profit but viewed the aggressive pursuit of profit as unseemly, uncivilized and uncouth. Sombart also asserts another cause of Christian frustration with Jewish businesses, who imported raw materials, which was considered inappropriate by Christian merchants.

Jealousy

Niewyk and Nicosia describe economic antisemitism as focusing on "excessive" Jewish wealth and power growing out of the Jews' success in commerce, banking and professional careers. Marvin Perry asserts that much antisemitism in the European commercial world derived from the fact that non-Jewish merchants could not match the "economies of scale and advertising promotions" of Jewish competitors.

Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has p ...

(Samuel Clemens) wrote, "I am persuaded that in Russia, Austria, and Germany nine-tenths of the hostility to the Jew comes from the average Christian's inability to compete successfully with the average Jew in business in either straight business or the questionable sort". Similarly, Foxman writes that it is likely that non-Jews in medieval or Renaissance Europe had feelings of fear, vulnerability and hostility towards Jews because they resented being beholden to Jewish lenders. He claims that money-based antisemitism is a result of resentment and jealousy of Jews. Krefetz also makes a similar point: the ability of Jews to make money occasionally stirs jealousy and hate in non-Jews, contributing to a fear that Jews will "ascend too high" in the economic sphere and begin to manipulate and control world finances. Krefetz asserts that US antisemitism seems "rooted less in religion or contempt and more in envy, jealously and fear" of Jewish affluence and of the hidden power of "Jewish money". However,

Dennis Prager Dennis Mark Prager (; born August 2, 1948) is an American conservative radio talk show host and writer. He is the host of the nationally syndicated radio talk show ''The Dennis Prager Show''. In 2009, he co-founded PragerU, which creates five-m ...

and

Joseph Telushkin Joseph Telushkin (born 1948) is an American rabbi, lecturer, and bestselling author of more than 15 books, including volumes about Jewish ethics, Jewish literacy, as well as the book '' Rebbe'', a ''New York Times'' bestseller released in Ju ...

offer a different perspective. Addressing the premise that "the Jews' disproportionate wealth and concentration in business and in the professions is said to provoke anti-Jewish hostility", they assert that "while economic factors can and often do exacerbate antisemitism, ��economic factors do not cause Jew-hatred; they only provide opportunities for it to be expressed". As one of the arguments supporting their thesis, Prager and Telushkin point out, "Jews have often suffered the worst antisemitism when they were poor, as was true with the overwhelming majority of Jews in ��Poland and Russia, and have encountered the least amount of antisemitism when affluent as in the United States and Canada today".

Anti-mercantilism

Penslar characterised economic antisemitism as "an extreme form of the antimercantile sentiments that are rooted in pagan antiquity and the early Christian tradition".

Blame for the ills of capitalism

In the 19th century, Jews came to be so closely associated with capitalism that some even viewed the Jews as the "creators of capitalism". According to Muller, those who embraced capitalism tended to be sympathetic to Jews, and those who rejected capitalism tended to be hostile to Jews. Marx old

Richard Levy writes that although there were local variations, most modern economic antisemitism is defined by "the scapegoating of Jews for capitalism's ills". Similarly, Steven Beller writes that economic antisemitism at the turn of the 20th century was "based on fear and envy at the supposed stranglehold of 'the Jews' over finance and accused Jews of being behind the depredations of capitalism on the traditional economy". Laurel Platt attributes antisemitic attitudes that extend back to the Middle Ages for the tendency to blame Jews for the problems of capitalism and urbanisation that arose in the late 19th century. Scholars have noted the antisemitic attitudes of mid-19th-century French socialists such as

Charles Fourier François Marie Charles Fourier (;; 7 April 1772 – 10 October 1837) was a French philosopher, an influential early socialist thinker and one of the founders of utopian socialism. Some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in ...

and

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (, , ; 15 January 1809, Besançon – 19 January 1865, Paris) was a French socialist,Landauer, Carl; Landauer, Hilde Stein; Valkenier, Elizabeth Kridl (1979) 959 "The Three Anticapitalistic Movements". ''European Socia ...

. Fourier vilified the Jews as the "incarnation of commerce: parasitical, deceitful, traitorous and unproductive". Proudhon used even more vehement invective, attacking Jews as the "incarnation of finance capitalism" and characterizing them as anti-producers by temperament.

Alphonse Toussenel Alphonse Toussenel (March 17, 1803 – April 30, 1885) was a French naturalist, writer and journalist born in Montreuil-Bellay, a small meadows commune of Angers; he died in Paris on April 30, 1885. A utopian socialist and a disciple of Charles F ...

, a follower of Fourier, wrote finance, meaning the Jews, was dominating and ruining France. Similarly,

Auguste Blanqui Louis Auguste Blanqui (; 8 February 1805 – 1 January 1881) was a French socialist and political activist, notable for his revolutionary theory of Blanquism. Biography Early life, political activity and first imprisonment (1805–1848) Bla ...

commented in his correspondence on Jews as being usurers and "Shylocks".

Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...

– himself from a Jewish background – argued that earning a living from collecting interest or acting as a middleman was an unjust and exploitive aspect of capitalism.Perry, pp. 153-156 Because many Jews were employed in occupations that Marx considered "non-productive", he singled out Jews for particular criticism and blamed Judaism for the exploitation and alienation of workers.

Moses Mendelssohn Moses Mendelssohn (6 September 1729 – 4 January 1786) was a German-Jewish philosopher and theologian. His writings and ideas on Jews and the Jewish religion and identity were a central element in the development of the ''Haskalah'', or 'Je ...

argued to the contrary that commercial activity was just as valid and beneficial as manual labour: "Many a merchant, while quietly engaged at his desk in forming commercial speculations, ��produces ��more than the most active and noisy mechanic or tradesman". Penslar wrote that Marx argued not that Jews merely embraced capitalism but that they "embodied" it. Penslar stated that Marx claimed that the Jewish religious culture shared many key characteristics of capitalism, such as materialism and egoism. Marx concluded that Judaism was responsible for the alienation of many Jewish workers. In his 1844 work ''

On the Jewish Question "On the Jewish Question" is a response by Karl Marx to then-current debates over the Jewish question. Marx wrote the piece in 1843, and it was first published in Paris in 1844 under the German title "Zur Judenfrage" in the ''Deutsch–Französi ...

'', Marx distinguished between the "Sabbath Jew" and the "everyday Jew." Marx argued that, practically speaking, everyday Judaism was a commercial practice, not a theology. According to Perry, Marx believed that "Jews are the embodiment of capitalism (money-system) in action and the creators of all its evil consequences for humanity". Several other commentators have noted that economic antisemitism increases in times of recession or economic hardship, such as during the

Depression of 1873 The Panic of 1873 was a financial crisis that triggered an economic depression in Europe and North America that lasted from 1873 to 1877 or 1879 in France and in Britain. In Britain, the Panic started two decades of stagnation known as the "Lon ...

Identification of Jews as socialists or communists

Jewish Bolshevism Jewish Bolshevism, also Judeo–Bolshevism, is an anti-communist and antisemitic canard, which alleges that the Jews were the originators of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and that they held primary power among the Bolsheviks who led the revo ...

is an antisemitic and anti-communist canard that is based on the claim that Jews have been the driving force behind or are disproportionately involved in communism, sometimes more specifically Russian

Bolshevism Bolshevism (from Bolshevik) is a revolutionary socialist current of Soviet Marxist–Leninist political thought and political regime associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, fo ...

. The expression was the title of a pamphlet, '' The Jewish Bolshevism'', and became current after the 1917

October Revolution The October Revolution,. officially known as the Great October Socialist Revolution. in the Soviet Union, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was a key moment ...

in Russia, featuring prominently in the propaganda of the anti-Bolshevik "

White White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no hue). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully reflect and scatter all the visible wavelengths of light. White on ...

" forces during the

Russian Civil War , date = October Revolution, 7 November 1917 – Yakut revolt, 16 June 1923{{Efn, The main phase ended on 25 October 1922. Revolt against the Bolsheviks continued Basmachi movement, in Central Asia and Tungus Republic, the Far East th ...

. That idea spread worldwide in the 1920s with the publication and circulation of ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion''. That was popularised by the Jewish ancestry of many leading Bolsheviks, most notably

Leon Trotsky Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian ...

, during and after the October Revolution.

Daniel Pipes Daniel Pipes (born September 9, 1949) is an American historian, writer, and commentator. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its ''Middle East Quarterly'' journal. His writing focuses on American foreign policy and the ...

says that "primarily through ''the Protocols of the Elders of Zion'', the Whites spread these charges to an international audience". James Webb wrote that it is rare to find an antisemitic source after 1917 that "does not stand in debt to the White Russian analysis of the Revolution". The label "Judeo-Bolshevism" was used in

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

to equate Jews with communists, implying that the communism served Jewish interests and/or that all Jews were communists. Jews and Communists were both blamed for having allegedly betrayed Germany during

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

and resulting in Germany signing

The Treaty of Versailles The Treaty of Versailles (french: Traité de Versailles; german: Versailler Vertrag, ) was the most important of the peace treaties of World War I. It ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1 ...

, in what is known as the "

stab-in-the-back The stab-in-the-back myth (, , ) was an antisemitic conspiracy theory that was widely believed and promulgated in Aftermath of World War I, Germany after 1918. It maintained that the Imperial German Army did not lose World War I on the battl ...

myth". In

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous ...

before World War II, ''

Żydokomuna ' (, Polish for "Judeo-Communism") is an anti-communist and antisemitic canard, or a pejorative stereotype, suggesting that most Jews collaborated with the Soviet Union in importing communism into Poland, or that there was an exclusively Jewish ...

'' was used in the same way to allege that Jews were conspiring with the Soviet Union to invade Poland. According to André Gerrits, "The myth of Jewish Communism was one of the most popular and widespread political prejudices in the first half of the 20th century, in Eastern Europe in particular". The allegation still sees use in antisemitic publications and websites today.

Historical development

Jerome Chanes identifies six stages in the historical development of antisemitism: #Pre-Christian anti-Judaism in ancient Greece and Rome, which was primarily ethnic in nature #Christian anti-semitism in antiquity and the Middle Ages, which was religious in nature and has extended into modern times #Traditional Muslim antisemitism, which was, at least in its classical form, nuanced in that Jews were a protected class #Political, social and economic antisemitism of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Europe, which laid the groundwork for racial antisemitism #Racial antisemitism, which arose in the 19th century and culminated in Nazism #Contemporary antisemitism, which has been labelled by some as the

New Antisemitism New antisemitism is the idea that a new form of antisemitism has developed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, tending to manifest itself as anti-Zionism and criticism of the Israeli government. The concept is included in some definitions ...

Middle Ages

According to Norman Roth, "far more attention has

een Een ːnis a village in the Netherlands. It is part of the Noordenveld municipality in Drenthe. History Een is an ''esdorp'' which developed in the middle ages on the higher grounds. The communal pasture is triangular. The village developed dur ...

focused on Jewish moneylending than on any other occupation". He asserts that general histories of the medieval period, if they mention Jews at all, refer to them as moneylenders or as being involved in the slave trade. He asserts that there is not a great abundance of research on commercial activity of Jews in the Middle East. He accuses scholars of making "sweeping generalizations that would be "laughable and unthinkable in any other context". Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews were subjected to a wide range of legal

disabilities Disability is the experience of any condition that makes it more difficult for a person to do certain activities or have equitable access within a given society. Disabilities may be cognitive, developmental, intellectual, mental, physical, se ...

and restrictions, some of which lasted until the end of the 19th century. At times, even moneylending and peddling were forbidden to them. The number of Jews permitted to reside in different places was limited. They were concentrated in

ghettos A ghetto, often called ''the'' ghetto, is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially as a result of political, social, legal, environmental or economic pressure. Ghettos are often known for being more impoverished t ...

, they were not allowed to own land, they were subject to discriminatory taxes on entering cities or districts other than their own, they were forced to swear special

Jewish Oaths Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

, and they suffered a variety of other measures. The exclusion of Jews from many trades and craft guilds began after the

First Crusade The First Crusade (1096–1099) was the first of a series of religious wars, or Crusades, initiated, supported and at times directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The objective was the recovery of the Holy Land from Islamic ru ...

(1096–1099). The exclusion often came at the urging of the clergy, local guild members, state and local governments.Sachar Jews were excluded in certain places from certain crafts as they were excluded by the

craft guilds A guild ( ) is an association of artisans and merchants who oversee the practice of their craft/trade in a particular area. The earliest types of guild formed as organizations of tradesmen belonging to a professional association. They sometimes ...

in certain trades and, indirectly, agriculture by bans on land-ownership. That often led Jews into peddling, second-hand goods, pawnbroking and moneylending.Perry, p. 125 In Southern Europe, Christian competitors of Jews in several occupations, including moneylending, asked leaders to expel Jews to reduce competition. The result of those occupational restrictions was to push Jews into marginal roles, considered socially inferior, such as tax and rent collecting and moneylending, which were tolerated as a "necessary evil". Although Jews had not been particularly associated with moneylending in antiquity, a stereotype of them doing so was developed beginning in the 11th century. Jonathan Frankel notes that the stereotype, though obviously an exaggeration, had a solid basis in reality. While not all Jews were moneylenders, Jews were probably disproportionately represented in that trade. Catholic doctrine then held that lending money for interest was a

and so was an occupation forbidden to Christians. Not being subject to the restriction, Jews made that business their own despite possible criticism of

in the

and later sections of the

Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. Hebrew: ''Tān ...

. Unfortunately, that led to many negative stereotypes of Jews as insolent, greedy usurers, and the understandable tensions between creditors, typically Jews, and debtors, typically Christians, added to social, political, religious and economic strains. Peasants who were forced to pay their taxes to Jews could see them as personally taking their money while they were unaware of those on whose behalf those Jews worked.

Howard Sachar Howard Morley Sachar (February 10, 1928 – April 18, 2018) was an American historian. He was Professor Emeritus of History and International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and the author of 16 books, as well as nu ...

wrote that the occupations that were left for Jews to engage in were often the occupations that Christians disdained, such as peddling, hawking and moneylending. He estimated that three fourths of Jews in Central and Western Europe were occupied in those occupations in the 18th century. Sachar stated, "In their ews'struggle for livelihood, they generated a sizable underclass of beggars, fencers, pimps, even robbers, thereby creating a self-fulfilling gentile scenario of Jews, one that would endlessly invoked by Jew-haters throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries". Similarly, Todeschini wrote that the perception of Jews as dishonest and immoral became a

self-fulfilling prophecy A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that comes true at least in part as a result of a person's or group of persons' belief or expectation that said prediction would come true. This suggests that people's beliefs influence their actions. ...

because the exclusion from other professions forced them to engage in moneylending and other marginal professions that were regarded as unethical. One of the reasons that moneylending was open to Jews as a profession was that European Christian culture regarded moneylending as sinful or immoral. That caused Christians to avoid the profession, leaving a vacuum for which Jews could fill. The Christian abhorrence of moneylending was rooted in the

Old Testament The Old Testament (often abbreviated OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew writings by the Israelites. The ...

laws of , , and .Foxman p. 59 Those biblical rules were emphasized in the Middle Ages again in the Lateran councils, particularly the

Second Lateran Council The Second Council of the Lateran was the tenth ecumenical council recognized by the Catholic Church. It was convened by Pope Innocent II in April 1139 and attended by close to a thousand clerics. Its immediate task was to neutralise the after-ef ...

in 1139, and the

Fourth Lateran Council The Fourth Council of the Lateran or Lateran IV was convoked by Pope Innocent III in April 1213 and opened at the Lateran Palace in Rome on 11 November 1215. Due to the great length of time between the Council's convocation and meeting, many bi ...

in 1215, but proclamations of the Catholic Church outlawed excessively-high interest rates, not all interest.

Max Dimont Max Isaac Dimont (August 12, 1912 – March 25, 1992) was a Finnish American Jewish historian, lecturer, publicist, and writer. Early life Dimont was born into a Jewish family on August 12, 1912 in Helsinki, Finland, one of five children. Some ...

asserts that moneylending, of all professions, was the "most reviled". The occupation of moneylending was considered a "degenerate" profession in the 14th century by many Christians, including

Franciscans , image = FrancescoCoA PioM.svg , image_size = 200px , caption = A cross, Christ's arm and Saint Francis's arm, a universal symbol of the Franciscans , abbreviation = OFM , predecessor = , ...

in England such as

John Peckham John Peckham (c. 1230 – 8 December 1292) was Archbishop of Canterbury in the years 1279–1292. He was a native of Sussex who was educated at Lewes Priory and became a Friar Minor about 1250. He studied at the University of Paris under B ...

, who engaged in discussions of usury and debt. One reason that Christians permitted Jews to engage in moneylending, despite it being considered a sinful activity, was that Jews were already considered to be damned and so they may as well commit the sin of usury, thus saving the souls of Christians who would otherwise be forced to lend money. Moneylending became an important occupation for Jews, beginning in the early Middle Ages, and continuing into the modern era. Moneylending was first noted as a significant occupation in the 9th century, and in the 10th century, some Jews were large scale financiers.Kahan, p. 257 That prevalence in the field of moneylending has led to scholarly debate, which considered why Jews gravitated towards money-related occupations. Dimont writes that the Jewish role in moneylending was the most important contribution of Jews to medieval society since the feudal culture might have failed without a flow of capital. Foxman writes that the moneylending profession gave rise to the modern financial industries, including banking. Over time, Jews became very skilled at both commerce and moneylending. Some European leaders encouraged Jews to engage in moneylending because it enhanced economic activity and provided personal benefit to the leaders themselves. In addition, leaders benefited from Jewish moneylenders by collecting fees and taxes.Perry, p. 126 Throughout Europe, Jews filled the role of Court Jew for virtually every seat of nobility. However, some European leaders expelled Jews from their countries (England 1290, France 1306 and 1394), depriving themselves of the economic benefits provided by the moneylenders. Although most scholars attribute the large number of Jews in the moneylending occupation to the exclusion from other crafts and trades,

Werner Sombart Werner Sombart (; ; 19 January 1863 – 18 May 1941) was a German economist and sociologist, the head of the "Youngest Historical School" and one of the leading Continental European social scientists during the first quarter of the 20th century. ...

, in his ''The Jews and Modern Capitalism'', asserted that moneylending was an occupation that many Jews preferred and chose. As evidence, he pointed out his book that Jews had heavily been engaged in moneylending before the era when they were excluded from trades and crafts and also that Jews' religion and culture predisposed them to commercial and financial endeavours. Because Sombart speculated on anthropological and racial explanations, his work has been described as antisemitic and racist. However, some modern scholars characterise his presentation of the topic as sympathetic and valid.Dimont, p. 263 Sombart's work was a watershed in the scholarship of Jewish culture because it prompted subsequent historians and economists to begin to examine the relationship between Jews and money. Sombart contends that many of the trade and craft prohibitions were rarely enforced and so Jews could have found employment in many of the proscribed occupations if they had desired. However, Sombart writes that Jews were absolutely excluded from government jobs, that exclusion being more significant than the putative trade exclusions. He also suggests that exclusion from government jobs had some incidental benefits for Jews because it freed them from problems associated with political partisanship.

Early modern period

Penslar asserted that the "more fantastic aspects of medieval antisemitism, which include the demonization of Jews, and accusations of ritual murder and black magic were (incompletely) suppressed, to some extent, by the combined forces of Protestantism and the modern state", but economic antisemitism did not share the same fate because "it has fit as well into a rationalized worldview as a magical one, into a secular sensibility as a theological one". According to Perry and Schweitzer, "Jewish economic endeavors labored under the stigma, variously, of being 'unproductive', sterile, parasitic, usurious, dangerous, dishonest, criminal and the like".

19th-century Europe

Prior to around 1820 in Europe, most Jews were peddlers and shopkeepers, but after the

Jewish emancipation Jewish emancipation was the process in various nations in Europe of eliminating Jewish disabilities, e.g. Jewish quotas, to which European Jews were then subject, and the recognition of Jews as entitled to equality and citizenship rights. It incl ...

, in the 19th century, Jews were able to migrate to the middle and upper classes and to engage in a wider variety of occupations.Perry, p. 139 In 1859, the

Austrian Empire The Austrian Empire (german: link=no, Kaiserthum Oesterreich, modern spelling , ) was a Central-Eastern European multinational great power from 1804 to 1867, created by proclamation out of the realms of the Habsburgs. During its existence, ...

had guilds abolished, which was an opportunity for Jews to enter "liberal professions" such as law, journalism and medicine.Perry, p. 136 In the mid-19th century, a number of German Jews founded investment banking firms, which later became mainstays of the industry. Most prominent Jewish banks in the US were

investment bank Investment is the dedication of money to purchase of an asset to attain an increase in value over a period of time. Investment requires a sacrifice of some present asset, such as time, money, or effort. In finance, the purpose of investing is ...

s, rather than

commercial bank A commercial bank is a financial institution which accepts deposits from the public and gives loans for the purposes of consumption and investment to make profit. It can also refer to a bank, or a division of a large bank, which deals with cor ...

s. Jonathan Knee postulates that Jews were forced to focus on the development of investment banks because they were excluded from the commercial banking sector. After legislation supporting the equality of French Jews with other citizens during the

French Revolution The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are considere ...

, similar laws promoting Jewish emancipation were enacted in the early 19th century in parts of Europe over which France had influence. The old laws restricting them to ghettos and the many laws that limited their rights to property, worship and occupation were rescinded. Despite the lifting of official economic restrictions against Jews throughout Europe, economic stereotypes and unofficial or semiofficial restrictions on the economic activity of Jews continued.

Bernard Lazare Bernard Lazare (14 June 1865, Nîmes – 1 September 1903, Paris) was a French literary critic, political journalist, polemicist, and anarchist. He was also among the first Dreyfusards. Life Lazare's initial contact with symbolists introduced h ...

commented, "Economic antisemitism to-day is stronger than it ever was, for the reason that to-day, more than ever, the Jew appears powerful and rich. Formerly he was not seen: he remained hidden in his Ghetto, far from Christian eyes. He had but one care, to conceal his wealth, that wealth of which tradition regarded him as the gatherer, and not the proprietor. The day he was freed from his disabilities, the day the restrictions put to his activities fell away, the Jew showed himself in public".

wrote that throughout much of the 19th century, popular literature and theatrical performances in the Austrian and German empires were merciless in their caricatures of the

Rothschilds The Rothschild family ( , ) is a wealthy Ashkenazi Jewish family originally from Frankfurt that rose to prominence with Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812), a court factor to the German Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel in the Free City of F ...

as "Jewish cash bags" or "Jews behind the throne". Those caricatures evolved from mere political satire to more-overt antisemitism in the early 20th century. Sachar noted the irony that Jewish proponents of communism, such as Marx, were partially responsible for antisemitism targeting the relationship between Jews and capitalism. One example of economic antisemitism was promulgated in France by

Édouard Drumont Édouard Adolphe Drumont (3 May 1844 – 5 February 1917) was a French antisemitic journalist, author and politician. He initiated the Antisemitic League of France in 1889, and was the founder and editor of the newspaper ''La Libre Parole''. ...

in his 1879 pamphlet ''What we Demand of Modern Jewry'' that contrasted the poverty of French workers with the wealth of Jewish bankers and industrialists.

19th-century United States

By the time of the

American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states th ...

, tensions over race and immigration and economic competition between Jews and non-Jews combined to produce the worst American outbreak of anti-Semitism until then. Americans on both sides of the slavery issue denounced Jews as disloyal war profiteers and accused them of driving Christians out of business and aiding and abetting the enemy. Major General

Ulysses S. Grant Ulysses S. Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant ; April 27, 1822July 23, 1885) was an American military officer and politician who served as the 18th president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. As Commanding General, he led the Union Ar ...

was influenced by such sentiments and issued General Order No. 11, expelling Jews from areas under his control in western Tennessee:

The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled ��within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.

That order was quickly rescinded by President

Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln ( ; February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was an American lawyer, politician, and statesman who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. Lincoln led the nation thro ...

, but it already been enforced in a number of towns. According to Jerome Chanes, Lincoln's revocation of Grant's order was based primarily on "constitutional strictures against ��the federal government singling out any group for special treatment". Chanes characterised the order as "unique in the history of the United States" because it was the only overtly-antisemitic official action of the US government. Grant later issued an order "that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the road southward". His aide, Colonel John V. DuBois, ordered "all cotton speculators, Jews, and all vagabonds with no honest means of support" to leave the district. "The Israelites especially should be kept out… they are such an intolerable nuisance". From the early 1880s, declining farm prices also prompted elements of the

Populist movement Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against " the elite". It is frequently associated with anti-establishment and anti-political sentiment. The term developed ...

to blame the perceived evils of capitalism and industrialism on Jews because of their alleged racial/religious inclination for financial exploitation. More specifically, they alleged financial manipulations by Jewish financiers such as the Rothschilds. Although Jews played only a minor role in the nation's commercial banking system, the prominence of Jewish investment bankers, such as the Rothschilds in Europe,

Jacob Schiff Jacob (; ; ar, يَعْقُوب, Yaʿqūb; gr, Ἰακώβ, Iakṓb), later given the name Israel, is regarded as a patriarch of the Israelites and is an important figure in Abrahamic religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Jac ...

, and Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York City, made the claims of anti-Semites believable to some. In the 1890s,

Mary Elizabeth Lease Mary Elizabeth Lease (September 11, 1850 – October 29, 1933) was an American lecturer, writer, Georgist, and political activist. She was an advocate of the suffrage movement as well as temperance but she was best known for her work with the P ...

, an American farming activist and populist from Kansas, frequently blamed the Rothschilds and "British bankers" for farmers' ills.Levitas, pp. 187-88 The Morgan Bonds scandal injected populist anti-Semitism into the 1896 presidential campaign. It was disclosed that President

Grover Cleveland Stephen Grover Cleveland (March 18, 1837June 24, 1908) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 22nd and 24th president of the United States from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897. Cleveland is the only president in American ...

had sold bonds to a syndicate that included

J. P. Morgan John Pierpont Morgan Sr. (April 17, 1837 – March 31, 1913) was an American financier and investment banker who dominated corporate finance on Wall Street throughout the Gilded Age. As the head of the banking firm that ultimately became known ...

and the Rothschilds. The syndicate was now selling the bonds for a profit, and the Populists used that as an opportunity to uphold their view of history that both Washington, DC, and Wall Street were in the hands of international Jewish banking houses. Another focus of anti-Semitism was the allegation that Jews were at the middle of an international conspiracy to fix the currency, and thus the economy, to a single gold standard.

''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion''

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'' () or ''The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion'' is a fabricated antisemitic text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. The hoax was plagiarized from several ...

'', an antisemitic text, purported to describe a Jewish plan to achieve global domination and to document the minutes of a late-19th-century meeting attended by world Jewish leaders, the "Elders of Zion", conspiring to take over the world. The fraudulent ''Protocols'' included plans to subvert the morals of the non-Jewish world, to control the world's economies by Jewish bankers, to have the press in Jewish control of the press and ultimately destroy civilisation. The document of 24 "protocols" was analysed by Steven Jacobs and Mark Weitzman, who documented several protocols that suggested that Jews would employ control of the worlds banking system to dominate the world. Those that focus on economic issues are 2, 3, 4, 21 and 22.

Henry Ford and the ''Dearborn Independent''

was a

non-interventionist Non-interventionism or non-intervention is a political philosophy or national foreign policy doctrine that opposes interference in the domestic politics and affairs of other countries but, in contrast to isolationism, is not necessarily opposed t ...

who opposed both world wars and believed that Jews were responsible for starting wars to profit from them: "International financiers are behind all war. They are what is called the international Jew: German Jews, French Jews, English Jews, American Jews. I believe that in all those countries except our own the Jewish financier is supreme ��here the Jew is a threat". Ford also shared Marx's view that Jews were responsible for capitalism. He believed that in their role as financiers, they did not contribute anything of value to society. In 1915, during World War I, Ford blamed Jews for instigating the war: "I know who caused the war: German-Jewish bankers". In 1925, Ford said, "What I oppose most is the international Jewish money power that is met in every war. That is what I oppose – a power that has no country and that can order the young men of all countries out to death". According to Steven Watts, Ford's antisemitism was partially caused by a desire for world peace. Ford became aware of ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion''. Believing them to be legitimate document, he published portions of it in his newspaper, ''

The Dearborn Independent ''The Dearborn Independent'', also known as ''The Ford International Weekly'', was a weekly newspaper established in 1901, and published by Henry Ford from 1919 through 1927. The paper reached a circulation of 900,000 by 1925, second only to the ...

''. From 1920 to 1921, the ''Dearborn Independent'' also carried a series of articles expanding on the themes of financial control by Jews. One of the articles, "Jewish Power and America's Money Famine", asserted that the power exercised by Jews over the nation's supply of money was insidious by helping deprive farmers and others outside the banking coterie of money when they needed it most. The article asked, "Where is the American gold supply? ��It may be in the United States but it does not belong to the United States". It drew the conclusion that Jews controlled the gold supply and thus American money. Another of the articles, "Jewish Idea Molded Federal Reserve System", was a reflection of Ford's suspicion of the

Federal Reserve System The Federal Reserve System (often shortened to the Federal Reserve, or simply the Fed) is the central banking system of the United States of America. It was created on December 23, 1913, with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, after a ...

and its proponent,

Paul Warburg Paul Moritz Warburg (August 10, 1868 – January 24, 1932) was a German-born American investment banker who served as the 2nd Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve from 1916 to 1918. Prior to his term as vice chairman, Warburg appointed as a member of ...

. Ford believed that the Federal Reserve was secretive and insidious. Those articles gave rise to claims of antisemitism against Ford, and in 1929, he signed a statement apologising for the articles.

Nazi Germany

Antisemitism and the persecution of

Jew Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""Th ...

s represented a central tenet of

Nazism Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Na ...

. In its 25-point Party Program, published in 1920,

Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that crea ...

members publicly declared their intention to segregate Jews from "

Aryan Aryan or Arya (, Indo-Iranian *''arya'') is a term originally used as an ethnocultural self-designation by Indo-Iranians in ancient times, in contrast to the nearby outsiders known as 'non-Aryan' (*''an-arya''). In Ancient India, the term ' ...

" society and to abrogate Jews' political, legal and civil rights. Nazi leaders began to carry out their pledge to persecute

German Jews The history of the Jews in Germany goes back at least to the year 321, and continued through the Early Middle Ages (5th to 10th centuries CE) and High Middle Ages (''circa'' 1000–1299 CE) when Jewish immigrants founded the Ashkenazi Jewish ...

soon after their assumption of power.

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...

rose to power in Germany during a time of economic depression. Hitler blamed Jews for Germany's economic woes. Hitler's book ''

Mein Kampf (; ''My Struggle'' or ''My Battle'') is a 1925 autobiographical manifesto by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler. The work describes the process by which Hitler became antisemitic and outlines his political ideology and future plans for Germ ...

'' (German for "My Struggle") included the following passage, which was representative of much antisemitism in Germany and Europe: "The Jewish train of thought in all this is clear. The Bolshevization of Germany – that is, the extermination of the national '' völkisch'' German intelligentsia to make possible the sweating of the German working class under the yoke of Jewish world finance – is conceived only as a preliminary to the further extension of this Jewish tendency of world conquest ��If our people and our state become the victim of these blood-thirsty and avaricious Jewish tyrants of nations, the whole earth will sink into the snares of this octopus". From 1933, repressive laws were passed against Jews, culminating in the

Nuremberg Laws The Nuremberg Laws (german: link=no, Nürnberger Gesetze, ) were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of th ...

, which removed most of the rights of citizenship from Jews by using a racial definition based on descent, rather than any religious definition of who was a Jew. Sporadic violence against the Jews became widespread with the

Kristallnacht () or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (german: Novemberpogrome, ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's (SA) paramilitary and (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from ...

riots, which targeted Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship, killing hundreds across Germany, including the newly-annexed Austria. The ideologically-antisemitic agenda of that culminated in the

genocide Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Latin ...

of the Jews of Europe, known as the

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

. The first major law to curtail the rights of Jewish German citizens was the

Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Hitler Service (german: Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums, shortened to ''Berufsbeamtengesetz''), also known as Civil Service Law, Civil Service Restoration Act, and Law to Re-es ...

on 7 April 1933. Those who were Jewish or "politically unreliable" were now excluded from state service. That was the German authorities' first formulation of the so-called

Aryan Paragraph An Aryan paragraph (german: Arierparagraph) was a clause in the statutes of an organization, corporation, or real estate deed that reserved membership and/or right of residence solely for members of the "Aryan race" and excluded from such rights a ...

, which excluded Jews (and often other "non-Aryans") from organizations, professions, and other aspects of public life. In April 1933, German law restricted the number of Jewish students at German schools and universities. In the same month, further legislation sharply curtailed "Jewish activity" in the medical and legal professions. Subsequent laws and decrees restricted reimbursement of Jewish doctors from state health insurance funds. On 1 April 1933, Jewish doctors, shops, lawyers and stores were boycotted. Only six days later, the

was passed, banning Jews from being employed in government. Jews were now indirectly and directly dissuaded or banned from privileged and upper-level positions reserved for "Aryan" Germans. From then on, Jews were forced to work at more-menial positions, beneath non-Jews. Using the Weimar-era ''Reich'' Flight Tax, the Nazis subjected emigrants to punitive taxes as a form of "legalized theft", with a particular focus on Jews fleeing the country. In 1936, Jews were banned from all professional jobs, effectively preventing them from exerting any influence in education, politics, higher education and industry. There was no longer to stop the anti-Jewish actions that spread across the German economy. In 1937 and 1938, German authorities again stepped up legislative persecution of German Jews. The government set out to impoverish Jews and remove them from the German economy by requiring them to register their property. Even before the Olympics, the Nazi government had initiated "

Aryanization Aryanization (german: Arisierung) was the Nazi term for the seizure of property from Jews and its transfer to non-Jews, and the forced expulsion of Jews from economic life in Nazi Germany, Axis-aligned states, and their occupied territories. I ...

", the dismissal of Jewish workers and managers of a company and/or the takeover of Jewish-owned businesses by non-Jewish Germans, who bought them at bargain prices, fixed by government or Nazi party officials. On 1 March 1938, government contracts could no longer be awarded to Jewish businesses. On 30 September, the government forbade Jewish doctors to treat non-Jews, and it revoked the licences of Jewish lawyers. After the

(commonly known as "Night of Broken Glass") pogrom of 9–10 November 1938, Nazi leaders stepped up "Aryanization" efforts and enforced measures that increasingly succeeded in physically isolating and segregating Jews from their fellow Germans. Jews were barred from all public schools and universities as well as from cinemas, theatres and sports facilities. In many cities, Jews were forbidden to enter designated "Aryan" zones. German decrees and ordinances expanded the ban on Jews in professional life. By September 1938, for instance, Jewish physicians were effectively banned from treating "Aryan" patients. By April 1939, nearly all Jewish companies had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits or had been forced to sell out to the Nazi German government. That further reduced Jews' rights as human beings, and they were in many ways officially separated from the German populace.

Occupied Europe

Antisemitism was particularly virulent in

Vichy France Vichy France (french: Régime de Vichy; 10 July 1940 – 9 August 1944), officially the French State ('), was the fascist French state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. Officially independent, but with half of its ter ...

during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. The antisemitic demands of right-wing groups were implemented under the collaborating Vichy regime of Marshal

Philippe Pétain Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Pétain (24 April 1856 – 23 July 1951), commonly known as Philippe Pétain (, ) or Marshal Pétain (french: Maréchal Pétain), was a French general who attained the position of Marshal of France at the end of World ...

after the defeat of the French by the German army in 1940. A

law on the status of Jews __NOTOC__ The Law of 3 October 1940 on the status of Jews was a law enacted by Vichy France. It provided a legal definition of the expression ''Jewish race'', which was used during the Nazi occupation for the implementation of Vichy's ideologica ...

that year, followed by one in 1941, purged Jews from employment in administrative, civil service and judicial posts; most professions and even from the entertainment industry, restricting most of them to menial jobs.

Soviet Union

William Korey describes a 1977

Academy of Sciences of the USSR The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union was the highest scientific institution of the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1991, uniting the country's leading scientists, subordinated directly to the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (until 1946 ...

report, ''International Zionism: History and Politics'', alleging that "Jewish bourgeoisie", using Zionism as a cover, sought "the expansion of their positions in the economy of the largest capitalist states ��and in the economic system of world capitalism as a whole". The report specifically mentioned six Wall Street investment firms:

Lazard Brothers Lazard Ltd (formerly known as Lazard Frères & Co.) is a financial advisory and asset management firm that engages in investment banking, asset management and other financial services, primarily with institutional clients. It is the world's la ...

Lehman Brothers Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. ( ) was an American global financial services firm founded in 1847. Before Bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, filing for bankruptcy in 2008, Lehman was the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States (behind Gol ...

, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., Loeb Rhoades, Bache & Co. and Goldman-Sachs. The report also expounded on the "clannish" theory that Jewish financial firms around the world were related by family-ties and collaborated unethically.

20th-century United States

In 1922, educational discrimination became a national issue when

Harvard College Harvard College is the undergraduate college of Harvard University, an Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636, Harvard College is the original school of Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher lea ...

announced that it was considering a quota system for Jewish students. Although it was eventually dropped, the quota was enforced in many colleges by underhanded techniques. As late as 1945, Dartmouth openly admitted and defended a quota system against Jewish students. To limit the growing number of Jewish students, a number of private liberal arts universities and medical and dental schools instituted a quota system referred to as

numerus clausus ''Numerus clausus'' ("closed number" in Latin) is one of many methods used to limit the number of students who may study at a university. In many cases, the goal of the ''numerus clausus'' is simply to limit the number of students to the maximum ...

. Those included Harvard University,

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

, and

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...

. In 1925,

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

, which already had such admissions preferences as "character", "solidity" and "physical characteristics", added a program of

legacy preference Legacy preference or legacy admission is a preference given by an institution or organization to certain applicants on the basis of their familial relationship to alumni of that institution. It is most controversial in college admissions, where st ...

admission spots for children of Yale alumni in an explicit attempt to put the brakes on the rising percentage of Jews in the student body. That was soon copied by other Ivy League and other schools, and admissions of Jews were kept down to 10% until the 1950s. Such policies were for the most part discarded during the early 1960s, but the last vestiges were not eliminated at Yale University until 1970. Jews encountered resistance when they tried to move into white-collar and professional positions. Banking, insurance, public utilities, medical schools, hospitals, large law firms and faculty positions restricted the entrance of Jews. That era of "polite" antisemitism by social discrimination underwent an ideological escalation in the 1930s.

Federal Reserve System

The Anti-Defamation League documented one of the more common aspects of money-related antisemitism: the claim that the United States' Federal Reserve System was created by Jews and is run by them for their own financial benefit. The ADL gives examples of that myth repeated by

Aryan Nations Aryan Nations is a North American antisemitic, neo-Nazi, white supremacist organization that was originally based in Kootenai County, Idaho, about miles (4.4 km) north of the city of Hayden Lake. Richard Girnt Butler founded the group i ...

Louis Farrakhan Louis Farrakhan (; born Louis Eugene Walcott, May 11, 1933) is an American religious leader, black supremacist, anti-white and antisemitic conspiracy theorist, and former singer who heads the Nation of Islam (NOI). Prior to joining the NOI, h ...

, Sheldon Emry and Wickliffe Vennard. Another example cited is

Bo Gritz James Gordon "Bo" Gritz (; born January 18, 1939) is an American former United States Army Special Forces officer and presidential candidate. After serving in the Vietnam War and retiring from the military, Gritz has worked on attempted POW res ...

, the 1992 Presidential candidate of the Populist Party, in his book ''Called to Serve''. Foxman rebuts the Federal Reserve myth, in his book ''Jews and Money'', by explaining that the Federal Reserve is a quasi-public entity that was created and is controlled by the

US Congress The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washingto ...

Islamic world

Various incarnations of money-related antisemitism have been documented in the Islamic world. In a 1968 conference at the

University of Cairo Cairo University ( ar, جامعة القاهرة, Jāmi‘a al-Qāhira), also known as the Egyptian University from 1908 to 1940, and King Fuad I University and Fu'ād al-Awwal University from 1940 to 1952, is Egypt's premier public university ...

, a speaker proclaimed that "money-worship

s among the S, or s, is the nineteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ess'' (pronounced ), plural ''esses''. History ...

inherent qualities in them

he Jews He or HE may refer to: Language * He (pronoun), an English pronoun * He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ * He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets * He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' in ...

��They are characterized by avarice and many other vices, which arose from selfishness, love of worldly life, and envy �� Arabs' discourse on the Holocaust displays various instances of economic antisemitic rhetoric. One such example is Shaykh Muhammad Sayyid al-Tantawi's 1997 book ''The Israelites in the Qur’an''. He was an integral part of the religious leadership in Egypt, which purported the idea that Jews had undermined Islam throughout history. In the book, Jews are characterised as a swindler people starting both world wars for selfish economic gain and taking over the German economy as a result of their sinister fiscal techniques. Tantawi used that perception of Jews as a justification for Hitler's genocidal agenda and said that it is "iittle wonder that the Germans rose against them several times and employed all the means of killing, expulsion, and pillage". The Murabitun organization has published policy statements that are antisemitic and concentrate on breaking Jewish control of the world financial system. According to

Robert S. Wistrich Robert Solomon Wistrich (April 7, 1945 – May 19, 2015) was the Erich Neuberger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the head of the University's Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study ...

, both

Hamas Hamas (, ; , ; an acronym of , "Islamic Resistance Movement") is a Palestinian Sunni-Islamic fundamentalist, militant, and nationalist organization. It has a social service wing, Dawah, and a military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Bri ...

and

Hezbollah Hezbollah (; ar, حزب الله ', , also transliterated Hizbullah or Hizballah, among others) is a Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and militant group, led by its Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah since 1992. Hezbollah's parami ...

routinely blame "the world banking crisis on the Jews who supposedly control the American government and economy".

Osama bin Laden Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (10 March 1957 – 2 May 2011) was a Saudi-born extremist militant who founded al-Qaeda and served as its leader from 1988 until Killing of Osama bin Laden, his death in 2011. Ideologically a Pan-Islamism ...

, in his 2002 ''Letter to America'', wrote, "You

nited States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

are the nation that permits usury, which has been forbidden by all religions. yet you build your economy and investments on Usury. As a result of all this, in all its different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving aims at their expense."Foxman, p. 63

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ( fa, محمود احمدی‌نژاد, Mahmūd Ahmadīnežād ), born Mahmoud Sabbaghian ( fa, محمود صباغیان, Mahmoud Sabbāghyān, 28 October 1956),

, the president of

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...

, told the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...

General Assembly in 2008 that the Zionists "have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers ��in a deceitful, complex, and furtive manner". Foxman also identifies editorials, cartoons and news stories throughout the Middle East as sources that repeat money-related antisemitic myths.

Nation of Islam

The

has promulgated some money-based antisemitic myths, particularly in its book ''

''. Volume 1 claims that Jews played a major role in the Atlantic slave trade and profited from black slavery. Volume 2 of the book alleges that Jews in America exploited black labour and innovation in cotton, textiles, music and banking, for example. The book also asserts that Jews have promoted a myth of black racial inferiority. Nation of Islam leader

has also elaborated on these concepts in speeches, making statements such as "The Federal Reserve is the

synagogue of Satan In the letters to the early Christian churches of Smyrna and Philadelphia in Revelation 2:9 and 3:9, reference is made to a synagogue of Satan ( gr, συναγωγή τοῦ Σατανᾶ, ''synagoge tou satana''), in each case referring to a gr ...

, ��the House of Rothschild" and "The Black man and woman have always been looked upon as the 'property' of White America, and particularly, members of the Jewish community".

20th-century populism

White supremacists

In the 1970s, the

white supremacist White supremacy or white supremacism is the belief that white people are superior to those of other Race (human classification), races and thus should dominate them. The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any Power (social and polit ...

movement in the United States adopted the position that Jews are "parasites and vultures" who are attempting to enslave Aryans by dominating world banking and media. White supremacists such as William L. Pierce have repeated money-based antisemitic myths. The

American militia movement The American militia movement is a term used by law enforcement and security analysts to refer to a number of private organizations that include paramilitary or similar elements. These groups may refer to themselves as militia, unorganized milit ...

is also a source of money-based antisemitism. Its leaders include Bo Gritz, who alleges that the Federal Reserve System is controlled by Jews, and John Trochman, who believes that the nation's problems are the fault of a Jewish "banking elite".

New economic antisemitism

According to Rosensaft and Bauer, the international Arab boycott constitutes a "new economic antisemitism".

Irwin Cotler Irwin Cotler, PC, OC, OQ (born May 8, 1940) is a retired Canadian politician who was Member of Parliament for Mount Royal from 1999 to 2015. He served as the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada from 2003 until the Liberal gov ...

elaborates that the new economic antisemitism involves Arab countries applying an international restrictive covenant against corporations in other countries by conditioning their trade with Arab countries to the following: *refrain from doing business with Israel (

secondary boycott Secondary may refer to: Science and nature * Secondary emission, of particles ** Secondary electrons, electrons generated as ionization products * The secondary winding, or the electrical or electronic circuit connected to the secondary winding ...

) *refrain from doing business with another corporation that may be doing business with Israel (tertiary boycott) *refrain from hiring or promoting Jews within the corporation.

21st-century

The topic of economic antisemitism came to the public spot-light yet again when NBA player

LeBron James LeBron Raymone James Sr. (; born December 30, 1984) is an American professional basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Nicknamed "King James", he is widely considered one of the greatest pl ...

quoted on

Instagram Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can ...

a line of lyric from a song by

21 Savage Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph (born October 22, 1992), known professionally as 21 Savage, is a rapper based in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Born in London, he moved to Atlanta with his mother at age seven. He became known after releasing two m ...

“We been gettin’ that Jewish money, everything is kosher”. James apologized for his behaviour, but pleaded

ignorance Ignorance is a lack of knowledge and understanding. The word "ignorant" is an adjective that describes a person in the state of being unaware, or even cognitive dissonance and other cognitive relation, and can describe individuals who are unaware o ...

by stating that he "actually thought it was a compliment, and obviously it wasn't through the lens of a lot of people." This episode came one year after James said that "racism may appear hidden, but it is alive every single day in the US, and across the world." Ignorance among factions of the left over economic forms of antisemitism have been blamed for the Labour Party's recent antisemitism controversy.

Siobhain McDonagh Siobhain Ann McDonagh (born 20 February 1960) is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Mitcham and Morden since the 1997 general election. She served as an Assistant Whip in the Labour Government, b ...

received controversy from the left wing of the party after she appeared to agree with a statement put forward by John Humphreys that "to be anti-capitalist you have to be antisemitic".

In literature

Jews have been portrayed as miserly and greedy in both

belles-lettres is a category of writing, originally meaning beautiful or fine writing. In the modern narrow sense, it is a label for literary works that do not fall into the major categories such as fiction, poetry, or drama. The phrase is sometimes used pejora ...

and popular literature.Krefetz p. 7

Shylock

The character

Shylock Shylock is a fictional character in William Shakespeare's play ''The Merchant of Venice'' (c. 1600). A Venetian Jewish moneylender, Shylock is the play's principal antagonist. His defeat and conversion to Christianity form the climax of the ...

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

's play ''

The Merchant of Venice ''The Merchant of Venice'' is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1596 and 1598. A merchant in Venice named Antonio defaults on a large loan provided by a Jewish moneylender, Shylock. Although classified as ...

'' is a Jewish moneylender who is portrayed in unscrupulous and avaricious. Penslar asserts that Shylock is a metaphor for the Jewish "otherness" and that he represents the "inseparability of Jewish religious, social, and economic distinctiveness".

Gerald Krefetz Gerald Krefetz (died 27 January 2006)
''The New York Times.'' January 29, 2006. Retrieved 23 August 2012. was an

scapegoat In the Bible, a scapegoat is one of a pair of kid goats that is released into the wilderness, taking with it all sins and impurities, while the other is sacrificed. The concept first appears in the Book of Leviticus, in which a goat is designate ...

. Historian

Richard Hofstadter Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916October 24, 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historic ...

wrote that Shylock was used as the basis for "crankery" by

Charles Coughlin Charles Edward Coughlin ( ; October 25, 1891 – October 27, 1979), commonly known as Father Coughlin, was a Canadian-American Catholic priest based in the United States near Detroit. He was the founding priest of the National Shrine of the ...

and

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...

John Gross John Gross FRSL (12 March 1935 – 10 January 2011) was an eminent English man of letters. A leading intellectual, writer, anthologist, and critic, ''The Guardian'' (in a tribute titled "My Hero") and ''The Spectator'' were among several pub ...

stated that Shylock represents "the sinister international financier" on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Foxman contends that Shylock may have contributed to antisemitism in

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

since ''

'' has been translated into Japanese more than any other play by Shakespeare.

Fagin

The character

Fagin Fagin is a fictional character and the secondary antagonist in Charles Dickens's 1838 novel ''Oliver Twist''. In the preface to the novel, he is described as a "receiver of stolen goods". He is the leader of a group of children (the Artful Dod ...

Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian e ...

's novel ''

Oliver Twist ''Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress'', Charles Dickens's second novel, was published as a serial from 1837 to 1839, and as a three-volume book in 1838. Born in a workhouse, the orphan Oliver Twist is bound into apprenticeship with ...

'' is depicted as avaricious and has served to support antisemitic stereotypes. Dickens claimed that he held Jews in high regard and that the depiction of Fagin was simply a caricature that was based upon actual persons. In an apparent demonstration of remorse, he removed many occurrences of the word "Jew" from later editions of the work.

Ezra Pound

Poet

mentions Jewish attitudes towards money in his ''

The Cantos ''The Cantos'' by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a ''canto''. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date ...

'', which has primarily economic and governance themes. In the poem, Jews are implicated in sinister manipulations of the money supply. Foxman asserts, "''The Cantos'' include a "vicious diatribe against interest-paying finance" and that it has sections with antisemitic passages. In Canto 52, "Stinkschuld's othschildssin drawing vengeance, poor yitts paying for / Stinkschuld othschilds/ paying for a few big jews' vendetta on goyim" had the name Rothschilds replaced by "Stinkschulds" at the insistence of Pound's publisher.Bruce, Ira Nadel, ''The Cambridge companion to Ezra Pound'', Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 293

References

Sources

*ADL Report
"Jewish 'Control' of the Federal Reserve: A Classic Anti-Semitic Myth"
July 1995 *Aris, Stephen, ''The Jews in Business'', Cape, 1970 *Arkin, Marcus, "Not of Pure Aryan Stock: The Jewish Impact on the Economic Transformation of Modern Germany", in ''A new Jewry: America since the Second World War'', Peter Medding (Ed.), Oxford University 1992, pages 237–240. First printed in ''One people- one destiny: some explorations in Jewish affairs'' by Marcus Arkin, O. Burgess Publishers, 1989. * Baron, Salo, Kahan, Arcadius; ''et al.'', ''Economic history of the Jews'', Nachum Gross (Ed.), Schocken Books, 1975. Originally published as an article in ''Encyclopedia Judaica'', 1972, vol 16, pp. 1266–1326. * Birmingham, Stephen, ''"The rest of us": the rise of America's eastern European Jews'', Syracuse University Press, 1999 *Botticini, Maristella, "A Tale of 'Benevolent' Governments: Private Credit Markets, Public Finance, and the Role of Jewish Lenders in Medieval and Renaissance Italy". ''The Journal of Economic History'', vol 60, 2000, pp. 164–189 * Brown, Erica, ''Confronting Scandal: How Jews Can Respond When Jews Do Bad Things'', Jewish Lights Publishing, 2010 * Cameron, Rondo E., et al., ''International banking, 1870-1914'', Oxford University Press US, 1991 *Cassis, Youssef, "Finance, Elites, and the Rise of Modern Capitalism", in ''Finance and the making of the modern capitalist world, 1750-1931'', Clara Eugenia N˙Òez, P. L. Cottrell (Eds.), Universidad de Sevilla, 1998 *Chapman, Peter, ''The Last of the Imperious Rich: Lehman Brothers, 1844-2008'', Penguin, 2010 *Cohen, Naomi Wiener, ''Jacob H. Schiff: a study in American Jewish leadership'', UPNE, 1999 *Dearborn Publishing Company, ''Jewish Influence in the Federal Reserve System'', excerpts reprinted from the ''Dearborn Independent'', Dearborn Publishing Company, 1921. * Dimont, Max I., ''Jews, God, and History'', 1962, (reprinted Penguin, 2004) * Foxman, Abraham, ''Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype'', Macmillan, 2010 * * Goldberg, J. J., ''Jewish Power''. Addison Wesley, 1996. * Gurock, Jeffrey S., ''Central European Jews in America, 1840-1880: migration and advancement'', Taylor & Fancis, 1998 *Jackson, Kathy Merlock, ''Rituals and patterns in children's lives'', Popular Press, 2005 * Korey, William, ''Russian antisemitism, Pamyat, and the demonology of Zionism'', Psychology Press, 1995 * Krefetz, Gerald, ''Jews and money: the myths and the reality'', Ticknor & Fields, 1982 *Kuznets, Simon, "Economic Structure and Life of the Jews", in ''The Jews'', Louis Finkelstein (Ed.), 1960, vol II, pp. 1597–1666. *

Marx, Karl Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 p ...

, ''On the Jewish Question'', 1843. *Kasindorf, Jeanie, "The Chutzpah Defense", ''New York Magazine'' 11 November 1991 *Levitas, Daniel, ''The terrorist next door: the militia movement and the radical right'', Macmillan, 2002 *Mosse, Werner Eugen, ''Jews in the German Economy'', Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1987. *Mosse, Werner Eugen, ''The German-Jewish Economic Elite 1820-1935: A socio-economic profile'', Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1989. *Muller, Jerry, ''Capitalism and the Jews'', Princeton University Press, 2010 *

, '' The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews: How Jews Gained Control of the Black American Economy'', Nation of Islam- Historical Research Department, 2010 *Nelson, Benjamin, ''The idea of usury, from tribal brotherhood to universal otherhood'', Princeton University Press, 1949 * Neusner, Jacob, ''The Economics of the Mishnah'', University of Chicago Press, 1990 *Norwood, Stephen Harlan, ''Encyclopedia of American Jewish History'', ABC-CLIO, 2008 * Penslar, Derek Jonathan, ''Shylock's children: economics and Jewish identity in modern Europe'', University of California Press, 2001 *Perry, Marvin, ''Antisemitism: myth and hate from antiquity to the present'', Palgrave Macmillan, 2002 (chapter 4: "Homo Judaicus Economicus: the Jew as Shylock, Parasite, and Plutocrat"). *Pfeffer, Jacob, ''Distinguished Jews of America: a collection of biographical sketches of Jews who have made their mark in business, the professions, politics, science, etc'', Distinguished Jews of America Pub. Co., 1917 *Reuveni, Gideon, (Ed.)''The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship Between Ethnicity and Economic Life'', Berghahn Books, 2010. * Sachar, Howard Morley, ''A history of the Jews in the modern world'', Random House, Inc., 2005 *Sanua, Marianne Rachel, ''Let us prove strong: the American Jewish Committee, 1945-2006'', UPNE, 2007 *Shapiro, Edward, ''A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II'', JHU Press, 1995 *Sherman, A. J., "German-Jewish Bankers in World Politics: The Financing of the Russo-Japanese War", ''Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook'' (1983) 28 (1): 59-73 *Slater, Robert ''The Titans of Takeover'', Beard Books, 1999 *Todeschini, Giacomo, "Franciscan Economics and Jews", in ''Friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Volume 2'', Myers, Susan E. and McMichael, Steven J. (Eds), BRILL, 2004. * Sombart, Werner, ''Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben'', Duncker, 1911. Translated into English by M. Epstein: ''The Jews and Modern Capitalism'', E.P. Dutton, 1913. English translatio
online hereand here
an
version
(page numbers cited refer to the 1913 English translation) * Steward, James B., ''Den of Thieves'', Simon and Schuster, 1992 *Stone, Amy, ''Jewish Americans'', Gareth Stevens, 2006 *Supple, Barry E., "A Business Elite: German-Jewish Financiers in Nineteenth-Century New York", ''The Business History Review'', Vol. 31, No. 2 (Summer, 1957), pp. 143–178 *Valdman, Edouard, ''Jews and money: towards a metaphysics of money'', Schreiber, 2000 *Iranian President Ahmadinejad's 2008 UN Addres

{{Jews and Judaism Economic antisemitism,

Antisemitism Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism. Antis ...

Usury fr:Antisémitisme#Antisémitisme économique