Greed, Exploitation and Identification with Capitalism
Authors: Bolton Matthew , Chapelan Alexis , Vincent Chloé 
Published: October 2024

Greed

The association of Jews with money, and the depiction of Jews as a uniquely greedy and rapacious people, is one of the oldest of antisemitic myths. Writings, speeches and imagery portraying Jews as grasping, avaricious and miserly, ever ready to lie and trick their way to a profit, and willing to sacrifice all morality in pursuit of riches, can be traced back to the origins of Western-Christian culture. Early Christianity was in great part founded on the contrast between the supposed materialism of Jews and the spiritualism of Christians. The New Testament story in which Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and “overturned the tables of the money-changers” became a cornerstone of early Christian depictions of Jews as corrupting the holy, while the reviled figure of Judas, betraying Jesus in exchange for thirty pieces of silver, enabled the association of Jews with money to be fused with the concept of Jewish deicide. Throughout the early Christian era and into the Middle Ages, this belief was strengthened through the popular association between Jews and the practice of moneylending (usury), with Jews depicted as demanding extortionate rates of interest. In modernity the idea of a supposed connection between Jews, money and greed continued to circulate, and remains one of the most common antisemitic stereotypes in popular culture.

Exploitation

The idea that Jews are uniquely and inherently exploitative people seeks to encapsulate and express the experience of being on the ‘receiving end’ of the supposed Jewish propensity for self-enrichment at the expense of both morality and other people. At the core of the concept is the notion that Jews take any and every opportunity to gain materially, regardless of the moral, ethical or physical consequences or harm inflicted on others. Jews are thus presented as inherently untrustworthy, people who will routinely lie and deceive for material gain. This idea of untrustworthiness is connected to the broader concept of Jewish foreignness/alienness, according to which Jews do not belong to any nation or people, and so cannot be regarded as “wholly reliable” interlocutors or political and economic partners. It is given additional force by the long anti-Jewish association of Jews with immoral money-making and greed. The result is an antisemitic concept in which Jews are always suspected of seeking to cut an unfair deal, to ‘rip off’ those who trade with them and to charge extortionate interest or rent.

Association with Capitalism

Modern antisemitism was often twinned with a dogged hostility to modernity and its economic expression: capitalism, free trade and the world of finance. Often overshadowed by the scholarly emphasis on biological racism, antisemitic anti-capitalist discourse is nevertheless a powerful mechanism of othering and a key element in the metamorphosis of traditional anti-Judaism into modern antisemitism. In medieval societies, Jewish minorities—prohibited from owning land and therefore excluded from the core economy of feudal society—often engaged in urban, skilled occupations such as trade, finance or the medical profession. These sectors played a significant role in future capitalistic developments, thus creating the distorted picture of capitalism itself being an offshoot of a specific Jewish mindset and worldview—the core thesis of early sociologists of capitalism such as Werner Sombart. Of course, in-depth analysis of the cultural dynamics of early capitalism paints a much more nuanced picture: some authors, such as Max Weber, situate the moral impetus of capitalism in the Protestant faith, rather than Judaism. Nonetheless, the association of Jewishness and capitalism mapped onto stereotypes which already enjoyed widespread currency in pre-modern European societies, such as the dichotomy between the ‘pure,’ ‘spiritual’ Christians and the ‘materialistic,’ ‘cynical’ and ‘profit-driven’ Jews.