Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: ebrei e capitalismo

http://www.jidaily.com/3yr/r
In a 1972 lecture, “Capitalism and the Jews,” Nobel laureate Milton
Friedman presented a paradox: Jews “owe an enormous debt to free
enterprise and competitive capitalism,” he said, but “for at least the
past century the Jews have been consistently opposed to capitalism and
have done much on an ideological level to undermine it.” According to
historian Jerry Muller, Friedman’s paradox may make for a great
headline, but it cannot be substantiated. Only the first premise is
true—there is little doubt that capitalism has benefited Jews. And as
Muller shows, there is equally little doubt that Jews have excelled at
developing capitalism in the West.
In his new collection of essays, Muller concurs with Friedman in
explaining how free markets counteract anti-Semitic prejudice by
putting it at a competitive disadvantage. A law firm that hires only
lawyers of the dominant ethnic group will lose clients to a firm that
hires the best lawyers, regardless of origin. As economist Thomas
Sowell has demonstrated, discrimination is most likely to occur under
conditions of monopoly; in a more competitive market, prejudice
becomes disadvantageous.
Jews have thus benefited from capitalism, which explains why their
liberation in Europe and America occurred in direct relation to the
progress of the market. Muller adeptly shows how in the nineteenth
century, Jews were oppressed where capitalism didn’t exist, such as in
Russia and the Ottoman Empire. But they could escape oppression in
Western Europe, where the free market was replacing public and private
monopolies. Still more welcoming was America, to which Jews migrated
in large numbers because it was simultaneously the land of free-market
opportunity and freer of anti-Semitism than Europe.
Why have certain ethnic minorities benefited more from capitalism than
others? Muller tries to avoid generalization, but he can’t escape the
fact of Jewish success within the capitalist system. Muller argues
that Jews were well-positioned to succeed at capitalism; they’d shown
a preference for market-oriented occupations going back to the Middle
Ages. Along with most historians, Muller traces Jews’ “commercial
propensities” to the legal and political environment of medieval
Europe: Jews had no choice but to become moneylenders or peddlers, as
landowning was usually denied to them. They retained these pursuits
into the modern period, and added a taste for the liberal professions
(law and medicine) that depended on advanced education. Jewish
religious education, too, played a role. The Talmud, unlike the
Christian tradition, encourages commerce. Muller quotes the praise of
commerce by Talmudic authorities in Lithuania—well-known among
practicing Jews, though not among secular Jews or non-Jews—and he
argues that commerce gave the Jews more free time to read the Talmud
than other trades could. It is thus no surprise that in the 38 years
the Nobel Prize for economics has been awarded, it has gone to an
economist of Jewish origin 22 times.
But what about Friedman’s contention that Jews were ideologically
opposed to capitalism? Were Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky Jews only by
coincidence? Muller sees two cultural reasons why Jews were so active
in the beginnings of European socialism. For many, socialism
represented a break with the past, an escape from the world of the
ghetto into a world of post-ethnic comradeship. Also, some Jewish
socialists sought, in the Jewish tradition, to reconfigure socialism
into secular messianism. Marx, for instance, saw Communism both as the
Brotherhood of Man overcoming the ghetto and as the underpinning of a
workable messianic age.
Still, Friedman was wrong to confuse the high visibility of Jewish
socialists with their number, which was actually modest. In 1920,
Winston Churchill, no anti-Semite, made the same mistake when he
described the Bolshevik revolution as “the schemes of international
Jews.” True, many Russian Communists were of Jewish origin—but “most
of the Communists were not Jews,” writes Muller, and “most of the Jews
were not communists.” In the 1920s, 95 percent of the Russian
Communist Party’s members were non-Jews.
Moreover, since the Enlightenment, many more Jews have promoted
democracy and free markets than socialism. It’s true, Muller concedes,
that “leading socialist intellectuals were of Jewish origin—but then,
so were leading proponents of capitalism.” Since Ronald Reagan’s
conservative revolution in the United States, Jewish intellectuals
have been leading voices for market-oriented policies: Gary Becker,
Richard Posner, Irving Kristol, and others, including Friedman
himself. In England, Margaret Thatcher’s leading advisors were Keith
Joseph and Leon Brittan, both Jewish. Because Jews are overrepresented
in intellectual professions, they tend to be prominent as ideological
spokesmen of almost every political tendency.
Instead of the Friedman paradox, one is tempted to raise another, more
compelling one, which Muller alludes to: Jews have been simultaneously
ardent propagators of socialism and the targeted victims of socialism.
Trotsky was the organizer of the Bolshevik Revolution, and anti-
Semitism became a pillar of the Stalinist regime in Russia and Eastern
Europe. In 1918, the chief rabbi of Moscow is said to have told
Trotsky (born Bronstein): “The Trotskys made the revolutions, and the
Bronsteins pay for it.” In Russia, this history keeps repeating
itself. Today, many Russians are persuaded that the Bolshevik
Revolution was a Jewish plot, and because many of the new tycoons are
Jewish, capitalism is accused of being a Jewish plot as well. Around
and around we go.

 monopolies.
e poi venne un caporale austriaco....