the confluence of three major developments during the late medieval period that sparked the idea that the capital-based economy was “Jewish.” First, a small number of Jews held a virtual, but brief, monopoly in moneylending. Second, this came at a time of immense economic change and, for political and economic reasons, the demand for capital greatly increased. Third, this prompted a reaction by those who were against the proliferation of interest-bearing loans, which they regarded as immoral.
For its critics, usury was not just a bad thing; it was a dreadful sin and harmful to the common good. It went against the idea of caritas (charity) which was a critical issue for members of a Church often attacked as too worldly, because it is uncharitable to profit off your neighbor’s financial distress. It devoured the poor and ruptured society. In contrast, the highest mark of virtue was to own nothing and to give everything freely. The idea that a component of an economic system, and the economic system itself, had a moral character encouraged critics to term the profession of moneylending as “Jewish” and those who were not Jewish but who practiced it, as “Judaizers.” It was circular reasoning: Jews were immoral because they practiced usury and they practiced usury because they were immoral.
The spur for this widespread concern over usury was the significant economic expansion in Western Europe that went hand-in-hand with the long and uneven transformation of the economy from feudalism to capitalism. As many historians have pointed out, this was not a neat transition from a so-called “natural economy” to a market economy. Barter continued, especially between families in rural areas, even as markets and fairs expanded. But more people desired products that could not be obtained from their family and neighbors, and so the need for coinage and capital grew. Stability after a period of Viking and Hungarian raids, combined with Western Europe’s greater fragmentation after the cessation of the Carolingian empire, and the desire of secular rulers to enhance their power and fill their treasuries, encouraged a greater reliance on capital in an increasingly global market. With the development of insurance, mortgages, limited regulations, legislation and policing for merchants’ safety, along with a vigorous circulation of credit, commerce and trade prospered ←xi | xii→over the centuries. Old ways of life were not automatically dispensed in favor of new. Instead, the economy evolved over time with news ways and institutions side by side with past customs and sometimes in conflict with them.7
The debate over usury was never static. It shifted over time and was dependent on the personal views and needs of the authorities and the various members of the population, as well as social, political, and economic conditions. Usury was therefore defined and redefined to accommodate the changes in economic and political society. Once interest loans were accepted, the debate changed to other aspects of the market system, such as “excessive” interest, luxury, and speculation. What is consistent is that, despite the small percentage of Jews involved in finance, regardless of the presence of Christians, and blind to the benefits the expanding commercial world brought to generation after generation, critics over the centuries derided Jews for money-hungry exploitation of the poor.
The issue of Jews and usury, banking, and capitalism, thus took place within this larger contest between those who claimed, at one end of the spectrum, that virtue and the common good rejected the pursuit of money and profit and, at the other end, those who understood that credit was an essential component in the growth of the economy. Some critics maintained that if Jews extricated themselves from the financial professions, they would be better subjects or citizens. Rather than making money off money, which was “parasitical,” they should take up “honest” and “real” occupations that were physical, such as agriculture and manufacturing. This was an argument regularly used by anti-usury critics against Jews, which led to discussions about the “regeneration” of Jews by physical labor. With the rise of national identities and racial categorization in the nineteenth century, the notion of inherently unmalleable traits altered the debate. By the modern era, the belief on the part of anticapitalists that those in finance were corrupt and corrupting, because capitalism itself was innately immoral and exploitative, was deeply entrenched in wide sectors of modern society. Even though bankers came from all different backgrounds, the myth endured that it was a “Jewish spirit” that pervaded capitalism.
Given the long history that forged the myths that Jews pursued gold at the expense of others and that capitalism is an immoral system, the two figures on the float in 2019 Belgium or the cabal around the Monopoly table needed no explanation to their audience.
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There are some major terms that need explanation. Antisemitism is a word first popularized by the radical journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879. His purpose in ←xii | xiii→using this new term to describe his ideology about Jews in Germany was to distance his point of view from other anti-Jewish perspectives. His was not a religious animus, and he had no time for that sort of anti-Jewishness. The term emanated from the racial studies of the nineteenth century which described and categorized human beings into races and then attributed to those categorized races various characteristics. The categories into which humans were caged, were based on skin color and ethnicity. There were the Whites, the Blacks, the Yellows, and the Semites. The latter comprised Jews and Arabs but as Europe was home to a significant number of Jews and few Arabs, the term became synonymous with Jews. The term antisemitism was therefore racially charged and part of the modern world. Racial theorists contemplated the temperament of the various groups, giving the Whites the most favorable attributes, the Blacks the least. Jews were middling, given both good and bad attributes. But what is critical is that there was a significant shift in how Jews were regarded. Race was something finite and unchangeable. Character was set at birth. The term antisemitism, therefore, is more suited to describing the hostility to Jews from the late nineteenth century on rather than in earlier centuries. It is for this reason why the title speaks of the “emergence of antisemitism.” People in the medieval period or the early modern era did not share Marr’s outlook or generally think about Jews in a “racial” sense.
The words “moneylender” and “banker” are used interchangeably with the understanding that until the modern era, the lines of a banking profession were blurred. Most medieval bankers combined that profession with other, often related, occupations, such as goldsmith and moneychanger. The term capitalism, first coined in the mid-nineteenth century, is used in the broadest sense to refer to an economy based on capital as opposed to a service-in-kind or state-run economy. There is no sharp divide between a feudal system and a capitalist one—they overlap for centuries. I have therefore used the term capitalism throughout the book to describe a market profit economy based on capital and coinage and it is understood as a system without moral character. There was, and is, always potential for human economic dishonesty and exploitation, whatever the system, but this is not the focus of the book. There is no assessment as to whether some moneylenders were exploitative or not, as assessing each individual would be an impossible and fruitless task. Instead, capitalism is identified as a morally indifferent economic system that can be used well and productively by the honest and diligent, or poorly and unjustly by the inept, the reckless, and the dishonest.
There is a tendency in books and in popular culture to relate antisemitism to political views that are contrary to the author’s political stance. The terms “leftwing” ←xiii | xiv→and “rightwing” are generally unhelpful in the history of antisemitism, or, indeed, history in general, although they are frequently employed. Antisemitism is often labeled “right-wing,” but this is clearly erroneous. The stereotype about Jews and money comes from a wide array of people—from peasants and townspeople, from aristocrats to blue collar workers, from the educated and non-educated, from Liberals, Socialists, Conservatives, Communists, Anarchists, Utopians and populists. It is found in strikingly different countries. If the “Jews/money/capitalism” construction was not rooted in a wide range of people, then it would have endured as it has. Nor would it have any troubling effect if there had been no Jews in moneylending at a time that usury was a critical issue in society. The fact that so many people for so long connected Jews with capitalism, and capitalism with greed, made it a powerful weapon for antisemites in the modern era, as well
