From the Christian Era to the Enlightenment
Into the new millennium, the Jewish reputation for trouble-making and exploitation continued.
In the year 41 AD, Roman emperor Claudius issued his third edict, condemning the Jews of Alexandria for abuse of privilege and sowing discord; he charged them with “fomenting a general plague which infests the whole world.”
Eight years later he expelled them from Rome.
Ever dissatisfied, the Jews revolted in Jerusalem in the years 66-70, and again in 115 and 132.
Of that final uprising, Cassius Dio made the following observation—the first clear evidence of Jews causing a major war:
Jews everywhere were showing signs of hostility to the Romans, partly by secret and partly overt acts…
[M]any other nations, too, were joining them through eagerness for gain, and the whole earth, one might almost say, was being stirred up over the matter.
The Hebrews were evidently paying foreigners to help them fight their wars; one can see in this a precedent for the later practice of bribing government officials in order to encourage them to declare war on their behalf.
Thus, it was not without good reason that notable Romans denounced the Jews—among these Seneca (“an accursed race”), Quintilian (“a race which is a curse to others”), and Tacitus (a “dis- ease,” a “pernicious superstition,” and “the basest of peoples”).
Prominent German historian Theodor Mommsen (1856/1871: 643) reaffirmed this view, noting that the Jews of Rome were indeed agents of social disruption and decay:
Also in the ancient world, Judaism was an effective ferment of cosmopolitanism and of national decomposition.
Even before the end of the classical age, Jews took to money-lending, usury, and other shady business practices in Europe.
In 387, church leader John Chrysostom condemned them for, among other things, “their plundering, their covetousness, their thefts, their cheating in trade”.
By the time of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, it was deemed necessary to specifically target exploitative Jewish lending practices:
The more the Christians are restrained from the practice of usury, the more are they oppressed in this matter by the treachery of the Jews, so that in a short time they exhaust the resources of the Christians.
Thomas Aquinas was concerned about nobles who allowed Jews to continue their money-lending because they received a share of the profits:
“it would be better for [royalty] to compel Jews to work for a living… than to allow them to live in idleness and grow rich by usury.
In 1543, Martin Luther felt compelled to issue a scathing rebuke; among his many concerns was that they are nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel and wear no thread of clothing which they have not stolen and pilfered from us by means of their accursed usury.
Into the Enlightenment era, it went from bad to worse.
Baron d’Holbach declared that “the Jewish people distinguished themselves only by massacres, unjust wars, cruelties, usurpations, and infamies.”
He added that they, “the most unfortunate people that ever existed,… lived continually in the midst of calamities, and were, more than all other nations, the sport of frightful revolutions”.
But few critics were harsher than the French litterateur Voltaire.
He made dozens of biting remarks over the years, including this observation from 1771:
“[the Jews] are, all of them, born with a raging fanaticism in their hearts… I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race”.
In this we have perhaps one of the most troubling and prescient warnings in all of history.
German intellectuals held the Jews in equally low regard, and were equally concerned about their detrimental effect on society.
The great philosopher Immanuel Kant had this to say:
[The Jews] have, through their usurious spirit since their exile, received the not-unfounded reputation of deceivers. It seems strange to think of a nation of deceivers; but it is just as strange to think of a nation made up of nothing but merchants, which are united for the most part by an old superstition that is recognized by the government under which they live. They do not seek any civil honor, but rather wish to compensate their loss by profitably outwitting the very people among whom they find protection, and even to make profit from their own kind. It cannot be otherwise with a whole nation of merchants, who are nonproductive members of society (for example, the Jews in Poland). …
Their condition, sanctioned by ancient precepts and recognized even by us, cannot be altered by us without serious consequences, even though they have made the saying “buyer beware” the supreme principle of morality in their dealings with us. (1798/1979: 101-102)
Once again, we see the recurring theme:
Jewish deception and exploitation, leading to personal gain—or as I suggested above, ‘profit through distress.’
It was this very quality that led another prominent German philosopher, Georg Hegel, to remark that “the only act Moses reserved for the Israelites was… to borrow with deceit and repay confidence with theft”.
For Johann Fichte, the threat posed was so great that the only appropriate action was banishment:
“To protect ourselves against them, I see no other way than to conquer for them their promised land and see them all there”.
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