Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable

Evidence

Rich yet contemptible, the Jews provided a natural lightning-rod to divert early discharges of the anti-modernist energy. They provided the point where formidable powers of money met with social disdain, moral condemnation and aesthetic disgust. This was exactly what hostility to modernity, and particularly to its capitalist form, needed for an anchor. If only capitalism could be connected to the Jew, it would stand condemned as simultaneously alien, unnatural, inimical, dangerous and ethically repulsive. The connection was easy to establish: money power was confined to the margins and (under the contemptuous name of usury) writhed under the burden of authoritative condemnation as long as the Jews stayed enclosed in the ghetto: it moved to the centre of life and (under the prestigious name of capital) claimed authority and social respect once the Jews appeared on the streets of the city centre. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 146

Categorization

• XREF: Weber’s ‘elective affinity’ and the conflation mechanism are directly reusable analytic moves for how a group stands in for an abstract order — applicable to contemporary substitute-thesis framings in Islamophobia. — connects to: The delusion of existing Jewish world domination anchored the dream of German dominion; Antisemitic slogans effectively mobilize masses for imperialist destruction; France’s weak industrial development made leftist antisemitism mistake Jewish bankers for capitalism itself. (+21 more)

Related

• Jews became a symbolic target for everything the mob hated (similarity 0.89)
• Jewish banking ties to state loans turned class resentment into political antisemitism (similarity 0.85)
• The delusion of existing Jewish world domination anchored the dream of German dominion (similarity 0.84)
• France’s weak industrial development made leftist antisemitism mistake Jewish bankers for capitalism itself. (similarity 0.83)
• Petty-bourgeois resentment of free trade made Jews a ready scapegoat for industrial capitalism (similarity 0.82)
• Marx converted antisemitism from backward-looking into forward-looking anti-capitalism (similarity 0.82)
• Jews were attacked simultaneously from left and right as capitalist and liberal symbols (similarity 0.81)
• Jews faced opposing attacks as both capitalist symbols and liberal values incarnate. (similarity 0.80)
• Scapegoating a Jewish parasite class let the corrupt system continue unchanged (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalist anti-Semitism is the bourgeoisie’s self-hatred displaced onto Jews (similarity 0.79)
• A society wholly commercialized condemns Jews as materialists it has itself become. (similarity 0.79)
• Jews drew hatred because they carried capitalism into pre-capitalist economies (similarity 0.79)
• Antisemitism among the lower middle class arose from fear of proletarianization (similarity 0.79)
• Chimerical images of Jewish power became dangerous public fears (similarity 0.79)
• The Jew-capital link survived because later movements absorbed and refashioned it (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Marx converted antisemitism from backward-looking into forward-looking anti-capitalism #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 149