Jewish banking ties to state loans turned class resentment into political antisemitism

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

It was indeed Karl Marx, the father of scientific socialism (i.e., socialism that set itself an aim of overcoming and leaving behind, rather than arresting the capitalist development; which acknowledged the irrevocability of capitalist transformation and accepted its progressive nature; and which promised to start building a new, better society at the point to which capitalist progress brought universal human progress), who turned the anti-capitalist antisemitism from backward-looking into forward-looking. Having done so, he made it potentially usable for the anti-capitalist opposition at a time when the last illusion that capitalism was a temporary disease which could be cured or exorcised would have been dashed and rejected. Marx accepted the elective affinity between the ‘spirit of Judaism’ and that of capitalism; both were prominent for promoting self-interest, haggling, the money-chase. Both had to be pushed out of the way if human cohabitation was to be placed on a safer and saner basis. Capitalism and Judaism shared their fate. They triumphed together, and they will perish together. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 149 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: European states came to depend on Jewish financiers for government loans; France’s weak industrial development made leftist antisemitism mistake Jewish bankers for capitalism itself.; Jewish bankers switched government allegiances within hours of political revolutions — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 113 (+9 more)

Related

• France’s weak industrial development made leftist antisemitism mistake Jewish bankers for capitalism itself. (similarity 0.89)
• Marx converted antisemitism from backward-looking into forward-looking anti-capitalism (similarity 0.86)
• Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable (similarity 0.85)
• Petty-bourgeois resentment of free trade made Jews a ready scapegoat for industrial capitalism (similarity 0.83)
• Jews became a symbolic target for everything the mob hated (similarity 0.82)
• Jews’ state-loan role fused lower-middle-class resentment with politics (similarity 0.82)
• Marx’s anti-Jewry rhetoric was not full-fledged antisemitism (similarity 0.81)
• Jews’ partial conformity to middle-class norms fueled antisemitic resentment. (similarity 0.81)
• Jewish wealth simultaneously attracted antisemitism and enabled socialist identification in heirs (similarity 0.79)
• Jewish economic roles made them appear as capitalism’s aggressive face to oppressed masses (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 146
• Marx converted antisemitism from backward-looking into forward-looking anti-capitalism #complicates (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 149