Nobility contempt for industry branded Jewish modernization as a national calamity
Evidence
While Jewish entrepreneurs were constructing the railroads, a leading Polish economist, J. Supiński, was complaining that ‘the railways are an abyss in which enormous resources are being sunk, not leaving other traces than the raised dyke and the rail lying on it’. When Jews built industrial plants, landowners accused them of destroying agriculture, which allegedly was short of labour. When the factories began working, their owners were not only hated by the Polish literary and social elite, but also pitied, for having left the life of country delights and bohemian liberty and pleasure for the dreary surroundings of a factory, which enslaves man and destroys him. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 152
Categorization
- XREF: The nobility’s pity for factory owners mirrors the earlier chapter’s analysis of how genteel value-horizons distort perception of economic activities — supports the anti-capitalist aristocratic worldview mechanism. — connects to: France’s weak industrial development made leftist antisemitism mistake Jewish bankers for capitalism itself.; Jews and nobility shared pre-national allegiances that the nation-state attacked; Economic usefulness of Jews outweighed noble prejudice until state change (+2 more)
Related
- Petty-bourgeois resentment of free trade made Jews a ready scapegoat for industrial capitalism (similarity 0.84)
- Economic usefulness of Jews outweighed noble prejudice until state change (similarity 0.81)
- Jews served as middlemen in nineteenth-century financial scandals without lasting gain (similarity 0.81)
- France’s weak industrial development made leftist antisemitism mistake Jewish bankers for capitalism itself. (similarity 0.80)