Petty-bourgeois resentment of free trade made Jews a ready scapegoat for industrial capitalism

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)

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: France’s weak industrial development made leftist antisemitism mistake Jewish bankers for capitalism itself.; Jewish question became a catalyst for social unrest in bourgeois society; Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 146 (+10 more)

Related

• France’s weak industrial development made leftist antisemitism mistake Jewish bankers for capitalism itself. (similarity 0.92)
• Scapegoating a Jewish parasite class let the corrupt system continue unchanged (similarity 0.85)
• Jewish economic roles made them appear as capitalism’s aggressive face to oppressed masses (similarity 0.84)
• Nobility contempt for industry branded Jewish modernization as a national calamity (similarity 0.84)
• Jewish banking ties to state loans turned class resentment into political antisemitism (similarity 0.83)
• Jews drew hatred because they carried capitalism into pre-capitalist economies (similarity 0.82)
• Jews’ economic roles made them scapegoats for capitalist misery. (similarity 0.82)
• Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable (similarity 0.82)
• Jews became a symbolic target for everything the mob hated (similarity 0.82)
• Economic usefulness of Jews outweighed noble prejudice until state change (similarity 0.82)
• Jews served as middlemen in nineteenth-century financial scandals without lasting gain (similarity 0.80)
• Antisemitism among the lower middle class arose from fear of proletarianization (similarity 0.80)
• Jews’ partial conformity to middle-class norms fueled antisemitic resentment. (similarity 0.78)
• A society wholly commercialized condemns Jews as materialists it has itself become. (similarity 0.78)
• Anti-Semitism deflects class hatred onto merchants who embody the whole system’s exploitation. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Conflating capitalism with Jews made anti-capitalist hostility emotionally anchorable #expands (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 146
• Nobility contempt for industry branded Jewish modernization as a national calamity #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 152
• Jewish banking ties to state loans turned class resentment into political antisemitism #expands (0.85)
• Scapegoating a Jewish parasite class let the corrupt system continue unchanged #expands (0.80)
• Marx converted antisemitism from backward-looking into forward-looking anti-capitalism #expands (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 149
• Antisemitism peaked after Jews had already lost economic influence #complicates (0.75)