/lit/ - Literature

Their history of ursury helped pave the way.

>>21843699
They’ve historically been placed in charge of tax collecting, simply to deflect the ire of the masses onto them

>>21843704
>>21843720
I don't doubt any of this, but from what I understand of Medieval history (which is not much), Jews and Christians self-segregated themselves from the other pretty completely. How, from this situation, did Jews become wealthy enough that when rulers realized a need for great amount of credit from the mid-seventeenth century onward, Jews were the natural lenders? Did the more integrated elements of society not lend because they did not have the wealth, or because they had religious reservations towards it, or both, or something else?

I guess I'm looking for a political history of Jews and the advent of court Jews in the early modern period now then. But at least Arendt cites a fair amount of the stuff she talks about, so maybe that'll be a good place to start.

Either way, the contemporary (modern) preponderance of Jews in finance is starting to make more sense to me now from a historical perspective; they had the first mover advantage for hundreds of years, and that's how we got all those major Jewish banking families.

>>21843699
>(((hannah ardendt)))
stopped reading

>>21843858
If we use the standards of today, the first section of the book is pretty profoundly anti-semitic. It's elaborating what led to the Jewish dominance of finance and influence over the state.

>>21843699
Jews still lived in cities just often in their own seperate parts. So they could still just lend there. Throughout history usury was either completely forbidden or had limits placed on the intrest rates. Jews however were often exempt from this. Governments gave them an advantage simply because they didn't have to adhere to christian morals. The first chapter in Rudolf Jung's book National Socialism: It's Foundations, Development, and Goals actually went into some more specific examples of that.

>>21843905
Hannah gets a free pass to say things anyone else would be demonized for on account of being a part of the tribe. Banality of Evil was so sympathetic to the Germans sections could be read as pro Nazi, if it weren't for the author. Maybe she got off on being contrarian to the (((narative))), maybe she revealed truth, maybe both.

>>21844379
Yeah, at the very least she is willing to talk shit when it's due about the Jews. A lot of the stuff she references is also in the same vein, not all of it by Jew authors.

Bump, looking for book recs

Practically all posts in this thread are wrong.
>>21843699
>>How were these individual Jews so wealthy as to be able to provide credit to these nascent nation-states?
The answer to this is a combination of a multitude of different facts.
First; pre-modern states (as in the overarching government) had a very small cashflow to begin with. Most of societies' burdens were decentralized to cities and local lords. f.e. the french monarchy did not pay to construct a network of roads; the cities and provinces were ordered - in lieu of taxes, in this case the corvee - to construct those roads. The vast majority of taxes that ran the actual bureaucracy came from the personal property of the monarch; supported by a few excise duties on some goods. It also meant that the state did not spend much on anything beyond the monarch's prestige or the royal army.
Second: we're not really talking about "individuals" in the modern sense: we're talking about rich private banks owned by single persons (or families).
So those jews represented actual banking houses and the amount of credit they provided was less than you'd think.

>>Why wouldn't any internal group or class provide credit to the state?
They did; up to a certain level. But there comes a point in lending to your king that you have to ask "how is he ever going to pay us all back without raising taxes?" and after which people stop lending the king money. The idea that jews were some victimised group banished to the edge of society where they slowly worked themselves up doing a dirty job (moneylending) is an absurd fable.

Not only was lending money far less taboo than pop-history makes it seem (the vast majority of credit-providing institutions in the middle ages were catholic i.e. mounts of piety; there were also other groups providing credit. Mainly italians but also germans. Think the de Medici and the Fuggers.
It is actually kind of fascinating how bad jews were at it, since they had one of the best positions regarding being bankers and they pretty much got out-competed until the rothschilds used the napoleonic wars to set the system to their hand. The jewish diaspora was an enormously powerful network and they did little with it.

Jews were also protected by law by most overarching governments and were pushed to take up crafts. Of course they refused this, and preferred to be generally deceitful traders and hagglers instead of working in the field or in the smithy. Only when they really tried to exploit the local commoners did pogroms arise; from the bottom up.

A minority group always has the advantage to the majority in a society if there is no legalistic repression in place. See the Jews in Europe, Baltic Germans in 18th C Tsarist Russia, Farsi in India etc etc. It is actually not surprising that the Jews have such influential positions: only that it took them so damn long.

>>21845798
Interesting take, makes me think of the minority Alawites in Syria making up the ruling dynasty.

>>21843720
>They’ve historically been placed in charge of tax collecting, simply to deflect the ire of the masses onto them

>>21843777
>Did the more integrated elements of society not lend because they did not have the wealth, or because they had religious reservations towards it, or both, or something else?
Both.

Being a diasporic peoples also meant that Jews were well placed to anticipate changes throughout the world via networks of communication that others didn't have ( example, England had Nathan Rothschild's bank handle the transportation of gold through periods of war because of the strength of his networks of comms and liquidity).

Their wealth also made jews well positioned to absorb more risks when it came to playing markets as they first cropped up. More access to money and information (as well as a class of retarded elites willing to go into endless debt) and it's no wonder they held so much influence.

>>21845798
Any books you'd recommend?

>Christians can't give loans
>Jews can
>Loans grow business's a lot, finance becomes a thing
>Jew's get a lot of interest
>Jew's are also hated by everyone - chicken vs egg, regardless they obviously stick together
>Hundreds of years later you get Rothschilds and Nazi's

>How were these individual Jews so wealthy as to be able to provide credit to these nascent nation-states?
Jews are a ethnoreligious group that separates people into two classes: the chosen people of God, themselves, and the gentiles; non-chosen, who exist to serve their will.

Unlike Christianity, Judaism does not view humility, poverty and enlightment as virtues, instead, the only virtue to them is the accumulation of material wealth, which is achieved by usury, bad-faith trade practices and only helping other Jews, while fucking gentiles over, as to always have an advantage.
After thousands of years of wealth accumulation and creating new ways to generate money without engaging in actual labour, the Jews amassed enormous fortunes, being involved in many shady trades, such as enslavement and usury (something Christians and Muslims couldn't practice).
And, as Judaism is also an enormous network of self-help, like Masons they helped other Jews into achieving positions of power:

>I, seth goldberg, owner of goldberg industries will only put other jews in positions of power
>I will only help the state if they accept jews into positions of power
And so on.

>Why wouldn't any internal group or class provide credit to the state?

Because the Jewish clade is very strong. They keep the same customs and religious laws for thousands of years, while doing everything in their power to undermine traditional and religious gentile values around the globe, to ease penetration by international capitalist organizations and petty banana democracies that can be easily manipulated by their companies, for the people's culture and values have been undermined so much that they will not question the large number of changes their government made to accommodate and usher the capitalist development in their country.

Bump

>>21843699
Plato is the fons et origio of all -isms today...

>>21845949
>>21845798
>>21846208
These posts are all mutually contradictory

>>21843777
>How, from this situation, did Jews become wealthy enough
The hand money to the poor and other uneducated people and then ask for more of than they handed in the first place. It never works with educated a grounded people; only with lesser beings. Basically any uncultured ethnical group does that (take a look at contemporary colombian people rotting the whole of the american continent).

>>21845798
To my knowledge medieval jews didn't "lend" money like a bank would, but rather acted as pawnbrokers.

not a single person here mentions a book lmao

>>21845912
Are you implying kings of Europe weren't antisemitic?

>>21843699
Semi-related, but "The Lost Science of Money" by Stephen A. Zarlenga offered an interesting perspective on usury. Read it critically tho.

>>21849102
If they were, they were anti-semites that handed over the keys to the kingdom to Jews

Sombart's The Jews and Modern Capitalism, but it's a bit dated.

Read this too regarding Arendt
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/conscious-pariah/

>>21849846
Holy shit I literally have this book in pdf open on my other monitor right this second. My first impression is that this would be decried instantly as anti-Semitic conspiracy theories but apparently it was pretty well received by a good number of Jews, and was even translated by a Jew. Scary to think about the implications for today that raises.

I'm trying to find the work that Arendt cites by Salo Wittmayer Baron. She cites a volume (or chapter) of his A Social and Religious History of the Jews ("Volume II: Jews and Capitalism"), but I can't find that volume or chapter at all.

Bump. Plenty of Jewish historians cover the history and preponderance of Jewish banking. It is well documented and not a conspiracy. On the high and late middle ages look to Baron's Social and Religious History of the Jews, Vol XII, which covers it region by region. On the early modern period nothing immediately comes to mind, but the answer to the OP question is that they were already wealthy because they had been lending with various barriers for hundreds of years already; the early modern period has a strong continuity with the late medieval period as far as Jewish wealth and dominance in banking.

As far as why not Gentiles, a reason given by Arendt is that Gentiles maintained the negative view of usury and non-productive labor and preferred the private sector which was seen as more promising than government work. Her argument is that this changed with the rise of colonialism and imperialism due to the newfound realization that investing in the government can be extremely lucrative.

Whether Jews have some sort of cultural or biological predisposition towards being good with money I don't know, but by most accounts they are intelligent, and they also benefitted from having virtually no Christian or Muslim competition for more five centuries. It goes without saying that most Jews were not much wealthier than their Christian analogs. But the current taboo around discussing Jewish dominance in banking is probably a consequence of the Holocaust. Arendt was wrong in that regard, as she believed Jewish historiography was ready to dispense with the lachrymose interpretation. But plenty of works in the early through mid 20th century do so and they are enlightening books to read.

>reading a jew lecture you why having a strong nationalistic culture is bad
>reading a woman lecture you on anything
When will you retards learn

>>21850402
>t. Clueless
Retard

>>21850418
Explain how I'm wrong. Like, nigger, what possesses an (I'm assuming hopefully) white male in his 20s or 30s to sit down with a book, and the book he chooses is "Here's Why You're a Bad Person and Not Allowed to Have Good Things, or Why Israel Is Allowed To by Some Jewess."
Like, explain what you think you will get out of this book. If you want to read political theory, read Hobbes or Rousseau. If you want analysis about jews, read a non jew. If you want analysis on history, read an actual historian like Braudel.

>>21850430
Why are you talking about what's in this book? You haven't ever read it and your only impression of it has to do with the writer being a Jew and a woman, and the title

>>21850402
"That totalitarian movements depended less on the structurelessness of a mass society than on the specific conditions of an atomized and individualized mass, can best be seen in a comparison of Nazism and Bolshevism which began in their respective countries under very different circumstances. To change Lenin's revolutionary dictatorship into fuIl totalitarian rule, Stalin had first to create artificiaIly that atomized society which had been prepared for the Nazis in Germany by historical circumstances."

"The October Revolution's amazingly easy victory occurred in a country where a despotic and centralized bureaucracy governed a structureless mass population which neither the remnants of the rural feudal orders nor the weak, nascent urban capitalist classes had organized. When Lenin said that nowhere in the world would it have been so easy to win power and so difficult to keep it, he was aware not only of the weakness of the Russian working class, but of anarchic social conditions in general, which favored sudden changes. Without the instincts of a mass leader-he was no orator and had a passion for public admission and analysis of his own errors, which is against the rules of even ordinary demagogy-Lenin seized at once upon all the possible differentiations, social, national, professional, that might bring some structure into the population, and he seemed convinced that in such stratification lay the salvation of the revolution. He legalized the anarchic expropriation of the landowners by the rural masses and established thereby for the first and probably last time in Russia that emancipated peasant class which, since the French Revolution, had been the firmest supporter of the Western nation-states. He tried to strengthen the working class by encouraging independent trade unions. He tolerated the timid appearance of a new middle class <...>. He introduced further distinguishing features by organizing, and sometimes inventing, as many nationalities as possible, furthering national consciousness and awareness of historical and cultural differences even among the most primitive tribes in the Soviet Union. It seems clear that in these purely practical political matters Lenin followed his great instincts for statesmanship rather than his Marxist convictions; his policy, at any rate, proves that he was more frightened by the absence of social and other structure than by the possible development of centrifugal tendencies in the newly emancipated nationalities or even by the growth of a new bourgeoisie out of the newly established middle and peasant classes. There is no doubt that Lenin suffered his greatest defeat when, with the outbreak of the civil war, the supreme power that he originally planned to concentrate in the Soviets definitely passed into the hands of the party bureaucracy; but even this development, tragic as it was for the course of the revolution, would not necessarily have led to totalitarianism."

>>21850402
>>21850585
2/2
"A one-party dictatorship added only one more class to the already developing social stratification of the country, i.e., bureaucracy, which, according to socialist critics of the revolution, "possessed the State as private property" (Marx).27 At the moment of Lenin's death the roads were still open. The formation of workers, peasants, and middle classes need not necessarily have led to the class struggle which had been characteristic of European capitalism. Agriculture could still be developed on a collective, co-operative, or private basis, and the national economy was still free to follow a socialist, state-capitalist, or a free-enterprise pattern. None of these alternatives would have automatically destroyed the new structure of the country.
All these new classes and nationalities were in Stalin's way when he began to prepare the country for totalitarian government. In order to fabricate an atomized and structureless mass, he had first to liquidate the remnants of power in the Soviets which, as the chief organ of national representation, still played a certain role and prevented absolute rule by the party hierarchy."

>>21843720
>tfw they force you again to farm taxes, lease mines, exploit colonial ressources, for a fixed fee and keep all the risk or windfall profits

>>21843699
there's an unfinished survey of early banking by richard ehrenberg "capital and finance in the age of renaissance", i dont know of a more detailed book. there were other big and nonjewish financiers (bardi, gondi, fugger etc) but they tend to move on to other sectors, become respected patricians who don't need no usury or tax farming, unlike jews.

>>21843699
why are jews so self-obsessed? borderline solipsistic behavior. I mean I'm a pretty self-centered guy myself but come on...

>>21850597
>>21850585
Good post

>>21843699
This book is insane. If I walked onto a bus and started reading from the first section (Antisemitism) people would call me a anti-Semite conspiracy theorist and I'd be arrested before long.

>>21843699
>>21850585
>>21850396
>>21845798
I'm having an issue following Arendt's argument in the book. She states that in the course of the nineteenth century the Prussian state developed a conveniently ambivalent policy towards Jews. It advocated for keeping poor Jews segregated, Jewish intelligentsia suppressed, and Jewish media suppressed, but ensured the continued privilege of the wealthy Jewish families.

This suited the state because they were 1) able to keep the status quo in regards to their Jewish banking partners and 2) able to keep the Jewish population at large from assimilating, which would threaten their position as an international banking element in the future.

This suited the wealthy Jewish interests because they were 1) able to keep the status quo in regards to their wealth, influence, and power and 2) because they did not want to be emancipated, because emancipation would spell the end of the privileges that they enjoyed.

Why were the wealthy Jewish interests against the emancipation of their poorer brethren throughout Prussia and Poland? By what mechanism would their emancipation be counterproductive to the wealthy Jew's interests?

Bump