The stereotype of the callous Jewish moneylender pops its head out of the Vice President’s mouth.
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“The pound of flesh which I demand of him is deerely bought, ’tis mine, and I will have it.” — Shylock, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice
The character of Shylock in Shakespeare’s 1596 play symbolizes the image of the cheap, unscrupulous, ruthless, and obsessed Jewish moneylender who manipulates, controls, and ultimately destroys individuals and entire nations.
Vice President Joe Biden stepped into the stereotype muck at a press conference September 16 as he commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the Legal Services Corporation. He recounted a story of his son Beau’s experience. While serving in Iraq, Beau met with military service members who needed legal assistance because of financial problems they faced back home.
“That’s one of the things that he finds was most in need when he was over there in Iraq for a year,” Joe Biden said. “That people would come to him and talk about what was happening to them at home in terms of foreclosures, in terms of bad loans that were being … I mean these Shylocks who took advantage of, um, these women and men while overseas.”
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While the Vice President later apologized to for his “poor choice of words,” he is certainly not alone in living in a society, or more accurately, a world saturated with these representations of Jews, images that have been encoded into the individual’s consciousness and woven into the fabric of our institutions and social systems.
A Jewish student in my Multicultural Foundations in Schools and Society course expressed to me in private a few years ago that since he came to our Midwestern university campus, he has gone into a “religious closet.” To avoid marginalization by his peers, he tells them that he was raised Methodist, because he has often heard other students express cruel anti-Jewish sentiments regarding Hitler and the German Holocaust as well as every-day expressions such as “Don’t Jew me down” (translated as “Don’t cheat me like a Jew”) and “That’s so Jewish” (like “That’s so gay”), both intense put-downs.
Thumbnail Sketch Origins of Jews as Deceitful Usurers
Soon following Jesus’ crucifixion by the Romans, the myth developed that Jews were responsible for his death. Though the Jews did not make the decision to kill Jesus, nor did they have the power to carry out the death sentence, Judas became the Jewish archetype of evil and deception by supposedly accepting a handful of gold coins by the Pharisee for his betrayal.
In early times, Jews were part of an agricultural economy, but rulers and resident mobs eventually pushed them out through forced expulsions, confiscation of their land, and unfairly high taxes. Jews then entered the trade occupations becoming merchants and shop keepers, peddlers, money-lenders, and tax-collectors — occupations needed in the developing economies but sometimes prohibited to Christians by the Christian Churches.
The landed classes, peasants, and serfs often blamed Jews for the problems of the feudal system. Jews soon became scapegoated by involuntarily serving as the buffers for the landed classes who carried the real power. Rich landowners encouraged the scapegoating of Jews to take the blame off themselves for the economic plight of the serfs.
Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican scholar born in1225 C. E., advanced so-called “natural law,” a morality system based on human constraints. He believed, and echoed in the High Middle Ages, that usury (the lending of money for profit) was contrary to “natural law,” and, therefore, was unjust and forbidden for Christians. Therefore, a pattern emerged: Jews were invited into a region to fill gaps in the economy. They were blamed for the problems of the economic system. Then they were expelled or massacred. The stereotype of Jews as money-lovers, cheap, and miserly was codified.
During the 1200s, the Church saw Jews as a challenge to its power, since by not converting to Christianity, Jews symbolized the idea of religious freedom. The Church, therefore, confined Jews to designated areas within the town and countryside. Pope Innocent III enacted laws to isolate Jews from Christians, arguing that Jews had corrupted and reversed the “natural order” with their unscrupulous use of money and power, and that the “free Christian” had essentially become the servant of a Jewish master.
In 1478, Church leaders commenced the Spanish Inquisition. By 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella drove the last Jews from Spain and Portugal, since Jews were no longer needed for the economic roles they once filled. Christopher Columbus, who set sail at this time, changed his intended port of departure because it was severely congested with Jews fleeing Spain. Much of the funding for his voyage the Spanish monarchy confiscated from Jews.
In a number of European countries, Jews continued to be forced to reside in designated and extremely overcrowded sites. Often, Bishops prohibited Jews from living among Christians. These areas would come to be called “ghettos.” The word ghetto has its derivation in the Italian word gietto, which the artillery foundry was called located in the district of Venice, Italy dating to the year 1516 where Jews were forced to live.
The Protestant Reformation resulted in a schism in Christianity around 1517. Catholic and Protestant leaders, however, agreed on one issue: the Jews. Reformer, Martin Luther, published a book in 1526 called, On the Jews and Their Lies, which some have called the first work of modern anti-Semitism.
He recommended:
“First, their synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever is left should be burned in dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a stone or cinder of it.”
Jewish prayer books, he advised, should be destroyed and rabbis forbidden to preach. The homes of Jews should likewise be “smashed and destroyed” and their residents
“put under one roof or in a stable like gypsies, to teach them they are not master in our land.”
He also suggested Jewish banishment from roads and markets, and seizure of their property. Then these
“poisonous envenomed worms should be drafted into forced labor. The young and strong Jews and Jewesses should be given the flail, the ax, the hoe, the spade, the distaff, and the spindle, and let them earn their bread by the sweat of their noses.”
Between 1648-1655, after suffering the distress of expulsion from Western Europe, Jews traveled to Eastern European countries such as Austria and Poland. Here they filled many of the same roles they had earlier occupied in Western Europe. Others viewed Jews as hated tax collectors, as the oppressor, but in actuality they were once again filling the involuntary role of “buffer” between serfs and nobility.
The eighteenth-century Philosopher, Voltaire, advocated equal rights and freedom of religion during the Enlightenment. Like most prominent philosophers at the time, however, Voltaire argued that Judaism was incompatible with the principles of human reason and progress.
“The Jews are nothing more than an ignorant, barbarian people, who combine the foulest greed with a terrible superstition and an uncompromising hatred of all the peoples who tolerate them and at whose cost they even enrich themselves…[T]he Jews are cowardly and lecherous, greedy, and miserly.”
In the United States during the Civil War, in December 1862, Major General Ulysses S. Grant unfairly accused Jews of plotting to illegally engage in the cotton trade, and ordered all Jews expelled from the states of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky, then under the control of the Union forces. This action repeated the European forced expulsions of Jews. President Abraham Lincoln had the good sense to reverse this order, which was, up to that time, the most egregious single anti-Semitic action ever taken by a high U.S. government official.
Though in actuality, Jews had little control over the conditions surrounding their lives in many European countries, the stereotype of Jews as obsessed with money and power with an interest in world domination persisted into the modern era. The Rothchild family, caricatured in numerous publications at the end of the ninetenth century, symbolized a Jewish passion for world economic and political domination.
Change was in the air in Russia in the late ninetenth century. Early Socialist thinkers, like Karl Marx, wrote of the oppression of the workers, and called for revolution to break their chains. Many of these same writers, however, were vehemently anti-Semitic. Karl Marx, for example, who himself was grandson of a rabbi, and son of Christian converts, in his 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question,” wrote:
“What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money… Money is the universal and self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value.”
Originally appearing under the reign of Czar Nicholas II around 1895 in Russia, then distributed in various translations throughout the world, the infamous bookletProtocols (Minutes) of the Elders of Zion circulated throughout Russia in 1905. An unknown writer who worked for the Russian secret police in Paris wrote this work to influence the policies of Czar Nicholas II regarding Jews. It comprised the alleged minutes of a supposed conference where rabbis plotted how Jews would overtake and dominate the world. During the Russian Revolution in 1917, Czarist forces widely distributed the Protocols to incite the populous against the so-called “Jewish revolution,” and to convince those who favored a revolution that Jews were actually plotting to impose a Jewish government and Jewish financial systems.
In the 1930s, U. S. Father Charles E. Coughlin, Irish-Catholic priest, anti-Semite, and anti-Communist, used his radio broadcasts to warn that the Jews were out to destroy the U.S. economy, and he defended Hitler’s treatment of the Jews as warranted in the fight against Communism.
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So paradoxically, we saw contradictory representations of Jews depicted both as super rich and powerful Capitalists controlling worldwide financial systems, and as ◊ Communists bent on overthrowing the Capitalist system.
During the 1980s-1990s in the United States, the “JAP” (or Jewish American Princess) “jokes” swept college campuses throughout the country. Though some students saw these as innocuous, in fact, they represented young Jewish women as immature, spoiled, greedy, selfish, sexually frigid, and dependent, usually on their doting fathers. In actuality, these so-called “jokes” were and continue to be thinly disguised general modern stereotypical representations of Jews and the Jewish religion as rich, self-absorbed, clannish, bloodsucking, and immature and/or lacking in religious consciousness.
“I mean these Shylocks who took advantage of, um, these women and men ”
With the military 85% or so male, what does it say that he mentioned women first in his concern? This is overwhelmingly a man’s issue if we use the same standards progressives use when they define issues.
I’d like to believe that the Vice President referenced the character of Shylock not due to the character’s race but due to the character’s actions. But you can see how the anti-Semetic Shylock remains a tenacious symbol in our culture. That said, if you want to find unscrupulous moneylenders, just go look in the top floor offices of all our major banking institutions. Plenty of damning evidence and guilt to go around to those of all races and creeds.