Burning Synagogue
A couple of GOP county chairmen in South Carolina had to apologize for calling Jews penny pinchers in an op-ed defending Senator Jim DeMint’s opposition to Congressional earmarks. “There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves…By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.”
One claimed he’d heard the saying about Jews all his life and intended it to be positive. I suppose it is like how people like to call Asian Americans the “model minority.” However, the thoughtless use of a stereotype is still bigotry, and this one about Jews is particularly nasty.
Stereotypes about Jews and money have deep roots in the rise of Christian anti-Semitism and, interestingly enough, a difficult relationship between Christians and money. As the great Yale church historian John Boswell pointed out in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, if, as a Christian, you want to follow the guidance of the Bible, it might be a good idea to listen to where it speaks the loudest. It condemns men have sex with other men (never mentions women with women) a miniscule number of times. The Bible shouts the loudest against usury. Early church leaders knew this, so they forbad Christians from doing it. Instead, they let Jews lend people money, zoned their activity, and then resented them for wanting to collect on their debts.
Making Jews creditors for Christians turned out to be a neat trick. Get people you oppress to do your dirty work, even though, according to your own “economy of salvation” (an old Christian term), God preordained them to kill your savior to pay your own insurmountable debt of sin. Then encourage people to hate and ostracize them for being Christ-killers and stereotype them as money-grubbing penny pinchers, even though you need them to lend you money. It was not unheard of for the flames of anti-Semitism to flare when Christians got into too much debt.
Having angry mobs kill your creditors was one Christian version of debt relief. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the eleventh century theologian, Anselm of Canterbury, who was the first to elaborate the debt-repayment theory of Jesus’ execution, was himself plagued by real debt all his life. He wrote his theory in 1098, just three years after his friend, Pope Urban II, launched the first crusade and created the idea of holy war by promising debt forgiveness, literal and spiritual, to all who died. The crusaders first went to the Rhineland and slaughtered 10,000 Jews on “Good” Friday, the first of Europe’s anti-Semitic mass pogroms, but, as we know, not the last and definitely not the worst.
While we probably can’t expect people to know the history of every oppressed or persecuted group in the U.S., we should know that Christians did not spring ex nihilo from the gospels. Those who claim to be Christian ought at least to know the sordid and nasty history of what Christians have done to the religious brothers and sisters of their own savior. A good primer is James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword. Jews gave us the vast majority of our scriptures (and most of the best commentary on them) and our finest religious ideas about justice.
What Christians gave Jews in return is unspeakable.
Thank you for speaking up with authority about this, Rita ~ I will post it to my facebook page….
It was also quite common for nobles and royals to get deeply in debt from profligate spending (these were classes that had very little concept of living within your means) and then petition the prince to renounce those debts as unChristian. Since that went on all over the time all over Europe, moneylenders had to set interest rates high enough that they recouped their original loan plus a modest profit in a very short period of time. Thus “usury,” which originally meant the taking of interest on “sterile” gold, gained a second meaning (which has continued until this day) of “excessive” interest.