From Peter Meyers website:
{p. 1} Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual, and political life. Jews played a central role in American finance during the 1980s, and they were among the chief beneficiaries of that decade's corporate mergers and reorganizations. Today, though barely 2% of the nation's population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews. The chief executive officers of the three major television networks, and the four largest film studios are Jews, as are the owners of the nation's largest newspaper chain and most influential single newspaper, the New York Times. In the late 1960s, Jews already constituted 20% of the faculty of elite universities and 40% of the professors of elite law schools; today, these percentages doubtless are higher.
The role and influence of Jews in American politics is equally marked. Jews are elected to public office in disproportionate numbers. In 1993, ten members of the United States Senate and thirty-two members of the House of Representatives were Jewish, three to four times their percentage of the general population. Jews are even more prominent in political organizations and in finance. One recent study found that in twenty-seven of thirty-six campaigns for the United States Senate, one or both candidates relied upon a Jewish campaign chairman or finance director. In the realm of lobbying and litigation, Jews organized what was for many years one of Washington's most successful political action committees, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and they play leadership roles in such important public interest groups as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Common Cause. Several Jews also played very important roles in the 1992 Democratic presidential campaign. After the Democrats' victory, President Clinton appointed a number of Jews to prominent positions in his administration.
Their role in American economic, social, and political institutions has enabled Jews to wield considerable influence in the nation's public life. The most obvious indicator of this influence is the $3 billion in direct military and economic aid provided to Israel by the United States each year and, for that matter, the like amount given to Egypt since it agreed to maintain peaceful relations with Israel.
{p. 2} That fully three-fourths of America's foreign aid budget is devoted to Israel's security interests is a tribute in considerable measure to the lobbying prowess of AIPAC and the importance of the Jewish community in American politics {but what does it say about "Jewish Internationalism" - that trademark Jewish concern for the poor?}.
At least until recently, another mark of Jewish influence was the virtual disappearance of anti-Semitic rhetoric from mainstream public discourse in the United States. As a general rule, what can and cannot be said in public reflects the distribution of political power in society; as Jews gained political power, politicians who indulged in anti-Semitic tactics were labeled extremists and exiled to the margins of American politics. Similarly, religious symbols and forms of expression that Jews find threatening have been almost completely eliminated from schools and other public institutions. Suits brought by the ACLU, an organization whose leadership and membership are predominantly Jewish, secured federal court decisions banning officially sanctioned prayers in the public schools and creches and other religious displays in parks and public buildings.
American Jews secured their position of power quite recently. During the Second World War, the Jewish community lacked sufficient influence to induce the U.S. government to take any action that might have impeded the slaughter of European Jews. As recently as the early 1950s, public officials such as Representative John Rankin of Mississippi felt free to make anti-Semitic speeches on the floor of Congress. In 1956, during the Suez crisis, President Dwight D. Eisenhower could refuse even to meet with American Jewish leaders who sought to discuss U.S. policy in the Middle East. Into the early 1960s, elite universities including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton maintained quotas limiting Jewish enrollments.
Not only is the extraordinary prominence of Jews in American politics a relatively recent development but, during the past several years, there have been some indications that Jewish influence might already be waning. In 1992, for example, former President George Bush resisted and ultimately defeated efforts by AIPAC and other Jewish organizations to secure American loan guarantees to assist Israel in the construction of additional Jewish settlements in the territories it occupied after its 1967 war with the Arab states.
In a nationally televised press conference during the loan guarantee struggle, Bush seemed to question the legitimacy of American Jews' efforts on Israel's behalf. The president later denied that this had been his intention. The effect of the Bush press conference and subsequent comments, however, was to intimidate American Jewish organizations and weaken their support for the loan guarantees. The
{p. 3} Bush administration's larger goal was to undermine Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's Likud government, which was viewed as an obstacle to the realization of American policy aims in the Middle East. By cowing Israel's Jewish supporters in America, the White House hoped to weaken Shamir and replace him with a more compliant Israeli government. This American effort was successful. The Likud bloc was defeated in Israel's 1992 elections by a labor coalition led by Yitzhak Rabin. In the fall of 1992, having secured the election of an Israel government more to its liking, the White House gave its support to a new loan guarantee package as an inducement to the Israelis to toe the American line in the Middle East. Then, having nominally improved its relations with Israel, the Bush administration made a token effort to mend its fences with Jewish voters and contributors in America. The administration made it clear, however, that, having humbled the once-powerful Jewish lobby, it would not permit its Middle East policies to be shaped by the wishes of the Jews.
Another indication that the influence of American Jews may be waning is the resurgence of anti-Semitic - sometimes veiled as anti-Zionist - rhetoric in American political discourse. On the liberal left, opposition to Israel is commonplace. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, for example, some liberal activists charged that the Israeli occupation of Arab lands was a major underlying cause of the conflict. Indeed, the Persian Gulf War opened major cleavages between Jews and other elements within the American liberal community. Liberal groups ranging from the National Council of Churches through the Friends of the Earth argued against the use of force to dislodge Iraq from Kuwait, leaving liberal Jewish advocates of a military solution such as Ann Lewis, former political director of the Democratic National Committee, isolated from their usual allies. In its statement opposing American military action in the Persian Gulf, the National Council of Churches also endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state.
African Americans, for their part, usually do not bother to hide their attacks on Jews behind the smoke screen of opposition to Zionism. In recent years, some black leaders, including Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan, former U.S. Representative Gus Savage, and Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson have made anti-Semitic comments of the sort that had all but disappeared from American politics. At the same time, anti-Semitic black speakers have become the wandering minstrels of the college lecture circuit. Curiously, some of the very same student and faculty groups that vehe-
{p. 4} mently assert that the first Amendment does not protect speech deemed to be racist, homophobic, or sexist cheerfully dabble in anti-Semitic rhetoric.
To be sure, liberal forces are sufficiently dependent upon Jews for their power in American politics so that anti-Semitic rhetoric on the part of blacks and other liberals is not a direct threat to the Jews. The influence of Jews within the liberal camp may be reduced somewhat by an alliance of blacks and other left liberals. Barring some cataclysmic restructuring of political forces in the United States, however, Jews could not be jettisoned from the contemporary liberal coalition in the way that they were, say, from America's nineteenth-century industrialist coalition - a phenomenon we shall examine in Chapter 2.
Nevertheless, the use of anti-Semitic rhetoric on the part of nominal allies of the Jews - and the inability of the Jews to do much about it - is a signal to other forces that Jews are now fair game. This signal has not been missed by forces on the political right - forces that are not dependent upon Jews for their own political power. Among some groups of conservatives, anti-Semitism has become sufficiently noteworthy that an entire recent issue of the National Review was devoted to the topic. The prominent conservative commentator and recent presidential aspirant, Patrick Buchanan, barely bothers to deny his anti-Semitism, while a number of other conservatives are pleased to flaunt theirs.
In 1991, prior to the Persian Gulf War, Buchanan asserted that men named Rosenthal, Kissinger, Perle, and Krauthammer - a group he called Israel's "amen corner" in the United States - were beating the drums for a war in which "kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and LeRoy Brown" would be the ones to die. Later, as a candidate in Georgia's March 1992 Republican presidential primary, Buchanan attacked a group of Jewish hecklers by saying, "This is a rally of Americans, by Americans, and for the good old U.S.A., my friends." During the same rally, Buchanan responded to a question about his anti-Semitism and racism by referring to his First Amendment guarantee of free speech.
In addition, radical populists, who until recently had been viewed as part of the lunatic fringe, have become much more active over the past several years. The most notorious of these, of course, is David Duke, a neo-Nazi who captured 55% of the white vote in the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election. For radical populists like Duke, anti-Semitism is an important drawing card, even if they sometimes choose to keep it face down - but still in a prominent spot on the
{p. 5} table - when appealing for middle-class votes. Duke failed to win much support in the several 1991 primaries he entered, mainly because he was overshadowed by Buchanan. Nevertheless, the brute fact remains that a Nazi very nearly was elected governor of an American state in 1991.
Many surveys suggest that, except among blacks, popular anti-Semitism in the United States is still at a relatively low level. Contrary to the views of the pollsters, however, surveys are a barometer or reflection of what has taken place in political life, not a predictor of what is politically possible. If anti-Semitic appeals or rhetoric began to figure more prominently in political discourse among whites, as they already have among blacks, then in due course the polls would undoubtedly reflect this change by recording more popular anti-Semitism. Just as the public cannot be in favor of a political candidate they have not yet heard about, they cannot support a political ideology that has not yet forcefully been presented to them. Ideas, like candidates and products, need to be marketed before they can gain adherents. As Joseph Schumpeter once put it, public opinion is the "product rather than the motive power of the political process."
Could anti-Semitism be promoted successfully in contemporary America? Some social historians have maintained that American "exceptionalism," that is, the unusual strength of liberal values in the United States, precludes the emergence of major anti-Semitic movements in this country. The validity of this optimistic view, though, is open to question. Certainly, liberal democracy has been more firmly rooted in the United States than anywhere else in the world. It is extremely important to understand, however, that the strength of liberalism in America is not a function of some immutable ideological commitment on the part of Americans. Liberalism, rather, has prevailed in the United States as a result of the victories won by liberal forces in political struggles - sometimes pitched battles - against opponents whose values were decidedly illiberal. The triumph of liberal democracy was, by no means, preordained in, say, the 1860s or the 1930s. During both these periods liberal values prevailed because, and only because, the political - and military - forces controlled by the proponents of those values won after long and heroic conflicts whose outcomes remained in doubt for many years.
Understanding liberalism as a doctrine that has prevailed, rather than one that has never been challenged in the United States, helps to illuminate the place of Jews and anti-Semitism in American history. First, over the past century, Jews have generally supported lib-
{p. 6} eral values and been linked to liberal political forces in the United States. In turn, the opponents of those forces and values have upon occasion sought to make use of anti-Semitism to discredit them. Far from being excluded by liberalism, during several periods in American history, including the 1880s, 1930s, and 1950s, anti-Semitism played a significant role in attacks launched against liberal regimes in which Jews participated. Anti-Semitism was used, in part, to delegitimate liberal democracy by exposing it as a creature of, or cover for, the Jews. For example, many readers will, no doubt, recall that some right-wing opponents of the New Deal labeled it the "Jew Deal" as a prominent component of their effort to undermine the Roosevelt administration.
Second, during these periods - the 1930s and 1950s in particular - anti-Semitism was defeated by liberal forces rather than precluded by liberalism. Groups espousing anti-Semitic ideologies were vanquished by Jews and their allies in liberal coalitions after long and arduous political struggles whose favorable outcomes were in no sense guaranteed. During these struggles, Jews were important members of the liberal camp. Indeed, as we shall see, Jews helped to defend American liberalism from its foes as much as liberalism protected the Jews from anti-Semitism.
Finally, far from excluding anti-Semitism, American liberalism has, itself, not been entirely free of antagonism to Jews. At the end of the nineteenth-century, as we shall see, the liberal forces of the day, led by Northeastern industrialists, found it politically expedient to respond to their patrician and populist opponents' use of anti-Semitism by distancing themselves from the Jews. As a result, nominally liberal forces participated in a campaign to extrude Jews from American political and social life. Paradoxically, it was precisely the strength of liberal groups that allowed them to jettison their putative Jewish allies. The triumph of liberalism in the aftermath of the Civil War made Jews superfluous to the liberal coalition. A parallel to this experience, as we shall see, is to be found in the relationship between blacks and Jews today.
Thus, anti-Semitism has played a role in American history despite and, in some instances, because of the strength of American liberalism. It follows that there would seem to be no a priori reason to believe that American exceptionalism precludes the reemergence of anti-Semitism in the United States. In point of fact, there is certainly ample precedent in American history for an era of Jewish success to be followed by a period of decline - even anti-Semitism. During the Reconstruction era, Jews achieved a considerable measure of influ-
{p. 7} ence, but beginning in the 1880s they were systematically excluded from many key institutions in American society. Jews played important roles in Wilsonian Progressivism, but then were assailed through the post-World War I Red Scare and the immigrant restriction movement. The influence of Jews rose during the New Deal era, but institutions in which Jews were prominent, such as government bureaucracies, labor unions, and the entertainment industry, came under attack - at times manifestly anti-Semitic in character - during the McCarthy period.
In this way, the experience of Jews in America echoes the more general pattern of Jewish history. In a number of places and times, for example, fifteenth-century Spain, the Ottoman Empire, Weimar Germany, and post-revolutionary Russia, Jews achieved great power only to lose their influence and find themselves under assault.
Most theories of anti-Semitism seek to identify the roots of ethnic prejudice. Some theorists locate these in economic relations. Others emphasize the role of religious institutions. Still others look to cultural differences and misunderstandings. No doubt, all of these explanations have some validity. It is not clear, however, that there is any mystery here to be explained. Whatever its psychological, social, economic, or even evolutionary basis, suspicion of strangers is the norm in all societies, while it is acceptance of outsiders that is unusual and generally ephemeral. When times are good and foreigners play a recognized and useful role in the community, they may be tolerated. On the other hand, when times are hard and outsiders seem to compete with their hosts, any latent popular xenophobia is more likely to manifest itself, and foreigners may become useful targets for rabble-rousing politicians. Recent events throughout Western Europe are unambiguous examples of this phenomenon.
Certainly, everywhere that Jews have lived, their social or economic marginality - their position, "outside society," as Hannah Arendt put it - sooner or later exposed Jews to suspicion, hostility, and discrimination. Even in multiethnic societies, Jews have usually been the most successful and visible - and, hence, the most exposed - outsiders. In America, Jews currently appear to be accepted by the larger community. Nevertheless, at least in part by their own choosing, American Jews continue to maintain a significant and visible measure of communal identity and distinctiveness in religious, cultural, and political matters. At the same time, most gentiles continue to perceive Jews to be a peculiar and distinctive group. Though Jews have learned to look, talk, and dress like other Americans, they are not fully assimilated either in their own minds or in
{p. 8} the eyes of their neighbors. Even in America, the marginality of the Jews makes them at least potentially vulnerable to attack.
In America as elsewhere, moreover, Jews are outsiders who are often more successful than their hosts. Because of their historic and, in part, religiously grounded emphasis on education and literacy, when given an opportunity Jews have tended to prosper. And, to make matters worse, Jews often, secretly or not so secretly, conceive themselves to be morally and intellectually superior to their neighbors. Jews, to be sure, by no means have a monopoly on group or national snobbery. In contemporary America every group is encouraged to take pride in its special heritage and achievements. The problem is that Jews as a group are more successful than virtually all the others. Indeed, Jews are extremely successful outsiders who sometimes have the temerity to rub it in. As one outraged right-wing columist noted recently, a Yiddish synonym for dullard or dope is "goyischer kopf," that is, someone who thinks like a non-Jew.
The question with which this book is concerned, however, is not so much the roots of anti-Jewish sentiment as the conditions under which such sentiment is likely to be politically mobilized. As we shall see, where an anti-Semitic politics becomes important, usually more is involved than simple malice toward the Jews. In politics, principles - even as unprincipled a principle as anti-Semitism - are seldom completely divorced from some set of political interests. In the case of anti-Semitism, major organized campaigns against the Jews usually reflect not only ethnic hatred, they also represent efforts by the political opponents of regimes or movements with which Jews are allied to destroy or supplant them. Anti-Semitism has an instrumental as well as an emotive character. Thus, to understand the cycle of Jewish success and anti-Semitic attack - and to understand why the United States is not exceptional - it is necessary to consider the place of Jews in politics particularly, as Hannah Arendt noted long ago, their peculiar relationship to the state.
Jews and the State
For nearly two thousand years, Jews lived as scattered minorities while preserving a considerable measure of communal identity and cultural distinctiveness from the societies that surrounded them. Their distinctiveness was maintained by Jews' religious and communal institutions and was often reinforced by the hostility of their neighbors and the antipathy of Moslem and Christian religious institutions. Jewish religious practice required male participants to read
{p. 9} prayers and other texts, and hence Jewish men received a measure of education that made them considerably more literate and numerate than the people among whom they lived. Their geographic dispersion and literacy combined to help Jews become important traders in the medieval and early modern worlds. Jewish merchants linked by ties of religion, culture, and often family, played an important role in international commerce.
At the same time, however, their literacy, commercial acumen, and even their social marginality often made Jews useful to kings princes, and sultans. Into the eighteenth century, rulers regularly relied upon Jews as a source of literate administrators and advisors. European monarchs, moreover, depended upon Jewish financiers to manage their fiscal affairs and relied heavily upon Jewish merchants and bankers for loans. In addition, because Jews remained outsiders to the societies in which they lived, sovereigns found them useful instruments for carrying out unpopular tasks, notably collecting taxes.
For their part, Jews, who like Sikhs and other ethnic minorities offered the state's protection in exchange for services, have usually conceived it to be to their advantage to undertake these tasks. Indeed, Jews often saw this as their only viable alternative. Social marginality made Jews the objects of popular hostility at times shading into violence, and kings could offer a Jewish community protection in exchange for its services. At the same time, the crown could provide Jews with financial opportunities and allow thern to enter commercial fields that would otherwise have been closed to them. This exchange of protection and opportunity for service was the foundation for a centuries-long relationship between Jews and the state. Such alliances were responsible for the construction of some of the most powerful states of the Mediterranean and European worlds, including the Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman empires.
These patterns persisted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jews have maintained a sense of distinctiveness from surrounding societies and have, as a result, continued to experience a measure of suspicion, hostility, and discrimination. Concern about their neighbors' attitudes toward them has continued to lead Jews to seek the protection of the state {most recently through legislation against free speech}. At the same time, modern Jewish secular culture, like its religious antecedents, has emphasized education. This has enabled Jews to acquire professional and technical skills that can make them as valuable to presidents, prime ministers and commissars as they had been to monarchs.
Where Jews have been unable to obtain protection from existing
{p. 10} states, they have often played active roles in movements seeking to reform or supplant these regimes with new ones more favorably disposed toward them. Thus, in the nineteenth century, middle-class Jews were active in liberal movements that advocated the removal of religious disabilities. At the same time, working-class Jews were prominent in socialist and communist movements that sought the overthrow of existing regimes in the name of full social equality. In some cases, including Wilhelmian Germany and Hapsburg Austria-Hungary, regimes provided access to a small number of very wealthy Jews while subjecting the remainder to various forms of exclusion. In those cases, Jews could be found both at the pinnacles of power and among the leaders of the opposition.
Over the past several centuries, then, Jews have played a major role both in the strengthening of existing states and in efforts to supplant established regimes with new ones. Their relationship to the state has often made it possible for Jews to attain great wealth and power. At the same time, however, relationships between Jews and states have also been the chief catalysts for organized anti-Semitism.
Even when they are closely linked to the state, Jews usually continue to be a separate and distinctive group in society and, so, to arouse the suspicions of their neighbors. Indeed, in the service of the state, Jews have often become very visible and extremely powerful outsiders and thus awakened more suspicion and jealousy than ever before. As a result, the relationship between Jews and the state is always problematic. An identification with Jews can weaken the state by exposing it to attack as the servant of foreigners. Correlatively, Jews' identification with the state invites political forces that are seeking to take over or destroy the established order to make use of anti-Semitism as a political weapon.
In contemporary America, for example, radical populist fringe groups such as "The Order" and the "White Aryan Resistance" refer to the administration of the United States as the "ZOG," or "Zionist Occupation Government" - a corrupt tool of the Jews who are so prominent in the American political elite. Not so differently, Patrick Buchanan has referred to the United States Congress as "Israeli occupied territory," in this way defining a political institution controlled by his liberal Democratic foes as nothing more than a Jewish front.
It is in these struggles between regimes and their enemies that popular supicion of Jews is often mobilized by contending political forces and transformed into organized anti-Semitism. This is when
{p. 11} the embrace of the state, initially filled with so much promise, can prove to be fatal.
In the remainder of this chapter, we shall first examine the centuries-long history of the relationship between Jews and the state in Europe and the Middle East. Second, we will look at the ways in which this association can give rise to organized anti-Semitism. In subsequent chapters, we shall examine the relationship between Jews, the state, and anti-Semitism in American history.
Chapter 2 will treat the period between the Civil War and the great Red Scare that followed World War I. Chapter 3 will focus on the New Deal, the Kennedy and Johnson periods, and the era of the "New Politics" in the 1970s. At the turn of the century, Jews had been extruded from American political and social life. By the 1970s, however, Jews had attained enormous influence in the political process. Chapters 4 and 5 will examine two of the major threats to that influence. Chapter 4 will discuss the contemporary conflict between Jews and blacks, while Chapter 5 will analyze the rise and fall of the Jewish/Republican alliance of the 1980s. Chapter 6 will assess the prospects for a revival of anti-Semitism in contemporary America. As we shall see, the Jewish experience in America has not been exceptional, even though the embrace of the state has not been fatal - at least not yet.
Jews, States, and Anti-Semitism
Jews played key roles in constructing a number of the most important states to emerge in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds over the past 700 years. These have included an extraordinary variety of regimes running the gamut from absolutist through liberal to Socialist governments. For many of these states, Jews were crucial in building and staffing institutions of extraction, coercion, administration, and mobilization. As we shall subsequently see, these relationships between Jews and the state have been the chief catalysts for organized anti-Semitism.
As a foreign minority, wherever they lived Jews have faced disabilities and dangers. The protection of the state, therefore, has for centuries seemed to represent opportunity and safety. For example, in both Europe and the Middle East during the medieval era, Jews were eager to induce rulers to grant them privileges and provide them with protection from potentially hostile neighbors. Because Jews tended to stimulate commerce and were a useful source of tax revenues, rulers were often happy to oblige.
The bishopric of Speyer is a typical example. During the eleventh
{p. 12} century, the Jews of Speyer asked the ruling prince-bishop to grant them a charter of privileges and to build a defensive wall around their quarter. Because the Jews were economically valuable and he wished to induce more to settle in his city, the bishop agreed. Subsequently, the bishop protected the Jewish community from rioting crusaders, going so far as to hang the ring leaders of the mob that sought to attack the Jewish quarter.
Similarly, in twelfth-century Germany, in the wake of crusader pogroms, Jews sought and were granted royal protection under the "Land Peace" of the German king. Here, too, the activities of Jewish merchants were deemed economically useful. It is an interesting fact that the yellow badge Jews were required to wear in Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe during the 1930s and 1940s originated as a symbol of the official protection Jews enjoyed in Muslim lands during portions of the Middle Ages. The badge was a visible reminder to Moslems that it was not permissible to attack Jews.
Frequently, Jewish communal leaders sought an alliance with the state for still another reason. Not only did they offer protection and opportunity for the community, but the Gentile authorities could bolster the position of their Jewish colleagues by providing them with what they otherwise lacked: coercive powers through which to enforce their commands. In turn, the Gentile authorities welcomed a cooperative relationship with Jewish communal leaders because this facilitated the collection of taxes from the Jews. Thus, the Gentile government and Jewish communal authorities could serve one another's interests.
For example, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Poland, the verdicts of Jewish courts were enforced by the royal authorities, sometimes even in cases involving non-Jews. In exchange, the Jewish authorities ensured the proper collection of taxes from the Jewish community. For a similar reason, in medieval Spain, edicts of the Jewish authorities, even in matters pertaining strictly to religious practice such as the wearing of a hat on the Sabbath, were enforceable by the crown's officials. In the Byzantine empire, the state recognized Jewish courts of law and enforced their decisions. ln the Muslim Middle East, the alliance between the Gentile state and the Jewish leadership could sometimes be very strong, indeed, with the leaders of the Jewish community serving, simultaneously, as officials of the host state.
Partly as a consequence of this historic experience, Jews often continued to look to the state for protection even when it was the
{p. 13} state itself that was the source of their problems. Thus, in his famous work, Shevet Yehuda, written in the wake of the Jewish - and his personal - expulsion from Spain, Solomon ibn Verga sought to portray the rulers of Spain, including Ferdinand and Isabella who ordered the expulsion, as the allies of the Jews.
In a similar vein, as Arendt and others have observed, to the very end many German Jews could not believe that the German state would fail to protect them from the excesses of Nazi fanatics. The historical dependence of Jews upon the state also gave rise to a Jewish philosophical tradition, beginning in the seventeenth century with Spinoza and continuing through the maskilim of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which the state is glorified and venerated and seen, essentially, as a kind parent worthy of total obedience.
As we shall see, Jews have continued to look to the state for protection and opportunity through the modern era. And, for their part, rulers have continued to see advantages in allying themselves with Jews. A confluence of three circumstances is most likely to encourage rulers to cultivate alliances with Jews. These are the desire to strengthen the powers of the state, substantial opposition to this endeavor from established elites, and the absence of alternative sources of financial, intellectual, and administrative talent. The latter consideration has also led many liberal and socialist movements to draw upon the support of Jews.
Jews and the Absolutist State
Despite the severe disabilities to which religious minorities were typically subject, Jews played a remarkable role in the building of a number of absolutist regimes in both Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East. Rulers were most likely to turn to Jews when they sought to expand their domains at the expense of foreign princes or centralize their power over the opposition of domestic magnates. The Jews who served absolutist regimes secured riches and power for themselves and protection for their communities.
In Europe this pattern was especially notable in Christian Spain from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. Medieval Spain consisted of a number of independent kingdoms containing large numbers of Muslims as well as more than 300,000 Jews in a total population of about 5 million. Throughout Spain, Jews were active in the crafts, trade, scholarship, and in the learned professions, especially medicine. Jews were so prominent in the economies of the Spanish kingdoms that their tax payments were major factors in
{p. 14} royal treasuries, sometimes accounting for half of all royal revenues.
In sharp contrast to England and France where clerical orders played an important part in the royal administration, the Spanish church and clerical orders had been militarized during the centuries-long war against the Moors, and had come to be more closely linked with the territorial nobility than the crown. As a result, kings had little alternative but to draw heavily upon the talents of Jews as administrators. Spanish kings also depended upon Jews as tax collectors and financiers, particularly in Castile, the most powerful and populous of the Christian realms where, as John Crow has noted, royal power in essence was sustained by Jewish money, industry, and intelligence. Jews played a particularly important role in the efforts of Alfonso X (1252-1284), Pedro the Cruel (1350-1369), Juan II (1406- 1454), and Henry IV (1454-1474) to centralize royal authority at the expense of the nobility as well as in the efforts of these monarchs to expand the boundaries of the Castilian state.
To be sure, Jews were ineligible to serve in the very highest offices. The number of literate and educated Christians in medieval Spain, however, was small. Consequently, to secure administrators with the requisite talents, Spanish kings often found it necessary to appoint Jews who had nominally converted to Christianity - so-called conversos or New Christians - to high administrative positions. At the end of the fifteenth century, for instance, the occupants of the five highest administrative offices in Aragon were all conversos. Indeed, even the Spanish church was heavily dependent upon this source of administrative talent. A particularly notable example is the career of Salomon Halevi. Though he served as chief rabbi of Burgos, Halevi was converted to Christianity in 1390, adopting the name Pablo de Santa Maria. Soon thereafter, as Henry Kamen reports, Halevi took holy orders and became in turn bishop of Cartagena, bishop of Burgos, tutor to the son of Henry II, and papal legate. One of his sons, Gonzalo, became bishop successively of Astorga, Plasencia, and Siguenza. Another son, Alonso de Cartagena, succeeded him as bishop of Burgos. As we shall see, the extraordinary position that Jews occupied in the Spanish kingdoms was directly linked to their later expulsion.
Jews also played a major role in state finance and administration in the medieval Muslim world. As the Umayyeds expanded their control of the Iberian peninsula in the tenth and eleventh centuries, they depended heavily upon Jewish administrators and diplomats. Hasday b. Shaprut (905-975), for example, was a major figure in
{p. 15} the courts of the caliphs Abd al-Rahman III and al-Hakam II. In the eleventh century, Jews attained the highest levels of political power in Muslim Spain, including the viziership of Grenada, a position held by Samuel b. Naghrela (Samuel ha-Nagid), a Jewish soldier and politician, from 1026-1056. Other powerful Jewish administrators included Yequtiel b. Hasan (d. 1039) in Saragossa and Abraham b. Muhajir (d. ca. 1100) in Seville.
In Fatimid North Africa during the tenth and eleventh centuries, Jews were important bankers, financiers, and advisors to the caliphate. During the reign of al-Mustansir, who succeeded to the caliphate in 1036 while still a small boy, the power behind the Fatimid throne was the Jewish financier and courtier, Abu Saed Ibrahim al-Tustari. Dhimmis, or nonbelievers, were precluded from holding the very highest Fatimid offices, such as the vizierate. Paralleling the case of Christian Spain, however, several nominally converted Jews became viziers {this shows that Jewish covertness was not CAUSED by the Inquisition}.
One such official, Yaqub b. Killis, converted to Islam specifically in order to advance his political career and, as vizier, helped to plan the Fatimid conquest of Egypt in 969. Subsequently, he reorganized the new province, revamping its fiscal system and currency, and prepared Egypt to become the seat of Fatimid government. Other converts who became Fatimid viziers included Hasan b. Ibrahim al-Tustari and Sadaqa b. Yusuf al-Fallahi. The Ayyubids (1171-1250), who succeeded the Fatimids. also employed large numbers of Jews and Jewish converts as administrators.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Jews came to play a major role in the fiscal affairs and administration of the Ottoman empire. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the Ottomans accepted thousands of refugees because they valued the financial, administrative, and manufacturing skills that the Jews brought with them. Sultan Bayazid II is reported to have remarked that King Ferdinand was foolish to have expelled such talented subjects. Jews were particularly useful to the Ottomans because they lacked ties to any of the subject populations of the multiethnic empire and, thus, could be entrusted with unpopular tasks such as tax collection.
Jews dominated the imperial revenue system, serving as tax collectors, tax farmers, tax intendants, and tax inspectors. Jews also created and operated the imperial customs service. Indeed, so complete was Jewish control over this segment of the Ottoman state that Ottoman customs receipts were typically written in Hebrew. Jews also accompanied provincial governors or "pashas," as financial ad-
{p. 16} visors and fiscal administrators. In the latter days of the empire, when provincial governorships became hereditary or quasi-independent, local Jewish financiers continued in this capacity. For example, the Farhi family of Damascus directed the financial affairs of Syria from the eighteenth century through the termination of Ottoman rule after World War I.
A number of Jews also became important advisors to the Ottoman court. The most famous was Joseph Nasi, who was the principle counselor to two sultans and was ennobled as the duke of Naxos. Nasi used his influence to secure the sultan's support for the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then under Ottoman rule. With the sultan's help, a Jewish settlement was created in Safed, in the upper Galilee, that became a center for rabbinic study. Unfortunately, not all of Nasi's advice was sound. It was his plan that helped to bring about the Turkish naval defeat in the battle of Lepanto in 1571, and, as a result, his influence at court declined.
Another major Ottoman state institution that relied upon Jewish administrators was the imperial army - the janissary corps. Jews dominated the position of ocak bazirgani, or chief quartermaster for the corps. This became the hereditary possession of a small group of Jewish families in Istanbul and Salonika. In addition, each provincial janissary garrison had its own quartermaster, virtually always a Jewish merchant.
Absolutist regimes were constructed throughout Europe from the sixteenth century. Some state-building monarchs, most notably those of France, England, and Tsarist Russia were able to make use of the church or to co-opt segments of the aristocracy for this endeavor. The church was a particularly important source of literate and experienced administrators. Cardinals Richelieu in France and Wolsey in England are notable examples.
Where, for one or another reason, monarchs were unable to make use of established institutions and elites in this way, they often found it useful to turn to Jews. For example, to finance his conquest of England, William of Orange turned to the Dutch Jewish financiers who, descended from Spanish exiles, had helped to make Holland a major commercial center and played an important role in the finances of the Dutch state. In 1688, William obtained a loan of two million gulden from the Lopez Suasso family. After he secured control of the English throne, William encouraged a number of Jewish financiers, most notably the Machado and Pereire families, to move to London where they financed William's effort to form a military coalition against Louis XIV.
{p. 17} In the less heavily urbanized and commercialized European periphery, the savings of Jewish merchants and traders represented one of the few sources of liquid capital. Jewish financiers could mobilize this capital and provide monarchs with loans to underwrite war making and state building. Thus, in Central Europe, so-called Court Jews served as administrators, financiers, and military provisioners. The Hapsburg emperors of Austria relied upon Jews for these purposes from the late sixteenth century and, in return, provided Jews with protection from riots and pogroms. For example, when a mob attacked Frankfurt's Jewish quarter in 1614, Emperor Matthias moved forcefully against the rioters and hanged their leaders.
After the Thirty Years War broke out in 1618, the Hapsburg emperor, Ferdinand II, turned to financier Joseph Bassevi of Prague to finance the war effort. Bassevi was allied with the most powerful figure at the imperial court, Prince Liechtenstein, and with General Wallenstein, commander of the imperial armies. In exchange for loans to finance the war, Emperor Ferdinand leased the imperial mint to Bassevi, Liechtenstein, and Wallenstein. The three men recouped their investment by debasing the coinage. Bassevi also established a network through which to supply the imperial arrnies with food, fodder, arms, and ammunition. During and after the Thirty Years War, virtually all the major states in Central Europe and Scandinavia found it necessary to make use of the resources and talents of Jews to compete with their rivals. The Hohenzollern rulers of Prussia relied initially upon Israel Aaron and then upon the Gomperz family. The Behrends served the court of Hanover and the Lehmans Saxony, while the Fuersts served Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenberg, and Holstein-Gottorp. The Danish royal family employed the Goldschmidts, while Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden relied upon Jewish contractors to provision his army.
Jews continued to serve absolutist states in these ways through the nineteenth century. The most prominent of these Jews, of course, was the Rothschild family whose name came to be synonymous with international finance. The founder of the dynasty, Mayer Amschel Rothschild of Frankfurt, was the chief financial agent for William IX, elector of Hesse-Cassel. During and after the Napoleonic wars, Mayer dispatched his sons to the major financial capitols of Europe - London, Paris, Vienna, and Naples. Nathan Rothschild, who headed the London branch of the family, saved William IX's fortune by investing it in England and served the British government by transferring millions of pounds in gold to the British army in Spain.
In the decades after the war, governments became increasingly
{p. 18} dependent upon foreign borrowing - an activity that the Rothschilds came to dominate. Between 1818 and 1832, Nathan Rothschild handled 39% of the loans floated in London by such governments as Austria, Russia and France. Similarly, the Vienna and Paris branches of the family raised money and sold bonds for the Hapsburgs, Bourbons, Orleanists, and Bonaparts. By mid-century, the entire European state system was dependent upon the international financial network dominated by the Rothschilds. In the 1860s and 1870s, another Jewish financier, Baron Gerson von Bleichroeder, was a principal figure in the creation of a united German state. Bleichroeder helped Bismarck obtain loans for the war against Austria after the chancellor failed to secure financing from the Prussian parliament. Subsequently, Bismarck entrusted Bleichroeder with negotiating the indemnity to be paid by France after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 (on the French side, negotiations were conducted by the Rothschilds). During Bismarck's tenure as chancellor of a united Germany, Bleichroeder continued to serve as his chief confidente and fiscal advisor.
Absolutist regimes provided a small number of Jews with the opportunity to exercise considerable power and acquire great wealth. Liberals in the nineteenth century, by contrast, advocated legal equality and national citizenship for all Jews, holding out the promise of economic opportunity for broad segments of the Jewish community. As a result, Jews supported liberal movements everywhere and benefited from their success. Where liberal forces were strongest - in France, Britain, and, of course, the United States - this Jewish support was not critical to liberalism's success. Jewish participation, however, was important in Southern and Central Europe where liberal movements faced their greatest obstacles.
Jews in substantial numbers supported Mazzini's "Young Italy" movement and took part in the uprisings of the 1830s. In addition, Mazzini received considerable financial aid from the Jewish banking firm of Todros in Turin. Subsequently, the Jewish banking houses of Rothschild, Bendi, and Tedesco financed Cavour's efforts to unify Italy. Jews were also important in Cavour's inner circle, serving as publicists for his cause and members of his cabinets. From early in his career, Cavour was a staunch advocate of Jewish emancipation.
Significant numbers of Jews participated in the liberal revolutions of 1848 in central Europe. In Germany, Jews fought at the barricades in Berlin and helped to lead the Prussian national assembly and
{p. 19} Frankfurt parliament. Such intellectuals as Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Borne were major publicists and propagandists for the liberal cause. In Austria, Jews participated in the Vienna uprising and helped to formulate a new liberal constitution. In Hungary, 20,000 Jews enlisted in the national army formed by Louis Kossuth. The constitutions of most of the liberal regimes established in 1848 provided for emancipation of the Jews. After these regimes were overthrown by conservative forces, however, many of the Jews' new privileges were rescinded. Central European Jews continued to support liberal movements even after the revolutions of 1848 were defeated. In the 1860s and 1870s Austrian and German rulers were compelled to make concessions to liberal forces, and Jewish disabilities were removed as they had been earlier in France and Britain when liberal regimes were consolidated in those countries.
If the distinctive contribution of Jews to the construction of absolutist states lay in the realm of finance and military provisioning, their characteristic role in the development of liberal regimes was in the domain of political mobilization and opinion formation. Liberal regimes removed religious disabilities and opened up opportunities for Jews in business and the professions. This cleared the way for a great expansion of the Jewish business class and fostered the emergence of an important urban Jewish stratum consisting of lawyers, journalists, writers, physicians, and other professionals. These businessmen and professionals became important figures in the popular politics of the liberal era as publishers, editors, writers, politicians, political organizers, and party financiers. In these capacities, Jews were staunch supporters of the liberal state and important allies for those leaders who sought to strengthen it.
In France, Jews supported the liberal revolution of 1848. Two prominent Jews, Adolphe Cremieux and Michel Goudchaux, served the Second Republic as ministers of justice and finance, respectively. The accession of Napoleon III brought an end to this short-lived regime, and Jews played little role in the Second Empire that followed. After the rout of French forces in the Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870, Jews were active in the founding of the Third Republic. The Rothschilds organized the payment of the German war indemnity, and a number of Jews participated in the early republican governments. Cremieux once again served as minister of justice; Eugene Manuel, Narcisse Leven, and Leonce Lehmann occupied important government posts; and several Jews served in the Chamber of Deputies. Throughout the history of the Third Republic, until its destruction at the hands of the Germans
{p. 20} in 1940, Jewish politicians, financiers, and publicists were active participants in the defense of the Republic against those institutions and forces in French society - the army, aristocracy, and clergy in particular - that sought its downfall.
A small number of Jewish financiers had become wealthy during the period of the Second Empire. On the whole, however, most French Jews lived in relative poverty in Alsace prior to the 1870s. With Germany's annexation of Alsace in 1870, thousands of Jews moved to Paris. Under the auspices of the Third Republic economic opportunities opened to Jews, and they used these to make significant places for themselves in banking, commerce, and the professions.
Between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War, Paris was a major international banking and financial center, and Jews were among the dominant figures in French finance. In the late nineteenth century, roughly one-third of all Paris bankers were Jews. Among the most prominent were the Rothschilds, the Camondos, the Leoninos, and such financiers as Bamberger, Reinach, Stern, Deutsch, Heine, Ephrussi, Goudchaux, Lippmann, Pereire, and Bischoffsheim.
These bankers were heavily involved with the development of railroads and industry within France and also loaned large amounts of money abroad, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. Their clients included the rulers of Egypt, Tunis, Turkey, and Morocco, Louis-Raphael Bischoffsheim, a prominent Jewish banker, was typical of this group. He financed a number of railways in the south of France as well as provided funding for both governments and private ventures in North Africa. He served as a director of the Banque des Pay-Bas, the Credit Foncier Colonial, the Franco-Egyptian Bank, and the Societe du Prince Imperial.
Similarly, the financiers Emile and Isaac Pereire founded the Credit Mobilier, one of the first investment banks in France. Isaac's son Eugene, also a banker, developed railroads in the Midi and in Spain. Isaac Pereire had interests in the Middle East as well, and at one point he served as France's honorary consul in Persia. Isaac Camondo, whose father immigrated from Turkey, was a major figure in French industrial development, serving as head of the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas as well as president of a number of railroad, natural gas, and cement companies.
Jews were very active in the political life of the Third Republic. Before the First World War, they were most closely identified with
{p. 21} Leon Gambetta's liberal "Opportunist" faction of the Radical Republican party. Prominent Jewish Gambettists included Cremieux, Leven, and Lehmann as well as Isaie Levaillant, Edouard Millaud, Joseph Reinach, and David Raynal. Cremieux was Gambetta's first political mentor; Reinach was the owner and editor of the Gambettist newspaper. Jews figured so prominently in the Gambettist faction that its opponents often charged that Gambetta himself must be a Jew. After Gambetta's death, Jews continued to be closely aligned with his most prominent political heir, Jules Ferry.
Early in his career, Gambetta had been something of an economic radical. By the late 1870s and 1880s, however, the Gambettists had come to be identified with a probusiness position similar to that of American Republicans during the same period. In addition, the Gambettists were the chief proponents of anticlerical legislation and, especially under Ferry's leadership, pursued a policy of French imperial expansion in Africa, the Near East, and Asia.
These positions were congenial to the interests of French Jews. The Gambettists' anticlerical legislation reduced the political power of the Catholic church, an institution that by definition excluded Jews. Jewish businessmen welcomed the Gambettists' program for promoting domestic economic development, which included a protective tariff, tax incentives, and support for railroad construction. Gambettist colonial policy served the interests of those who sought protection for the investments in North Africa and the Near East.
Through their political activities, Jews helped to strengthen the liberal state vis-a-vis its opponents. In particular, Jews threw their weight behind the anticlerical campaign, thus helping to undermine the power of a leading bastion of opposition to the Republic. In alliance with the army, the aristocracy, and the administrative corps, the Catholic church opposed the Republic and sought the restoration of a monarchy.
The church's control of the nation's educational system made it an especially important member of this alliance. Thus, from the perspective of republican forces, it was critically important to strip the church of its educational functions. Joseph Reinach, Alfred Naquet, and Georges Mandel, along with other Jewish politicians and journalists, played a leading role in the republican anticlerical campaign. Jews helped to formulate the educational program of the Ferry government which, in 1882, broke the church's educational monopoly by establishing a system of free primary schools where religious instruction was forbidden. This reform of the educational system, fol-
{p. 22} lowed in 1884 by the Ferry government's enactment of a law permitting divorce, was seen as a major blow against the political power of the Catholic church and, hence, the entire antirepublican coalition.
In Britain, Jews did not figure in the creation of the liberal state. However, Jewish politicians, publishers, and financiers helped to strengthen the liberal regime and expand its popular base between the Crimean War and the First World War. During the mid- and late nineteenth centuries, British Jews achieved considerable wealth, status, and political influence. The Rothschilds were one of the two most important banking families in Britain. Other important Jewish financiers included the Sassoons, the Cassels, the de Hirsch family, and the Semons. By the First World War, though Jews constituted only 1% of the total population of Britain, 23% of Britain's nonlanded millionaires were of Jewish origin.
Continued next post
Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1993):Peter Meyers said:Selections and comments by Peter Myers mailto:myers@cyberone.com.au; bold emphasis added, footnotes omitted. My comments are shown {thus}. Date May 3, 2001; update December 10, 2003.
{Jews in Communist regimes: p. 30, then p. 53}
{p. 1} Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual, and political life. Jews played a central role in American finance during the 1980s, and they were among the chief beneficiaries of that decade's corporate mergers and reorganizations. Today, though barely 2% of the nation's population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews. The chief executive officers of the three major television networks, and the four largest film studios are Jews, as are the owners of the nation's largest newspaper chain and most influential single newspaper, the New York Times. In the late 1960s, Jews already constituted 20% of the faculty of elite universities and 40% of the professors of elite law schools; today, these percentages doubtless are higher.
The role and influence of Jews in American politics is equally marked. Jews are elected to public office in disproportionate numbers. In 1993, ten members of the United States Senate and thirty-two members of the House of Representatives were Jewish, three to four times their percentage of the general population. Jews are even more prominent in political organizations and in finance. One recent study found that in twenty-seven of thirty-six campaigns for the United States Senate, one or both candidates relied upon a Jewish campaign chairman or finance director. In the realm of lobbying and litigation, Jews organized what was for many years one of Washington's most successful political action committees, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and they play leadership roles in such important public interest groups as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Common Cause. Several Jews also played very important roles in the 1992 Democratic presidential campaign. After the Democrats' victory, President Clinton appointed a number of Jews to prominent positions in his administration.
Their role in American economic, social, and political institutions has enabled Jews to wield considerable influence in the nation's public life. The most obvious indicator of this influence is the $3 billion in direct military and economic aid provided to Israel by the United States each year and, for that matter, the like amount given to Egypt since it agreed to maintain peaceful relations with Israel.
{p. 2} That fully three-fourths of America's foreign aid budget is devoted to Israel's security interests is a tribute in considerable measure to the lobbying prowess of AIPAC and the importance of the Jewish community in American politics {but what does it say about "Jewish Internationalism" - that trademark Jewish concern for the poor?}.
At least until recently, another mark of Jewish influence was the virtual disappearance of anti-Semitic rhetoric from mainstream public discourse in the United States. As a general rule, what can and cannot be said in public reflects the distribution of political power in society; as Jews gained political power, politicians who indulged in anti-Semitic tactics were labeled extremists and exiled to the margins of American politics. Similarly, religious symbols and forms of expression that Jews find threatening have been almost completely eliminated from schools and other public institutions. Suits brought by the ACLU, an organization whose leadership and membership are predominantly Jewish, secured federal court decisions banning officially sanctioned prayers in the public schools and creches and other religious displays in parks and public buildings.
American Jews secured their position of power quite recently. During the Second World War, the Jewish community lacked sufficient influence to induce the U.S. government to take any action that might have impeded the slaughter of European Jews. As recently as the early 1950s, public officials such as Representative John Rankin of Mississippi felt free to make anti-Semitic speeches on the floor of Congress. In 1956, during the Suez crisis, President Dwight D. Eisenhower could refuse even to meet with American Jewish leaders who sought to discuss U.S. policy in the Middle East. Into the early 1960s, elite universities including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton maintained quotas limiting Jewish enrollments.
Not only is the extraordinary prominence of Jews in American politics a relatively recent development but, during the past several years, there have been some indications that Jewish influence might already be waning. In 1992, for example, former President George Bush resisted and ultimately defeated efforts by AIPAC and other Jewish organizations to secure American loan guarantees to assist Israel in the construction of additional Jewish settlements in the territories it occupied after its 1967 war with the Arab states.
In a nationally televised press conference during the loan guarantee struggle, Bush seemed to question the legitimacy of American Jews' efforts on Israel's behalf. The president later denied that this had been his intention. The effect of the Bush press conference and subsequent comments, however, was to intimidate American Jewish organizations and weaken their support for the loan guarantees. The
{p. 3} Bush administration's larger goal was to undermine Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's Likud government, which was viewed as an obstacle to the realization of American policy aims in the Middle East. By cowing Israel's Jewish supporters in America, the White House hoped to weaken Shamir and replace him with a more compliant Israeli government. This American effort was successful. The Likud bloc was defeated in Israel's 1992 elections by a labor coalition led by Yitzhak Rabin. In the fall of 1992, having secured the election of an Israel government more to its liking, the White House gave its support to a new loan guarantee package as an inducement to the Israelis to toe the American line in the Middle East. Then, having nominally improved its relations with Israel, the Bush administration made a token effort to mend its fences with Jewish voters and contributors in America. The administration made it clear, however, that, having humbled the once-powerful Jewish lobby, it would not permit its Middle East policies to be shaped by the wishes of the Jews.
Another indication that the influence of American Jews may be waning is the resurgence of anti-Semitic - sometimes veiled as anti-Zionist - rhetoric in American political discourse. On the liberal left, opposition to Israel is commonplace. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, for example, some liberal activists charged that the Israeli occupation of Arab lands was a major underlying cause of the conflict. Indeed, the Persian Gulf War opened major cleavages between Jews and other elements within the American liberal community. Liberal groups ranging from the National Council of Churches through the Friends of the Earth argued against the use of force to dislodge Iraq from Kuwait, leaving liberal Jewish advocates of a military solution such as Ann Lewis, former political director of the Democratic National Committee, isolated from their usual allies. In its statement opposing American military action in the Persian Gulf, the National Council of Churches also endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state.
African Americans, for their part, usually do not bother to hide their attacks on Jews behind the smoke screen of opposition to Zionism. In recent years, some black leaders, including Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan, former U.S. Representative Gus Savage, and Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson have made anti-Semitic comments of the sort that had all but disappeared from American politics. At the same time, anti-Semitic black speakers have become the wandering minstrels of the college lecture circuit. Curiously, some of the very same student and faculty groups that vehe-
{p. 4} mently assert that the first Amendment does not protect speech deemed to be racist, homophobic, or sexist cheerfully dabble in anti-Semitic rhetoric.
To be sure, liberal forces are sufficiently dependent upon Jews for their power in American politics so that anti-Semitic rhetoric on the part of blacks and other liberals is not a direct threat to the Jews. The influence of Jews within the liberal camp may be reduced somewhat by an alliance of blacks and other left liberals. Barring some cataclysmic restructuring of political forces in the United States, however, Jews could not be jettisoned from the contemporary liberal coalition in the way that they were, say, from America's nineteenth-century industrialist coalition - a phenomenon we shall examine in Chapter 2.
Nevertheless, the use of anti-Semitic rhetoric on the part of nominal allies of the Jews - and the inability of the Jews to do much about it - is a signal to other forces that Jews are now fair game. This signal has not been missed by forces on the political right - forces that are not dependent upon Jews for their own political power. Among some groups of conservatives, anti-Semitism has become sufficiently noteworthy that an entire recent issue of the National Review was devoted to the topic. The prominent conservative commentator and recent presidential aspirant, Patrick Buchanan, barely bothers to deny his anti-Semitism, while a number of other conservatives are pleased to flaunt theirs.
In 1991, prior to the Persian Gulf War, Buchanan asserted that men named Rosenthal, Kissinger, Perle, and Krauthammer - a group he called Israel's "amen corner" in the United States - were beating the drums for a war in which "kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and LeRoy Brown" would be the ones to die. Later, as a candidate in Georgia's March 1992 Republican presidential primary, Buchanan attacked a group of Jewish hecklers by saying, "This is a rally of Americans, by Americans, and for the good old U.S.A., my friends." During the same rally, Buchanan responded to a question about his anti-Semitism and racism by referring to his First Amendment guarantee of free speech.
In addition, radical populists, who until recently had been viewed as part of the lunatic fringe, have become much more active over the past several years. The most notorious of these, of course, is David Duke, a neo-Nazi who captured 55% of the white vote in the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election. For radical populists like Duke, anti-Semitism is an important drawing card, even if they sometimes choose to keep it face down - but still in a prominent spot on the
{p. 5} table - when appealing for middle-class votes. Duke failed to win much support in the several 1991 primaries he entered, mainly because he was overshadowed by Buchanan. Nevertheless, the brute fact remains that a Nazi very nearly was elected governor of an American state in 1991.
Many surveys suggest that, except among blacks, popular anti-Semitism in the United States is still at a relatively low level. Contrary to the views of the pollsters, however, surveys are a barometer or reflection of what has taken place in political life, not a predictor of what is politically possible. If anti-Semitic appeals or rhetoric began to figure more prominently in political discourse among whites, as they already have among blacks, then in due course the polls would undoubtedly reflect this change by recording more popular anti-Semitism. Just as the public cannot be in favor of a political candidate they have not yet heard about, they cannot support a political ideology that has not yet forcefully been presented to them. Ideas, like candidates and products, need to be marketed before they can gain adherents. As Joseph Schumpeter once put it, public opinion is the "product rather than the motive power of the political process."
Could anti-Semitism be promoted successfully in contemporary America? Some social historians have maintained that American "exceptionalism," that is, the unusual strength of liberal values in the United States, precludes the emergence of major anti-Semitic movements in this country. The validity of this optimistic view, though, is open to question. Certainly, liberal democracy has been more firmly rooted in the United States than anywhere else in the world. It is extremely important to understand, however, that the strength of liberalism in America is not a function of some immutable ideological commitment on the part of Americans. Liberalism, rather, has prevailed in the United States as a result of the victories won by liberal forces in political struggles - sometimes pitched battles - against opponents whose values were decidedly illiberal. The triumph of liberal democracy was, by no means, preordained in, say, the 1860s or the 1930s. During both these periods liberal values prevailed because, and only because, the political - and military - forces controlled by the proponents of those values won after long and heroic conflicts whose outcomes remained in doubt for many years.
Understanding liberalism as a doctrine that has prevailed, rather than one that has never been challenged in the United States, helps to illuminate the place of Jews and anti-Semitism in American history. First, over the past century, Jews have generally supported lib-
{p. 6} eral values and been linked to liberal political forces in the United States. In turn, the opponents of those forces and values have upon occasion sought to make use of anti-Semitism to discredit them. Far from being excluded by liberalism, during several periods in American history, including the 1880s, 1930s, and 1950s, anti-Semitism played a significant role in attacks launched against liberal regimes in which Jews participated. Anti-Semitism was used, in part, to delegitimate liberal democracy by exposing it as a creature of, or cover for, the Jews. For example, many readers will, no doubt, recall that some right-wing opponents of the New Deal labeled it the "Jew Deal" as a prominent component of their effort to undermine the Roosevelt administration.
Second, during these periods - the 1930s and 1950s in particular - anti-Semitism was defeated by liberal forces rather than precluded by liberalism. Groups espousing anti-Semitic ideologies were vanquished by Jews and their allies in liberal coalitions after long and arduous political struggles whose favorable outcomes were in no sense guaranteed. During these struggles, Jews were important members of the liberal camp. Indeed, as we shall see, Jews helped to defend American liberalism from its foes as much as liberalism protected the Jews from anti-Semitism.
Finally, far from excluding anti-Semitism, American liberalism has, itself, not been entirely free of antagonism to Jews. At the end of the nineteenth-century, as we shall see, the liberal forces of the day, led by Northeastern industrialists, found it politically expedient to respond to their patrician and populist opponents' use of anti-Semitism by distancing themselves from the Jews. As a result, nominally liberal forces participated in a campaign to extrude Jews from American political and social life. Paradoxically, it was precisely the strength of liberal groups that allowed them to jettison their putative Jewish allies. The triumph of liberalism in the aftermath of the Civil War made Jews superfluous to the liberal coalition. A parallel to this experience, as we shall see, is to be found in the relationship between blacks and Jews today.
Thus, anti-Semitism has played a role in American history despite and, in some instances, because of the strength of American liberalism. It follows that there would seem to be no a priori reason to believe that American exceptionalism precludes the reemergence of anti-Semitism in the United States. In point of fact, there is certainly ample precedent in American history for an era of Jewish success to be followed by a period of decline - even anti-Semitism. During the Reconstruction era, Jews achieved a considerable measure of influ-
{p. 7} ence, but beginning in the 1880s they were systematically excluded from many key institutions in American society. Jews played important roles in Wilsonian Progressivism, but then were assailed through the post-World War I Red Scare and the immigrant restriction movement. The influence of Jews rose during the New Deal era, but institutions in which Jews were prominent, such as government bureaucracies, labor unions, and the entertainment industry, came under attack - at times manifestly anti-Semitic in character - during the McCarthy period.
In this way, the experience of Jews in America echoes the more general pattern of Jewish history. In a number of places and times, for example, fifteenth-century Spain, the Ottoman Empire, Weimar Germany, and post-revolutionary Russia, Jews achieved great power only to lose their influence and find themselves under assault.
Most theories of anti-Semitism seek to identify the roots of ethnic prejudice. Some theorists locate these in economic relations. Others emphasize the role of religious institutions. Still others look to cultural differences and misunderstandings. No doubt, all of these explanations have some validity. It is not clear, however, that there is any mystery here to be explained. Whatever its psychological, social, economic, or even evolutionary basis, suspicion of strangers is the norm in all societies, while it is acceptance of outsiders that is unusual and generally ephemeral. When times are good and foreigners play a recognized and useful role in the community, they may be tolerated. On the other hand, when times are hard and outsiders seem to compete with their hosts, any latent popular xenophobia is more likely to manifest itself, and foreigners may become useful targets for rabble-rousing politicians. Recent events throughout Western Europe are unambiguous examples of this phenomenon.
Certainly, everywhere that Jews have lived, their social or economic marginality - their position, "outside society," as Hannah Arendt put it - sooner or later exposed Jews to suspicion, hostility, and discrimination. Even in multiethnic societies, Jews have usually been the most successful and visible - and, hence, the most exposed - outsiders. In America, Jews currently appear to be accepted by the larger community. Nevertheless, at least in part by their own choosing, American Jews continue to maintain a significant and visible measure of communal identity and distinctiveness in religious, cultural, and political matters. At the same time, most gentiles continue to perceive Jews to be a peculiar and distinctive group. Though Jews have learned to look, talk, and dress like other Americans, they are not fully assimilated either in their own minds or in
{p. 8} the eyes of their neighbors. Even in America, the marginality of the Jews makes them at least potentially vulnerable to attack.
In America as elsewhere, moreover, Jews are outsiders who are often more successful than their hosts. Because of their historic and, in part, religiously grounded emphasis on education and literacy, when given an opportunity Jews have tended to prosper. And, to make matters worse, Jews often, secretly or not so secretly, conceive themselves to be morally and intellectually superior to their neighbors. Jews, to be sure, by no means have a monopoly on group or national snobbery. In contemporary America every group is encouraged to take pride in its special heritage and achievements. The problem is that Jews as a group are more successful than virtually all the others. Indeed, Jews are extremely successful outsiders who sometimes have the temerity to rub it in. As one outraged right-wing columist noted recently, a Yiddish synonym for dullard or dope is "goyischer kopf," that is, someone who thinks like a non-Jew.
The question with which this book is concerned, however, is not so much the roots of anti-Jewish sentiment as the conditions under which such sentiment is likely to be politically mobilized. As we shall see, where an anti-Semitic politics becomes important, usually more is involved than simple malice toward the Jews. In politics, principles - even as unprincipled a principle as anti-Semitism - are seldom completely divorced from some set of political interests. In the case of anti-Semitism, major organized campaigns against the Jews usually reflect not only ethnic hatred, they also represent efforts by the political opponents of regimes or movements with which Jews are allied to destroy or supplant them. Anti-Semitism has an instrumental as well as an emotive character. Thus, to understand the cycle of Jewish success and anti-Semitic attack - and to understand why the United States is not exceptional - it is necessary to consider the place of Jews in politics particularly, as Hannah Arendt noted long ago, their peculiar relationship to the state.
Jews and the State
For nearly two thousand years, Jews lived as scattered minorities while preserving a considerable measure of communal identity and cultural distinctiveness from the societies that surrounded them. Their distinctiveness was maintained by Jews' religious and communal institutions and was often reinforced by the hostility of their neighbors and the antipathy of Moslem and Christian religious institutions. Jewish religious practice required male participants to read
{p. 9} prayers and other texts, and hence Jewish men received a measure of education that made them considerably more literate and numerate than the people among whom they lived. Their geographic dispersion and literacy combined to help Jews become important traders in the medieval and early modern worlds. Jewish merchants linked by ties of religion, culture, and often family, played an important role in international commerce.
At the same time, however, their literacy, commercial acumen, and even their social marginality often made Jews useful to kings princes, and sultans. Into the eighteenth century, rulers regularly relied upon Jews as a source of literate administrators and advisors. European monarchs, moreover, depended upon Jewish financiers to manage their fiscal affairs and relied heavily upon Jewish merchants and bankers for loans. In addition, because Jews remained outsiders to the societies in which they lived, sovereigns found them useful instruments for carrying out unpopular tasks, notably collecting taxes.
For their part, Jews, who like Sikhs and other ethnic minorities offered the state's protection in exchange for services, have usually conceived it to be to their advantage to undertake these tasks. Indeed, Jews often saw this as their only viable alternative. Social marginality made Jews the objects of popular hostility at times shading into violence, and kings could offer a Jewish community protection in exchange for its services. At the same time, the crown could provide Jews with financial opportunities and allow thern to enter commercial fields that would otherwise have been closed to them. This exchange of protection and opportunity for service was the foundation for a centuries-long relationship between Jews and the state. Such alliances were responsible for the construction of some of the most powerful states of the Mediterranean and European worlds, including the Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman empires.
These patterns persisted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jews have maintained a sense of distinctiveness from surrounding societies and have, as a result, continued to experience a measure of suspicion, hostility, and discrimination. Concern about their neighbors' attitudes toward them has continued to lead Jews to seek the protection of the state {most recently through legislation against free speech}. At the same time, modern Jewish secular culture, like its religious antecedents, has emphasized education. This has enabled Jews to acquire professional and technical skills that can make them as valuable to presidents, prime ministers and commissars as they had been to monarchs.
Where Jews have been unable to obtain protection from existing
{p. 10} states, they have often played active roles in movements seeking to reform or supplant these regimes with new ones more favorably disposed toward them. Thus, in the nineteenth century, middle-class Jews were active in liberal movements that advocated the removal of religious disabilities. At the same time, working-class Jews were prominent in socialist and communist movements that sought the overthrow of existing regimes in the name of full social equality. In some cases, including Wilhelmian Germany and Hapsburg Austria-Hungary, regimes provided access to a small number of very wealthy Jews while subjecting the remainder to various forms of exclusion. In those cases, Jews could be found both at the pinnacles of power and among the leaders of the opposition.
Over the past several centuries, then, Jews have played a major role both in the strengthening of existing states and in efforts to supplant established regimes with new ones. Their relationship to the state has often made it possible for Jews to attain great wealth and power. At the same time, however, relationships between Jews and states have also been the chief catalysts for organized anti-Semitism.
Even when they are closely linked to the state, Jews usually continue to be a separate and distinctive group in society and, so, to arouse the suspicions of their neighbors. Indeed, in the service of the state, Jews have often become very visible and extremely powerful outsiders and thus awakened more suspicion and jealousy than ever before. As a result, the relationship between Jews and the state is always problematic. An identification with Jews can weaken the state by exposing it to attack as the servant of foreigners. Correlatively, Jews' identification with the state invites political forces that are seeking to take over or destroy the established order to make use of anti-Semitism as a political weapon.
In contemporary America, for example, radical populist fringe groups such as "The Order" and the "White Aryan Resistance" refer to the administration of the United States as the "ZOG," or "Zionist Occupation Government" - a corrupt tool of the Jews who are so prominent in the American political elite. Not so differently, Patrick Buchanan has referred to the United States Congress as "Israeli occupied territory," in this way defining a political institution controlled by his liberal Democratic foes as nothing more than a Jewish front.
It is in these struggles between regimes and their enemies that popular supicion of Jews is often mobilized by contending political forces and transformed into organized anti-Semitism. This is when
{p. 11} the embrace of the state, initially filled with so much promise, can prove to be fatal.
In the remainder of this chapter, we shall first examine the centuries-long history of the relationship between Jews and the state in Europe and the Middle East. Second, we will look at the ways in which this association can give rise to organized anti-Semitism. In subsequent chapters, we shall examine the relationship between Jews, the state, and anti-Semitism in American history.
Chapter 2 will treat the period between the Civil War and the great Red Scare that followed World War I. Chapter 3 will focus on the New Deal, the Kennedy and Johnson periods, and the era of the "New Politics" in the 1970s. At the turn of the century, Jews had been extruded from American political and social life. By the 1970s, however, Jews had attained enormous influence in the political process. Chapters 4 and 5 will examine two of the major threats to that influence. Chapter 4 will discuss the contemporary conflict between Jews and blacks, while Chapter 5 will analyze the rise and fall of the Jewish/Republican alliance of the 1980s. Chapter 6 will assess the prospects for a revival of anti-Semitism in contemporary America. As we shall see, the Jewish experience in America has not been exceptional, even though the embrace of the state has not been fatal - at least not yet.
Jews, States, and Anti-Semitism
Jews played key roles in constructing a number of the most important states to emerge in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds over the past 700 years. These have included an extraordinary variety of regimes running the gamut from absolutist through liberal to Socialist governments. For many of these states, Jews were crucial in building and staffing institutions of extraction, coercion, administration, and mobilization. As we shall subsequently see, these relationships between Jews and the state have been the chief catalysts for organized anti-Semitism.
As a foreign minority, wherever they lived Jews have faced disabilities and dangers. The protection of the state, therefore, has for centuries seemed to represent opportunity and safety. For example, in both Europe and the Middle East during the medieval era, Jews were eager to induce rulers to grant them privileges and provide them with protection from potentially hostile neighbors. Because Jews tended to stimulate commerce and were a useful source of tax revenues, rulers were often happy to oblige.
The bishopric of Speyer is a typical example. During the eleventh
{p. 12} century, the Jews of Speyer asked the ruling prince-bishop to grant them a charter of privileges and to build a defensive wall around their quarter. Because the Jews were economically valuable and he wished to induce more to settle in his city, the bishop agreed. Subsequently, the bishop protected the Jewish community from rioting crusaders, going so far as to hang the ring leaders of the mob that sought to attack the Jewish quarter.
Similarly, in twelfth-century Germany, in the wake of crusader pogroms, Jews sought and were granted royal protection under the "Land Peace" of the German king. Here, too, the activities of Jewish merchants were deemed economically useful. It is an interesting fact that the yellow badge Jews were required to wear in Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe during the 1930s and 1940s originated as a symbol of the official protection Jews enjoyed in Muslim lands during portions of the Middle Ages. The badge was a visible reminder to Moslems that it was not permissible to attack Jews.
Frequently, Jewish communal leaders sought an alliance with the state for still another reason. Not only did they offer protection and opportunity for the community, but the Gentile authorities could bolster the position of their Jewish colleagues by providing them with what they otherwise lacked: coercive powers through which to enforce their commands. In turn, the Gentile authorities welcomed a cooperative relationship with Jewish communal leaders because this facilitated the collection of taxes from the Jews. Thus, the Gentile government and Jewish communal authorities could serve one another's interests.
For example, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Poland, the verdicts of Jewish courts were enforced by the royal authorities, sometimes even in cases involving non-Jews. In exchange, the Jewish authorities ensured the proper collection of taxes from the Jewish community. For a similar reason, in medieval Spain, edicts of the Jewish authorities, even in matters pertaining strictly to religious practice such as the wearing of a hat on the Sabbath, were enforceable by the crown's officials. In the Byzantine empire, the state recognized Jewish courts of law and enforced their decisions. ln the Muslim Middle East, the alliance between the Gentile state and the Jewish leadership could sometimes be very strong, indeed, with the leaders of the Jewish community serving, simultaneously, as officials of the host state.
Partly as a consequence of this historic experience, Jews often continued to look to the state for protection even when it was the
{p. 13} state itself that was the source of their problems. Thus, in his famous work, Shevet Yehuda, written in the wake of the Jewish - and his personal - expulsion from Spain, Solomon ibn Verga sought to portray the rulers of Spain, including Ferdinand and Isabella who ordered the expulsion, as the allies of the Jews.
In a similar vein, as Arendt and others have observed, to the very end many German Jews could not believe that the German state would fail to protect them from the excesses of Nazi fanatics. The historical dependence of Jews upon the state also gave rise to a Jewish philosophical tradition, beginning in the seventeenth century with Spinoza and continuing through the maskilim of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which the state is glorified and venerated and seen, essentially, as a kind parent worthy of total obedience.
As we shall see, Jews have continued to look to the state for protection and opportunity through the modern era. And, for their part, rulers have continued to see advantages in allying themselves with Jews. A confluence of three circumstances is most likely to encourage rulers to cultivate alliances with Jews. These are the desire to strengthen the powers of the state, substantial opposition to this endeavor from established elites, and the absence of alternative sources of financial, intellectual, and administrative talent. The latter consideration has also led many liberal and socialist movements to draw upon the support of Jews.
Jews and the Absolutist State
Despite the severe disabilities to which religious minorities were typically subject, Jews played a remarkable role in the building of a number of absolutist regimes in both Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East. Rulers were most likely to turn to Jews when they sought to expand their domains at the expense of foreign princes or centralize their power over the opposition of domestic magnates. The Jews who served absolutist regimes secured riches and power for themselves and protection for their communities.
In Europe this pattern was especially notable in Christian Spain from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. Medieval Spain consisted of a number of independent kingdoms containing large numbers of Muslims as well as more than 300,000 Jews in a total population of about 5 million. Throughout Spain, Jews were active in the crafts, trade, scholarship, and in the learned professions, especially medicine. Jews were so prominent in the economies of the Spanish kingdoms that their tax payments were major factors in
{p. 14} royal treasuries, sometimes accounting for half of all royal revenues.
In sharp contrast to England and France where clerical orders played an important part in the royal administration, the Spanish church and clerical orders had been militarized during the centuries-long war against the Moors, and had come to be more closely linked with the territorial nobility than the crown. As a result, kings had little alternative but to draw heavily upon the talents of Jews as administrators. Spanish kings also depended upon Jews as tax collectors and financiers, particularly in Castile, the most powerful and populous of the Christian realms where, as John Crow has noted, royal power in essence was sustained by Jewish money, industry, and intelligence. Jews played a particularly important role in the efforts of Alfonso X (1252-1284), Pedro the Cruel (1350-1369), Juan II (1406- 1454), and Henry IV (1454-1474) to centralize royal authority at the expense of the nobility as well as in the efforts of these monarchs to expand the boundaries of the Castilian state.
To be sure, Jews were ineligible to serve in the very highest offices. The number of literate and educated Christians in medieval Spain, however, was small. Consequently, to secure administrators with the requisite talents, Spanish kings often found it necessary to appoint Jews who had nominally converted to Christianity - so-called conversos or New Christians - to high administrative positions. At the end of the fifteenth century, for instance, the occupants of the five highest administrative offices in Aragon were all conversos. Indeed, even the Spanish church was heavily dependent upon this source of administrative talent. A particularly notable example is the career of Salomon Halevi. Though he served as chief rabbi of Burgos, Halevi was converted to Christianity in 1390, adopting the name Pablo de Santa Maria. Soon thereafter, as Henry Kamen reports, Halevi took holy orders and became in turn bishop of Cartagena, bishop of Burgos, tutor to the son of Henry II, and papal legate. One of his sons, Gonzalo, became bishop successively of Astorga, Plasencia, and Siguenza. Another son, Alonso de Cartagena, succeeded him as bishop of Burgos. As we shall see, the extraordinary position that Jews occupied in the Spanish kingdoms was directly linked to their later expulsion.
Jews also played a major role in state finance and administration in the medieval Muslim world. As the Umayyeds expanded their control of the Iberian peninsula in the tenth and eleventh centuries, they depended heavily upon Jewish administrators and diplomats. Hasday b. Shaprut (905-975), for example, was a major figure in
{p. 15} the courts of the caliphs Abd al-Rahman III and al-Hakam II. In the eleventh century, Jews attained the highest levels of political power in Muslim Spain, including the viziership of Grenada, a position held by Samuel b. Naghrela (Samuel ha-Nagid), a Jewish soldier and politician, from 1026-1056. Other powerful Jewish administrators included Yequtiel b. Hasan (d. 1039) in Saragossa and Abraham b. Muhajir (d. ca. 1100) in Seville.
In Fatimid North Africa during the tenth and eleventh centuries, Jews were important bankers, financiers, and advisors to the caliphate. During the reign of al-Mustansir, who succeeded to the caliphate in 1036 while still a small boy, the power behind the Fatimid throne was the Jewish financier and courtier, Abu Saed Ibrahim al-Tustari. Dhimmis, or nonbelievers, were precluded from holding the very highest Fatimid offices, such as the vizierate. Paralleling the case of Christian Spain, however, several nominally converted Jews became viziers {this shows that Jewish covertness was not CAUSED by the Inquisition}.
One such official, Yaqub b. Killis, converted to Islam specifically in order to advance his political career and, as vizier, helped to plan the Fatimid conquest of Egypt in 969. Subsequently, he reorganized the new province, revamping its fiscal system and currency, and prepared Egypt to become the seat of Fatimid government. Other converts who became Fatimid viziers included Hasan b. Ibrahim al-Tustari and Sadaqa b. Yusuf al-Fallahi. The Ayyubids (1171-1250), who succeeded the Fatimids. also employed large numbers of Jews and Jewish converts as administrators.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Jews came to play a major role in the fiscal affairs and administration of the Ottoman empire. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the Ottomans accepted thousands of refugees because they valued the financial, administrative, and manufacturing skills that the Jews brought with them. Sultan Bayazid II is reported to have remarked that King Ferdinand was foolish to have expelled such talented subjects. Jews were particularly useful to the Ottomans because they lacked ties to any of the subject populations of the multiethnic empire and, thus, could be entrusted with unpopular tasks such as tax collection.
Jews dominated the imperial revenue system, serving as tax collectors, tax farmers, tax intendants, and tax inspectors. Jews also created and operated the imperial customs service. Indeed, so complete was Jewish control over this segment of the Ottoman state that Ottoman customs receipts were typically written in Hebrew. Jews also accompanied provincial governors or "pashas," as financial ad-
{p. 16} visors and fiscal administrators. In the latter days of the empire, when provincial governorships became hereditary or quasi-independent, local Jewish financiers continued in this capacity. For example, the Farhi family of Damascus directed the financial affairs of Syria from the eighteenth century through the termination of Ottoman rule after World War I.
A number of Jews also became important advisors to the Ottoman court. The most famous was Joseph Nasi, who was the principle counselor to two sultans and was ennobled as the duke of Naxos. Nasi used his influence to secure the sultan's support for the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then under Ottoman rule. With the sultan's help, a Jewish settlement was created in Safed, in the upper Galilee, that became a center for rabbinic study. Unfortunately, not all of Nasi's advice was sound. It was his plan that helped to bring about the Turkish naval defeat in the battle of Lepanto in 1571, and, as a result, his influence at court declined.
Another major Ottoman state institution that relied upon Jewish administrators was the imperial army - the janissary corps. Jews dominated the position of ocak bazirgani, or chief quartermaster for the corps. This became the hereditary possession of a small group of Jewish families in Istanbul and Salonika. In addition, each provincial janissary garrison had its own quartermaster, virtually always a Jewish merchant.
Absolutist regimes were constructed throughout Europe from the sixteenth century. Some state-building monarchs, most notably those of France, England, and Tsarist Russia were able to make use of the church or to co-opt segments of the aristocracy for this endeavor. The church was a particularly important source of literate and experienced administrators. Cardinals Richelieu in France and Wolsey in England are notable examples.
Where, for one or another reason, monarchs were unable to make use of established institutions and elites in this way, they often found it useful to turn to Jews. For example, to finance his conquest of England, William of Orange turned to the Dutch Jewish financiers who, descended from Spanish exiles, had helped to make Holland a major commercial center and played an important role in the finances of the Dutch state. In 1688, William obtained a loan of two million gulden from the Lopez Suasso family. After he secured control of the English throne, William encouraged a number of Jewish financiers, most notably the Machado and Pereire families, to move to London where they financed William's effort to form a military coalition against Louis XIV.
{p. 17} In the less heavily urbanized and commercialized European periphery, the savings of Jewish merchants and traders represented one of the few sources of liquid capital. Jewish financiers could mobilize this capital and provide monarchs with loans to underwrite war making and state building. Thus, in Central Europe, so-called Court Jews served as administrators, financiers, and military provisioners. The Hapsburg emperors of Austria relied upon Jews for these purposes from the late sixteenth century and, in return, provided Jews with protection from riots and pogroms. For example, when a mob attacked Frankfurt's Jewish quarter in 1614, Emperor Matthias moved forcefully against the rioters and hanged their leaders.
After the Thirty Years War broke out in 1618, the Hapsburg emperor, Ferdinand II, turned to financier Joseph Bassevi of Prague to finance the war effort. Bassevi was allied with the most powerful figure at the imperial court, Prince Liechtenstein, and with General Wallenstein, commander of the imperial armies. In exchange for loans to finance the war, Emperor Ferdinand leased the imperial mint to Bassevi, Liechtenstein, and Wallenstein. The three men recouped their investment by debasing the coinage. Bassevi also established a network through which to supply the imperial arrnies with food, fodder, arms, and ammunition. During and after the Thirty Years War, virtually all the major states in Central Europe and Scandinavia found it necessary to make use of the resources and talents of Jews to compete with their rivals. The Hohenzollern rulers of Prussia relied initially upon Israel Aaron and then upon the Gomperz family. The Behrends served the court of Hanover and the Lehmans Saxony, while the Fuersts served Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenberg, and Holstein-Gottorp. The Danish royal family employed the Goldschmidts, while Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden relied upon Jewish contractors to provision his army.
Jews continued to serve absolutist states in these ways through the nineteenth century. The most prominent of these Jews, of course, was the Rothschild family whose name came to be synonymous with international finance. The founder of the dynasty, Mayer Amschel Rothschild of Frankfurt, was the chief financial agent for William IX, elector of Hesse-Cassel. During and after the Napoleonic wars, Mayer dispatched his sons to the major financial capitols of Europe - London, Paris, Vienna, and Naples. Nathan Rothschild, who headed the London branch of the family, saved William IX's fortune by investing it in England and served the British government by transferring millions of pounds in gold to the British army in Spain.
In the decades after the war, governments became increasingly
{p. 18} dependent upon foreign borrowing - an activity that the Rothschilds came to dominate. Between 1818 and 1832, Nathan Rothschild handled 39% of the loans floated in London by such governments as Austria, Russia and France. Similarly, the Vienna and Paris branches of the family raised money and sold bonds for the Hapsburgs, Bourbons, Orleanists, and Bonaparts. By mid-century, the entire European state system was dependent upon the international financial network dominated by the Rothschilds. In the 1860s and 1870s, another Jewish financier, Baron Gerson von Bleichroeder, was a principal figure in the creation of a united German state. Bleichroeder helped Bismarck obtain loans for the war against Austria after the chancellor failed to secure financing from the Prussian parliament. Subsequently, Bismarck entrusted Bleichroeder with negotiating the indemnity to be paid by France after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 (on the French side, negotiations were conducted by the Rothschilds). During Bismarck's tenure as chancellor of a united Germany, Bleichroeder continued to serve as his chief confidente and fiscal advisor.
Absolutist regimes provided a small number of Jews with the opportunity to exercise considerable power and acquire great wealth. Liberals in the nineteenth century, by contrast, advocated legal equality and national citizenship for all Jews, holding out the promise of economic opportunity for broad segments of the Jewish community. As a result, Jews supported liberal movements everywhere and benefited from their success. Where liberal forces were strongest - in France, Britain, and, of course, the United States - this Jewish support was not critical to liberalism's success. Jewish participation, however, was important in Southern and Central Europe where liberal movements faced their greatest obstacles.
Jews in substantial numbers supported Mazzini's "Young Italy" movement and took part in the uprisings of the 1830s. In addition, Mazzini received considerable financial aid from the Jewish banking firm of Todros in Turin. Subsequently, the Jewish banking houses of Rothschild, Bendi, and Tedesco financed Cavour's efforts to unify Italy. Jews were also important in Cavour's inner circle, serving as publicists for his cause and members of his cabinets. From early in his career, Cavour was a staunch advocate of Jewish emancipation.
Significant numbers of Jews participated in the liberal revolutions of 1848 in central Europe. In Germany, Jews fought at the barricades in Berlin and helped to lead the Prussian national assembly and
{p. 19} Frankfurt parliament. Such intellectuals as Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Borne were major publicists and propagandists for the liberal cause. In Austria, Jews participated in the Vienna uprising and helped to formulate a new liberal constitution. In Hungary, 20,000 Jews enlisted in the national army formed by Louis Kossuth. The constitutions of most of the liberal regimes established in 1848 provided for emancipation of the Jews. After these regimes were overthrown by conservative forces, however, many of the Jews' new privileges were rescinded. Central European Jews continued to support liberal movements even after the revolutions of 1848 were defeated. In the 1860s and 1870s Austrian and German rulers were compelled to make concessions to liberal forces, and Jewish disabilities were removed as they had been earlier in France and Britain when liberal regimes were consolidated in those countries.
If the distinctive contribution of Jews to the construction of absolutist states lay in the realm of finance and military provisioning, their characteristic role in the development of liberal regimes was in the domain of political mobilization and opinion formation. Liberal regimes removed religious disabilities and opened up opportunities for Jews in business and the professions. This cleared the way for a great expansion of the Jewish business class and fostered the emergence of an important urban Jewish stratum consisting of lawyers, journalists, writers, physicians, and other professionals. These businessmen and professionals became important figures in the popular politics of the liberal era as publishers, editors, writers, politicians, political organizers, and party financiers. In these capacities, Jews were staunch supporters of the liberal state and important allies for those leaders who sought to strengthen it.
In France, Jews supported the liberal revolution of 1848. Two prominent Jews, Adolphe Cremieux and Michel Goudchaux, served the Second Republic as ministers of justice and finance, respectively. The accession of Napoleon III brought an end to this short-lived regime, and Jews played little role in the Second Empire that followed. After the rout of French forces in the Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870, Jews were active in the founding of the Third Republic. The Rothschilds organized the payment of the German war indemnity, and a number of Jews participated in the early republican governments. Cremieux once again served as minister of justice; Eugene Manuel, Narcisse Leven, and Leonce Lehmann occupied important government posts; and several Jews served in the Chamber of Deputies. Throughout the history of the Third Republic, until its destruction at the hands of the Germans
{p. 20} in 1940, Jewish politicians, financiers, and publicists were active participants in the defense of the Republic against those institutions and forces in French society - the army, aristocracy, and clergy in particular - that sought its downfall.
A small number of Jewish financiers had become wealthy during the period of the Second Empire. On the whole, however, most French Jews lived in relative poverty in Alsace prior to the 1870s. With Germany's annexation of Alsace in 1870, thousands of Jews moved to Paris. Under the auspices of the Third Republic economic opportunities opened to Jews, and they used these to make significant places for themselves in banking, commerce, and the professions.
Between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War, Paris was a major international banking and financial center, and Jews were among the dominant figures in French finance. In the late nineteenth century, roughly one-third of all Paris bankers were Jews. Among the most prominent were the Rothschilds, the Camondos, the Leoninos, and such financiers as Bamberger, Reinach, Stern, Deutsch, Heine, Ephrussi, Goudchaux, Lippmann, Pereire, and Bischoffsheim.
These bankers were heavily involved with the development of railroads and industry within France and also loaned large amounts of money abroad, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. Their clients included the rulers of Egypt, Tunis, Turkey, and Morocco, Louis-Raphael Bischoffsheim, a prominent Jewish banker, was typical of this group. He financed a number of railways in the south of France as well as provided funding for both governments and private ventures in North Africa. He served as a director of the Banque des Pay-Bas, the Credit Foncier Colonial, the Franco-Egyptian Bank, and the Societe du Prince Imperial.
Similarly, the financiers Emile and Isaac Pereire founded the Credit Mobilier, one of the first investment banks in France. Isaac's son Eugene, also a banker, developed railroads in the Midi and in Spain. Isaac Pereire had interests in the Middle East as well, and at one point he served as France's honorary consul in Persia. Isaac Camondo, whose father immigrated from Turkey, was a major figure in French industrial development, serving as head of the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas as well as president of a number of railroad, natural gas, and cement companies.
Jews were very active in the political life of the Third Republic. Before the First World War, they were most closely identified with
{p. 21} Leon Gambetta's liberal "Opportunist" faction of the Radical Republican party. Prominent Jewish Gambettists included Cremieux, Leven, and Lehmann as well as Isaie Levaillant, Edouard Millaud, Joseph Reinach, and David Raynal. Cremieux was Gambetta's first political mentor; Reinach was the owner and editor of the Gambettist newspaper. Jews figured so prominently in the Gambettist faction that its opponents often charged that Gambetta himself must be a Jew. After Gambetta's death, Jews continued to be closely aligned with his most prominent political heir, Jules Ferry.
Early in his career, Gambetta had been something of an economic radical. By the late 1870s and 1880s, however, the Gambettists had come to be identified with a probusiness position similar to that of American Republicans during the same period. In addition, the Gambettists were the chief proponents of anticlerical legislation and, especially under Ferry's leadership, pursued a policy of French imperial expansion in Africa, the Near East, and Asia.
These positions were congenial to the interests of French Jews. The Gambettists' anticlerical legislation reduced the political power of the Catholic church, an institution that by definition excluded Jews. Jewish businessmen welcomed the Gambettists' program for promoting domestic economic development, which included a protective tariff, tax incentives, and support for railroad construction. Gambettist colonial policy served the interests of those who sought protection for the investments in North Africa and the Near East.
Through their political activities, Jews helped to strengthen the liberal state vis-a-vis its opponents. In particular, Jews threw their weight behind the anticlerical campaign, thus helping to undermine the power of a leading bastion of opposition to the Republic. In alliance with the army, the aristocracy, and the administrative corps, the Catholic church opposed the Republic and sought the restoration of a monarchy.
The church's control of the nation's educational system made it an especially important member of this alliance. Thus, from the perspective of republican forces, it was critically important to strip the church of its educational functions. Joseph Reinach, Alfred Naquet, and Georges Mandel, along with other Jewish politicians and journalists, played a leading role in the republican anticlerical campaign. Jews helped to formulate the educational program of the Ferry government which, in 1882, broke the church's educational monopoly by establishing a system of free primary schools where religious instruction was forbidden. This reform of the educational system, fol-
{p. 22} lowed in 1884 by the Ferry government's enactment of a law permitting divorce, was seen as a major blow against the political power of the Catholic church and, hence, the entire antirepublican coalition.
In Britain, Jews did not figure in the creation of the liberal state. However, Jewish politicians, publishers, and financiers helped to strengthen the liberal regime and expand its popular base between the Crimean War and the First World War. During the mid- and late nineteenth centuries, British Jews achieved considerable wealth, status, and political influence. The Rothschilds were one of the two most important banking families in Britain. Other important Jewish financiers included the Sassoons, the Cassels, the de Hirsch family, and the Semons. By the First World War, though Jews constituted only 1% of the total population of Britain, 23% of Britain's nonlanded millionaires were of Jewish origin.
Continued next post