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Soros, Jewish Bankers and Interest Explained
by Doniphan Blair
Currency trader, philanthropist and open society activist, as well as Holocaust survivor, George Soros at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, 2018. photo: courtesy Bitcoinist WITH THE FIRST REAL POGROM IN
American history—the Pennsylvania slaughter of eleven Jews in a synagogue, on the Sabbath no less (Oct 27, 2018)—and President Trump growing ever more inflammatory, dropping dog whistles like piss marks, many Jews, liberals and people of good will, including many friends of mine, particularly female, are feeling rather freaked out.
Some are depressed; others are wringing their hands; a few have asked me, “What are we going to do?”
Antisemitism did not abate with the Holocaust, many of us were shocked to learn, late in life. That is because antisemitism faded during the four decades following World War II, while many of us were growing up, leaving us without an early, frightening cautionary experience. Alas, antisemitism is on a tear today, as we can see, from homicidal hometown shut-ins and white nationalists to European and Middle Eastern intellectuals, from 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists to otherwise laudable leftists, who nevertheless retain an oddly oversized obsession with Israel.
After studying the matter for 35 years, discussing it with Jews, gentiles, Holocaust survivors (including my mother) and a few neo-Nazis, as well as helping to make the movie “Our Holocaust Vacation” (2007), I was lucky enough to stumble on four seemingly game-changing discoveries.
“Seemingly,” I say because when I announced them two years ago in cineSOURCE, “Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed” (2016), there was hardly uproarious acclaim.
My most earthshaking finding? A few Jews lent money at interest—sometimes high interest, sometimes what is called usury, although the exact percentage where interest becomes usury is rarely specified—during the Middle Ages.
Brilliant deduction Einstein, you might say, given the popular middle American saying “Don’t Jew me,” Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice” (1598), and everyone’s favorite Elder of Zion, financier and civil society advocate George Soros. But, when I was growing up in New York, across the street from the world’s largest rabbinical school, attending majority-Jewish schools, literally surrounded by Jews, no one once breathed the words “medieval Jewish moneylending.”
“That’s because it didn’t exist,” would probably be the response of Julie L. Mell, an associate history professor, who teaches medieval and Jewish history at North Carolina State University. Although the pressing need to publish this essay precluded my perusal of Professor Mell’s book, her title is telling: “The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender” (2017).
With all due respect to those who claim medieval Jewish moneylending was invented outright by zoological antisemites or exaggerated to an extreme, it is not hard to see or research that:
A) civilizations need capital to operate; B) “The Bible” outlaws lending at interest; C) both the Christians and Muslims adopted that Jewish law; D) the Catholic Church was the bank during the Dark Ages (how else did they build all those fancy churches?); E) when Christ didn’t return to kick off the second millennia, Church fathers concluded it was due to sin, the biggest one being that they themselves lent money at interest; F) to keep civilization crawling out of the Dark Ages, they needed a tax loophole with God; G) the Jews, who were living next door to the Vatican, as well as across Europe, could read, write and do a little math—some even had far-flung relatives with whom they were trading; which brings us to H):
“Hey, I have a great idea to solve this goddamn interest problem,” a bishop must have shouted in Latin, in the middle of the eleventh century, “We can lend money at interest to the Jews, who are going to hell anyway, and they can lend to the Christians, allowing us to make our 'vic' and keep God happy, while providing the peasants a way to survive the winter.”
Although I have not read Professor Mell, I recently reread “The Jew in the Medieval Community”, written by Reverend James Parkes in the 1940s, after he fled for his life from Germany and was living under that country's bombardment of England. A medieval and Judiaica scholar, Parkes realized that the time had come to finally review all available ancient texts, letters and laws concerning medieval Jewish moneylending.
The cover of Reverend James Parkes's 'The Jew in the Medieval Community' showing Christians and Jews arguing, books in hand. photo: courtesy J. Parkes“It was unfortunate that [medieval society] did not recognize that [Jewish] men followed moneylending as a profession,” Parkes concludes on page 282, “because society needed to be able to borrow money, and that many of their loans were made for the profit of the borrower.”
“Medieval Jewish moneylending” are three words that strike terror in the hearts of BOTH Jewish educators, scholars and clerics, who are stumped as to how to summarize such a complex, ancient issue, AND haters, antisemites and neo-Nazis, who need an all-controlling puppet master and father figure on whom to blame their grandfather’s, their father's and their own mistakes.
The mere fact of medieval Jewish moneylending, regardless of the details, allows people to fantasize that Jews built a secret compartment inside European banking, which lets them control interest rates, a notion supposedly certified by the notorious forgery—or revealing historical document, according to conspiracists—“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (1903, Russian secret police).
Interests rates are even more criminal than killing the revolutionary Jesus Christ, which “The Bible” tells us the Romans did and even simple-minded Christians realize they must forgive. Obviously, you can’t be both a pacifist follower of Christ and a rabid wolf baying to crucify the Jews, while Christ can’t die for your sins and not be crucified (by the Romans, of course, although a Jewish mob may have cheered them on).
Indeed, the banking libel is bigger than the medieval blood libel, which accused Jews of harvesting Christian children to make their Passover matzo, and continued to emerge periodically until the 20th century, especially in Eastern Europe.
While the blood libel was cannibalistic and absurd—shouldn't blood make white matzo red?—the banking libel seemed to make sense and appealed to broad swaths of the world's population. Published as fact by the Nazis and antisemites like Henry Ford, "The Protocols" gathered believers across the 20th century and had a resurgence in the 21st, post-9/11. Indeed, “The Protocols” are available today at many ethnic or nationalist book outlets, as well as online versions, while Arabic editions can consume up to few percent of any given year's book runs in Egypt, which is the center of Arab publishing.
What can Jews do? They are the most readily-available “other” on which small-minders can blame big problems. Indeed, they are the perfect scapegoat, as Freud conceded in “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1929).
This is simply because the Jews are Western Civilization’s oldest, well-documented group—precursing the Greeks and about whom a blockbuster bestseller was written—who are still intimately involved in its evolution. Given the fact that: A) Jewish people were present at every major point in Western Civilization (Egypt, Greece, Christ, Rome, the Middle Ages, both of Spain’s Golden Ages, Magna Carta England and Germany’s 19th century unification and expansion), and that B) many people believe Western Civilization went off its rails and injured their grandfathers, you get C) the Jews must have conspired to screw their tribe somehow.
And so we have the vicious circle: Even though the Jews appear to have been severely punished for their supposed sins, from medieval pogroms through the Holocaust to today’s military and moral attacks on Israel, they’re still doing well. How can that be? They must control interest rates! Moreover, they’re more dangerous than people of color (although some are also that) because many can pass as white (hence the neo-Nazi chant: "You shall not replace us").
When I finally figured out medieval Jewish moneylending, around age thirty, after years of reading references to it while doing research at the Holocaust Library of Northern California, in San Francisco, I broached the subject with my mother.
“Don’t be an idiot antisemite,” she barked right back. “I grew up in one room, without water or electricity. There were no moneylenders in my city, as far as I could see.”
Admittedly, my mother's city was conquered by the Nazis when she was fourteen, precluding her ability to examine it closely, and she is not a professor of Jewish history or a rabbi. Nor were they honest or forthcoming. Indeed, if you peruse the indexes of books on Jewish history, of which there are hundreds, only a handful have more then a few entries under “moneylending,” and even fewer attempt to explain what happened, let alone adequately.
“The Bible”, also a book on Jewish history, as well as myth, philosophy, law and romance, does much better than most with eighteen moneylending mentions, all of which forbid the practice to fellow tribal members. It also enjoins Jews to forgive non-tribal members all loans, indentured servitude or promissory notes every seven years, during the so-called Jubilee Year, as well as to enact other redemptive measures, like leaving some harvest in the field to be gleaned by the poor.
Lending at interest TO FOREIGNERS, on the other hand, is not only perfectly legal but absolutely mandatory, both to Biblical authors as well as almost all other civilizational figures.
In point of fact, no merchant in their right mind, two thousand years ago or today, in the Middle East, Mongolia or Mexico, would hand over one hundred sheep to someone without them promising, when they came back the following year, to return the herd plus some of the new-born lambs. That would be the benefit of the transaction, some of which must cover the cost of the lender not having the benefit of a hundred sheep for one year, lest we disincentivize lending.
“Poppycock,” might be the retort of anthropologist and best-selling author David Graeber, albeit not using that word, since his 2011 “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” is very readable and well, if selectively, researched. Although “Debt” is a comprehensive, 500-page accounting of the myriad methods oppressors enslave people using debt and interest—and they are disgusting—it allocates only two pages to Jewish moneylending. That is hardly enough to explain the complexity, no matter how great the author, while still tarring the Jews as debt slavers.
Aside from Graeber and Marx, who studied lending at interest and didn't like it, almost none of our most influential philosophers, as far as I can see, have looked into it, despite the obvious fact that lending at interest is more critical to Western Civilization than geometry or electricity. Lending at interest is so central, in fact, it is the bright line dividing civilization, our supra-social structure, from our older, still very powerful human grouping, tribe.
I stumbled on this closely-held secret some thirty years ago, but it is so complicated I made no mention of it in my recent treatise, “Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto”.
Lending at interest was so difficult and divisive during Europe's transition from tribe to civilization, almost two-thirds of medieval rabbinical writing on record was concerned with it. Indeed, the two fiscal systems are diametrically opposed and almost impossible to reconcile.
While tribes do not lend at interest internally, because they enforce financial responsibilities through family ties, civilizations exist largely due to lending at interest. Yes the Muslims, who also adopted the Hebrew prohibition against lending with interest, developed a workaround—they treated loans as investments, with income dependent on outcome—that is too complex for many deals. Hence, Islam also depended on loans at interest, from forced Jewish moneylenders or others. Without interest, there would be no incentive for anyone to help a non-tribal member or to reinvest the surplus of one tribe into another tribe, the very definition of civilization.
Let me repeat: Without interest, there would be no incentive for anyone to help a non-tribal member or to reinvest the surplus of one tribe into another tribe, the very definition of civilization.
Yes, the resources needed to build civilization—the buildings, armies and infrastructure, the castles and crowns—can simply be stolen by force. But the fact of the matter is: it is easier and more efficient for kings and tyrants to borrow at interest, since people will offer their capital willingly, on the assumption of recompense at a profit. Meanwhile borrowing at interest makes it much easier for average folk to recover from a natural or enemy-inflicted catastrophe, or to develop a business or invention.
Indeed, with the maturation of rule of law in Holland and England around the 16th century, which vastly increased the likelihood debts would be repaid, via the courts or debtor prisons, lending at interest created capitalism and—in tandem with the scientific revolution and The Enlightenment—modern civilization.
Back in the Middle Ages, however, the only professions open to most Jews were rag-picker and moneylender. Indeed, the rag-pickers and the moneylenders were often the only Jews allowed to leave the ghettos, closed after the 11th century’s First Crusade (which started with a slaughter of Rhine Valley Jews). One wore actual rags, the other the finest couture and rode in a gilded carriage, going to dine with the prince, although both were fully under his jurisdiction.
By the way, Christendom’s popes, kings, bishops, princes and even saints frequently claimed their oppression of the Jews—using ghettos, the obligation to wear funny caps or Stars of David or practice usury, or outright violence against them—was part of their Christian love for the Jews. They were trying to push the Jews to the "true religion" so they could enjoy eternal life.
And so Jewish leaders were compelled to accept the churches’ and princes’ wealth and lend it back to the Christians at a healthy interest, gifting the church and princes a four-fer: avoiding sin, making money, building civilization AND destroying the Jews’ reputation.
In this way, the Jews simultaneously became both economically central and deeply hated in most European principalities and many Muslim ones. Indeed, Jews lived inside the castle (where the women were often royal mistresses, making many European noble families part Jewish, if only genetically); Jews were fiduciary serfs, owned by the prince; which means they could be literally sold, lent at interest or harvested, although slaughtering them drove them to bury their wealth and forced the princes to turn to blackmail, ransom and torture.
With Western Civilization’s dependence on Jewish banking besmirched by such grotesque practices, it’s no wonder peasants, farmers and workers became antisemitic. Imagine you’re an illiterate farmer in 17th century Ukraine, where the princes used “tax farming,” a practice originating in the ancient Middle East.
Not as bucolic as it might sound, tax farming is where the richest local Jew is compelled, under pain of death, to pay the prince their region’s entire tax bill, up front. When the practice was standardized, they came to bid on it as a worthwhile investment, given they were then entitled to extract the sum from the population, the so-called farming, at whatever profit the market could bear.
Watching a wealthy Jew crisscrossing the countryside collecting taxes, with the help of the prince’s pretorian guard, just might turn a peasant from a giving Christian into a rabid antisemite, especially as the prince claims he himself is being squeezed by the Jews. The princes often gambled away their liquid assets and became beholden to their Jewish moneylenders, although the more frequent factor was the need for financiers and procurers to assemble the immense resources needed to fight their wars. Meanwhile, the priests are railing from the pulpit that Jews as Christ killers, demons and interest manipulators.
A related situation still stands today. On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, Trump’s final ad “has been criticized for having antisemitic overtones and implying a vast international Jewish conspiracy behind Hillary Clinton… Philanthropist investor George Soros, Federal Reserve head Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, all of whom are Jewish, appear onscreen as Trump inveighs against ‘levers of power in Washington’ and ‘global special interests’—both considered antisemitic dog-whistles,” (The Times of Israel, 11/6/16).
Soros, as you may recall, made his first billion “shorting” the Bank of England in 1992, when Prime Minister John Major was artificially propping up the pound sterling.
Shorting, which was invented in 16th century by Isaac La Maire, a Dutch Jew, may seem like the most insane fiduciary instrument since tax farming, but it caught on because it is perfectly logical, legal and functional.
Shorting is when an entity loans shares to an investor, who either pays them back plus some, when the shares go up, or, when they go down, buys now-cheaper shares on the open market, repaying the loaned shares to the entity and pocketing the profit. Say A lends B 100 shares of A stock at $10 a share. If, after a set amount of time, the stock devalues to $9, B simply buys 100 A shares on the open market for $900, returns A the 100 shares and makes $100.
Although this is condemned by the tautology "making money from money," it is a perfectly logical use of funds which are simply another resource which can be hidden, held, invested or shared.
How does this help economies you might ask? Of course, when A’s stock goes up to $11, B simply pays $100. But, even if a short happens, the capital is kept close since it is usually a community member placing the short. In fact, companies often contract their own shorts as a form of insurance.
But does anyone ever take the time to explain lending at interest, medieval Jewish moneylending, shorting or Soros’s first billion to contemporary Hungarians, 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists, college kids or folks from ethnic communities featuring old-wives tales about Jews?
The short answer is no. The obvious and logical long answer would be for George Soros’s Open Society Foundations to produce a documentary series about the evolution of fiduciary instruments with ten episodes, at a minimum—given it’s so damn complicated. In fact, Soros should host, simply so viewers can see for themselves that he doesn’t have horns. It could be titled just like this essay, “Soros, Jewish Bankers and Interest Explained”.
Barring that, Soros or one of my millionaire readers, of which I have one that I know of—and there are undoubtedly a few more, among the million plus millionaires in the Bay Area—should write me a check for $10,000, with which I can start this vitally important humanitarian project (cineSOURCE has access to a documentary production company).
Without such an educational effort to save us from the insanity of blaming Jews for lending at interest, which they didn’t invent (that would be the Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians and other civilizations, in fact the Jews prohibited it), let’s get at least one economic fact straight:
The trick to lending at interest is not prohibition or limitation, a la Biblical Jews, medieval Christians or modern conspiracy theorists, but freedom, within some regulatory structure, so lenders can compete, which would allow the market to lower interest rates on its own. Once the average citizen comprehends the basic facts of interest rates as well as markets, they can start studying other normative investment methods, like shorting.
Yes, a few Jews have been at the forefront of inventing financial instruments, either due to compulsion in the Middle Ages, to being excluded from other professions, or to the brilliant math and risk taking of people like George Soros today. Yes, not all financial instruments are functional, as we found out the hard way in 2008, with the toxic bundled mortgages. And yes, new financial instruments are hard to regulate, precisely because they are new.
Nevertheless, we need and will keep inventing new financial instruments, of which lending at interest was the very first, after money itself.
As harsh as lending at interest’s side effects may be—if you think the 20th and 21st century is bad, check out the 19th century’s boom, bust and rampant fraud cycles—it did create the majority of our wealth, tools and toys. To begin functioning in a healthy fiduciary manner, to cut back on the pogroms, we have to get used to that five-thousand-year-old practice and cornerstone of civilization and stop blaming the Jews.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Nov 06, 2018 - 11:44 AM
by Doniphan Blair
Currency trader, philanthropist and open society activist, as well as Holocaust survivor, George Soros at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, 2018. photo: courtesy BitcoinistAmerican history—the Pennsylvania slaughter of eleven Jews in a synagogue, on the Sabbath no less (Oct 27, 2018)—and President Trump growing ever more inflammatory, dropping dog whistles like piss marks, many Jews, liberals and people of good will, including many friends of mine, particularly female, are feeling rather freaked out.
Some are depressed; others are wringing their hands; a few have asked me, “What are we going to do?”
Antisemitism did not abate with the Holocaust, many of us were shocked to learn, late in life. That is because antisemitism faded during the four decades following World War II, while many of us were growing up, leaving us without an early, frightening cautionary experience. Alas, antisemitism is on a tear today, as we can see, from homicidal hometown shut-ins and white nationalists to European and Middle Eastern intellectuals, from 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists to otherwise laudable leftists, who nevertheless retain an oddly oversized obsession with Israel.
After studying the matter for 35 years, discussing it with Jews, gentiles, Holocaust survivors (including my mother) and a few neo-Nazis, as well as helping to make the movie “Our Holocaust Vacation” (2007), I was lucky enough to stumble on four seemingly game-changing discoveries.
“Seemingly,” I say because when I announced them two years ago in cineSOURCE, “Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed” (2016), there was hardly uproarious acclaim.
My most earthshaking finding? A few Jews lent money at interest—sometimes high interest, sometimes what is called usury, although the exact percentage where interest becomes usury is rarely specified—during the Middle Ages.
Brilliant deduction Einstein, you might say, given the popular middle American saying “Don’t Jew me,” Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice” (1598), and everyone’s favorite Elder of Zion, financier and civil society advocate George Soros. But, when I was growing up in New York, across the street from the world’s largest rabbinical school, attending majority-Jewish schools, literally surrounded by Jews, no one once breathed the words “medieval Jewish moneylending.”
“That’s because it didn’t exist,” would probably be the response of Julie L. Mell, an associate history professor, who teaches medieval and Jewish history at North Carolina State University. Although the pressing need to publish this essay precluded my perusal of Professor Mell’s book, her title is telling: “The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender” (2017).
With all due respect to those who claim medieval Jewish moneylending was invented outright by zoological antisemites or exaggerated to an extreme, it is not hard to see or research that:
A) civilizations need capital to operate; B) “The Bible” outlaws lending at interest; C) both the Christians and Muslims adopted that Jewish law; D) the Catholic Church was the bank during the Dark Ages (how else did they build all those fancy churches?); E) when Christ didn’t return to kick off the second millennia, Church fathers concluded it was due to sin, the biggest one being that they themselves lent money at interest; F) to keep civilization crawling out of the Dark Ages, they needed a tax loophole with God; G) the Jews, who were living next door to the Vatican, as well as across Europe, could read, write and do a little math—some even had far-flung relatives with whom they were trading; which brings us to H):
“Hey, I have a great idea to solve this goddamn interest problem,” a bishop must have shouted in Latin, in the middle of the eleventh century, “We can lend money at interest to the Jews, who are going to hell anyway, and they can lend to the Christians, allowing us to make our 'vic' and keep God happy, while providing the peasants a way to survive the winter.”
Although I have not read Professor Mell, I recently reread “The Jew in the Medieval Community”, written by Reverend James Parkes in the 1940s, after he fled for his life from Germany and was living under that country's bombardment of England. A medieval and Judiaica scholar, Parkes realized that the time had come to finally review all available ancient texts, letters and laws concerning medieval Jewish moneylending.
The cover of Reverend James Parkes's 'The Jew in the Medieval Community' showing Christians and Jews arguing, books in hand. photo: courtesy J. Parkes“Medieval Jewish moneylending” are three words that strike terror in the hearts of BOTH Jewish educators, scholars and clerics, who are stumped as to how to summarize such a complex, ancient issue, AND haters, antisemites and neo-Nazis, who need an all-controlling puppet master and father figure on whom to blame their grandfather’s, their father's and their own mistakes.
The mere fact of medieval Jewish moneylending, regardless of the details, allows people to fantasize that Jews built a secret compartment inside European banking, which lets them control interest rates, a notion supposedly certified by the notorious forgery—or revealing historical document, according to conspiracists—“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (1903, Russian secret police).
Interests rates are even more criminal than killing the revolutionary Jesus Christ, which “The Bible” tells us the Romans did and even simple-minded Christians realize they must forgive. Obviously, you can’t be both a pacifist follower of Christ and a rabid wolf baying to crucify the Jews, while Christ can’t die for your sins and not be crucified (by the Romans, of course, although a Jewish mob may have cheered them on).
Indeed, the banking libel is bigger than the medieval blood libel, which accused Jews of harvesting Christian children to make their Passover matzo, and continued to emerge periodically until the 20th century, especially in Eastern Europe.
While the blood libel was cannibalistic and absurd—shouldn't blood make white matzo red?—the banking libel seemed to make sense and appealed to broad swaths of the world's population. Published as fact by the Nazis and antisemites like Henry Ford, "The Protocols" gathered believers across the 20th century and had a resurgence in the 21st, post-9/11. Indeed, “The Protocols” are available today at many ethnic or nationalist book outlets, as well as online versions, while Arabic editions can consume up to few percent of any given year's book runs in Egypt, which is the center of Arab publishing.
What can Jews do? They are the most readily-available “other” on which small-minders can blame big problems. Indeed, they are the perfect scapegoat, as Freud conceded in “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1929).
This is simply because the Jews are Western Civilization’s oldest, well-documented group—precursing the Greeks and about whom a blockbuster bestseller was written—who are still intimately involved in its evolution. Given the fact that: A) Jewish people were present at every major point in Western Civilization (Egypt, Greece, Christ, Rome, the Middle Ages, both of Spain’s Golden Ages, Magna Carta England and Germany’s 19th century unification and expansion), and that B) many people believe Western Civilization went off its rails and injured their grandfathers, you get C) the Jews must have conspired to screw their tribe somehow.
And so we have the vicious circle: Even though the Jews appear to have been severely punished for their supposed sins, from medieval pogroms through the Holocaust to today’s military and moral attacks on Israel, they’re still doing well. How can that be? They must control interest rates! Moreover, they’re more dangerous than people of color (although some are also that) because many can pass as white (hence the neo-Nazi chant: "You shall not replace us").
When I finally figured out medieval Jewish moneylending, around age thirty, after years of reading references to it while doing research at the Holocaust Library of Northern California, in San Francisco, I broached the subject with my mother.
“Don’t be an idiot antisemite,” she barked right back. “I grew up in one room, without water or electricity. There were no moneylenders in my city, as far as I could see.”
Admittedly, my mother's city was conquered by the Nazis when she was fourteen, precluding her ability to examine it closely, and she is not a professor of Jewish history or a rabbi. Nor were they honest or forthcoming. Indeed, if you peruse the indexes of books on Jewish history, of which there are hundreds, only a handful have more then a few entries under “moneylending,” and even fewer attempt to explain what happened, let alone adequately.
“The Bible”, also a book on Jewish history, as well as myth, philosophy, law and romance, does much better than most with eighteen moneylending mentions, all of which forbid the practice to fellow tribal members. It also enjoins Jews to forgive non-tribal members all loans, indentured servitude or promissory notes every seven years, during the so-called Jubilee Year, as well as to enact other redemptive measures, like leaving some harvest in the field to be gleaned by the poor.
Lending at interest TO FOREIGNERS, on the other hand, is not only perfectly legal but absolutely mandatory, both to Biblical authors as well as almost all other civilizational figures.
In point of fact, no merchant in their right mind, two thousand years ago or today, in the Middle East, Mongolia or Mexico, would hand over one hundred sheep to someone without them promising, when they came back the following year, to return the herd plus some of the new-born lambs. That would be the benefit of the transaction, some of which must cover the cost of the lender not having the benefit of a hundred sheep for one year, lest we disincentivize lending.
“Poppycock,” might be the retort of anthropologist and best-selling author David Graeber, albeit not using that word, since his 2011 “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” is very readable and well, if selectively, researched. Although “Debt” is a comprehensive, 500-page accounting of the myriad methods oppressors enslave people using debt and interest—and they are disgusting—it allocates only two pages to Jewish moneylending. That is hardly enough to explain the complexity, no matter how great the author, while still tarring the Jews as debt slavers.
Aside from Graeber and Marx, who studied lending at interest and didn't like it, almost none of our most influential philosophers, as far as I can see, have looked into it, despite the obvious fact that lending at interest is more critical to Western Civilization than geometry or electricity. Lending at interest is so central, in fact, it is the bright line dividing civilization, our supra-social structure, from our older, still very powerful human grouping, tribe.
I stumbled on this closely-held secret some thirty years ago, but it is so complicated I made no mention of it in my recent treatise, “Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto”.
Lending at interest was so difficult and divisive during Europe's transition from tribe to civilization, almost two-thirds of medieval rabbinical writing on record was concerned with it. Indeed, the two fiscal systems are diametrically opposed and almost impossible to reconcile.
While tribes do not lend at interest internally, because they enforce financial responsibilities through family ties, civilizations exist largely due to lending at interest. Yes the Muslims, who also adopted the Hebrew prohibition against lending with interest, developed a workaround—they treated loans as investments, with income dependent on outcome—that is too complex for many deals. Hence, Islam also depended on loans at interest, from forced Jewish moneylenders or others. Without interest, there would be no incentive for anyone to help a non-tribal member or to reinvest the surplus of one tribe into another tribe, the very definition of civilization.
Let me repeat: Without interest, there would be no incentive for anyone to help a non-tribal member or to reinvest the surplus of one tribe into another tribe, the very definition of civilization.
Yes, the resources needed to build civilization—the buildings, armies and infrastructure, the castles and crowns—can simply be stolen by force. But the fact of the matter is: it is easier and more efficient for kings and tyrants to borrow at interest, since people will offer their capital willingly, on the assumption of recompense at a profit. Meanwhile borrowing at interest makes it much easier for average folk to recover from a natural or enemy-inflicted catastrophe, or to develop a business or invention.
Indeed, with the maturation of rule of law in Holland and England around the 16th century, which vastly increased the likelihood debts would be repaid, via the courts or debtor prisons, lending at interest created capitalism and—in tandem with the scientific revolution and The Enlightenment—modern civilization.
Back in the Middle Ages, however, the only professions open to most Jews were rag-picker and moneylender. Indeed, the rag-pickers and the moneylenders were often the only Jews allowed to leave the ghettos, closed after the 11th century’s First Crusade (which started with a slaughter of Rhine Valley Jews). One wore actual rags, the other the finest couture and rode in a gilded carriage, going to dine with the prince, although both were fully under his jurisdiction.
By the way, Christendom’s popes, kings, bishops, princes and even saints frequently claimed their oppression of the Jews—using ghettos, the obligation to wear funny caps or Stars of David or practice usury, or outright violence against them—was part of their Christian love for the Jews. They were trying to push the Jews to the "true religion" so they could enjoy eternal life.
And so Jewish leaders were compelled to accept the churches’ and princes’ wealth and lend it back to the Christians at a healthy interest, gifting the church and princes a four-fer: avoiding sin, making money, building civilization AND destroying the Jews’ reputation.
In this way, the Jews simultaneously became both economically central and deeply hated in most European principalities and many Muslim ones. Indeed, Jews lived inside the castle (where the women were often royal mistresses, making many European noble families part Jewish, if only genetically); Jews were fiduciary serfs, owned by the prince; which means they could be literally sold, lent at interest or harvested, although slaughtering them drove them to bury their wealth and forced the princes to turn to blackmail, ransom and torture.
With Western Civilization’s dependence on Jewish banking besmirched by such grotesque practices, it’s no wonder peasants, farmers and workers became antisemitic. Imagine you’re an illiterate farmer in 17th century Ukraine, where the princes used “tax farming,” a practice originating in the ancient Middle East.
Not as bucolic as it might sound, tax farming is where the richest local Jew is compelled, under pain of death, to pay the prince their region’s entire tax bill, up front. When the practice was standardized, they came to bid on it as a worthwhile investment, given they were then entitled to extract the sum from the population, the so-called farming, at whatever profit the market could bear.
Watching a wealthy Jew crisscrossing the countryside collecting taxes, with the help of the prince’s pretorian guard, just might turn a peasant from a giving Christian into a rabid antisemite, especially as the prince claims he himself is being squeezed by the Jews. The princes often gambled away their liquid assets and became beholden to their Jewish moneylenders, although the more frequent factor was the need for financiers and procurers to assemble the immense resources needed to fight their wars. Meanwhile, the priests are railing from the pulpit that Jews as Christ killers, demons and interest manipulators.
A related situation still stands today. On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, Trump’s final ad “has been criticized for having antisemitic overtones and implying a vast international Jewish conspiracy behind Hillary Clinton… Philanthropist investor George Soros, Federal Reserve head Janet Yellen and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, all of whom are Jewish, appear onscreen as Trump inveighs against ‘levers of power in Washington’ and ‘global special interests’—both considered antisemitic dog-whistles,” (The Times of Israel, 11/6/16).
Soros, as you may recall, made his first billion “shorting” the Bank of England in 1992, when Prime Minister John Major was artificially propping up the pound sterling.
Shorting, which was invented in 16th century by Isaac La Maire, a Dutch Jew, may seem like the most insane fiduciary instrument since tax farming, but it caught on because it is perfectly logical, legal and functional.
Shorting is when an entity loans shares to an investor, who either pays them back plus some, when the shares go up, or, when they go down, buys now-cheaper shares on the open market, repaying the loaned shares to the entity and pocketing the profit. Say A lends B 100 shares of A stock at $10 a share. If, after a set amount of time, the stock devalues to $9, B simply buys 100 A shares on the open market for $900, returns A the 100 shares and makes $100.
Although this is condemned by the tautology "making money from money," it is a perfectly logical use of funds which are simply another resource which can be hidden, held, invested or shared.
How does this help economies you might ask? Of course, when A’s stock goes up to $11, B simply pays $100. But, even if a short happens, the capital is kept close since it is usually a community member placing the short. In fact, companies often contract their own shorts as a form of insurance.
But does anyone ever take the time to explain lending at interest, medieval Jewish moneylending, shorting or Soros’s first billion to contemporary Hungarians, 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists, college kids or folks from ethnic communities featuring old-wives tales about Jews?
The short answer is no. The obvious and logical long answer would be for George Soros’s Open Society Foundations to produce a documentary series about the evolution of fiduciary instruments with ten episodes, at a minimum—given it’s so damn complicated. In fact, Soros should host, simply so viewers can see for themselves that he doesn’t have horns. It could be titled just like this essay, “Soros, Jewish Bankers and Interest Explained”.
Barring that, Soros or one of my millionaire readers, of which I have one that I know of—and there are undoubtedly a few more, among the million plus millionaires in the Bay Area—should write me a check for $10,000, with which I can start this vitally important humanitarian project (cineSOURCE has access to a documentary production company).
Without such an educational effort to save us from the insanity of blaming Jews for lending at interest, which they didn’t invent (that would be the Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians and other civilizations, in fact the Jews prohibited it), let’s get at least one economic fact straight:
The trick to lending at interest is not prohibition or limitation, a la Biblical Jews, medieval Christians or modern conspiracy theorists, but freedom, within some regulatory structure, so lenders can compete, which would allow the market to lower interest rates on its own. Once the average citizen comprehends the basic facts of interest rates as well as markets, they can start studying other normative investment methods, like shorting.
Yes, a few Jews have been at the forefront of inventing financial instruments, either due to compulsion in the Middle Ages, to being excluded from other professions, or to the brilliant math and risk taking of people like George Soros today. Yes, not all financial instruments are functional, as we found out the hard way in 2008, with the toxic bundled mortgages. And yes, new financial instruments are hard to regulate, precisely because they are new.
Nevertheless, we need and will keep inventing new financial instruments, of which lending at interest was the very first, after money itself.
As harsh as lending at interest’s side effects may be—if you think the 20th and 21st century is bad, check out the 19th century’s boom, bust and rampant fraud cycles—it did create the majority of our wealth, tools and toys. To begin functioning in a healthy fiduciary manner, to cut back on the pogroms, we have to get used to that five-thousand-year-old practice and cornerstone of civilization and stop blaming the Jews.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Nov 06, 2018 - 11:44 AM
