Usury

February 27th, 2013

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

From the beginning of their tenure in Europe (and elsewhere), many Jews were merchants. This provided a base as they began expanding into money lending activities, including usury. Usury is defined most simply as money lending for profit. In medieval times it was universally condemned as a heinous and immoral act by the Christian church. The act of usury was deemed a mortal sin, and its practitioner’s path of greed was understood to end in eternal damnation in Hell. The idea of profiteering from someone else’s’ need — possibly desperate — for money was believed by medieval Christianity to be the antithesis of compassion, generosity, and charity. Christ was upheld as an example of poverty, non-materialism, and abstinence. Common wisdom asserted that those who had surplus money to lend in the first place were obsessed with greed and avarice and needed no more — certainly by usury — for their coffers.

usury Usury

And making money for doing absolutely nothing (except having the money available) went against Christian medieval understandings of decency, justice, honest work, and morality. In essence, usury was perceived as a crass system of exponential exploitation by which the already wealthy could get increasingly wealthier for little more than the fact of their wealth in the first place. (In the nineteenth century, notes Abram Leon, Karl Marx argued that “usury centralized money wealth, where the means of production are disjointed. It does not alter the modes of production but attaches itself to it as a parasite, and makes it miserable. It sucks blood, kills its nerve and compels production to proceed under even more disheartening conditions.” [LEON, p. 150]

As George Eaton Simpson and J. Milton Yinger observed:

The church’s condemnation of usury made sense in the relatively self-sufficient, largely barter economy in which a large proportion of the population lived, even down to the eighteenth century. Under those circumstances, a person borrows money only when he has suffered some unusual loss — long illness of the breadwinner, loss of crops, a destructive fire. To charge interest in such a situation is to kick a man when he is down. To the great majority of people, this continued to be the perspective on interest-taking: it was robbery; money was unproductive and yet one had to pay for its use. [SIMPSON/YINGER, p. 295]

The vast gap between Christian and Jewish moral perspectives, per materialist self-aggrandizement, is evidenced everywhere in their respective traditions. In the Christian New Testament, for instance, Jesus enjoined values of humility and modesty to his followers, teaching that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of heaven.” [LUKE 18-25] Jewish religious tradition stands in drastic opposition. The [Talmudic] Mishnah, for instance, proclaims, “Who is rich? He who enjoys his wealth.” Likewise, there is no equivalent in Jewish mainstream tradition to Christian vows of poverty and material abstinence, [SHAPIRO, p. 12] as epitomized in recent times by Mother Teresa. As the Talmud says: “Poverty in the home is more painful than fifty lashes.” [KOTKIN, p. 46]

“Judaism is a this-world religion,” says Joshua Halberstam, “and making money is considered a natural human endeavor. Unlike Christianity, Judaism never considered poverty a virtue; the idea that the meek shall inherit the earth is a New Testament doctrine, not a Jewish one.” [HALBERSTAM, p. 25] “Judaism does not consider poverty noble,” says Maurice Lamm, “… The Jew prays for parnassah, a respectable income.” [LAMM, p. 108] As famed sociologist Max Weber wrote, “Pharisaic [i.e., rabbinic] Judaism was also far from rejecting wealth or from thinking that it be dangerous, or that its unqualified enjoyment endangers salvation. Wealth was, indeed, considered prerequisite to certain priestly functions.” [POLL, S., 1969, p. vii]

The Jews were not forbidden in medieval Europe to become usurers. Because they refused to convert en masse to the dominant religious faith and, to Christian belief, be spiritually saved, Jews were considered outsiders. Whatever its continuously decried immoral atmosphere, usury was an economic opportunity and the Jewish community gravitated to it. In historical perspective, this niche they were afforded was a great economic privilege and a springboard for Jewish economic expansion to our own day. (In the Islamic world too, where usury was religiously prohibited to Muslims, Jews again gravitated towards that generally regarded repugnant activity). Of course there were, religious and legal injunctions or not, small numbers of Christian usurers too. But Jews had a distinct advantage in that they could be completely open in their profit-making activities. “The picture of the Jew,” says Jacob Katz, “waiting at home for the Gentile to come to borrow money or pay a debt is a realistic one … [but] many Jews also had also to call at the house of the Gentile to offer their services as traders or money-lenders.” [KATZ, Ex, p. 38]

Christian usurers, who were despised at least as much by their co-religionists as Jews, usually had to be more discrete in their dealings. The gravity in which all usurers were violently hated by the general European population may be measured in the following passage by Jacques Le Goff:

The persecution and slaughter of Italian usurers, in particular in France during the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were phenomena as frequent and widespread as pogroms against the Jews, with the one difference that the pogroms were prompted by religious motives as well as the hatred of wealthy moneylenders of a different faith. [LEGOFF]

“Italians and Hugenots,” adds Alan Edelstein, “were expelled from France for economic reasons, and the same factors caused Germans in Novgorod to wall themselves for protection from Russian mobs.” [EDELSTEIN, p. 23]

The exploitive nature of Jewish usury invariably alienated the Christian populace. The Cortes of Portugal, for instance, complained in 1361 that Jewish usury was becoming “an unbearable yoke upon the population.” [LEON, p. 165] Guido Kisch, in a probable understatement, notes that “the continual complaints against Jewish moneylenders, coming from all classes of the medieval population, particularly in the 14th and 15th centuries, necessarily made the Jew an unpopular figure.” [KISCH, p. 328] Usurious Jews who did no physical labor, who were segregated in their own communities, who did not serve in the local military, and who were agents of the hated aristocracy, were commonly accused of parasitism by local non-Jewish populaces. “Jewish money lending,” says Salo Baron, “[was a] lucrative business … For the most part, the accepted rate ranged between 33 and 43 per cent, although sometimes they went up to double and treble those percentages, or more … When the European economy entered a period of deceleration in the late thirteenth century, further aggravated by recurrent famine and pestilence, such exorbitant charges, though economically doubly justified because of the increased risks, created widespread hostility.” [BARON, EHoJ, p. 45] Money lending was not usually for a borrower’s business expenses or expansion, but for subsistence survival. [MACDONALD, p. 263] We are talking about desperate people who often enough stood to perish from their web of increasing debt.

“It was not luxury needs,” says Abram Leon, “but the direct distress which forced the peasant or the artisan to borrow from the Jewish usurer. They pawned their working tools which were often indispensable to assure their livelihood. It is easy to understand the hatred that the man of the people must have felt for the Jew in whom he saw the direct cause of his ruin … [LEON, p. 171] In this role as petty usurers exploiting the people, [Jews] were often victims of bloody uprisings…” [LEON, p. 83] [uprisings that were] “first and foremost efforts to destroy the letters of credit which were in [Jewish] possession.” [LEON, p. 171]

In 1431, for instance, armed peasants demanded that the city of Worms surrender its Jews to them, “in view of the fact that they had ruined [the peasants] and taken away their last shirt.” [LEON, p. 172]

Usury was in fact considered immoral by Jews too. The great Jewish theologian, Maimonides, wrote “why is [usury] called nesek [biting]? Because he who takes it bites his fellow, causes pain to him, and eats his flesh.” [MINKIN, p. 362] Usury was forbidden to Jews, as well as Christians, in the Old Testament. (The Islamic Quran also expressly states its prohibition of “interest.”) But there was a qualifier. Jews conjured a double moral standard; usury upon others in their own community was prohibited, but usury upon non-Jews was acceptable. The Torah states that one cannot practice usury upon a brother, but can to a stranger. [DEUTERONOMY, 23:20] Who is a brother and who is a stranger? “Brother,” in Jewish religious teachings means “Jew.” “Stranger” is anyone else.

St. Ambrose (339-397), the bishop of Milan and writer whose works influenced later medieval Christian thinking, “considered lending to a stranger a legitimate hostile act against an enemy.” [BARON, p. 53] St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), a well-known Christian theologian of his time, sounded an idealized, universalized Christian ethic about the Deuteronomic double standard:

The Jews were forbidden to take usury from their brethren, i.e., from other Jews. By this we are given to understand that to take usury from another man is simply evil, because we ought to treat every man as our neighbor and brother…
[NELSON, p. 14]

“All Jewish converts [to Christianity] of early sixteenth century Germany,” says R. Po-Chia Hsia, “attacked the practice of Jewish money lending.” One convert, Johannes Pfefferkorn, argued that profits from usury was the main reason that Jews remained Jews, that they were reluctant to become Christians and do “honest work.” Another, Anton Margaritha, argued that such “honest work by Jews would humble them.” [HSIA, p. 172] (Conversely, in England, the Jewish “monopoly of usury brought them such wealth that some Christians undoubtedly went over to Judaism in order to participate in the Jewish monopoly in lending.”) [LEON, p. 140, quoting BRENTANO]

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