The horrors of the Holocaust should have permanently discredited anti-Semitism but that ancient and venomous hatred has had a recent resurgence in Europe. How much of this is due to a growing Muslim population in Europe is a question for which there is no ready answer.
Many of the explanations of anti-Jewish attitudes and actions over the centuries, including mob violence and mass expulsions, have focused on things unique to Jews or unique to the Christian-Jewish relationship in Europe or the Muslim-Jewish relationship in the Middle East. Yet many of the same attitudes and actions—and some of the very same words and phrases—have been directed at other groups which have had none of the factors which are said to explain anti-Jewish attitudes and actions among Christians and Muslims. What these other groups—the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Ibos in Nigeria, Marwaris in Burma, overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, and Lebanese in a number of countries—have had in common with the Jews has not been religion, race, or language, but their economic and social roles.
These groups have all been, at some point in their history, “middleman minorities”—that is, people whose work takes place somewhere between producers and consumers, whether in retail trade or money-lending. Often these middleman minorities began at the petty level of a peddler with a pack on his back or a little pushcart. Even such large enterprises as Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Levi Strauss among the Jews, and Haggar and Farah among the Lebanese, began at the level of the lowly peddler.
Beginning as a peddler was a very widespread experience among Jewish men who emigrated from Eastern Europe to nineteenth-century America. The next step up was often owning a little retail shop. A similar pattern of petty retailing could be found among the Lebanese in Brazil and among the Chinese in Southeast Asia, as well as among other middleman minorities in countries around the world. In their early stages, these shop owners often lived in their little establishments. At one time Lebanese storekeepers in Sierra Leone simply slept on their counters at night. In India, Marwaris were often missed by census takers because they did not live in any residential neighborhood but in their own little shops in business districts. In America, Jewish storekeepers often lived in back of their stores or over the stores, as Milton Friedman’s family did.
What has been remarkable about such groups has not been simply their eventual prosperity but the utter poverty from which their prosperity arose over the years or generations. People on welfare in America today live better than the immigrant Jews did on New York’s Lower East Side. A 1908 study, for example, found that about half the families on the Lower East Side slept three or four people to a room, nearly one-fourth slept five or more to a room, and fewer than one-fourth slept two to a room. During that same era, Chinese immigrants typically arrived in Southeast Asian countries in similar rock-bottom poverty. According to Victor Purcell’s landmark study, The Chinese in Southeast Asia, “Immigrant Chinese arriving in Indonesia usually brought nothing but a bundle of clothes, a mat, and a pillow.” It was much the same story with Lebanese immigrants to colonial Sierra Leone and, in a later era, Korean immigrants and Vietnamese refugees to the United States.
These and other similarities among middleman minorities in countries around the world have caused the overseas Chinese to be called “the Jews of Southeast Asia,” the Ibos to be called “the Jews of Nigeria,” the Parsees to be called “the Jews of India,” and the Lebanese to be called “the Jews of West Africa.”
What is chilling is what other things these groups have been called. “Parasites” has been another epithet applied to middleman minorities because, as retailers or money-lenders, they do not produce any physical product but are simply intermediaries between manufacturers and customers. “Bloodsuckers” is another epithet expressing the notion that middleman minorities do not add anything to the wealth of a community or nation but simply manage to extract a share of the existing wealth for themselves, at the expense of others. This charge has rung out against innumerable middleman minorities, from the villages of India to black ghettos in the United States.
In many times and places, middleman minorities have been forced to flee for their lives from mobs or have been expelled en masse by political authorities. Yet the departure of these supposed “parasites” and “exploiters” has not been followed by a more prosperous life by the rest of the population but usually by economic decline—sometimes catastrophic decline, as the economy of Uganda collapsed after middleman minorities from India and Pakistan were expelled during the 1970s. Similar things happened after the expulsions of Jews in Europe in various periods of history or other middleman minorities in parts of Asia.
“Clannish” is another epithet applied to the Parsees in India, to the Jews in the United States, and to other middleman minorities in places in between. To a certain extent, clannishness goes with the territory, so long as these groups remain locally predominant in retailing or in money-lending. Where a minority operates most of the retail stores or pawn shops and other money-lending places in a community with a different majority population, the whole basis of the middleman minority’s livelihood is their cultural difference from that majority. Southeast Asian peasants who did not save could get loans and credit from overseas Chinese middlemen only because the overseas Chinese did save. For the overseas Chinese to allow their children to become part of the larger culture around them and absorb their values and behavior patterns would have been to have the family commit economic suicide. The same has been true of other middleman minorities around the world.
The economic necessity of maintaining a separate culture has meant not only social separation but also resentments of that separation by the surrounding community—resentments that could easily be whipped up to political hostility or outright violence by suitably talented demagogues. This has happened in innumerable times and places, as mobs have been aroused to lethal fury against the Marwaris in Burma, the Ibos in Northern Nigeria, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the Lebanese in Sierra Leone, the overseas Chinese in Saigon, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur, and the Jews in many parts of both medieval and modern Europe.
Lethal violence against middleman minorities has been on a scale seldom approached by violence against other kinds of minorities, such as conquered indigenous groups or formerly enslaved people. All the blacks lynched in the entire history of the United States do not add up to as many people as the number of Chinese slaughtered by mobs near Saigon in 1782, or the Jews killed by mobs in Central Europe in 1096 or in Ukraine in 1648, much less the slaughters of Armenians by mobs in the Ottoman Empire during the 1890s or during the First World War. Only the Nazi Holocaust exceeded the slaughter of Armenians and, while the Holocaust was the ultimate catastrophe for Jews, it was also the culmination of a long history of lethal mass violence unleashed against middleman minorities around the world.
Why such venom against this particular kind of minority? Why such violence against groups who are themselves typically non-violent?
Part of the answer may be the role of middleman minority, as such. Retailing and money-lending have long been regarded by the economically unsophisticated as not “really” adding anything to the economic well-being of a community, even when the people engaged in those activities have not been a separate group within the community. After all, both medieval Europe and the Islamic countries regarded the charging of interest as a sin and, in other societies in Asia and Africa, it was considered morally suspect, even without a religious prohibition against it. An often-cited article by a British economist who was a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II pointed out how middleman economic activities arose spontaneously among the POWs—and how the individuals who engaged in these activities were resented by the other POWs, even though these individuals were not from some middleman minority, but ranged from a Catholic priest to a Sikh.
For much of human history, most people did arduous work in agriculture, and the rise of industrial societies meant for most of them simply the transfer of the scene of that arduous labor from the farm to the factory. In that setting, people who made a living more easily, and with clean hands, just by selling what others had produced, and who received back more money than they had lent, were readily resented. Add in the factor of ethnic differences in the case of middleman minorities, and there are the ingredients for resentments to arise spontaneously and for demagogues to be able to raise those resentments to a higher pitch.
Perhaps even more important is the inherent threat that middleman minorities present to the egos of others when those minorities begin in poverty and then rise above the economic level of those around them. What are those others supposed to make of what has happened? Inspiring as rags-to-riches stories may be to some, especially observers at some distance, to those immediately in contact with the middleman minorities, who have seen them arrive destitute, often with little more than a few words of the local language, and then rise above the people around them, this phenomenon offers few alternatives other than to question themselves for having let these newcomers outperform them or to become hostile to the newcomers and be ready to believe that they have done something illegitimate to achieve success—the latter explanation being one that is usually readily supplied by demagogues and readily accepted by those who hear it.
When people are confronted with a choice between hating themselves for their stagnation or hating others for their progress, they seldom hate themselves.
Despite studies in the United States showing what hard work and frugal living usually preceded Korean immigrants’ reaching the point where they could even open a small shop in a black ghetto, and the very long hours of work put into those shops to enable them to survive economically, it has been widely believed in the black community that the success of the Koreans or other Asian immigrants has been due to some government favors which those immigrants received and which have not been available to blacks. What else can the residents of those ghettos believe without a high cost to their own egos? A black official in charge of a state agency that dispenses aid to small businesses recalled being besieged with claims from a black audience that his agency helped Asian businesses get started in preference to helping blacks. Nothing he said about the preposterousness of the notion that he would do that made any dent on the audience. The cost of believing him was just too high.
The role of ego in the hostility toward middleman minorities is shown in other ways as well. Even killing them has often not been sufficient for those who hate them. They must also be humiliated and dehumanized. Their women must be stripped naked in public, as Armenian women were during the mob violence in the Ottoman Empire and as Jewish women were in the Nazi death camps, and whatever sadistic humiliations could be thought of were inflicted on men and women alike. When it was suggested during the 1990s that the Asians who had been expelled from Uganda 20 years earlier should be brought back in hopes of restoring that country’s economy, the hostile responses included that of a group which threatened to kill them “in the most despicable way ever” if they dared to come back. Simply killing them would not be enough to assuage the wounded egos of those they had so greatly outperformed.
The movement of particular minorities out of the middleman occupations in which they began does not necessarily lead to an abatement of the hostility against them. The same capacity for hard work, frugal living, and long-term planning which was essential for survival as middleman minorities has often lead to great success in education, in the professions, and in large-scale business enterprises.
Even middleman minorities with little or no education themselves have often seen the value of education for their children. Thus, even though the Chinese immigrants who arrived in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century were often illiterate, once they began to prosper in their little shops and other enterprises, they began to finance the creation of Chinese schools. In later generations, the Chinese minority in Malaysia produced an absolute majority of the students at the University of Malaysia, until government-imposed quotas cut back their numbers. They were an overwhelming majority of those receiving degrees in engineering in the 1960s—404 Chinese to 4 Malays. This concentration of college and university students from middleman minority backgrounds in the more difficult and more remunerative specialties has been a common pattern, whether among the overseas Chinese in Malaysia, among the Lebanese in Brazil, or among Jews in a number of countries.
Lebanese immigrants to various countries have, in their early stages, included many who were illiterate and few who were highly educated. Nevertheless, they—like the Chinese, the Jews, the Armenians, and others—came from a culture that valued education, even when most of them had very little education themselves. Nor was education the key to their initial rise. Typically it was after becoming established economically as entrepreneurs that middleman minorities could then afford to dispense with their children’s labor in order to let them go to school instead and, still later, pay for them to continue on into higher education.
In schools and colleges, the children of middleman minorities tended to excel, whether among the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, or the Jews in the United States. But even the Jews, with their legendary reverence for learning, did not rise in America initially through education. A survey of students in the College of the City of New York in 1951, when the students there were predominantly Jewish, showed that only 17 percent of their fathers who were born before 1911 had completed the eighth grade.
Consider again the case of the Korean immigrant or Vietnamese refugee who has set up a small business in one of America’s black ghettos. Although this small-scale entrepreneur may have begun with very little money and may never become fluent in English or polished in manner, nevertheless his growing prosperity over the years may become manifest to ghetto residents, and his American-born children are likely to be heading off to colleges, perhaps prestigious colleges, while the children of many of the people in the community around his shop have prospects of low-paid jobs or unemployment, and many face prospects of jail. Add in the factor that this community lives in an atmosphere where “unfair” disparities are resented by those who set the tone in both the general society and in the local ghetto. All the ingredients are there for attitudes and actions which are called “anti-Semitism” when directed against Jews but which are very similar to the attitudes and actions to which other middleman minorities have been subjected in many times and places around the world.
TL;DR: education is critical, but even more critical is frugal living, working hard, and long-term planning.
Two quotes from the article that sum it up:
Quote 1: "In schools and colleges, the children of middleman minorities tended to excel, whether among the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, or the Jews in the United States. But even the Jews, with their legendary reverence for learning, did not rise in America initially through education."
Quote 2: "The same capacity for hard work, frugal living, and long-term planning which was essential for survival as middleman minorities has often lead to great success in education, in the professions, and in large-scale business enterprises."
>How much of this is due to a growing Muslim population in Europe is a question for which there is no ready answer. Abrahamic religions should never have set foot on Europe! They are just a bunch of desert story loving people who thinks that they can enslave people based on their stories which were written by desert scribes in the bronze age and maybe with some added passages later in history...
Nobody likes jews Not even Jesus liked them (John 8:44). Man, not even God liked them (Ezequiel 22) It's time to stop the jewish worshipping and start building camps
Julian Murphy
>4. Pay off your debts aggressively, and spend very little on expenses.
Thomas Sowell is pure enlightenment. Basic Economics changes lives.
Thank you for posting.
Xavier Rivera
It's Yeshua, there was no such thing as a J.
Elijah Allen
>is Antisemitism "generic"
FFS........ You are certainly GENETICALLY inferior
Brandon Jackson
Lol, so paying off debt is money laundering! Ok dumb ass
Sebastian Gutierrez
So was Socrates a communist?
Henry Allen
Kill yourself faggot kike
Sebastian Evans
dipshit
Hunter Gomez
They only whine about themselves. A lot of people died in the internment camps. But you only seem to care about yourself. Narcissism doesn't impress me.
Michael Peterson
Okay, something that sounds like an old Hebraic name.
You have missed the entire point of the op's article
Blake Torres
This is so stupid
Brayden Clark
Socrates also said the polis should have been communal, that everything in the city was for the people. Was he a communist now?
Benjamin Reed
>The horrors of the Holocaust should have permanently discredited anti-Semitism why? even if it weren't all bullshit? why would 'bad things happened to them' permanently discredit all criticism of them?
Why are you interested in Socrates now, he said what he said, how you view Socrates is not something that I care about because I don't have an emotional stake in it!
Grayson Price
>projecting Sure thing bud. I know it must feel horrible to lose to a subhuman like me.
Ayden Price
>A-ACTUALLY JEW ARE GOOD IF YOU DISAGREE YOU'RE A MUSLIM >Implying I can't hate both >Implying the false dichotomy of a conflict that my people had no skin in wasn't forced on Americans and Europeans by Jews to begin with Fight your own wars.
Yeah... Jews with their dark magical powers wiggle their fingers in front of white people's faces at AIPAC and whites hypnotically obey becuz dark magical Jewish powers
That explains it
Jordan Williams
Point out the misdeeds of people in the Jewish community. That's fine
It's your "ALL JOOZZZZ" mindset that's so stupid
Read the op article above
Ethan Wright
That's what power, influence and money does in the hands of people that go against your interest...
Vote in the correct politicians if you want out of the middle east
It is your fault
William Ortiz
So dark magical wiggly fingers then
Yeah, you're a stupid ass teen
Don't cut yourself on that angst
Brayden Lopez
>The horrors of the Holocaust What horrors? The holocaust never happened
Colton Fisher
>Point out the misdeeds of people in the Jewish community. That's fine Yeah, as it should be!
>It's your "ALL JOOZZZZ" mindset that's so stupid Have you researched how much power and influence they have in your country? And I haven't claimed it's all their fault, but they seem to play a huge role in numerous scandals, hold several positions of power and influence decision making by lobbying congress. Maybe you are scared since you benefit from them.
>Read the op article above This is between you and me, not the OP article which I don't need to respect.
Kevin Roberts
>This is between you and me
You certain?
>not the OP article which I don't need to respect.
Lol you just respected it
Isaiah Thompson
>So dark magical wiggly fingers then Money, power and influence, should be pretty basic if you ask me...
>Yeah, you're a stupid ass teen That was a while ago... And at least I don't go to endless wars in the middle-east...
>Don't cut yourself on that angst You Americans are the ones that violently cut small babies and don't think even flinch on what that might do to him...
Austin Wood
Whatever, pray to your desert god Yahweh and say hello to the Jew named Yoshua for me, for all I care...
Sebastian Wilson
Depends who you are, and the economic reality the person is in...
Define money. I doubt you even know it's formal definition
Noah Reed
That's rich coming from someone who espouses a simple-minded Death Star explosion fantasy. You think if Jews go away - with their dark magical wiggly fingers - all your life's problems will be solved
Read the op article
Jack Richardson
Monetary system that has it's value tied to different commodities and can be exchanged in trade for goods. Different factors play a role in it's value like the rarity and the amount of labor that's put in it, and what kind of supply and demand it has when it becomes traded.
Jose Sullivan
>That was a while ago...
2 years isn't that long ago, turbo angster
Alexander Gomez
No, I think there is still groups that will screw around with people after that. And it's no secret that Jews actively push and fantasize about something like that in the entertainment industry considering how they portray their enemies. The one that suggested that idea was yourself by the way!
Benjamin Roberts
This answer reveals a great deal of how cluttered your mindset is. This is such a convoluted definition of money that I'd laugh if it weren't such a sad implication of the person I'm responding to
You can't get yourself out of the hell hole you're in without understanding wealth. Blaming the Jews will have no positive effect on your life today or tomorrow or anytime
Read an economics book
Asher Evans
Starting with the one op posted
Oliver Jenkins
Whatever, desert nomad worshiper...
Caleb Garcia
>I think there is still groups that will screw around with people after that.
Ooh so you're beginning to realize the world is a complex place. I SEE!
Niiiiiiiiiiiiice
Jacob Smith
Lol truth hurts eh?
Austin Hall
>This answer reveals a great deal of how cluttered your mindset is. This is such a convoluted definition of money that I'd laugh if it weren't such a sad implication of the person I'm responding to I was just scratching the surface, and stop gas-lighting me for not knowing all the details of money. Underestimating other people won't do you any good either...
>Blaming the Jews will have no positive effect on your life today or tomorrow or anytime That I know, they will just ruin my life, even when they know that I am often right.
Xavier Gutierrez
>Ooh so you're beginning to realize the world is a complex place. I SEE!
No, I just like to annoy you! And to show who has a lot of power, that's all.
Andrew Wright
That nigga be spittin' fyer! Thanks op, good read, might actually read the book.
If you don't understand wealth, you are screwed from the beginning
Listen to the audiobook op posted
Jackson Baker
>I was just scratching the surface
Posting un-educated nonsense
Cameron Lewis
>Ooh so you're beginning to realize the world is a complex place.
>No
Well at least you're candid
Christopher Adams
Is it a dark magical.... O.o
Shhh don't tell GIZjDAnl. He doesn't like you
Jace Rivera
>The horrors of the Holocaust The official version of the holohoax is a verifiable fraud.
--
==The peaceful and fair solution to this issue of Jewish group subversion of Western nations:== 0) Educate the general population world-wide about the Jewish supremacism issue and Israeli crime; 1) Ban all Jewish interest groups in the West (along with all Muslim interest groups); 2) Ban all dual-citizenship politicians and judiciary in the West; 3) Cut all aid to Israel; 4) Ban Islam in the West because it is a supremacist ideology (make it illegal to: practice circumcision for religious purposes and; produce and/or sell Halal meat); 5) Ban Judaism in the West because it is a supremacist ideology (make it illegal to: practice circumcision for religious purposes and; produce and/or sell Kosher meat); 6) Terminate all “hate”-speech and “hate”-crime laws in the West, all hate speech and hate crime laws need to be done with, its a mechanism of censorship that thrives on false flags; 7) Terminate censorship online, so people can educate each other on the matter and lies and false narratives can’t take hold again; 8) Include the real history and facts about Jewish subversion and Israeli crime in school programs so future generations are protected against it in the future, given that the biggest weapon of jewish subversion is ignorance, censorship and the memory holing of the facts about it. 9) Last but not least, audit and then end/reform the FED so the people don’t get pimped into oblivion by it no more.
Your gas-lighting isn't going to convince anyone... In fact, it makes you look uneducated, just like you accused me of...
Landon Taylor
The point is an attempt to explain how Jews are successful The claim is these middle men add to the economy It says little about usury and it pernicious effects How they become market dominant minorities is only part of the issue. The issue is, is that a good thing for the rest of society? Even if it were economically beneficially doesn't mean it's a net benefit. There is strong correlation between IQ and income, however there is almost isn't clear correlation between wealth and IQ. This suggest rentierism, owning property and collecting profit, can be done by anyone and those at the top could be just about anyone. If not that could be a benefit as if other groups are actually less likely to do as well that means less wealth inequality.
Noah Barnes
>Your gas-lighting
I don't think you even understand what that term means
That's not what I was saying I was saying it doesn't take exceptional traits to be a renteir capitalist. It takes connections and perhaps perseverance to get to that level at most. Anyone can be a middle man.
Christian Martin
>I don't think you even understand what that term means According to google, "Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity."
James Deen quote is unverified. Fake and gay. Post link to source
Luke Davis
Well, you're using the term rather broadly then
Wyatt Reed
>Anyone can be a middle man.
Oh come on! Did you even read the op?
Asher Sanchez
Nope. Oh ok. Thanks. >James Deen quote is unverified. Fake and gay. Post link to source I don't have it. It was from an interview on haaretz that has been nuked out of the internet.
Nepotism in general should be pointed out publicly. Agreed
And if they don't stop with the nepotism, then expect to not be hired or for consumers to buy their products or for competing businesses to spring up
But you can't paint everyone as a nepotist due to religion - even IF there is a disproportionate amount of nepotism within said religion. Collective guilt is vile
Liam Parker
Based רִבִּי,
Anthony Morales
Not accusing all Jews of it. There are based Jews.
