On the cause of the hatred of Jews

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I have many times wondered: “Why is it that so many people in so many countries through the years have disliked Jews? What is the cause of the bias against them? What is it about Jews that has caused so many people to hate them?”The following gives insight into this question. It is from Chapter 2 of Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell. The chapter is titled “Are Jews Generic?”

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In any given country, a particular minority may be hated for any of a number of reasons peculiar to that country or that group. However, in a worldwide perspective, the most hated kinds of minorities are often not defined by race, color, religion, or national origin. Often they are generically “middleman minorities,” who can be of any racial or ethnic background, and in fact are of many. Many of the historical outbreaks of inter-ethnic mob violence on a massive scale have been against the Jews in Europe, the Chinese minorities in various Southeast Asian countries, against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the Ibos in Nigeria, and against other middleman minorities in other times and places.

While many kinds of minorities have been persecuted and subjected to violence, the sheer magnitude and duration of the persecution and violence against middleman minorities eclipses that unleashed against other kinds of groups. Conquered aborigines or formerly enslaved groups, for example, might be held in greater contempt but lethal animosities on a mass scale have been particularly often directed at middleman minorities. The mass slaughter of tens of thousands of Ibos in mob attacks in Nigeria, and the horrors inflicted on the Vietnamese “boat people” (most of whom were ethnically Chinese) have been reminiscent of the pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe, and the term “genocide” has been used to characterize what happened to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, as well as to the Jews under the Nazis a generation later. Smaller violent rampages against the businesses, homes, or persons of middleman minorities have been common around the world, whether directed against the Lebanese in Sierra Leone, the Japanese in Peru, the Indians in Burma, or the Chinese in Southeast Asia.

Other kinds of minorities have of course also suffered violence, but the scale of lethal mass violence against middleman minorities has been unequaled. 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 the1890s or during the First World War. Only the Nazi Holocaust exceeded the slaughter of Armenians and, while the Holocaust was the ultimate catastrophe for the Jews, it was also the culmination of a long history of lethal mass violence unleashed against middleman minorities around the world.

What do all these groups have in common and why have they been hated so much? Partly the resentments and animosities against these groups have derived from the economic role they play, a role that has been widely misunderstood and widely resented — in very disparate societies, over a period of many centuries — even when this role has been played by people not ethnically different from those around them. Differences of race, religion, or ethnicity, added to the resentments arising from the economic role itself, have produced explosive mixtures in many times and places.

The economic role

Middleman minorities have been intermediaries between producers and consumers, whether in the role of retailers or moneylenders. The retailing has ranged from the modest level of street peddlers to that of grand merchants owning chains of stores and money-lending has likewise ranged from the level of the small neighborhood pawnbroker to that of international financiers. Jews have historically been the classic middleman minority, to whom others have often been analogized — the overseas Chinese as the “Jews of Southeast Asia”, the Parsees as the “the Jews of India,” and the Ibos as “the Jews of Nigeria,” for example. Shakespeare’s merchant of Venice was a Jew and the story revolved around his money-lending. Numerically, however, the 36 million overseas Chinese are more than twice as numerous as all the Jews in the world.

Among other prominent middleman minorities have been the Gujaratis from India, who have played the middleman role in countries ranging from the South Pacific islands of Fiji to the United States and South America. Armenians have been another prominent middleman minority in countries around the world, and the Chettiars from India have specialized in the middleman occupation of money-lending in many times and places. In addition to these international middleman minorities, there have been ethnic groups who have played this role in particular countries or regions, such as the Marwaris in India’s Assam or Koreans in America’s black ghettoes.

Middleman minorities have often been middlemen in a social sense as well as an economic sense. They have often served as intermediaries between social groups who, for one reason or another, interact better through third parties than they do directly. Sometimes there are differences in language and culture, as between members of a colonial establishment and the indigenous population that they rule — such as between the European overlords in colonial Africa and the African population with whom they had economic and other transactions via the Lebanese as intermediaries in West Africa. Sometimes there are vast differences in status, which make both groups uncomfortable in dealing directly with one another, as for example, Polish noblemen who used Jews to collect rents from the peasants.

None of this is new. In ancient times, Milesians played the middle man role in this sense:

The Milesians not only were familiar with the Greek culture of the mainland, but also were conversant with the Near Eastern cultures of Lydia, of Cappadocia, of Phrygia, of the Phoenician lands, of Egypt, of the whole Levantine world. Traders they were, wandering about, speaking with great facility this, that, or the other tongue that they found necessary to transact their business.

Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were likewise middlemen in this social sense, as well as in the economic sense.

Armenians, although persecuted, possessed wealth and influence to a considerable degree because they had succeeded, in the course of centuries, in making themselves indispensable to their overlords. The Turk, after all, was not familiar with the intricate web of seaborne traffic, with the many languages of the Near East, with commercial accounting even when elementary — in short, was not able to get along without his despised Christian slave (because that is what the Armenian was, at least a semi-slave.)

During the centuries of Mongol domination in Central Asia, Armenians likewise served as trade envoys, interpreters, and soldiers. In modern Sierra Leone, the Lebanese were often middlemen between the Europeans and the native Africans, investing the time to become better acquainted with local African languages and the African way of doing things, as well as individual Africans. The Chinese played a similar role during the colonial era in French Indochina and, of what were then called the Dutch East Indies, it was said: “All that the natives sold to the Europeans they sold through the Chinese, and all that the natives bought from Europeans they bought through the Chinese.”

Such intermediary roles are not without their hazzards. High prices, for example, may be caused by others but it is the middleman minorities who directly charge these prices who are likely to be blamed. The manufacturer may be raising his prices, or the government may be raising taxes, or the costs of doing business in a given neighborhood may be higher because theft, vandalism, and violence raise the cost of insurance, or for other reasons. But, in any case, those who charge the customers these higher prices are more likely to be blamed than those who caused the prices to be higher. Where those who cause the higher prices are of the same ethnic background as the customers, and the middleman is ethnically different, then it is a virtual certainty that the middleman will be blamed by the customers and by their political and other leaders.

In the case of aristocratic or colonial overlords, where a middleman minority collects the rents or taxes that these overlords impose, or otherwise serves as a economic or social intermediary, the resentments of the masses may again be directed at the middleman who is seen face to face, more so than at distant overlords. What was said of the Chinese in the days of the Dutch East Indies could be said of other middlemen in other places and times: “the natives detested the Chinese, for they saw in them the active agents of a system of oppression by which they were frequently reduced to beggary.” Because the middleman is essential to the overlords, these rulers may protect him when necessary from violence. On the other hand, during periods when resentments reach the point where the governing powers are themselves are risk, nothing is easier than to throw the middleman minority to the wolves and not only withdraw protection but even incite the mobs in order to direct their anger away from the overlords.

Although there have been many middleman minorities over the centuries and around the world, the tragic history of the Jews, as a people without a country for two thousand years, climaxed by the Holocaust in which one-third of all the Jews in the world were murdered, is unique. Yet the history of many other groups in other times and places has borne a remarkable similarity to that of the Jews in a number of ways, though of course no two groups are the same in all ways. These similarities include their economic patterns, their social patterns, and the pattern of responses they have evoked from others.

Some observers have seen the resentments toward the middleman minorities as being due to their prosperity, but truly wealthy people have seldom provoked the kind of rage and bitterness directed at middleman minorities, even in times and places where most middlemen were far from rich. It is not just what these minorities have achieved, but how they have achieved it, that evokes suspicions and resentments.

Throughout most of the history of the human race, most people have made a living in agriculture — typically through arduous labor. The beginning of the industrial revolution meant, for most people, the transfer of the scene of that arduous labor from farm to factory. To such people, those who earned their livings without visible toil, with clean hands, and by simply selling things that others have produced at higher prices than the producers had charged, were ready targets of resentments, especially when these non-producers enjoyed a higher standard of living than those who worked in factories or on farms. It did not have to be a dramatically higher standard of living. Those nearby on the socioeconomic scale are often more hotly resented than distant rich people.

Just as those who believe that only workers who handle physical objects in the production process are “really” producing output, so they believe that middlemen who physically produce nothing are merely parasites who insert themselves gratuitously between the “real” producers and the consumers. If this crude misconception seems like too little to account for so many centuries of hostility and violence against so many groups that are typically non-violent themselves, it is nevertheless at the core of animosities that have endured even after most members of middleman minorities have moved on to professional careers in medicine, law, and other fields.

Even in the absence of differences in toil or reward, the seeming conjuring of wealth out of thin air, apparently by “overcharging” others or making them pay back more money than was lent, has been seen as parasitic activity, rather than a contribution to the well-being of the community.

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Social prerequisites

In the larger world, the economic role of a middleman minority, as distinguished from that of isolated individuals, implies various social patterns. For a particular minority group to become dominant in retailing or money-lending, whether at a high or a low economic level, means that their behavior must be fundamentally different from that of the surrounding population. Otherwise, the majority population would supply the majority of the middlemen in their own society. The crucial difference cannot be simply that the middleman minority has more money. Again and again, in different ages and in various countries, the middleman minority has arrived on the scene as destitute immigrants, owning virtually nothing and barely able to speak a few words of the language of the country.

This was the situation of the vast numbers of Eastern European Jews who arrived in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The greatest concentration of Jews in the world was on New York’s lower east side, where a 1908 study showed that about half the families 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 the same era, Chinese immigrants typically arrived in Southeast Asian countries in similar rock-bottom poverty. For example: “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 Sierra Leon and, in a later era, Korean immigrants and Vietnamese refugees to the United States. Whatever economic progress such people could make would come slowly and as a result of a long uphill struggle.

How could middleman minorities rise from such beginnings? More to the point, how could they eventually rise above the native-born population around them? Clearly, their values, their discipline, and their culture had to be different. Moreover, if they wanted their children to succeed, they had to make sure to keep these crucial intangible assets different. Accordingly, middlemen minorities around the world have distanced themselves and their children from social involvement with the very different people around them — whose differences were the basis of their livelihood — and have therefore often been accused of being “clannish.” The term has been applied not only to Jews in Europe and America but also, on the other side of the world, to Parsees of India — and to other middleman minorities in between.

Even when middlemen have lived in slums, their children have worked harder and succeeded more often in the same schools where other children were failing. That was not only the history of Jewish children in the United States but also of Chinese children in Southeast Asia, children of the Tamil middleman minority in Sri Lanka, of Korean immigrant children in the United States, and other offspring of middleman minorities elsewhere.

Middleman minorities, struggling up from the bottom, could not afford to have their children absorb the values of the society around them. Clannishness was all but inevitable.

This social differentness, compounded by social withdrawal from the larger society, creates additional sources of resentment and hostility faced by the middleman minority, besides the resentments growing out of the middleman economic role, as such. Yet, if the middleman minorities were not different, they would be of little use to others. People who do not save, for example, are able to get loans or to buy on credit from middleman minorities precisely because the later do save. If middleman minorities were as improvident as their customers or clients, they would have nothing to offer them and their businesses would be very short-lived.

The ability to save has played a key role in the rise of middleman minorities. An observer in India noted: “Gujaratis were rigorous savers, and their families worked endless hours and lived abstemiously to ensure their success.” The same thing could be said of the Jews, the Koreans, the Lebanese and many other middleman minorities. Although middleman minorities often began at the bottom, it was typically at the bottom in entrepreneurial activities, often as peddlers with packs on their backs, the more fortunate ones with pushcarts, and — usually somewhat later — small shops. 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.

According to a history of the Jews in the United States, “staggering numbers of Jews in the decades before and after the Civil War first experienced America through peddling,” which became “the nearly universal American Jewish male experience.” While Jewish peddlers worked as isolated individuals, their supplies came from a wider network:

Each peddler functioned in a long Jewish economic chain linking shopkeepers to Jewish wholesalers in the larger cities on whom they depended for credit. The Jewish peddler on the road served as the agent of the Jewish town shopkeeper and the big city jobber. This trading network depended on intracommunal trust. Wholesaler and peddler understood each other, spoke the same language, and knew the same people.

Jewish wholesalers in port cities from New York to San Francisco supplied Jewish peddlers with merchandise which they carried on their backs into the hinterlands — to farmers, miners, railroad crews and others working far from big cities and often in places where there were few or no stores. Peddlers of course also worked in cities and in every region of the country — from the Southern plantations to the California mining camps where Levi Strauss first began to sell the rugged trousers that were to make his name famous. While Jewish peddlers often worked in isolation among a non-Jewish population, they were nevertheless tied to a wider Jewish community, not only by commercial ties to Jewish wholesalers and manufacturers, but also to family members in Europe and America. They often saved money to pay for transatlantic passage for relatives in Europe to come and join them.

These savings at some point also allowed the peddler to set up a little shop in town, settle down, get married, and raise a family. The wives and children then worked in the same little business. Often the Jewish shopkeeper or other small businessman and his family live above or behind the store. Milton Friedman’s family lived this way when he was growing up, a pattern that he described as common among the immigrants to America in that era. Yet this pattern was by no means confined to Jews or to America. Similar economic and social patterns could be found among the Lebanese in Sierra Leone and among other middleman minorities in other parts of the world. The overseas Chinese storekeeper in the Philippines was likewise willing to live in a small corner of his store.

As among the Jews, Lebanese children were initiated into their family businesses in the United States, as were the children of other middleman minorities in other countries:

Whereas a minority of sons and daughters peddled at an early age, many, perhaps the majority of store owners’ children were prepared for life behind a counter. School-age children, when not in school, were at their parents’ elbows, waiting on customers, making change, stocking shelves, and imbibing the shrewdness of operating an independent business on meagre resources. They were inculcated with the parents’ work and thrift ethics and the lesson that family unity and self-denial was essential to the family’s goals.

Lebanese children were likewise initiated into their families’ stores and into its economic culture, in Sierra Lone.

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Early Lebanese businesses in the United States were noted for “opening 16 to 18 hours daily” utilizing the assistance of the whole family.” During the earlier rise of Chinese shopkeepers in Southeast Asia, sixteen-to-eighteen-hour days were also common, and market gardeners from India who settled in nineteenth-century South Africa, peddling produce, could be seen weeding their gardens by moonlight after hawking fruits and vegetables in the cities during the day.

While some observers might regard such determination and resourcefulness as admirable or inspiring, to others the rise of middleman minorities from poverty to prosperity has been like a slap across the face. If accepted as an achievement, it raises painful questions about others who have achieved nothing comparable, despite in some cases being initially more fortunate. Someone who was born rich represents no such assault on the ego and creates no such resentment or hostility. Anyone who can offer an alternative explanation of these middlemen’s successes — such as calling them “parasites” or “bloodsuckers” who have prospered at the expense of others — has been popular in many countries and some have built entire careers and whole movements on such popularity. When people are presented with the alternatives of hating themselves or hating others for their success, they seldom choose to hate themselves. More commonly they will listen to even inconsistent or irrational arguments against middlemen, as for example against the Chinese in the Philippines:

Pressed as to his case against the Chinese, the Filipino politician would say that the Chinese are too numerous, that they had more than half of the retail business in their hands, that they charged too high prices, cheated in weights and measures, and made high profits. Should it be objected that if this were so all the Filipino has to do was to open up a tienda of his own and put the Chinese out of business in the village, the politician would probably shift his ground. He would now say that the Chinese standard of living was is deplorably low; the owner of a Chinese tienda is willing to live in a small corner of his store, that he eats almost nothing and works day and night; so does his family and his assistant if he has one. The Chinese in Manila, he says, persistently disregard the eight-hour law. In fine, the charge now is that the Chinese runs his business with too little, not too great, overhead expenses and profits. If this is true, then the Chinese gives excellent service to the community as distributors. The Filipino can buy cheaply because the Chinese live so meagerly.

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20 Dec 2023