March 26, 2010 | 3:43 pm

Jews, Money and History - An End to Conspiratorial Fantasies

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Quentin Metsys, “The Money Changer and His Wife” (1514)

I will readily admit that the title of Jerry Z. Muller’s book, “Capitalism and the Jews” (Princeton University Press: $24.95) is a bit off-putting.  Indeed, the author himself understands how the phrase resonates for the Jewish reader.“Even today, some Jews regard the public discussion of Jews and capitalism as intrinsically impolitic, as if conspiratorial fantasies about Jews and money can be eliminated by prudent silence,” writes Muller. “For these reasons, the exploration of Jews and capitalism has tended to be left to apologists, ideologues, and anti-Semites.”

But Muller, a professor of history at the Catholic University of America and a contributor to the Wall Street Journal and The New Republic, among other publications, also insists that it is impossible to study the history of the Jewish people without examining and understanding the role that Jews have played over the centuries in commerce and capitalism, starting with money-lending in the Middle Ages and culminating in the vast family fortunes that turned the name “Rothschild” into a trope for money and power.

So Muller courageously unpacks the history of Jews and money in the four elegant essays that are showcased in his book. The first one focuses on “The Long Shadow of Usury,” one of the hot-button issues of classical anti-Semitism but also a fact of Jewish life since the Dark Ages. The second essay ponders why some Jews have been so contemptuous of capitalism while others Jews have been so successful at reaping its rewards.  The third essay examines the radical response to capitalism among Jews who embraced socialism. And the final essay shows how nationalism — and, by extension, the Jewish form of nationalism known as Zionism — can be seen as “an inevitable development, deeply intertwined with many of the characteristic processes of modernity, and above all with the politics of capitalist economic transformation.”

Muller is temperate and thoughtful but he is not afraid to conjure up and confront all of the ghosts who have haunted Jewish history. “The true God of the Jews is money, Marx assures his readers, and like the jealous God of the Bible, who would tolerate no lesser gods before him, money tolerates no other relations.”  Thus did Marx provide the anti-Semites, “from Richard Wagner down to the Nazi ideologist Gottfried Feder,” with a cudgel to use against the Jews: “[W]ith a twist of the argument one could suggest that the task was to rescue capitalism from its ‘Jewish’ aspects, and from the Jews themselves.”

He also reprises the argument of the late economist Milton Friedman that “the element of capitalism that has most benefited the Jews is free competition,” a credo of capitalism that “counteracts the forces of anti-Semitic prejudice.”  Muller explains that “as the development of modern capitalism created new economic opportunities in Europe and its colonial offshoots, Jews were disproportionately successful at seizing them.”  And he turns Marx’s ugly pronouncement on its head: “In an economic sense, and in the long run, capitalism was good for the Jews,” writes Muller. “And the Jews were good for capitalism.”

“Capitalism and the Jews” is a work of scholarship, but it’s an especially accessible and illuminating one.  It is a book that every Jewish capitalist, actual or aspiring, ought to read and ponder.  Indeed, Muller offers what can be regarded as a midrash on money. “Get wisdom,” we read in Proverbs 4:7.  “Yea, with all thy getting, get understanding.”

Jonathan Kirsch, book editor of The Jewish Journal, can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

March 20, 2010 | 12:04 pm

“A Wall in Palestine” - A Book That Cannot Be Safely Ignored

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

Ramat Shlomo is in the headlines today, but the next flashpoint may be the security barrier between Israel and the West Bank that is scheduled for completion in 2010.

That’s the subject of “A Wall in Palestine” by French journalist Rene Backmann (Picador: $16.00, 264 pps.). A best-seller when first published in France in 2006, and newly issued in the United States in an English translation by A. Kaiser, the book will be profoundly off-putting to many Jewish readers, but it makes a point that cannot be safely ignored — the wall is intended to be a barrier against suicide bombers, but it is also an obstacle to peace.

The wall is yet another painful example of how Israel can’t seem to win the war for hearts and minds.  Confronted with the appalling carnage that resulted from “martyr operations” in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israel resorted to the seemingly simple and obvious measure of making it harder for bombers and snipers to hit their targets. But critics like Backmann condemn the security barrier as an act of aggression and oppression against the Palestinian Arabs, and he speaks for many Israelis and Arabs who feel the same way.

“I still can’t believe that what the entire world saw fall down yesterday in Berlin,” writes Backmann, “could be a solution tomorrow in Jerusalem.”

“A Wall in Palestine” is a work of history, investigative reporting and human portraiture, and it affords us a rare opportunity to see the human face of the Arab-Israeli conflict. “My windows used to open on the rising sun,” says a man named Elie Yacoub, whose house is now only steps from the wall.  “They now open on this monster.”

From the perspective of its architects and builders, as Backmann allows us to see, the wall is meant to encourage the peace process. “We are only holding on to it for the duration of the barrier’s mission, which is to get rid of terrorism,” says Netzah Mashiah, the civil engineer who was appointed by Ariel Sharon to supervise its construction in 2002. “We are working from the principle that this barrier is temporary. And that the length of time it stays up depends on how the Palestinians work toward peace. So, it can stay here five minutes or five decades.”

But the real impact of the wall is far more consequential than the view from Elie Yacoub’s window. The wall was intended to create a “zone of separation” between Israel and the West Bank, and that’s why it is called the “apartheid wall” by Arab activists. “Simple things have become complicated, ordinary activities impossible, and there are many new constraints and humiliations,” writes Backmann about life in the shadow of the wall. And he insists that the “meanderings” of the security barrier were “conceived and constructed to protect the settlements, to give them room to develop and grow, and to create territorial integrity with Israel.”

For Backmann, the victims of the wall are the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs who do not carry out acts of terrorism. “Contrary to what one may assume about a people living under occupation, the Palestinians are infinitely patient,” he writes. “Waiting at checkpoints, at vehicle pull-overs and verifications, at barrier doors; waiting at the Civil Administration office for travel permits; waiting for release of prisoners; waiting for the creation of the Palestinian State.  Their lives consist of endless waiting.”

Of course, the Israelis are waiting, too.  They are waiting for the assurances and conditions that they deem necessary before taking the existential risk that seems to be required in order to make peace with their adversaries.  That day appears to be far off, and Backmann’s book makes a good case that the wall is not bringing it any closer.

Jonathan Kirsch, book editor of The Jewish Journal, can be reached at books@jewishjournal.com.

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March 6, 2010 | 12:03 pm

Rock, Silk and the End of the World

Posted by Jonathan Kirsch

John McPhee (Photo by Peter Cook)

If you share my fascination with what human beings have imagined about the beginning and ending of the world, you will find plenty to ponder in the Bible. But there are other and more recent texts to consider, including John McPhee’s masterpiece, “Annals of the Former World,” a “deep history” of the earth as it is has been studied not by theologians but geologists.

“With your arms spread wide . . . to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life,” writes McPhee in my favorite passage.  “n a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history” — an era of only a few thousand years that can be seen as “a small bright sparkle at the end of time.”