George Gilder - The Israel Test

For all its special features and extreme manifestations, anti-Semitism is a reflection of the hatred toward successful middlemen, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, lenders, bankers, financiers, and other capitalists that is visible everywhere whenever an identifiable set of outsiders outperforms the rest of the population in the economy. This is true whether the offending excellence comes from the Kikuyu in Kenya, the Ibo and the Yoruba in Nigeria, the overseas Indians and whites in Uganda and Zimbabwe, the Lebanese in West Africa, South America, and around the world, the Parsis in India, the Indian Gujaratis in South and East Africa, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and above all — the more than 30 million overseas Chinese in Indonesia, Malaysia, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution reports that in Indonesia overseas Chinese constituted only five percent of the population, but they controlled 70 percent of private domestic capital and ran three-quarters of the nation’s top two hundred businesses. Their economic dominance — and their repeated victimization in ghastly massacres — prompts Sowell to comment: “Although the overseas Chinese have long been known as the ‘Jews of Southeast Asia,’ perhaps Jews might more aptly be called the overseas Chinese of Europe.”

Sowell has written several books that document this pattern of hostility toward “middleman minorities” in fascinating detail and has explained its causes and effects with convincing authority. The role of wealth-creation and trade, with its rigorous disciplines, linguistic virtuosity, and accounting prowess, means that “middleman minorities must be very different from their customers.” These groups, “their wealth inexplicable, their superiority intolerable,” typically arouse hatred from competing intellectuals. “It is not usually the masses of the people who most resent the more productive people in their midst. More commonly, it is the intelligentsia, who may with sufficiently sustained effort spread their own resentments to others.”

The culture of economic advance “and the social withdrawal needed to preserve this differentness in their children,” Sowell writes, “leave the middleman minorities vulnerable to charges of ‘clannishness’ by political and other demagogues…. These accusations can exploit racial, religious, or other differences, but this is not to say that such differences are the fundamental reason for the hostility.”

It is a mistake for Prager and Telushkin to ignore the persistence and universality of this phenomenon and to claim some special, more exalted, and elusive source of anti-Semitism, while half-denying the obvious and massively disproportionate representation of Jews in almost every index of human achievement. This evasive argument may reduce the number of available allies and divert attention from the real problem.

Prager and Telushkin are so immersed in the world of the Left and its perspectives that their economic analysis treats wealth or capitalist prowess as negatives, as potential sources of anti-Semitism from labor movements and the poor and their advocates, rather than as the best remedies for anti-Semitism.

Capitalism overthrows theories of zero-sum economics and dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest. Thus, as in the United States (except for the Darwinian academic arena, where professors angle for grants from the outside), anti-Semitism withers in wealthy capitalist countries. It waxes in Socialist regimes where Jews may arouse resentment by their agility in finding economic niches among the interstices of bureaucracies, tax collections, political pork fests, and crony capitalism. As the elder Netanyahu’s great history shows, an oft-repeated pattern has the Jews serving as the most skilled and trusted servants of the central (or even absentee) government. Then, as the power of hated king or conqueror wanes, he abandons the Jews, who are left to the mercies of the enraged mob.

Static Socialist or feudalistic systems, particularly when oil-rich and politically controlled, favor a conspiratorial view of history and economics. Anti-Semitism is chiefly a zero-sum disease.

Christians may well gag at Prager and Telushkin’s accounts of the depraved anti-Semitism of Martin Luther, various miscreant cardinals, and rabid crusaders, as capitalists will retch at the views of Henry Ford. And all the charges are true. But, putting it as gently as I can, I would demur at the retrospective application of modern standards of morality to the long history of the human parade through the treacherous and bloodthirsty epochs of war, poverty, religious feuds, plagues, famines, and vicious ethnic struggles. The world has been at war for millennia, with hatred and death pandemic on all sides. During World War I, an entire generation comprising approximately 2 0 million young European men was lost. After World War I, an additional 29 million more Europeans died because of an influenza epidemic alone. Until the ascent of capitalism and trade, there was no alternative to joining in the zero-sum struggles for existence against enemies everywhere.

Feminists look back on that appalling panorama and see nothing but misogynist oppression, rape, and murder. Blacks look back and see virtually nothing but lynching and slavery. Native Americans see nothing but genocidal aggression by whites. Third Worlders everywhere see a history of colonialist and imperialist depredations. Armenians and Kurds give harrowing accounts of a history of murderous attacks that killed millions of their forbears. The Irish see an inexorable saga of predatory and vicious Englishmen, callously starving their ancestors to death. American Southerners tell of the loss of a generation of young men and the devastation of Dixie in the “War between the States.” The Muslims tell of rampant brutalities of the Crusades. All of them cherish their own acute grievances and sagas of victimization. All now have been taught to couch their historic suffering, whenever possible and often even when implausible, in the terms of “genocide.”

It is unseemly, as well as tactically questionable, for American Jews, the richest people on earth, to grapple with Armenians and Rwandan Tutsis, Palestinian Arabs and U.S. blacks, Sudanese and Native Americans to corner the trump cards of victimization. Although Jews are objectively correct that the Holocaust was unique in its diabolical details and genocidal reach, current-day Jews will get nowhere pointing to the suffering of their forebears. Every ethnic group has its own tale of woe, because the entire history of the world is woebegone. For most of human history, average longevity was under thirty years. For the vast majority of humans of all ethnic groups, nearly all previous history seemed essentially hopeless in any terms except the physical struggles for Darwinian group survival. You hated your enemies from other groups because most of the time they sought to kill you. You had no vision of the successes of others as your own opportunity.

Until the dominance of capitalism, with its positive spirals of mutual gain, the prevailing regime was a Darwinian zero-sum game in which groups fought for survival against their neighbors. As Walter Lippmann eloquently explained in The Good Society , capitalism for the first time opened a vista of mutually enriching enterprise, with the good fortune of others opening opportunities for all. The Golden Rule, he said, was transformed from an idealistic vision of heaven into a practical agenda. From Poor Richard’s Almanack to rich Andrew Carnegie’s autobiographical parables, all were rediscovering the edifying insights of the Author of Proverbs.

Yes, “Jew-hatred is unique,” as Prager and Telushkin’s first chapter proclaims. Jews are unique. Anti-Semitism subjects this uniquely gifted people to a crude and particularly incendiary manifestation of the immemorial hatreds that have afflicted the world for millennia. Judaism, however, perhaps more than any other religion, favors capitalist activity and provides a rigorous moral framework for it. It is based on a monotheistic affirmation that God is good and will prevail through transcending envy and hatred and zero-sum fantasies. Judaism can be plausibly interpreted as affirming the possibilities of creativity and collaboration on the frontiers of a capitalist economy.