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"Jews know how to make money"
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice helped
perpetuate the idea that the Jew is totally motivated by greed but a
little appreciated fact is that during the Middle Ages the Jews,
excluded from the European craft guilds, were encouraged to become
money lenders with interest rates fixed by the crown in anticipation of
considerable revenue in tax. The church forbade its members to engage
in the practice but those Gentiles who did charge interest rates
charged hundreds of times in excess of their Jewish counterparts. As
things
stand today there are no figures to suggest that the Jewish population
of Britain is better off financially than its Gentile neighbours. What
is certain is that Jews who do succeed in business or commerce are
noticed due to the fact that they are in a minority. Ironically because
of their high visibility the minority tends to be regarded as a
majority!
The other traditional characteristic of Jewishness
epitomised by Shakespeare’s Shylock is meanness. However, in the London
telephone directory there are listed over fifteen specifically Jewish
charitable and philanthropic organisations, the full number in Britain
far exceeding this figure. While the traditional concept of the "tight"
Jew is played up, Jews such as Godfrey Bradman who underwrote the
£2 million legal costs of claimants against the manufacturers of
Opren, or Cyril Stein who helped collect £40,000 from El Al
passengers for Moran Kadosh’s liver transplant, go unnoticed.
Philanthropic Jews do not usually wear their Jewishness or their
generosity on their sleeves.
"The Jews control everything."
Conspiracy theories are not new. In 1932 The
Fundamentalist magazine reviewed an exposé of the evils of
the film industry, The Devil’s Camera. The review made
reference to the "Jew-dominated film industry", implying strongly that
the Jews were responsible for the decline in public morals which was
encouraged, as they saw it, by the cinema. In the eighties, playwright
Jim Allen and his producer Ken Loach claimed that the "international
Zionist conspiracy" had infiltrated British broadcasting, publishing
and theatre thus preventing the wider presentation of their
anti-Zionist play Perdition.
A myth has persisted throughout this century that
the Jews are secretly plotting to take control of the world through the
control of the economic systems, government and the media. One
publication that has done more than any other to fuel this form of
Judaeophobia is The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,
the purported minutes of a secret council of Jewish businessmen who
plan to take over the world economy. This notorious forgery greatly
assisted in preparing the ground for the pogroms in Czarist Russia and
the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
The facts stand out in stark contrast to these
claims. In Jews and Money Gerald Krefetz points out that of 56
major businesses in the USA that could be controlled by a minority of
shareholders, three have substantial Jewish investment. In 1978 Senator
William Proxmire (at that time head of the US Senate Banking Committee)
revealed that rather than being controlled by Jews, Catholics or
negroes, the US banks were "controlled by the most Waspish [White
Anglo-Saxon Protestant] elements".
That there is a conspiracy behind scenes of world
history no Christian should doubt. But the conspiracy is not Jewish.
Behind the scenes of world history is the "prince of the power of the
air; the spirit who now works in the children of disobedience". What is
more, we are not ignorant of his devices. His machinations against the
Jews have been evident from the time of Pharaoh through the Crusades,
the Inquisition and the Holocaust to the present day. We must not fall
into the trap of somehow regarding the Jewish people as incapable of
doing wrong, neither must we despise, fear or hate them. We are to love
the Jews and express that love by praying for them and working for
their salvation.
This article first appeared in the Autumn 1987 issue
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