The distorting effects of the presence of the Jew on Western economic life

The tactics of this Jewish warfare was employment of money. His dispersion, his materialism, his finished cosmopolitanism, all precluded him from taking part in the heroic form of combat on the field, and he was thus confined to the war of lending, or refusing to lend, of bribing, of gaining legally enforcible power over important individuals. Since the early days when the Western Popes had forbade Christians to take interest, the Jew had enjoyed a favored economic position. Cromwell brought them back to England when he decided there was “not enough money in the land.” Theirs were the largest banking houses in the West in the 17th century. The Bank of England itself was founded on concessions granted to Ali-ben-Israel by Cromwell. This bank proceeded to give 4½ per cent on deposits and re-lent to the Government at 8 per cent.

This tactic had not been freely available to him before the middle of the millennium. Scholastic philosophy, the laws of the Church, the Spirit of the Age, the power of the feudal barons to rob him — all were against the Jew. St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, in the 13th century, taught that trade was to be despised, as being the creature of desire for gain, which tends to become measureless, that the taking of interest was injustice, that the Jews should be deprived of the money they had taken through usury, and forced to work and give up their lust for gain. Various Popes directed bulls against the economic practices, the materialism, the rising influence, of the Jew.

But the Soul of the West itself was slowly externalizing. The decisive turning-point of 1789 was prepared for by centuries of slow changes. The old inwardness of the West, which gave to the feudal centuries their self-evident spiritual cohesion, gradually was undermined by new conflicts especially those of town versus country, of trade-nobility versus landnobility, of materialism against the spirit of religion. The Reformation was a schism in the whole soul of the West. In it appeared as a symbol of the coming triumph of materialism the system of Calvinism. Calvin taught the sanctity of economic activity; he sanctioned usury; he interpreted wealth as a sign of Election to salvation. This spirit was abroad; Henry VIII legalized usury in England in 1545. The old Western doctrine of the sinfulness of usury was rejected.

This represented liberation for the Jew, accessibility to power, even if disguised, invisible power. In the Reformation time, the Jew was found everywhere fighting against the Church, and, as between Luther and Calvin, supporting Calvin, for Luther also rejected usury. The victory of Puritanism in England, an adaptation of Calvinism, gave the Jew favorable conditions. The Puritan writer Baxter even recognized a religious  duty to choose the more gainful of two economic choices. To choose the less gainful was to disregard the will of God. This atmosphere protected and increased the Jew in his possessions, so that none of the old robbery by monarchs and barons could occur again.

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The distorting effects of the presence of the Jew on Western economic life from the very beginning have been comprehensively set forth by the outstanding European economic thinker Werner Sombart in his Jews and Modern Capitalism. After the awakening within the Western soul of a stronger interest in the material world, the Jew became more secure, more indispensable, and more powerful. Even if he had wished to go into callings other than usury, they were closed to him, for the Western guilds admitted only Christians. His original economic superiority was thus maintained, and highly-placed Westerners in many cases became dependent on him. They in turn could not attack him, for the new commercial laws, reflecting the growing spirit of trade, protected him in his possessions, his bonds, and his contracts.

The story of Shylock shows the dual picture of the Jew — socially cringing on the Rialto, but emerging as a lion in the courtroom. It was the West that cast him into these two roles. It expected him to play a purely subordinate part, and at the same time it gave him a path to a leading part.

The more materialistic the Culture became, the more it approached the Jew, and the greater was his advantage. The West gradually abandoned its exclusiveness, but he retained his, invisible to the West.

The epoch is the appearance of Rationalism, the radical affirmation of Materialism. Around 1750, the new ideas are ascendant in the West: “freedom,” “humanity,” Deism, opposition to religion and to absolutism, “democracy,” enthusiasm for “the people,” belief in the goodness of human nature, “Return to Nature.” Reason challenges tradition, and slowly the old, highly-refined Western structures of thought and statecraft go down. Lessing, in this period, put the Jew into a leading role in his play Nathan der Weise, what a century before would have been ridiculous. The intellectuals became enthusiastic for the ghetto man with his highly refined caste system, his private religion existing side by side with his external materialism. He was the cosmopolitan and, as such, seemed to the Western intellectuals to be pointing toward the Western future. For the first and last time, Westerners and Jews worked together on Cultural tasks — the spreading of the new ideas. The Cultural distortion now spread to the political life. The form of the French Revolution was due to Culture-distortion. The particular epoch that this great episode marks is, of course, an organic Western development. The distortion is manifest in these particular facts, occurring in this particular way, in this particular time and place. Otherwise put — the distortion occurred on the surface of history, not in its depths, for there distortion cannot occur. A human analogy is offered in incarceration: it distorts the surface of a man’s life, by changing all the facts of it, but it does not touch his inner development, physical or spiritual. Distortion is twisting, warping, frustration; it is not killing, nor can it kill. It is a chronic illness, a running sore, a waste, an impurity in the Cultural life-stream.

Francis Parker Yockey
Imperium