Economic antisemitism, the representation of Jews as financial exploiters and economic parasites, was one of the oldest and most persistent strands of European antisemitism. The Nazis absorbed and radicalised this tradition, using it alongside racial ideology and political conspiracy theory to construct a comprehensive case for persecution. It served a particular function in the context of economic crisis: it offered a named culprit for impoverishment and uncertainty.
Medieval origins and modern development
The association between Jews and money-lending had specific historical origins. Medieval Christian canon law prohibited usury, the charging of interest, and Jewish communities were among the few permitted to fill the economic niche this prohibition created. By the nineteenth century, as restrictions on Jewish economic participation were lifted across Western Europe, Jews entered banking, trade, journalism, and law in numbers disproportionate to their population share. Antisemites interpreted this not as the predictable consequence of emancipation but as evidence of Jewish economic power and exploitation.
The figure of the Jewish banker or financier became a central image of nineteenth-century antisemitic literature. The Rothschild family, the most prominent Jewish banking dynasty in Europe, served as a focus for fantasies of financial manipulation that bore no relation to the actual operations of European capital markets. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the antisemitic forgery circulated from 1903 onwards, presented Jewish economic power as part of a coordinated conspiracy for world domination.
The Nazi version
The Nazis developed economic antisemitism in two apparently contradictory directions simultaneously. Jews were presented as the hidden power behind both capitalism and Communism: the financiers who exploited the worker through the banking system, and the revolutionaries who sought to destroy the nation through class conflict. The contradiction was not a problem for Nazi propaganda because the argument was not economic analysis but racial demonology: Jews were simply the hidden force behind whatever the audience feared most.
In practice this meant targeting Jews as a class in the economy through legislation. The April 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses was the first organised economic attack. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 included provisions against Jewish participation in German economic life. The November 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht was followed immediately by the Aryanisation decrees, which compulsorily transferred Jewish-owned businesses to non-Jewish ownership at below-market prices. By 1939 Jews had been almost entirely excluded from the German economy. Their assets had been systematically confiscated through a combination of Aryanisation, emigration taxes, and direct seizure.
The function of the scapegoat
The economic scapegoating of Jews served a specific political function in the context of Weimar Germany’s economic crises. The hyperinflation of 1923, which wiped out middle-class savings, and the mass unemployment of the Depression after 1929 created conditions of acute economic anxiety. The Nazi movement offered those experiencing this anxiety a specific, named enemy: not impersonal market forces but a identifiable group who could be held responsible and against whom action could be taken. This was not an explanation for the economic crisis. It was a political tool that converted economic grievance into racial hatred.
The confiscation of Jewish property was also materially important to the regime. The proceeds of Aryanisation, the emigration taxes, and the wartime looting of Jewish assets across occupied Europe funded significant parts of the German war effort. Economic antisemitism was both ideology and policy, and the two were inseparable.
See also
- The Nuremberg Laws
- The Long Roots of European Antisemitism
- The Racial Ideology, Aryan Supremacy and Pseudo-Science
- The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, HarperCollins, 1997
- Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews 1933-1943, University Press of New England, 1989
- Harold James, The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War Against the Jews, Cambridge University Press, 2001
- Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power, Allen Lane, 2005
- Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Allen Lane, 2006