Is Wealth a Jewish Value?

Essentialism as Impediment to Understanding

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

On March 5, 2008, Philip Weiss probably overstated in his blog entry 'Commentary' Says Wealth Is a Jewish Value (see below) when he wrote, "It appears that Commentary is advancing finance as a Jewish value. I believe Commentary is right."

While some Jews of the twenty-first century may put wealth before everything else, the first century Tanna Hanina ben Dosa, who was the Talmudic Hasid par excellence stated, "What is mine is yours, and what is yours is your own."

According the extra-Biblical literature of the Greco-Roman period, the sect of Hasidim (not connected with modern Eastern European Hasidim) were opponents of the Seleucids and joined the Maccabean rebellion.  This Hasidic tradition may have survived into the late Geonic period, and the letters of the Gaon Solomon ben Yehuda (11th century CE) suggest an interaction between Rabbinic Jewish descendants of Talmudic Hasidism and Muslim ascetic pietism or Sufism.

Developing Muslim ideas of ascetic theology are then borrowed back into Rabbinic Judaism via authors like Bahya ibn Pakuda, whose book entitled The Duties of the Heart belongs almost completely to the Muslim pietist heritage. Traditional Jews were retranslating and studying Bahya's work as part of their practice of Judaism at least until 1919.

Geonic ascetic pietism was already in competition with social-economic developments that brought pre-Rabbinic communities of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages into the slave trade. This highly profitable business remained an important source of Jewish riches during the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. (See Followup: Origins of Modern Jewry, Les origines des juifs actuels, and The Origins of Modern Jewry.)

 

By the fifteenth and sixteenth century, the extremely successful Jewish merchant class in Commonwealth Poland managed almost completely to co-opt the Rabbinic leadership, and wealth began to trump piety or learning in importance in the Polish Jewish culture sphere.

Eastern European Hassidism developed in the eighteenth century as a reaction to domination of Polish Jewish society by the combined merchant-scholar class, whose rapacious use of communal taxes increased as the collapsing Polish government tried to extract ever larger amounts of money from the Jewish community through the communal leaders.

Eventually, the Hassidic communities developed their own wealthy class while the draft of Jews into the Czarist army opened up new fissures in Jewish society when Jewish communal leaders began to employ kinderkhapper (kidnappers of children) to force the children of the poor into military service in lieu of those of the rich.

Among traditional religious Jews the Musar (Ethics) Movement took a leading role in fighting such outrageous exploitation of the poor by the rich, but the decline of religious faith led an increasing number of community dissenters into Marxist, socialist and revolutionary radicalism as more Jews became Russianized without full acceptance into Russian society. Radical Jews, who were a minority among Jews in the Czarist Empire and among Russian Jewish emigrants to the USA, focused on social justice instead of wealth.

Marxist radical Jews made it possible for the Russian Communist Party to steal the Russian Revolution and to consolidate the Soviet Union. American radical Jews produced a tremendous legacy in social activism and civil rights in the USA.

The Soviet government began to treat Soviet Jews with suspicion after the creation of the State of Israel while American Jewish radicalism was a victim of the Red Scare and the Rosenberg Trial.

The collapse of American and Russian Jewish radicalism did not necessarily mean that American Jews had to elevate wealth to the primary Jewish value, but the Israeli government and Israel advocacy groups seem to have made an effort since the 1950s to pick winners in media and other industries. Probably criminal collusion between wealthy American Jews, Israel advocacy groups, and the Israeli government has created a hyper-wealthy transnational elite Zionist Jewish political class that simultaneous intimidates American national political leaders and keeps them in a state of dependency.  Because this political class needs foot soldiers, it is providing funding to the organized Jewish community to indoctrinate American Jews to serve the elite's interests in the mistaken belief that they are acting to save Israel from all sorts of existential threats.*

The organized Jewish community is so afraid of the application of concepts of social justice to Palestinians that it has made writing Jewish radicalism out of official histories of the American Jewish community a high priority of the indoctrination program.. 

Hazony's article, which Phil mentions below, seems to be part of this effort to rewrite American Jewish history through an attack on Heschel, who serves as the official Jewish "hero" of the Civil Rights Movement.

The campaign constitutes poetic justice because Heschel's extremist bigotry against Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and Christians (Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation, Israel, An Echo of Eternity) should really have put him beyond the pale of acceptability as any sort of a positive American Jewish historical protagonist.

 

In any case, the dominance of the worship of mammon among modern American Jews is hardly a deterministic outcome of the development of the American Jewish community but results from conscious manipulation that excludes other intellectual currents like pious asceticism or radical commitment to social justice from modern Jewish consciousness.

 

The current system of control that the hyper-wealthy transnational Zionist elite exerts over American Jews is at least as vulnerable as the predecessor alliance of Jewish merchants and Rabbinic scholarly class became in nineteenth century Russian Poland.

 

Not only are the new mechanisms of control quite fragile with the proper sorts of pressure and reeducation, but the hyper-wealthy elite is aware of this problem and is desperately cultivating groups like Christian Zionists to supplement or replace American Jews as foot soldiers in its web of control over the American political cultural system. Because none of the elite's ongoing compensatory programs look particularly promising and generate considerable resistance within the existing Zionist Jewish power base, Palestinians, Americans and the world have good reason to hope that Zionist power in the USA can be broken.

Note

*) In other words Jews that would disdain a political program if the Bronfmans, the Krafts, Wexner, or Adelson proposed it fall over themselves in obedience if "profession Jewish leaders" from the organized Jewish community advocate the selfsame program as necessary to the survival of the Jewish state.

'Commentary' Says Wealth Is a Jewish Value

I always feel a twinge of guilt when I do it, but I often post news and views about Jewish wealth because I think it is such an important factor in the Jewish presence in American life. The guilt comes from the strong Jewish feeling I have that I might be endangering my people or playing into ancient stereotypes. I push this feeling down because a, I'm in my 50s and am sick of censoring recurrent ideas in my thinking, b, the feeling is anti-journalistic and c, it seems pretty selfish to me to worry about possible (and unlikely) persecution of one's own people when we are talking about wars in the Middle East that have produced real and present suffering on a tremendous scale...

Anyway, I noticed the following in David Hazony's attack on Rabbi Heschel in Commentary:

Heschel wound up advancing naïve or even harmful public positions, frequently echoing the most worn clichés of the universalist Left.

One example concerns his inveterate suspicion of well-earned wealth, a suspicion ungrounded in Jewish sources. Once, in a classroom discussion about whether a disused synagogue in New York City should be sold to a church or to a bank, he said: "If it is sold to a bank then it will become a temple of capitalism; if sold to a church, it will continue to be a temple of God." Thus did Heschel dismiss the one institution that had probably done more than any other to preserve Jewish economic life through centuries of persecution and deprivation—in favor of an institution whose record with regard to his people was, to say the least, more complicated.

It appears that Commentary is advancing finance as a Jewish value. I believe Commentary is right. As I remember, Paul Johnson's book A History of the Jews states that wealth and learning were the highest values in the shtetl. Benjamin Ginsberg has written (in the Fatal Embrace) that Jewish financiers helped create the modern state. Wealthy Jews helped spring my ancestors from Russia, as I once exulted here (based on Gary Dean Best's amazing book, To Free a People, as well as a biography of Jacob Schiff). Those rich Jews were able to do so because they had access to the White House in the late 1800s. Soon after, some of those same Jewish financiers helped defeat Russia in the Russian-Japanese war by denying Russia war loans; and there is evidence that Jewish financial gifts played a role in Britain's decision to issue the Balfour Declaration in 1917. It is inarguable that those gifts have played a role in the elevation of neoconservative ideas in the last 10 years, from The New Republic to the American Enterprise Institute to the New York Sun, etc. And of course in the power of the Israel lobby.

The great spiritual challenge to my people, and to Commentary, is what role those gifts ought to play when we are not living "in persecution and deprivation" but are principals in American society.

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