Jew Can't Be Serious

Now let's examine the strange behaviour of Arlen Specter (D-Pennsylvania), Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut), Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware), and Michael Bennet (D-Colorado). All of them Jewish, like me, but who voted today against the interests of American consumers and helped enshrine some of the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes in the process.

Let me explain:

Ever since the 4th Century AD when the Christian church said that clergy could not partake in transactions that charged interest (and the century after when the Church banned all Christians from charging interest), Jews have been tied to the idea of loaning money at high premiums. Jews were not constrained by the New Testament's perceived admonition against money lending for profit, and as a result were utilized by Christian (and similarly interest-prohibited Islamic) kingdoms to raise the capital for their empires that they themselves couldn't. In the Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were prohibited from engaging in manual labor, this was intended to press Jews into the finance industry so that Gentiles could take out loans (charging interest was prohibited, paying it allowed). And even then the Jews didn't exactly get a fair shake (from the online Jewish Encyclopedia):

Christian rulers gradually saw the advantage of having a class of men like the Jews who could supply capital for their use without being liable to excommunication, and the money trade of western Europe by this means fell into the hands of the Jews. They were freed from all competition,and could therefore charge very high interest, and, indeed, were obliged to do so owing to the insecure tenure of their property. In almost every instance where large amounts were acquired by Jews through usurious transactions the property thus acquired fell either during their life or upon their death into the hands of the king.

Gentiles' views of Jews have as a result of this history often in the past fallen pray to stereotypes of the money-obsessed Jew, charging unfair rates, and controlling the banking industry. This has been a bedrock of classical anti-Semitism in everything from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," to Nazi propaganda, to KKK hatred, to drunken Mel Gibson rants. Charging exorbitant interest rates on loans was given the term "usury" in the 14th century, and Jews were routinely referred to as "usurers" such as in Ogden's well-known poem/parable The Hangman: "The third he took — we had all heard tell — was a usurer and infidel, And: "What," said the Hangman, "have you to do with the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"" Even now, several dictionaries list Shylock, the Merchant of Venice himself, as a synonym for a usurer.

Today the word "usury" persists most commonly in "usury laws," state regulations which prevent the charging of exorbitant interest rates by businesses based in their state. The word usury's current usage is typically devoid of any direct association with Jews, but the association between Jews and interest rates, and more broadly between Jews and money, remains stubbornly intact.

Which brings me back to the four Jewish senators at the top of the post: Specter, Lieberman, Kaufman, and Bennet. Yesterday the Senate voted on H.R.627 "Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights Act of 2009" a bill that would have specifically established a "national consumer credit usury rate." Currently there is no national consumer credit usury rate, instead each state has the aforementioned power to determine a maximum rate of interest that companies operating within state lines may charge consumers. Credit card companies are now freely operating in states like Delaware with NO usury laws, which has resulted in everyone I know being up to their eyeballs in credit card debt.

Specter, Lieberman, Kaufman and Bennet all voted AGAINST the bill that would have helped put an end to usury in the consumer credit market. The other ten Jewish Senators voted for the measure.

So way to knock down those Jews-are-usurer stereotypes guys, and way to look out for the proverbial little guy during our great recession. The bill failed in the Senate 33-60, but the Shylock stereotype lives on.