Well, welcome to the Lew Church, the annual Lew Church Memorial Lecture in Religion and
Economics.
We're pleased to have this lecture every year as a result of a generous gift from the
Lew Church Memorial Foundation, Dr. Robert Hemholt, Chairman.
Lew Church was a Florida businessman and a champion of liberty.
He started out as a swimming pool cleaner, eventually built a great business in swimming
He was a dedicated libertarian all his life, and he understood that government was a threat not only to entrepreneurship, to prosperity, and to freedom, but to everything that was good.
Today the lecturer, the Lew Church lecturer, is Dr. David Gordon.
David is an historian, a philosopher, really is an economist too. He got his PhD at UCLA in intellectual history. He's the editor of the Mises Review, I might say one of the most feared book reviewers in America.
He's the author or the editor of eight books. He's a senior fellow at the Mises Institute.
Institute, and I'm just going to tell one story related to David. After Murray Rothbard's
death, Joey asked me to go through all his papers and other belongings in Las Vegas and
ship back what was necessary to New York. And in going through the letters, I came upon
one that Murray had written in 1979, and he was saying he'd been at a conference, but
by far the most exciting thing that happened to him was to meet this young man, David Gordon.
He said, David is the closest thing to a universal genius that I've ever encountered.
And when Murray Rothbard says that about you, that's something quite extraordinary because
all of us have gotten to know David, know Murray was not exaggerating.
So today, it's great to have David talk about Judaism and capitalism in the Lew Church Memorial
Lecture.
Dr. Gordon.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's a great honor to be asked to give the Lew Church Lecture.
I cannot help thinking, though, that as I'm talking about Judaism and capitalism, it might
have been more appropriate to call it this year the Lew Synagogue Lecture.
The subject Judaism and Capitalism needs to be addressed in two related but separate parts.
In one of these, the question up for discussion is, what is the relation between Judaism taken
as a body of religious doctrine and capitalism?
In the other, the issue that confronts us is, what is the relation between Jews taken
as a particular ethnic group and capitalism?
Obviously, the two questions are related. One way of identifying at least some Jews is as those who practice the Jewish religion.
Certainly, many of those ethnically Jewish are estranged from their ancestral faith.
Nevertheless, that there exists a connection between the two parts of our topic is clear.
I propose to consider both of these parts in the remarks that follow.
I shall take the capitalism in our title as not requiring an extended venture in definition
or analysis.
By it I intend nothing controversial.
I mean the economic system in place over much of the world since the Industrial Revolution
characterized for the most part by private ownership of the means of production.
I should note that contemporary left libertarians often use capitalism to designate a partnership
between government and big business in which they contrast with a truly free market.
That is not the usage of capitalism that I have in mind here.
The theories that endeavored to connect Judaism and capitalism often, though not invariably,
spring from distaste for one or both of the paired terms.
This was notoriously the case in Karl Marx's famous essay on the Jewish question written
in 1844.
In this early work, Marx said that capitalism was Jewish in that both, both capitalism and
Judaism were egoistic.
In his important book, Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Muller says, I quote, were Jews
egoistic as Bauer had charged?
By Bauer he's referring to Bruno Bauer, who was one of the left Hegelians who had been
a friend of Marx's who had written a book saying that Jews shouldn't be accorded political
rights in Germany until they renounced Judaism because Judaism was a particularistic religion
that really was inconsistent with civil society.
So, Mueller says, were Jews egoistic as Bauer had charged?
Certainly, Marx answered.
But in bourgeois society, everyone was egoistic.
Marx embraces all of the traditional negative characterizations of the Jew repeated by Bauer
and for good measure adds a few of his own.
But he does so in order to stigmatize market activity as such.
Where Marx's strategy is to endorse every negative characterization of market activity
that Christians associated with Jews, but to insist that those qualities have now come
to characterize society as a whole, very much including Christians, that's the end of the
quote.
Marx's argument is a simple one.
Capitalism is based on the pursuit of profit.
Each person is supposed to act to secure his self-interest. This makes universal the trader
ethics characteristic since the Middle Ages of Jewish peddlers and moneylenders. Marx
of course did not advance this view as a purely theoretical account. He deplored this sort
of society. In it, human beings lived alienated both from one another and from their own essence.
Marx expresses his argument in unmistakable terms. Criticizing the right of private property
in the French Constitution of 1793, he says, the right of man to private property is therefore
the right to enjoy one's property and to dispose of it at one's discretion, without
Without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest.
This individual liberty and its application form the basis of civil society.
It makes everyone see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier
to it."
So what Marx is saying here is that the idea of rights, of having a right to property is
is really one that expresses hostility between one person and another because in property
you're saying this belongs to me and not to you and Marx thought that was not really
a way of reflecting a true harmony between people.
It is precisely the attitude toward others here described that according to Marx constitutes
The Essence of Judaism
And now in a famous quotation he says
What is the secular basis of Judaism?
Practical needs self-interest
What is the worldly religion of a Jew?
Huxtering
What is his worldly god?
Money
Marx didn't intend that as very complimentary
How are we to evaluate Marx's argument?
It suffers from two main problems. First, Marx fails to establish a connection between selfish egoistic behavior and the Jewish religion.
Why is egoistic behavior distinctively Jewish? It is no doubt true that Judaism looks favorably on a person's pursuit of his own interests.
In the famous saying of Rabbi Hillel in the first chapter of the Ethics of Our Fathers,
that's a famous compilation of rabbinical sayings that's included in the Talmud,
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
But an approval of self-interest, as expressed in this saying by Rabbi Hillel, by no means
signifies a selfish disregard for the well-being of others.
One may only recall the continuation of Hillel's saying, If I am only for myself, what am I?
One could easily amass other citations on the role of regard for others in charity in
Judaism, but one more must here suffice.
Jewish sources often view the principal sin of Sodom, the city that God destroyed by firing
and Brimstone as Lack of Charity. As Rabbi Meir Tamari notes in his authoritative exposition
of Jewish law regarding economics, this quotation from Rabbi Tamari, the Mishnah, the Mishnah
is the first part of the Talmud, defined one who said, what's yours is mine and what's
What's mine is mine is an evil man. He who says what's yours is yours and what's mine
is yours is a righteous person. But what's yours is yours and what's mine is mine. Some
say that is the mark of Sodom. So go over what this account of the mission is saying.
What's criticized here as the mark of Sodom is not sort of the obviously evil attitude
where some would say, what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine, but here a strict
adherence to your own property where you're not going to be charitable to others, so to
say, what's mine is mine and what yours is yours, where you refuse all charity is disapproved
So it seems like Marx was clearly mistaken to think that egoism is in this sense of selfish behavior is intrinsic or essential to Judaism.
A defender of Marx might reply by recalling a distinction made earlier.
At the outset, I distinguish the claim that Judaism as a body of doctrine is related to capitalism from the claim that Jews as a group are so related.
One is saying there's something in the body of doctrine that's led to capitalism or is identical with capitalism.
of Capitalism, has the objection just raised to Marx's account ignored this distinction?
Perhaps Marx is not best taken as making a point about Jewish religious doctrine, rather
Is he not claiming that the behavior found in the economic activities of certain Jews,
namely the traders and money lenders, best expresses the essence of capitalism?
I just add here, just incidentally, a difficulty with both readings and Marx, which is if Judaism is capitalism,
How can it be at the same time true that Judaism gave rise to capitalism?
Obviously, Marx does not use is here to denote strict identity.
But to return to this defense, possible defense of Marx, that he was really not talking about
Jewish religion, but rather about particular Jews, namely the traders and moneylenders,
If this is what Marx had in mind, it is no more satisfactory than the earlier version
of his claim.
What is supposed to be specifically Jewish about either selling or lending money, Marx
nowhere informs us.
A more deep-seated failing besets Marx's account of Judaism and capitalism.
Marx characterizes both capitalism and Judaism as based on self-interest, practical need,
selling and money. Surely it would be difficult to find throughout recorded history many large-scale
and complex societies in which these features did not play a prominent role. Contrary to
Marx, neither self-interest nor the pursuit of money is distinctively either capitalist
or Jewish.
I should say this is a point that Max Weber realized when he investigated the origins
of capitalism in his famous work Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
What he said is, well, we find trading throughout history, but what we have to do is account
what's distinctive about capitalism.
So Weber is really making the same point I'm making here against Marx, that Marx hasn't
come up with anything distinctive about capitalism when he's talking about people trading or
being interested in pursuit of their own self-interest.
In seeking to exercise self-interest as a feature of the human condition, Marx is beguiled
Followed by a fantasy in which human beings abandon all antagonisms.
You remember the passage I quoted from Marxist criticism of the 1793 French Constitution.
He says that the idea of talking about an individual right is suggesting that one person
is opposed to someone else and he thinks in a truly human society that wouldn't be a feature.
And Rothbard remarks, to Marx, any differences between men and therefore any specialization
in the division of labor is a contradiction.
And the communist goal is to replace that contradiction with harmony among all.
This means that to the Marxists, any individual differences, any diversity among men are contradictions
is to be stamped out and replaced by the uniformity of the anthill.
And quotation, Murray Rothbard had always had a characteristically excellent way of
getting to the heart of an issue.
I think it comes out very well in that quotation.
Jerry Muller, the one I quoted earlier on Marx and the Jewish question, has insightfully
We've already drawn attention to the importance of Marx's essay, but in one respect he goes
too far.
Muller says, for on the question of the Jews contains in embryo most of the subsequent
themes of Marx's critique of capitalism.
If Marx had one big idea, it was that capitalism was the rule of money, itself the expression
of greed.
The rule of capital was fundamentally immoral because it deprived the vast majority in a capitalist society of their humanity, requiring labor that enriched a few capitalists while impoverishing the workers physically and spiritually.
So Muller thinks that Marx's basic criticism of capitalism was that it's a society based
on money-making in which people's humanity is trampled on, so it's fundamentally a moral
criticism of capitalism.
Muller here fundamentally misconceives Marxism.
Marx in Das Kapital has principally in mind a scientific criticism of capitalism based
primarily on the labor theory of value.
Of course, when I say scientific criticism, I don't mean the criticism is correct, the
labor theory of value is wrong, but what Marx thought it was correct, and he intended what
he said as a scientific criticism.
The book, Das Kapital, contains fierce moral invective directed against capitalism, some
of which makes reference to Jewish themes, but this is rhetoric rather than the core
of the book.
One such reference to a Jewish theme, incidentally, occurs in the famous passage of chapter 24
of Das Kapital, which says, accumulate, accumulate, that is Moses and the prophets.
The Jewish reference here is not just the obvious one to Moses, but the entire expression,
Moses and the prophets, refers to two out of the three divisions in the Jewish arrangement
of the books of the Bible.
Marx is saying that for the capitalist accumulation is the Bible.
I should mention that in Das Kapital Marx by no means confines his invective against
religion to remarks about the Jews.
For example, he says referring to the 39 articles of the Church of England, which is the defining
body of doctrine for the Anglican Church, he says the Church of England would sooner
The crucial point that Marx intended his project to science rather than ethics was made long
ago by Werner Zumbart, whom we shall be discussing later.
Before turning from Marx on Capitalism and the Jews, I allow myself one conjecture.
Marx said that the essence of capitalism was egoism. Could awareness of this claim have
influenced the young Ayn Rand, who after all grew up in Soviet Russia, where the writings
of Marx were abundantly available in Russian translation? I ask because she of course also
thought that capitalism was in essence egoism, though she embraced exactly what Marx deplored
and ignored his identification of Judaism with capitalism.
What lessons should we draw from the failure of Marx's attempt to link Judaism with capitalism?
Should we abandon altogether all inquiries along the same lines as fundamentally misguided?
Such a course was urged by Ludwig von Mises.
He remarks in Socialism,
Today the Islamic and Jewish religions are dead.
They offer their adherents nothing more than a ritual.
They know how to prescribe prayers and fasts, certain foods, circumcision and the rest,
but that is all.
They offer nothing to the mind.
They completely despiritualize all they teach and preach are legal forms and external rule.
They lock their follower into a cage of traditional usages in which he is often hardly able to
breathe, but for his inner soul they have no message.
They suppress the soul instead of elevating it and saving it.
For many centuries in Islam, for nearly 2000 years in Jewry, there have been no new religious
movements.
Today, the religion of the Jews is just as it was when the Talmud was drawn up.
So to make obvious how this would relate to our topic, since capitalism is a feature of
of the Modern World, Mises would have to hold that Judaism is irrelevant to it, since he
thinks that Judaism has nothing to say to the modern world, so it couldn't have anything
to say to capitalism, one of the essential features of the modern world.
I do not think that Mises' remarks by themselves settle the questions at issue, even if one
and accepts Mises' highly dubious characterization of Judaism as pure ritual devoid of appeal to the mind.
Mises' comments do not exclude the possibility that legal regulations of the kinds Mises described in such unflattering terms
influence the development of capitalism, either by their content or by the qualities of mind and character
that people who adhere to the rituals tended to develop.
These are no more than possibilities. Where these regulations in fact had such effect is another question.
So if we don't accept that Mises' remarks say that we shouldn't consider the question of Judaism and capitalism at all,
I think I want to go on and we want to turn now to another attempt to connect Judaism and capitalism
In this one, the most significant of all, Werner Zumbarg's The Jews in Modern Capitalism, which appeared in 1911.
Zumbarg conforms to the pattern mentioned earlier, that those who ascribe to the Jews primary responsibility for capitalism tend to be hostile to both Judaism and capitalism.
In Zumbarg's case, this is hardly surprising.
Zonbart began his academic career as a convinced Marxist. In fact, Friedrich Engels took Zonbart very seriously.
Remember, after the only volume of Das Kapital was published in Marx's lifetime, the first volume, which came out in 1867,
And there appeared to be a contradiction in the volume between how the labor theory of
value said that prices, what prices would be and what actual market prices were, that
actual market prices didn't conform to their labor values.
So Marx's attempt to deal with that came out only when the volume three of the book
was published by Engels. But before that happened, various writers tried to come up with solutions
in what they thought how Marx might have solved this problem. Zombart was one of these and
Engels praised Zombart for what he had come up with, even though he didn't get the same
analysis as the one Marx actually had, but Engels thought it was significant. So as I
Say, he began his career as a convinced Marxist.
Though he veered to the right, he remained a socialist to the end, albeit of a peculiar
kind.
And at the end of his career, he was somewhat of a supporter of Hitler, although exactly
how much is disputed, he favored a return to an anti-industrial, sort of an agricultural
Like Marx, he stressed the Jewish involvement in trade as the essence of capitalism.
The Jews, with their trader ethic, had succeeded in transforming the more static values of
the Middle Ages.
The broad outlines of this theory will already be familiar from our discussion of Marx's
essay, but Zumbart developed the position with enormously greater learning in the Jewish
sources and in Jewish history. Zumbart himself says that Marx in his essay, quoting Zumbart,
looked deep into the Jewish soul. After mentioning two other writers, he says, what has been
said about the Jewish spirit since these men, all Jews, wrote is either a repetition of
of what they said or a distortion of the truth.
His favorable reference to Marx's essay should be sufficient to suggest that Zombart was
an unfriendly critic of Judaism, since of course Marx's essay is very hostile to Judaism.
But Milton Friedman descends.
He writes, Zoumbart's book has had in general a highly unfavorable reception, and indeed
something of an aura of antisemitism has come to be attributed to it.
There is nothing in the book itself to justify any charge of antisemitism, though there certainly
is in Zoumbart's writing and behavior several decades later, several decades later, what
Friedman has, I suggest, been deceived by his own strong approval for the behavior and attitudes that Zombart depicts.
Zombart was not praising the Jews, for example, when he ascribed to them the traitor's mentality.
The great strength of his book is that he goes beyond the generalities to be found in Marx's essay and offers specific evidence from Jewish religious sources in history.
He points out, for example, that though a Jew is forbidden to lend money at interest to another Jew, he is permitted, and according to some opinions, required to do so to non-Jews.
The majority opinion is that a Jew is permitted to lend money to non-Jews, but there is a view that a Jew is required to.
Not that he has to lend money to non-Jews, but if he does do so, he has to charge interest.
The ban on taking...
Jewish law sees nothing intrinsically wrong with lending an interest.
The ban on taking interest from fellow Jews stems from the bonds that ought to link fellow
believers.
Incidentally, the prohibition on taking interest from a fellow Jew is more than a negative
requirement, more than saying you're not allowed to take interest.
It is a positive duty to lend money without interest to Jews in need, and free loan societies
have long been a part of the Jewish community.
Zombart expresses the point about taking interest from non-Jews in typically colorful language.
If you read Zumbart, he's much easier to read than Max Weber, for example, tends to
be very dull and abstract.
Zumbart is a very colorful writer who always gives a great many historical examples.
This is what he says, he says, now think of the position in which the pious Jew and the
pious Christian respectively found themselves in the period in which money lending first
became a need in Europe in which eventually gave birth to capitalism.
The good Christian who had been addicted to usury was filled with remorse as he lay dying
ready at the eleventh hour to cast from him the ill-gotten gains which scorched his soul.
And you just say, when he's talking about usury, that doesn't mean as people use it
Today, Charging Exorbitant Rates of Interest, Usury refers to interest of any kind, so usury
is a synonym for interest.
So somebody just talked about how the Christian who lent money at interest would be remorseful
when he's dying.
And then he says, in the Good Jew, in the evening of his days, he gazed upon his well-filled
Zombart does not see the law regarding interest as standing alone.
To the contrary, he maintains that Judaism is a religion of calculative rationality,
peculiarly suited to success under capitalism.
He says, the kinship between Judaism and Caplan is further illustrated by the legally regulated
relationship.
I had almost said the business-like connection, except that the term has a disagreeable connotation
between God and Israel.
I should just say there that's a very interesting rhetorical device.
The contract usually sets forth that man is rewarded for duties performed and punished for duties neglected.
Two consequences must of necessity follow.
First, a constant weighing up of a loss and gain which any action needs must bring.
Banking, and secondly, a complicated scheme of bookkeeping as it were for each individual
person.
So Zumbart is saying in Judaism, great deal of emphasis is given on requirements that
the believer is supposed to do or prohibitions and you have to, when the believer is judged,
his good deeds are weighed against his bad deeds.
So, according to Zombart, this encouraged a calculating frame of mind which he thinks is essential to capitalism.
Zombart makes clear his evaluation of Judaism and capitalism in a passage that evidently escaped Milton Friedman's attention.
In all its reasoning it, referring to Jewish religion, appeals to us as a creation of the intellect,
A thing of thought and purpose projected into the world of organisms,
destined to destroy and to conquer nature's realm and to reign itself in her stead.
Just so capitalism, just so does capitalism appear on the scene,
like the Jewish religion, an alien element in the midst of a natural created world,
like it to something schemed and planned in the midst of teeming life.
This was a theme of German Romanticism, the abstract, alienated intellect was contrasted with the natural world.
So the view was the intellect, if it was taken apart from the natural world,
was a destructive force, and probably the greatest expression of this was in a book by the German philosopher Ludwig Clawges that had the spirit as the adversary of soul, so the spirit would be the rational intellect, would be the adversary of the soul, which would be acting in accord with nature.
What is one to make of all this? The main problem with Zonbart's thesis is obvious.
Though he is right that calculative rationality is integral to capitalism, this disposition is by no means peculiar to Jews.
If so, capitalism cannot be considered Jewish in essence, though Zonbart may well be right that certain traits of mind equip Jews to prosper under capitalism.
Zonbart could hardly ignore this point.
Only a few years before his own book, Max Weber had issued his famous The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that I mentioned before.
In that book, Weber ascribed some of the same traits that Zonbart thought especially Jewish
to the Puritans.
Faber suggested the Puritans were very interested in calculating their good deeds against their
bad deeds.
It cannot be said that Zombart's way of coping with the objection is entirely satisfactory.
He writes, I, let's say Zombart, have already mentioned that Max Faber's study of the importance
of Protestantism for the capitalistic system was the impetus that sent me to consider the
The Importance of a Jew, and now here is his answer to the claim, well, isn't Puritanism, doesn't that have the same calculative rationality that you're saying is Jewish, and his answer is, Puritanism is Judaism.
Zombart rightly stressed the importance for capitalism of lending money at interest, but
allowing this practice is hardly peculiar to Judaism.
It is great an Austrian perspective on the history of economic thought, Rothbard remarks.
Calvin's main contributions to the usury question was in having the courage to dump
the prohibition altogether.
To Calvin, then, usury is perfectly licit, provided it is not charged in loans to the
poor who would be hurt by such payment.
Rothbard continues about a later Calvinist.
The honor of putting the final boot to the usury prohibition belongs to Claudius Salmasius,
who finished off this embarrassing remnant of the mountainous eras of the past.
In short, Salmasius pointed out that money lending was a business like any other and
like other businesses was entitled to charge a market price.
Salmasius also had the courage to point out that there were no valid arguments against
usury either by divine or natural law.
Incidentally, you may recall, Salmasius was the object of an attack by one of the greatest
of All Masters of Invective, John Milton. I urge people to look up what Milton said
about Salmaseous. No doubt, Zombart would respond by declaring Calvin and Salmaseous
to be Jews. We have so far considered and found largely inadequate attempts to connect
Judaism with Capitalism, but we have also to examine the views of those who find a Jewish
impetus behind opposition to capitalism, especially at the beginning of the 20th century, a common
view held at the Bolshevik Revolution was largely a Jewish enterprise. Winston Churchill
wrote in 1920, there is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism
and the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for
the most part atheistic Jews. It is certainly a great one. It probably outweighs all others.
With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover,
the principal inspiration driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. It has come out since
Churchill wrote that Lenin did have Jewish ancestry in his background, so what he shouldn't
have said with the notable exception of Lenin.
Churchill by no means thought that all Jews were Bolsheviks.
To the contrary, he contrasted the internationalist Jews behind world revolution with nationalist
Jews, for example, Zionists.
The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionists and the Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.
Churchill was but one of many writers of his time with similar views.
As he notes in his article, he had read Nesta Webster, a popular historian of a time who studied conspiracy theories of revolution in among other books,
The French Revolution, A Study in Democracy, World Revolution, and Secret Societies and
Subversive Movement.
Contrary to general belief, Webster did not defend the authenticity of the notorious protocol
to be elders of Zion.
She discusses the question extensively in her book, The Secret Societies, but she doesn't
say it was authentic.
Russia was probably the formal source for the view that communism was Jewish.
Backers of the theory, like Churchill, appealed to the fact that Jews occupied a high number
of positions in the Bolshevik government.
The Irish priest, Father Denis Fahy, published a pamphlet, The Rulers of Russia, containing
long lists of Bolsheviks with Jewish-sounding names.
In Germany, the Nazi writer Alfred Rosenberg sometimes read out such lists over the radio,
which led to the joke that he considered that he thought everybody named Rosenberg was Jewish
except him.
In recent years, the German writer Johannes von Biberstein has devoted a long book to
and the topic Jewish Bolshevism, Myth and Reality.
Before we turn to evaluate this theory, it should be noted that it is possible, however
unlikely it may seem, for someone to hold this view, namely the view that the Jews are
behind communism, the main opposition to capitalism, together with the position we earlier examined
that Jews are responsible for capitalism.
This is more than a bare possibility, Hitler, for one, believed precisely this.
The main failing of the view that connects Judaism and communism is a simple one.
It confuses two questions.
First, why, looking at the historical circumstances that led to the Russian Revolution, were many
Jews attracted to revolution?
And is there anything intrinsic to Judaism that leads to support for communism?
The first question is readily answered when one recalls the long history of anti-Jewish
measures taken by the Tsarist Russian government in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
A similar appeal to particular circumstances would, I think, explain such other instances
of Jewish Support for Socialist Revolutionary Groups as the historical record discloses.
Absent the existence of special circumstances, there is no marked Jewish support for the
overthrow of capitalism. Jerry Muller is right when he says, Milton Friedman's contention
that Jews vilified capitalism while profiting from it is highly distorted. To the extent
that the Jews identified themselves with socialism, it was largely a phenomenon of Eastern European
Jews and their immediate descendants in the years from the late 19th century through the
1930s. And even if one is inclined to think the association between Jews and communism
greater than Muller allows, it is clear that any such affinity has its limit. Even during
In the period when Jewish radicalism was at its height, most Jews were not communists
and most communists were not Jews. It would be difficult to consider the Chinese communist
movement an instance of Jewish Bolshevism. Although I have read a book by an anti-Semitic
To show a close intellectual connection between Judaism and communism would require some derivation
of communist ideas from Jewish religious doctrine, and that is not in the offing.
True enough, radicals have appealed to Jewish texts to support their views.
Michael Walser has traced the role of the Exodus narrative on revolutionary thought.
He says, I, Walser, have found the Exodus almost everywhere, often in unsuspected places.
It is central to the communist theology or anti-theology of Ernst Bloch, who was a Marxist
writer who wrote on utopias.
It is the subject of a book called Moses in Red by Lincoln Steffens, published in 1926,
A detailed account of Israel's political struggles in the wilderness in the defense of Leninist politics.
And in his book, he lists many more such instances of the influence of the Exodus story.
Others have found in the Jewish prophets an inspiration for socialist schemes for reform of the world.
A once famous book of the 1920s, A Religion of Truth, Justice and Peace by Isadora Singer,
The editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia's standard reference work argued that the world leadership
of a social justice movement is offered to the Jew. Singer based his argument on an appeal
to the words of Amos, Isaiah, Micah and other prophets. Walzer and Singer, to the contrary
notwithstanding, the claim that Judaism teaches socialism or communism as a general political
Program cannot succeed. The basic reason such an attempt must fail is the same one that
dooms the theories that link Judaism and capitalism. The religious precepts of Judaism are meant
to apply only to Jews. They do not constitute an ethical system that prescribes a best social
Order for All of Humanity, and to avert an objection, the Jewish sources did not prescribe
socialism for the Jewish community either, quite the contrary, the Jewish sources strongly
support private property, although the system elaborated for the Jewish community is not
Identical to Free Market Capitalism either, but the basic point is that the Jewish laws
are intended only for the Jewish community.
As Meir Tamari, the rabbi quoted earlier, who has written the authoritative account
of Jewish law and economics, says, for centuries, Jews enjoyed autonomy in many countries and
maintained rabbinic codes of law which regulate and govern their economic activity, thereby
by preserving its specifically Jewish characteristics.
The Bible and the homiletical literature established an ethical moral framework within which Jewish
communities operated.
So he's saying these are laws just for the Jewish community.
I conclude then that although Mises radically underrated the intellectual merit of the Jewish
sources, he was not far from the truth in thinking that there are no direct connections
has to be drawn between Judaism and Capitalism. Thank you.