E. Michael Jones on Jews and Usury

                  by Edmund Connelly, Ph. D.

I find it charming when I read or hear of current Alt Right writers who tell us that they came to the Jewish Question “three years ago” or that “Five years ago I was a flaming liberal,” which implies that they had no idea there was a Jewish Question.

Don’t get me wrong  —  I’m pleased when anyone at any time finally realizes there is a Jewish Question. I believe it is the central issue of our times and I welcome all the company we can get.

In contrast, I discovered the Jewish Question on my own before I had even graduated from college in the mid-1980s. For me, it was simply a process of observation. While for over two decades after that I fought conventional wisdom on the topic and had to struggle mightily to realize that most Jewish writers had little interest in the “truth” regarding real Jews and their behavior, I gradually grasped some hard-earned insights into the situation, which I routinely try to share here on TOO and in the print journal TOQ.

Today I aim to praise one of the four modern American scholars who have had a major influence on my thinking when it comes to Jews. These men are Albert Lindemann (Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews ), John Murray Cuddihy (The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle With Modernity), our own Kevin MacDonald, and Catholic firebrand E. Michael Jones.

Today’s column discusses E. Michael Jones and his vast writing on Jews. I’ve written about Jones at least twice for the Occidental crowd, first here on TOO in late 2008 and after that in a book review in The Occidental Quarterly. The book in question was his magisterial The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, a book which absolutely should be on serious people’s shelves along with CofC.

To introduce possible new TOO readers to Dr. Jones, I’ll crib from my intro to the 2008 TOO entry:

Anyone who has followed the writing career of Catholic iconoclast E. Michael Jones will likely agree that his writings on Jews over the last half decade have been little short of incendiary. Thus the Internet site Fringe Watchclaims that Jones “represents one of the foremost proponents of ‘religious’ anti-Semitism in Catholic circles.”

Jones’ major vehicle for airing his views on Jews is his magazine Culture Wars, which in recent years has run cover stories such as “Judaizing: Then and Now,” “The Converso Problem: Then and Now,” “Shylock Comes to Notre Dame,” and “Too Many Yarmulkes: Abortion and the Ethnic Double Standard.” He then packaged these arguments in a monumental book called The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History(2008).

The ADL also gives Jones a rousing endorsement, writing on their site that

Michael Jones is an anti-Semitic Catholic writer who promotes the view that Jews are dedicated to propagating and perpetrating attacks on the Catholic Church and moral standards, social stability, and political order throughout the world. He portrays the Jewish religion as inherently treacherous and belligerent towards Christianity. He describes Jews as “outlaws and subversives [who use] religion as a cover for social revolution,” and claims that Judaism possesses “a particularly malignant spirit.” . . .

He also blames Jews for Bolshevism, Freemasonry, and an alleged contemporary “Jewish takeover of American culture.” Jones reaches for tenuous connections to paint “the Jews” as inherently wicked and prone to colluding openly or secretly to threaten other populations around them.

Jones, however, makes an extremely impressive case for his assertions — in his lectures, in his Culture Wars articles and most certainly in The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. So, as usual, I’ll dismiss the ADL’s claims as wrong.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Jones went to work in the art world, where he found a plethora of Jewish art dealers. After earning a Ph.D., he was hired as a tenure-track professor at St. Mary’s College, a women’s university associated with Notre Dame. After a year of supporting the Church’s official position on abortion, Jones was let go from his job.

This threw Jones into a career of independent publishing, which has resulted in Fidelity Magazine in the first year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. After fifteen years, this magazine became the current Culture Wars magazine, which appears monthly, both electronically and in print. Independent publishing seems well suited for Jones, for he has written prodigiously over the years, in his magazine and also in numerous books about American culture, descriptions of which can be found on the Culture Wars site or on Amazon.com.

I have found Jones to be a welcome maverick when it comes to discussing key issues in American life. In fact, his tendency toward controversy — along with linking surprising areas of culture — reminds me a lot of writer Camille Paglia. Because Paglia does not touch on Jewish issues, however, Jones’ work, in my view, rises far above hers since Jewish power and behavior are the 800-pound gorilla in the life of America. There are ample reasons to avoid this topic, of course, for Jews and Jewish groups have a terrifying array of ways to punish those who notice Jews in the wrong way, but Jones, backed by his deep faith, is fearless in this regard, for which we should all be thankful.

Before beginning discussion of Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict between Labor and Usury(2014), I would ask readers to click on the links above for my previous writing on Jones and read them in private as background to discussion of the current book. While The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit (JRS) is an indispensable tool in understanding what is happening in the epic battle between Jews and others, Barren Metalacts more as a footnote to the former, as odd as this may sound. I say odd because JRS weighs in at exactly 1200 pages while Barren Metal reaches an astonishing 1456 pages.

The subtitle contains the word capitalism because it is as pertinent now as it has been for the last several hundred years (and more). Many of us sense that all is not well when it comes to the confusing topic of economic structures  —  and the sense that many people are getting cheated to greater or lesser degrees thanks to the way capitalism is being applied. Also, as we see from the subtitle of the book, usury is central to the problems in capitalism because usury is the fulcrum on which capitalism turns (in Jones’ opinion).

Notice that Jones does not include the word ‘Jews’ in the title of the book. I suppose that is fair because much of the book deals with non-Jewish Europeans who played critical roles in their respective economies at various times in history. Still, there is no escaping the fact that Jews are central to the argument of the book, particularly from Chapter 64, “Napoleon Emancipates the Jews,” onward. From there the pronounced Jewish role crescendos to the point that, were the book divided in two and the second book to begin with Chapter 64, the sub-title would have to change to “Jews, Capitalism, and Usury.”

In the second decade of the 21st century, would anyone be surprised by such a title?

Another reason the lack of the word “Jews” in the title should not mislead readers is obvious: JRS was all about Jews. Further, any reader of his monthly magazine Culture Wars will know full well that Jones addresses Jews and Jewish behavior constantly, honestly, intelligently, morally, insistently, humorously, caustically, and, finally, religiously (in both senses of the word). In short, the writings (and podcasting) of Dr. Jones are now inseparable from Jews.

Here’s the message I took away from Barren Metal: “Banking is magic that works” (p. 128). I think that’s a fascinating insight, phrased in a sublime way. It really speaks to where we are today in the world, with central banks  —  including  the Federal Reserve  —  exercising so much power over most of the globe. And if you’re wondering what Jews have to do with banking and usury, Barren Metal is the book for you.

A competing phrase for summing up Barren Metal could be “Capitalism is state-sponsored usury.” This is hardly a new idea, since German writer Werner Sombart explored the concept in depth in Jews and Modern Capitalism(1911). Jones describes Sombart’s idea thus: “capitalism is the philosophical and political sanctification of usury. Because money-lending, according to Sombart, is ‘one of the most important roots of capitalism,’ capitalism ‘derived its most important characteristics from money-lending’” (20).

Having looked at many instances of usury in the Western world, Jones argues that “usury … is the fundamental economic fact in the liberal state, and all political arrangements must deal with the unbridgeable chasm it creates. The creditor, who is on the positive side of usury, will prosper; the debtor who is on the negative side of the usurious equation, will sink into unrepayable debt and penury” (909).

This problem was one of the greatest reasons for the rise of modern anti-Semitism in Europe over a century ago, which Jones unpacks. For instance, he points to Wilhelm Marr, “the patriarch of anti-Semitism” (interestingly, three of his four wives were Jewesses), whose racial animus toward Jews may have masked an economic cause, which was usury. Marr wrote:

The burning question of our day in our Parliaments . . . is usury. . . . The political correctness of our Judified society helps it to sail by the reef which is the usury question, and as a result, poor folk from every class become the victims of the Usurers and their corrupt German assistants, who are only too happy to earn 20 to 30 percent per month off of the misery of the poor. . . . In the meantime the cancer of usury continues to eat away at the social fabric, and the animosity against the Jews grows by the hour . . . so that an explosion can no longer be avoided. (1165)

In the chapter “Andrew Jackson and the Monster Bank,” Jones argues that “Jackson’s repeated use of the word ‘monster’  is the key which unlocks the door to understanding his stake in this fight. A monster is something unnatural. Usury is monstrous because it is contra naturam. The bank war of the 1830s arose because neither Andrew Jackson nor his opponent Nicholas Biddle could articulate the real issue which had plagued the American System from its inception in the mind of Alexander Hamilton, namely, usury” (930).

For Jones, this is the crux of the problem.

Once the state admits the liceity of usurious contracts, state-sponsored usury insures that everyone, including the state itself, eventually gets saddled with unrepayable debt. With liquidity gone, the state allows the usurers (and the elected representatives they have put in office) to loot labor to pay off the usury burden. That means layoffs, reduced pay, outsourcing, pension fund looting , and all of the other methods that have created the anger and frustration behind the protests in Zuccotti Park [i.e., Occupy Wall Street]. . . . This looting is, of course, to no avail because no force on earth can keep up with compound interest, which is the heart of usury. (19–20)

Needless to say, such a system is in direct contrast with the Catholic Church’s ban on usury, and much of the first half of Barren Metal discusses this ban and the ongoing attempts in Europe to circumvent or repeal the ban. From the fall of Rome, this Catholic ban on usury was enforced because the Church treated economics “as if God mattered.” According to this doctrine, God gave men faith and reason to pursue success in this life, but as the Middle Ages gave way to succeeding eras, God began to matter less and less, and Jews moved in to fill the void. Jones’ lengthy description of this epic transformation is fascinating, allowing Jones to once again show the incredible breadth of his knowledge.

The flip side of this unhealthy usurious equation is one that abides by the moral law and puts labor above other economic systems, for “there is only one use that will turn credit into wealth, and that is the application of labor.” Human labor, Jones maintains, “is the only thing that can create value out of money, capital, or God’s creation,” an argument that allows Jones to justify the title of the book: Barren Metal. For this reason, Jones refers to Dante’s claim that sodomy and usury were equally evil: sodomites make sterile what should be fertile, while usurers make fertile what should be sterile  —  gold, money. Lambs may in time reproduce but gold coins should not; labor is required to create wealth. As Jones shows, Jews consistently use their wealth to create more wealth through the labor of others.

The many chapters covering the period between the French Revolution and Bismarck’s consolidation of German states strike me as a superb overview of the role economics played in that era. In particular, the way Jones describes the period’s belief in alchemy was important to me. We may forget that alchemy held a privileged position in Europe far longer than we now believe. Sir Isaac Newton, for one, was an alchemist. In fact, “From the time of Roger Bacon to the Medicis to John Dee . . . to George Soros in the present, alchemy has exerted its unique attraction over the mind of many who are interested in getting out from under the necessity of labor as the road to wealth” (855). Jones’ familiarity with the literature and music of the time beautifully ties together the belief in alchemy and the leading concerns of the day, as seen, for example, in Goethe’s Faust. (Jones is fluent in German and quotes from Faust without providing translations.)

Jones later links the Goethe chapter with one on Wagner, whose Das Rheingold, Jones believes, is Wagner’s “post mortem on the Revolution of 1848.” More than that, however, is Jones belief that Das Rheingold is “the profoundest meditation to date on the metaphysical roots of capitalism.” I read this chapter when it appeared in Culture Wars and I read it twice in Barren Metal, but it is so good that I want to read it again.

In this long chapter, Jones parses The Ring Cycle to argue that “Wagner captures the world’s bewilderment at how the gold standard actually worked by constantly referring to the ring’s magical power” (1069). Repeating a theme about banking as magic, Jones shows how through holding gold, banks can again and again lend out the “money,” which earns interest, while keeping the gold in the bank all along. This was shown in Goetterdaemmerung, where Alberich keeps the gold. “Alberich can get it all back again, just as the Bank of England knows that it can draw all of the gold that went out in loans back from India and America by the simple manipulation of interest rates. Usury, in other words, ensures that the gold will end up back in Alberich’s hands just as inexorably as it ensures that it will end up back in the vaults of the Bank of England” (1071).

In my view, the climax of Barren Metal comes toward the end in the chapter on the Vatican-approved, Jesuit-run periodical Civiltà Cattolica that in 1890 forthrightly addressed the Jewish Question. Far more than modern America, the European financial scandals of the era were directly and openly linked to Jews, as Jones notes. In 1882, for example, the Union Generale bank collapsed and Jews were explicitly blamed for it. Its former head, for one, fumed that the Jewish financial power of the day was “not content with the billions which had come into its coffers for fifty years . . . not content with the monopoly which it exercises on nine-tenths at least of all Europe’s financial affairs.” This power, the man claimed, had “set out to destroy the Union Generale.”

Famed writer Emile Zola also published a novel at the time in which a fictional young Catholic banker seethed at Jewish deceit. The character, Zola writes,

is overwhelmed with an “inextinguishable hatred” for “that accursed race which no longer has its own country, no longer has its own prince, which lives parasitically in the home of nations, feigning to obey the law but in reality only obeying its own God of theft, of blood, of anger .  .  . fulfilling everywhere its mission of ferocious conquest, to lie in wait for its prey, suck the blood out of everyone, [and] grow fat on the life of others.” (1169)

(See my column “Culture of Deceit” for more on such European scandals of the day.)

The Catholic periodical Civiltà Cattolica traced Jewish influence back to the French Revolution, employing Abbe Augustin Barruel’s Memoirs Illustrating the History of Freemasonry in its description of Jewish financial power. The argument, in short, is that the French Revolution allowed the emancipation of the Jews, who were then able to foist their immoral ways (according to Christian mores) onto European society, and “the main way that the Jews achieved their hegemony over Christian societies was through ‘their insatiable appetite for enriching themselves via usury’” (1178). The verdict? “The source of Jewish power is usury.”

From this central fact rolled well-known consequences:

Once having acquired absolute civil liberty and equality in every sphere with Christians and the nations, the dam which previously had held back the Hebrews was opened for them, and in a short time, like a devastating torrent, they penetrated and cunningly took over everything: gold, trade, the stock market, the highest appointments in political administrations, in the army, and in diplomacy; public education, the press, everything fell into their hands or into the hands of those who were inevitably depending upon them. (1179)

With control of gold came control of Christian society, particularly through the public press and academia, since “journalism and public education are like the two wings that carry the Israelite dragon, so that it might corrupt and plunder all over Europe.”

How little things have changed in our own day.

In the same chapter as Civiltà Cattolica, Jones discusses how the writings of one German, Father Georg Ratzinger, informed discussions in the Vatican-approved periodical. As the name suggests, Fr. Ratzinger was indeed related to Joseph Ratzinger (his great-nephew), who became Pope Benedict XVI. The elder Ratzinger pointed directly to Jewish usury as the bane of Christian culture, which, when left unchecked, resulted in the enslavement of the surrounding non-Jews. Previously, of course, traditional Christianity forbade usury, meaning that the popes thus “deprived [Jews] of their ability to occupy the choke points in the culture.”

Further restrictions kept Jews under control:

Jews were not allowed to employ Christian servants in their houses . . . Jews who defamed Christ or Christians were punished.  . . . Jews couldn’t live wherever they pleased, but were confined to specific districts. It was also forbidden to sell houses or real estate to Jews, or to rent to them, as was living under the same roof with Jews. Similarly, Jews were forbidden to hire Christian nursemaids, servants or day laborers.” (1184-5)

Ratzinger insisted it was foolish to abandon these tried and true Christian practices because Jews learned from their Talmud that “cheating the goyim was a virtue.” Linking free trade, capitalism and Jewish methods of conducting business, Ratzinger concluded that it was “to be expected that the Jews, who with centuries of practice became skilled in the deceptions of economic warfare and acquired the arts of exploitation to perfection, would take center stage under the regime of free competition” (1187). It was not knowledge or ability, in Ratzinger’s opinion, that “makes the Jew rich and admired in society” but, rather, “deception and exploitation of others.”

In a charge that finds immediate resonance in our time, Jones includes a quote from Civiltà Cattolica about “the voracious octopus of Judaism.” Compare that with Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi’s brilliant quote about Goldman Sachs following the 2008 sub-prime meltdown: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” George Ratzinger and countless other Europeans of the latter half of the nineteenth century felt the same way, as evidenced by their writings, and we owe Dr. Jones a debt for bringing this to our attention.

Of course Ratzinger did not think that only Jews were blameworthy in these cultural and economic wars, for at a time “when Jews stand by even their own criminal element, we see Christian politicians and legislators betraying their own Christian faith on a daily basis and vying with each other to see who has the privilege of harnessing himself to the triumphal car of the Jews. In Parliament,” Ratzinger wrote, “no Jew need defend another Jew when their Christian lackeys do that for them.”

Another fascinating topic Jones covers concerns the relationship between landed English gentry and Jewish moneylenders. “Stated in its simplest terms, the Jewish Problem involved the inverse relationship between debt and political sovereignty” (1079). This antagonism toward growing Jewish power was common among the British aristocracy as well as politicians. For example, in 1891 Labour Leader, a socialist newspaper, denounced the money-lending Rothschild family as a

blood-sucking crew [which] has been the main cause of untold mischief and misery in Europe during the present century, and has piled up prodigious wealth chiefly through fomenting wars between the States which ought never to have quarreled. Wherever there is trouble in Europe, wherever rumors of war circulate and men’s minds are distraught with fear of change and calamity, you may be sure that a hook-nosed Rothschild is at his games somewhere near the region of the disturbance. (1081)

An exemplar of this which fell into the clutches of Jewish moneylenders was the extended Churchill family. Randolph, born in 1849, grew up in an era in which “spectacular bankruptcies” would plague aristocrats for much of the century. Much of this suffering was, of course, brought on by shameless profligacy among landed aristocrats, and Jones offers the Churchills as an exemplar of the blight. “In every generation, among his [Winston’s] relatives, there were too many debts, too much gambling, too much drinking.” Informed opinion was that “there was an above-average amount of infidelity, divorce, erratic behavior, sexual scandal, social ostracism, and court disfavor.” Randolph  —  and in turn Winston  —  were very much in this mold  and fell straight into the hands of Jewish moneylenders, with profound consequences for Britain and all of Christendom when Winston became an influential politician advocating war with Germany.

As far back as 1874, the Churchill family was forced to sell wide swaths of land along with livestock to Baron Rothschild in order to settle a serious debt. Randolph, who had grown up amidst rich Jews with opulent tastes, made the mistake of thinking that he could indulge such a lifestyle without the necessary funds to back it. What he didn’t understand was that “he was on the wrong side of compound interest and they [his Jewish friends] on the right side.”

What followed was predictable. Randolph eventually contracted syphilis and lost large sums of money while gambling in Monte Carlo. In this instance, a Rothschild came to his rescue  —  but at a price. “The Jews who were supporting Randolph’s syphilitic fantasies and the extravagant lifestyle that went along with it . . . [were] willing to write off 70,000 pounds in bad debt because [Natty Rothschild] needed a friend in high places who would share Cabinet secrets that could be turned into hard financial gains” (1087). In time, “the British Empire would become an essentially Jewish enterprise over the course of the 19th century.” By the end of the century, Jones concludes, “The British Empire had become one huge, Jewish usury machine, administered by impecunious, extravagant, perennially indebted, morally depraved agents like Randolph Churchill.” Far worse was to come.

Winston Churchill inherited a mountain of debt when his father died, so, in Jones’ words, “the only tangible asset inherited was Randolph’s relationship with the Rothschilds  and other wealthy Jewish financiers.” Not an auspicious beginning. Not surprisingly, when writing about his late father, Winston left out mention of the Rothschilds completely. He also fell into the orbit of wealthy Jew Sir Ernest Cassel, followed by Sir Henry Strakosch, who “took responsibility for all [Winston’s] debts.” This occurred by 1938; could it have affected Churchill’s decisions vis-a-vis Germany during the ensuing years? One wonders. Of course, such discussions of Jewish influence over the lives of powerful gentiles such as Winston Churchill are rarely present in modern discourse, so it is to Jones’ credit that he discusses it intelligently and in depth.

At this point, Jones still has over one hundred and fifty pages of text to go, but it amounts to passing footnotes to what has come before. The founding of the Federal Reserve gets a chapter, the Depression gets a few pages, World War II is mostly ignored, Keynes makes an appearance and so on.

Readers of the Jones’ monthly Culture Wars will know that Jones has diligently covered Jewish economic (and moral) misbehavior over the last century, but Barren Metal glosses over it, though we’re fed some nice quips. For instance, Jones writes that “The Jewish usurers’ Utopia which Milton Friedman promoted under the name of Chicago School economics was the mirror image of Communism, another Jewish Utopia, because both claimed that if their programs were implemented heaven on earth would follow.” Friedman’s advocacy of transferring public works projects into private hands “was another looting operation.” Properly read, this translates to “another Jewish looting operation.

Jones addresses a similar looting operation which we know as the leveraged buyouts of the 1980s, where Jewish actors such as Michael Milken and Henry Kravis patted themselves on the back while presumably mumbling that “[Jewish] greed is good.” Scholar Benjamin Ginsberg alluded to this theft when he wrote that “It apparently did not go unnoticed in executive suites across the country that virtually all the takeover specialists and their financial backers were Jews.” Read James B. Stewart’s excellent account of this “transfer of wealth” in his Den of Thieves.

Speaking of “virtually all,” how many readers remember Yale Law School professor Amy Chua’s 2003 book World on Fire? There she wrote about the attempt to implement free markets in Russia:  “Instead of dispersing ownership and creating functioning markets, these reforms had allowed a small group of greedy industrialists and bankers to plunder Russia, turning themselves almost overnight into the billionaire-owners of Russia’s crown jewels while the country spiraled into chaos and lawlessness.” Here’s where the “virtually all” comes in: Chua correctly noted that “six out of the seven of Russia’s wealthiest” oligarchs were Jewish. When her Jewish husband heard about this, naturally he had to ask, “Just six?  So who’s the seventh guy?” Jones would never miss such a point either, which is why he wrote of the period that “the looting of Russia was a Jewish operation from start to finish.”

Moving ahead in time, we get to the Crash of 2008, where Goldman Sachs was described as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” Situating this within the framework of his usury thesis, Jones writes how “the Jewish bankers at places like Goldman Sachs” practiced usury with no restraint once fellow Jews such as Greenspan, Summers and Rubin succeeded in removing the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act.

Using a play on German words, Jones writes that this is “the trajectory Capitalism always takes when moral considerations are removed from economic exchange. Usury (Wucher) like cancer (Wucherung) always ends up destroying itself by destroying the economic host which supports it.”

Why don’t we Americans know more about this largely Jewish campaign to usurp our labor and wealth, a cancerous process which is ongoing? Perhaps we can use a phrase Jones employs when chastising fellow Catholics such as Michael Novak and Robert Sirico for supporting what Jones sees as anti-Catholic capitalist policies. Jones writes that such people are employed to “produce economic fairy tales for the goyim to keep them in ignorance of what is really going on.” Likely Jones would approve of me extending this charge to cover the all of the Jewish behavior he so assiduously describes in Barren Metal. In my view, Jews use their (usurious) ill-gotten gains to get journalists, academics, filmmakers and many others to constantly “produce fairy tales for the goyim.”

I’ve covered this in depth in my writing for The Occidental Quarterly and specifically in writing about the orchestrated campaign in Hollywood to divert attention from Jewish economic misbehavior onto their innocent non-Jewish counterparts. If I ever write a book, perhaps this is the proper topic, for over a number of years I described a remarkable celluloid pattern of deceit, beginning in early 2012 with my review of “How They Lie to Us: the Film Margin Call,” followed by The Wolf of Wall Street (see the book review here), Other People’s Money, The Richard Gere Film Arbitrage, The Big Short: Film and Book and finally “Money Monster.” We are talking here about a list of the biggest (non-Jewish) names in Hollywood: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, Tim Roth, Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale and Steve Carell. And these names were employed in a campaign to convince the goyim that Wall Street miscreants were Gentiles. If someone ever makes a DVD of clips from these films, it could be pasted inside the back cover of Barren Metal to give a modern version of what Jones is writing about.

Conclusion: Capitalism and Catholicism are Irreconcilable

Jones, a Catholic traditionalist, is no fan of capitalism. In the great conflict between capitalism and Catholicism, Jones accepts the view of those who believe that “there is an unbridgeable gulf between the Catholic and the capitalist conception of life.” In fact, Jones concludes his book with this short paragraph:

Capitalism and Catholicism, far from being compatible, are antithetical. Capitalism is state-sponsored usury; Catholicism, the traditional foe of usury, believes in the priority of labor. There is no way to resolve this dichotomy. One system must prevail over the other.

At this point in history, does it seem even remotely possible that Catholicism, long rooted in Europe but a fading memory there now, can somehow triumph over capitalism? To most rational observers, the possibility seems laughable, but then again, at the end of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, Jones concluded that “judging from appearances, the conversion of the Jews did not seem imminent. The Jews had never been more powerful; the Church was weak. But appearances can be deceiving. . . . Reversal was in the air.”

Any signs of the Jewish stranglehold over our money, economies and cultures being reversed? If so, please let us know.

Final Thoughts

I have long thought that if someone could somehow reconcile E. Michael Jones’ Catholic interpretation of The Jewish Question with the social science perspective offered by Kevin MacDonald, a thrilling new synthesis might be achieved. MacDonald, of course, very much believes in the salience of race, but Jones’ views are militantly aracial, by which I mean he is insistent that race is not a factor in the struggle between Jewry and the rest of humanity. Rather, in his view, it is a religious story in which God plays the leading role and the Catholic Church is the agent of God’s work on Earth. Jews are, to Jones . . . well, read the opening of The Gospel of St. John, where Jesus says, “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do.”

I’ll be honest: I’m hugely disappointed that E. Michael Jones refuses to see race as an issue. It’s pretty obvious that the organized Jewish community and vast numbers of influential Jews are entirely on board with importing millions of non-Whites, a program that is aimed at destroying the power of White people. It’s a race war, and people who don’t play it will surely lose.

Prior to WWII, it could be argued, Jews were more parasitical and seemed content to keep their host alive. After the war, this seems to have changed into a war to eliminate Whites, which is being done through promotion of replacement-level non-White immigration, feminism, multiculturalism, homosexuality and stirring low-IQ non-Whites to commit low-intensity murder of Whites at the street level. All the while, Jews have been in the forefront of discouraging and attacking White attempts at kindling White identity and group action. At this late date, how can Jones deny the racial nexus of this war? Is he convinced God has plans for the White race one way or the other and we should simply trust in Him? If so, I humbly wish God would show us some favor during our time of need.

Still, it remains edifying to think that Jones’ theological account can so well mirror and add to evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald’s scientific (and racial) discussion of a Jewish “group evolutionary strategy.” Whichever version you accept as “getting to the root of the matter,” either will oblige you to take seriously the effect Jews and their movements have had on the modern world. And that story is far from over.

Bonald's Economic Thought

                          By F. Roger Devlin

   

Jean-François Millet, "Spring," 1868–1873

The French Age of Enlightenment witnessed and celebrated an economic revolution: the rapid growth of speculation and a money economy, and a corresponding diminution in the importance of landed wealth. Bonald believed that the change had been brought about by the practice of usury. He did not condemn all lending at interest as usury, but distinguished between the cases of lending for the acquisition of productive goods (such as land or capital) and lending for unproductive goods meant for consumption.

For example, if I lend a man money to buy a farm, I may legitimately charge him interest out of the goods produced by the farm. In the France of Bonald’s day, this would usually have yielded an interest rate of around four or five percent per annum. On the other hand, if I lend a man money to by bread, his purchase, far from being productive of further value, loses what value it has if not quickly consumed. In contrast to the earth itself, “the products of the earth, are dead values which diminish in quantity or quality.” To earn money by lending for consumption is, in Bonald’s view, essentially unjust and a violation of Christian charity even if freely agreed to between borrower and lender.

It might appear that such a doctrine would forbid an ordinary greengrocer from operating his store at a profit. Bonald holds that the grocer’s ‘profit’ really amounts to a wage for the work he does:

The labor of men who purchase, transport, store, preserve and improve goods merits a salary. The natural decrease, the accidental and eventual loss of goods and the inevitable waste they suffer from their transformation into industrial values all require compensation.

This contradicts the teaching of Adam Smith:

The profits of stock, it may perhaps be thought, are only a different name for the wages of a particular sort of labour, the labour of inspection and direction. They are, however, altogether different, are regulated by quite different principles, and bear no proportion to the quantity, the hardship, or the ingenuity of this supposed labour of inspection and direction. They are regulated altogether by the value of the stock employed, and are greater or smaller in proportion to the extent of this stock. . . . In many great works, almost the whole labour of this kind is committed to some principal clerk. His wages properly express the value of this labour of inspection and direction. Though in settling them some regard is had commonly, not only to his labour and skill, but to the trust which is reposed in him, yet they never bear any regular proportion to the capital of which he oversees the management; and the owner of this capital, though he is thus discharged of almost all labour, still expects that his profit should bear a regular proportion to his capital. In the price of commodities, therefore, the profits of stock constitute a component part altogether different from the wages of labour, and regulated by quite different principles. (The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 6)

I will not venture to decide the question in Bonald’s favor, but I am inclined to wonder how many modern economists could give a coherent explanation of why his unfashionable view is mistaken.

Money, in Bonald’s view, is properly a sign of value and medium of exchange rather than a commodity like any other. It should not, therefore, command a ‘price’ in the form of interest (except as noted). Where usury is permitted,

interest, or rather the price of money, is infinitely greater than the produce of the earth, [so] everyone wishes to sell his land in order to procure money to lend. But when everyone wants to sell, no one wants to buy. The produce of the land tends to rise to the highest prices, and the lands themselves fall to the lowest, or they are unable to be sold at any price, and one buys only what misery leaves behind or revolutions make available. One notes a general tendency to leave one’s home and the home of one’s fathers, to leave one’s family and country. A vague restlessness and desire for change torments landowners. They complain of being attached to an estate burdened with so many cares, and with too little income left to pay for their luxuries and pleasures. We see an immoderate desire to become rich extending even to the lowest orders of society, causing horrible disorders and unheard of crimes; while in others giving rise to a cold, hard egoism, a total extinction of every generous sentiment, and an insensible transformation of the most disinterested and friendly nation into a people of stock-jobbers who see in the events of society only chances for gain or loss.

To this unstable, calculating and hectic system Bonald opposes the traditional landed or agrarian system of economy which flourishes when interest rates are not allowed to exceed the production of the earth:

Those who can live within the revenue of their capital seek to acquire productive land, because the revenue of land is approximately the same as the interest paid for money, and it is more secure because the capital itself is more sheltered from events. Yet were everyone wants to buy, no one wants to sell. Lands are therefore at a high price relative to goods. All the citizens aspire to move from being possessors of money to being possessors of land, i.e., from a mobile and dependent political condition to a fixed and independent position. This is the most happy and most moral cast of the public mind, the one most opposed to the spirit of greed and to revolution.

The reader will learn more about agrarianism from a few pages of Bonald than from all the literary exercises in I’ll Take My Stand.

Bonald saw no reason why the legislator should remain neutral regarding developments so harmful to the moral habits of society:

A wise policy, one more attentive to general interests than to private ones, would seek to render the circulation of money less rapid: in Sparta, by using iron money, in modern states, by the prohibition of lending at usury. . . . If the profits of commerce regularly rise far above the revenue of the land, it would be a wise measure to bring them back to equality, either by favoring the cultivation of the earth in every possible way, or by containing the speculations of commerce within the limits of general utility.

To restore the agrarian order, Bonald also advocated the restoration of primogeniture and entail: “a law not made for the benefit of the eldest, but for the preservation and permanence of the landowning family.” Revolutionary legislation had mandated the equal division and inheritance of landed estates. This was not unlike Solomon’s judgment of carving the child in two: a half or a quarter or an eighth of an estate is often not worth the corresponding fraction of the original. It may be unfortunate that all men cannot live off their own lands, but parceling out estates into a welter of vegetable gardens does not improve matters; it only forces the ‘heirs’ to sell out for any price they can get. As a leading citizen of his district, Bonald got to know the evils of the new system at first hand.

A rich cultivator whom the author congratulated for the good state of his properties responded in a dolorous tone: “It is true, my property is beautiful and well cultivated. My fathers for several centuries and I for fifty years have worked to extend, improve and embellish it. But you see my large family, and with their laws on inheritance, my children will one day be servants here where they were the masters.”

Bonald even defended the guild system, which Smith had criticized for restricting competition and inefficiently requiring seven year apprenticeships for trades which took six months to learn.

For the inferior classes, the corporations of arts and trades were a sort of hereditary municipal nobility that gave importance and dignity to the most obscure individuals and the least exalted professions. These corporations were at the same time confraternities, and this is what excited the hatred of the philosophes who hunted down religion even in its most modest manifestations. This monarchical institution brought great benefits to administration. The power of the masters restrained youths who lacked education, who had been taken away from paternal authority at an early age by the necessity to learn a trade and win their bread, and whose obscurity hid from the public power. Finally, the inheritance of the mechanical professions also served public morals by posing a check to ruinous and ridiculous changes of fashion.

The author’s first point is especially worth pondering: a man can be happy in a low station, so long as it is a recognized station within his society. The ‘equality bug’ infects men who are deracinated, i.e., who do not belong anywhere. Those with the dignity of even a modest ‘place’ are seldom disturbed by the greater fortunes of others.

Bonald criticized Smith directly:

Wealth, taken in a general and philosophical sense, is the means of existence and conservation; opes, in the Latin tongue, signifies both wealth and strength. For the individual—a physical being—these means are material wealth, the produce of the soil and of industry. For society—a moral being—the means of existence and duration are moral riches, and the forces of conservation are, for the domestic society, morals, and for the public society, laws. Morals and laws are, therefore, the true and even the only wealth of societies, families and nations.

Here again we see Bonald’s sharp distinction between universal or public interests and particular or private ones: economic goods are always private, even if they happen to be enjoyed by all the individuals in a given society. This is why Liberalism (which, according to no less an authority than Ludwig von Mises, is “merely applied economics”) cannot give any account of why citizens should have to sacrifice their lives for their country:

A public spirit cannot be maintained in a commercial and manufacturing nation devoted to calculations of personal interest, and still less today when the laws of war protect the personal property of the vanquished and in our humanitarian sentiments we call it a crime for a citizen not to be paid to defend his land. In every era, poor nations have conquered rich ones, even though they held in their wealth the most powerful motives for self-defense.

Similarly, in his earlier treatise On Divorce (see my review here and here), Bonald pointed out that commercial peoples tend to think even of marriage on the model of a business contract. He writes of “the degradation of a neighboring people [the English] which evaluates the weakness of a woman, the crime of a seducer, and the shame of a husband in pounds, shillings, and pence, and sues for the total on expert estimates.”

Bonald rejects the “privatize everything!” impulse which sees socialism lurking in every town square:

The use of common things, temples, waters, woods, and pastures constitutes the property of the community. Indeed, there is no more community where there is no longer a community of use. It may be true that the commons were poorly administered. I would even believe that their division, in some places, has produced a little more wheat. Yet in some lands this division restricts flocks to spaces too small for them and thus ruins and important branch of agriculture. More importantly, there is no more common property among the inhabitants of the same place and, consequently, no more community of interests, no more occasions for deliberation and agreement. For example, if there were only one public fountain in a village from which water was distributed to all the households, to take away the fountain would be to deny the inhabitants a continual occasion to see, speak to, and hear one another.

Bonald, like Marx after him, saw that industrial poverty was different in kind from the poverty in agricultural states, and a greater threat to traditional social order. Indeed, he comes close to calling the industrial proletariat the vanguard of the Revolution.

The true politician is concerned about the disorders that arise from the alternation of ease and misery to which the industrial population is exposed, which, making the objects of industry without being able to consume them, is no less obliged to consume the fruits of the soil without the ability to produce or even purchase them—and which, finding itself without work and without bread, is a ready-made instrument for revolution. . . . Let it not be doubted that it is in hopes of one day taking this superabundant population into its pay that one party in Europe promotes the exaggerated growth of industry, certain that it can give work to these idle arms in the immense workshop of the revolutionary industry.

Recommended reading:

Louis de Bonald
The True and Only Wealth of Nations: Essays on Family, Economy, and Society
Ttranslated by Christopher Olaf Blum
Naples, Fla.: Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University, 2006

Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition
Edited and translated by Christopher Olaf Blum
Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2004

Louis de Bonald
On Divorce
Translated and edited by Nicholas Davidson
New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1992

TOQ Online, Dec. 5, 2009

On Usury

                           By Hilaire Belloc

     

Usury does not mean high interest. It means any interest, however low, demanded for an unproductive loan. It is not only immoral but it is ultimately destructive of society. It has only been the rule of our commerce to take usury since the breakup of Europe following on the Reformation. Usury will destroy our society, but meanwhile there is no escape from it. We are coming near the end of its maleficent action, not through awaking to its evils but because it is reaching the end of its resources. The Great War loans, which are almost entirely usurious, have powerfully accelerated this process.

The modern world is organized on the principle that money of its nature breeds money. A sum of money lent has, according to our present scheme, a natural right to interest. That principle is false in economics as in morals. It ruined Rome, and it is bringing us to our end.

Supposing a man comes to you and says: “There is a field next to mine which is a very good building site; if I put up a good little house on it I shall be able to let that house at a net profit–all rates, taxes and repairs paid–of £100 a year. But I have no capital with which to build this house. The field will cost £50 and the house £950. Will you lend me £1,000, so that I can buy the field, put up the house, and enjoy this nice little income?” You would presumably answer, “Where do I come in? You get your £100 a year all right; but you only get it by my aid, and therefore I ought to share in the profits. Let us go fifty-fifty. You take £50 every year as your share for your knowledge of the opportunity and for your trouble, and hand me over the other £50. That will be five percent on my money, and I shall be content.”

This answer, granted that property is a moral right, is a perfectly moral proposition. The borrower accepting that proposition certainly has no grievance. For a long time [theoretically, forever] you could go on drawing five percent on the money you lent, with a conscience at ease.

Now let us suppose that man comes to you and says: “I know the case of a man in middle age who has been suddenly stricken with a terrible ailment. Medical aid costing £1,000 will save his life, but he will never be able to do any more work. He has an annuity of £100 a year to keep him alive after the operation and subsequent treatment. Will you lend the £1,000? It will be paid back to you on his death, for his life has been insured in a lump payment for the amount of £1,000.” You answer: “I will lend £1,000 to save his life, but I shall require of him half his annuity, that is £50 a year, for every year he may live henceforward; and he must scrape along as best he can on the remaining £50 of his annuity.” That answer would make you feel a cad if you have any susceptibilities left, and if you have not–having already become a cad through the action of what the poet has called “the soul’s long dues of hardening and decay”–it would be a caddish action all the same, though you might not be disturbed by it.

It seems therefore that there are conditions under which you may legitimately and morally lend £1,000 at five percent in perfect security of conscience, and others in which you cannot.

Now look at the matter from another angle.

When the American city of Boston was founded, three hundred years ago, a man in London proposing to emigrate thither left gold to the value of £1,000 with a London goldsmith, under a bond that the goldsmith might use the money until he or his heirs should demand it, but with the proviso that five percent on the capital should accrue at compound interest until it was withdrawn. The emigrant did not reappear. The goldsmith’s business developed, as so many of them did, into a sort of bank as the seventeenth century wore on. By the beginning of the eighteenth it was a bank in due form, and its successor today is part of one of the great banking concerns of our time. The original deposit has gone on “fructifying,” as the phrase goes, with the liability piling up, but no one claiming it.

At last, in this year 1931, an heir turns up and proves his title. The capital sum into which this modest investment of a thousand pounds at five percent has grown is to be paid over to him under an order of the court. Do you know how much it will come to?–More than twice the annual revenue of the United States today.

Let us take a less fantastic example, and perhaps it will be more convincing. Supposing a man to have lent £10,000 on mortgage at six percent upon an English gentleman’s estate at the beginning of the American War of Independence, in 1776: the said estate to pay £600 a year to the lender. The debt is not pressed. The embarrassed gentleman is allowed to add to the principal the annual payments due, so that the whole sums up at the rate of six percent compound interest.

That is not at all an impossible supposition. Do you know what the mortgage-holder could demand of that estate today? Nearly five million pounds a year!

Neither of these examples could arise in practice because the law forbids such prolonged accumulation, but the very fact that the law has been compelled to do so, is proof that there is something wrong with the current notion everywhere acted upon, that money “earns” a certain rate of interest and has a moral right to it without regard to the way in which the capital is employed.

For what is common to all these illustrations is the patent fact that interest on a loan may, under some circumstances of time or extent, be a demand for an impossible tribute. It may under some circumstances be a tribute which is not morally due, because it does not represent an extra production of wealth due to the original investment. It is under some circumstances a demand for wealth which is not connected with the produce of the original investment, and the payment of which is therefore not a payment of part profit, but a payment to be made, if possible, out of whatever other wealth the debtor can obtain; and a tribute which, beyond a certain point, cannot even be paid at all, because the wherewithal to pay it is not present in society.

What are those circumstances? What are the conditions distinguishing a demand for payment of interest which is legitimate in morals from a demand which is illegitimate?

The distinction lies between a demand for part of the product of a productive loan, which is moral, and the immoral demand for either (1) interest on an unproductive loan, or (2) interest greater than the annual increment in real wealth which a productive loan creates. Such a demand “wears down”–“eats up”–“drains dry” the wealth of the borrower, and that is why it is called Usury. A derivation inaccurate in philology, but sound in morals, rightly connects “usura” “usury,” with the idea of destroying, “using up,” rather than with the original idea of “usus,” “a use.”

Usury, then, is a claiming of interest upon an unproductive loan, or of interest greater than the real increment produced by a productive loan. It is the claiming of something to which the lender has no right, as though I should say: “Pay me ten sacks of wheat a year for the rent of these fields” after the fields had been swallowed up by the sea, or after they had fallen to producing annually much less than ten sacks of wheat.

I must here reluctantly introduce a colloquial meaning of the word “Usury” which confuses thought. People talk of “usurious interest” meaning very high interest. It is obvious how the confusion arose. Very high interest is commonly greater than the real wealth produced even by a productive loan, and to demand it is, in effect, to demand more than the produce of the original loan; but there is nothing in the rate of interest per se which renders such interest usurious. You may demand one hundred percent on a loan and be well within your moral rights.

For instance, a small claim which was producing 500 ounces of gold a year has a sudden opportunity for producing 200 times as much, 100,000 ounces, if capital the equivalent of only 1,000 ounces can be obtained for development. The lender of that new capital is under no moral obligation to give all the vastly increased profits as a present to the borrower. He can legitimately claim his portion; he might well ask for half the new produce, that is 50,000 ounces per annum, 500 percent on his loan, for that very high interest would only come to half the new wealth produced. To ask for that 500 percent would not be an exaction of tribute from wealth that was not present, nor for wealth that was not created by the capital invested.

Strictly speaking, then, usury has nothing to do with the amount of interest demanded, but with the point whether there is or is not produced by the capital invested an increment at least equal to the tribute demanded.

If authority is asked for so obvious a position in morals it may be found in every great moral system sanctioned by the religious and permanent social philosophies adopted by men. Aristotle[1] forbids it, St. Thomas forbids it. The Mohammedan system of ethics condemns it.[2] In particular we have the luminous decision of the Fourth Lateran Council.

So far, so good. Next let us note the very interesting development of modern times since the break-up of our common European moral and religious system at the Reformation. After that disaster usury gradually became admitted. It grew to be a general practice sanctioned by the laws, and the payment of it enforced by the civil magistrate. In England it was under the reign of Cecil, in the year 1571, that interest, though limited to ten percent, became legal without regard to the use made of the loan. The birth year of what may be called “Indiscriminate Usury” is 1609, when, under Calvinism, the Bank of Amsterdam started on its great career of stimulating fortunate capacity and ruining the unfortunate. In general the governments which broke away from the unity of Christendom one after the other introduced legalized usury, and thus got a start over the conservative nations which struggled to maintain the old moral code. To the new moral, or rather immoral, ideas thus introduced we owe the rapid development of banking in the “reformed” nations, the financial hold they acquired and maintained for three centuries. Everyone at last fell into line, and today Usury works side by side with legitimate profit, and, confused with it, has become universal throughout what used to be Christian civilization. It is taken for granted that every loan shall bear interest, without inquiring whether it be productive or unproductive. The whole financial side of our civilization is still based on that false conception.

A very interesting essay might be written upon the ultimate fruits of such a conception in our own time. Were it ever written a good title for it would be, “The End of the Reign of Usury.” For it is becoming pretty clear that the inherent vice of the system under which long ago the Roman Imperial social scheme broke down is beginning to break down our own international financial affairs. With this difference, however: that they broke down from private usury, we from public.

But that is by the way; to return to our muttons. Usury being a demand for money that is not there, Usury being therefore, when once it is universally admitted, at first a machine for ultimate draining of all wealth into the hands of lenders and for reducing the rest of the community to economic servitude at last; Usury being at last a system which must break down of its own weight–when the demand made is greater than all productivity can meet–why, it may be asked, has it been practiced with success for so long? Why does it seem to be at the root of so vast a progress in production throughout the world?

That it has been in use successfully for all these generations, ever since it was solidly established in general practice during the seventeenth century, no one can deny. Nor can anyone deny that it has accompanied the great modern expansion in production. And here arises one of those apparent contradictions between a plain mathematical truth and the results of its negation in practice, of which experience is full. Persuaded by such appearances, most men abandon the abstract consideration and are content with the practical result. It is on this account that even so late in the day as this the mere mention of the word “Usury” and a discussion of its ethics has about it the savor of something ridiculous.

Not so long ago everyone would have told you that to adopt the attitude I am adopting here was to write oneself down a crank. The conclusions to which every clear mind must come in the matter were not even considered, but brushed aside as imperfect notions proper to early and uncritical ages when men had not thought out economics or any other science.

The increasing, though still small number of educated men who are growing suspicious of such contempt for the immemorial past and for the moral traditions of Christendom will give these objections less weight than they were given a generation ago; but they still have overwhelming weight with the general. If you say today, “Usury is wrong,” or even, “Usury is dangerous,” or even no more than, “Usury must in the long run break down,” all but a very few will, even today, refuse to follow this discussion of the matter. Most of the careless and all the foolish will put you into the company of those who think the earth is flat.

The error is theirs, not ours; yet their error has, as I have said, solid practical backing; for Usury has worked successfully. Productivity has been vastly increased since Usury took root. The last three hundred years have been centuries of immense expansion, and the leaders of it have been precisely those who first threw Christian morals overboard.

What is the explanation? The explanation lies in three considerations:

First, when Usury is universally permitted and enforced, it becomes only part of a general activity for the accumulation of capital with the object of investment. In the days when Usury was illegal and punished, the accumulation of capital for investment was hampered. Incidentally, those days were also days in which the production of wealth upon an increasing scale was not regarded as the end of man. But at any rate, from the purely economic point of view, the ceasing to inquire how capital would be used, the laying it down as a rule that all capital had a right to interest, no matter how it was invested, obviously tended to make accumulation more rapid, and incidentally, to make men keener to ferret out opportunities for productive as well as for unproductive lending.

With that, of course, though from other causes, went the increase of men’s powers over nature, the curve of which rose more and more steeply, and perhaps is still rising–though there are signs of fatigue and of interference with that process from causes other than economic, in spite of the rapid accumulation of further scientific knowledge and of its economic application.

This increase in our powers over nature is the second reason why the false action of Usury has been masked for so long. The economic evil of Usury stimulated and accompanied great economic advantage of accumulation for Production, and this legitimate use of money had its opportunity given it by a flood of geographical discovery and new achievements in Physical Science.

The third reason why Usury has not yet worked out its full ill effect is that it has long been automatically checked by repeated breakdowns which wiped out usurious claims. Capital unproductively lent failed to receive its tribute and had to be written off. It is true that Usury on such capital is commonly the last thing to be written off;[3] but written off it is continually, and this intermittent pruning of the unearned tribute has prevented the real character of that tribute from appearing in its full force.

The nineteenth century in particular, and still more the beginning of the twentieth century, is crowded with examples of these breakdowns–myriads of them. Money is invested in a particular enterprise. The enterprise does not fulfill expectations. Though the money no longer earns legitimate interest, debentures are raised, the guaranteed interest on which is strictly Usury. For some time this interest is paid, but over and over again you find that at last even the debenture interest cannot be paid. The whole concern lapses, and the usurious tribute can no longer be exacted. You may see the process at work today in many departments of the textile industry. The mill gets into difficulties; a loan is raised from the bank; interest is promised on the loan, though there is no surplus wealth over and above the cost of production. The interest is met from outside sources; but the process cannot go on forever, and there comes a time when the bank has to write the loan off as a bad debt. As the bank is making money out of other successful and profitable investments it continues to flourish, it continues to make money, its total income increases, and that part which it has lost through the breakdown of Usury is hidden in the general productive scheme; the usurious character of certain receipts is not distinguished from the legitimate character of the majority. But whenever a society shows signs of economic decay, the real nature of Usury, thus submerged and hidden in prosperous times, necessarily appears above the surface.

Mr. Orage many years ago, writing in his paper, The New Age, gave in this connection one of the numerous vivid illustrations of the affair, with that genius of his for exposition which ought to have made him famous. He took the example of an oasis of date-palms in the desert, the water-supply of which is got at by very primitive means. There comes a financier who lends money for development. The capital is productively used; artesian wells are sunk; the water-supply is largely increased; a better organization of the date-cultivation is begun; the produce of the oasis rapidly grows from year to year; the profits legitimately demanded by the financier are a part of the total extra annual wealth, the presence of which has been due to his enterprise. All are well-to-do; everything flourishes.

Then, whether through fatigue, or through war or pestilence, or variations in the external market, or some calamity of climate, things begin to go wrong. The annual wealth produced by the oasis declines. But the interest on the money lent must still be paid. As the cultivators get more and more embarrassed they borrow in order to pay that interest, and there comes a time of “overlap,” during which, paradoxically enough, the banker appears to be more and more prosperous, though the community which supplies him is getting less and less so. But it is mere arithmetic that the process must come to an end. There will arrive a moment after which the cultivator can no longer find the money to pay the interest, which has long since ceased to be morally due. Mere coercion under an all-powerful police system has got the last penny out of him. The “overlap” between real prosperity and apparent–merely financial or paper–prosperity ceases; and the temporary wealth enjoyed by the lender comes to an end, as had previously come to an end the real prosperity of the borrower.

In other words, great banking prosperity in any particular period may be, and commonly is, the proof of all-round prosperity in that period; but it is not necessarily nor always so. The one is not an inevitable adjunct of the other.

To these general conclusions there is another objection which anyone reasonably well acquainted with history will at once make:

“You tell us” [says the objector] “that in other times when the Faith was universally held–times which you perhaps think healthier, but which were certainly much less wealthy and had to deal with, not only a simpler, but a much smaller population–Usury was forbidden. That is quite true. But when you go on to argue that there is therefore an essential difference between that time and our time, or rather the recent past which you call ‘the reign of Usury,’ a different ethic prevailing now from what prevailed then, you are wrong. You are confusing that which is forbidden with that which is not done. It is true that the moral code of Christendom in Catholic times forbade Usury and punished it; even as late as the Provinciales of Pascal men felt moral indignation against Usury, and right on to the end of the eighteenth century the punishment for Usury continued to play a part in the courts of justice and appeared in the codes of law wherever the Church had power. But in point of fact Usury has always existed, because it always must. It is impossible to draw the line between the productive and the unproductive loan. The money which I lend a sick man may so put him to rights as to make him productive again, and may therefore be regarded as indirectly a productive loan, though unproductive in original intention. The money borrowed by a spendthrift for his pleasures may, on his death, immediately after, before he has had time to waste it, pass to a thrifty heir who invests it productively. Such considerations have always worked strongly upon men’s minds. That is why you find Usury plentifully existing in times and societies where it was morally condemned.

“Further, even were it possible to draw an exact line between the productive and the unproductive loan, there are all sorts of ways of evading the prohibition to take interest upon an unproductive one: to evade the duty of discovering whether the loan be productive or no. For instance, the Catholic governments, quite as much as the Protestant, issued what the French called ‘Rentes’–promises made by government to pay annual incomes. Henry IV of France, after his conversion, was especially active in this form of borrowing. Philip II of Spain, the very champion of Catholicism, sank up to his neck in embarrassment due to borrowing at high interest–borrowing, by a pretty irony, from the very people who were destroying his revenue. A government going to war–that is, about to spend money in an activity commonly unproductive–begged financiers to buy of it annual claims upon the revenue; and there is no difference at all between that and the modern habit of issuing a government loan. Then there was the obvious method of signing a bond for money and receiving less than the sum mentioned in the bond. Thomas Cromwell, of pious memory, was a zealot in this practice, at a time when the full Catholic morals about Usury were still taken for granted. Much earlier, in the true Middle Ages, princes were perpetually borrowing for their wars–principally from the newly arisen Italian banking system; and earlier still, when Usury was the exceptional, but chartered and legal privilege of the Jews and a source of immense revenue to the Christian princes under whom they lived, the practice was openly admitted. Usury therefore has always gone on in human society. It always will go on; discussions upon it are academic and futile.”

To this I answer that plain reasoning upon practical matters is never futile. If I say that an over-consumption of alcohol is bad for the human frame, especially in age, it is no answer to give me examples of topers who have to ninety. The evil effect of over-drinking is there, demonstrable and, to any honest mind, unquestioned. It is a mere question of experiment and experience and the use of reason applied to the same. Where true conclusions are apparently contradicted by experience they are so contradicted by other forces which do not make the truth any the less true.

So with this truth about Usury. As long as its impoverishing effects are masked or counter-balanced by stronger forces at work, they are neglected. But they are in existence all the same, and always active. To know that a truth is there, even when it is hidden, is of great practical use; such knowledge is a thing to be kept in reserve for action when the critical hour comes in which it must be applied.

Next it should be pointed out that there is all the difference in the world between a system in which an immoral principle is admitted and one in which, though the immorality is practiced, the principle is denied. There is, and presumably always will be, plenty of adultery, murder, swindling, and the rest, present in society; but the society in which the rights of property are admitted, in which marriage is sacred and to which the taking of human life is abhorrent, is very different from one where the sexes are promiscuous, or where Communism prevails, or where killing for private revenge or whim is an accepted pastime. To murder a bore, to run off with your neighbor’s wife, even to pick a man’s pocket, are still in our society abnormalities: abnormalities which we old-fashioned people ascribe to the Fall of Man, but which the most exuberant Pelagian will at least not deny to take place. There is all the difference in the world between a society in which such lapses continue, or are even tolerated, and one in which they are called good.

Man stands on two legs; but he can lean on one or on the other. Thus society in the department of law must insist both upon justice and upon order; and undoubtedly in any civilized society justice tends to be sacrificed to order. But there is all the difference in the world between the atmosphere and character of a society in which injustice is held more abominable than disorder and one in which disorder is held more abominable than injustice. Two parts of one chemical element to four parts of another will give you a certain product. Change the proportions, and quite a different product appears. A society in which Usury, though practiced, is held immoral is quite a different thing from a society where Usury is held to be moral. A society in which the lender assumes it to be his moral duty to examine the object of a loan before he considers its profit to himself is different from a society in which he is not expected to do so. A world in which interest upon the unprofitable loan is detested and the Usurer is a villain is quite another society from one in which men have ceased to ask whether a loan be profitable or unprofitable; and this again is a different society from one such as ours, where interest on any loan is demanded as a sort of sacred moral right with which the productivity or lack of productivity of the loan has nothing to do.

Well, then, since to every evil there should be a remedy, what should we say about Usury today? Since I am boasting that this discussion is practical, what about practice?

Let us suppose our opponent convinced; let him make reply: “I agree that Usury is an evil. What is more, I am inclined to agree that we are beginning to feel its evil effects throughout the world today at long last–principally through the enormous example of the great war loans. What then are we to do about it all?”

To this I answer in my turn that nothing immediate can be done. You cannot pull out a vital part of any existing social structure. The whole world today reposes upon banking, the whole system of investment renders inquiry about the productive or unproductive quality of an investment normally impossible.

There are especial private cases where you can judge the distinction clearly, and in those cases good men tend to act upon it, for the human conscience is at work all the time, even in the most corrupt and complex of societies. But in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand the distinction is impossible. A man is at pains to save. He must use his savings under a system where interest without examination is normal and all the infinite details of a world-wide system of production, distribution, and exchange have so long been based on the acceptation of Usury–as well as on the much larger calculation of legitimate profit–that the two can no more be divided in practice today than can the mixed colors in a dyer’s vat. If I go off for six months and leave money on deposit at my bank I can hardly ask what the bank is going to do with the money; and if I did they could not tell me. No one could say how much of it goes to feeding beasts on a fur farm in Canada; how much to a young man who is getting an overdraft on his securities and spending it in riotous living; how much to the development of a useful mine in the Andes. What sane man would hesitate to put his regular little self-denials into savings certificates, or his modest £1000 into a War Loan–that crying instance of Usury? The system must go on till we break, and even the word “break” is inaccurate. If history is any guide, the true word should rather be “decay.” Pleasing thought.

I did well to call this book Essays of a Catholic and not Catholic Essays. For if it became a matter of Catholic discipline that men should not today touch that unclean thing, the interest-bearing unproductive loan, discipline would stand self-condemned. The ecclesiastical order could not be obeyed. If by such an analysis as I am here engaged in I were to involve any of my fellow Catholics in the peculiar conclusions reached, I should be doing a very bad turn, not only to the common sense of my fellows, but to their sense of humor as well. Nevertheless, as the scent manufacturer has it, “Un jour viendra,”—–“A day will come.”

Notes

1. When I was first stammering out my elements as a boy at Oxford, a learned professor assured us in his lecture that the text of Aristotle must have become corrupt, because he could never have said so silly a thing as to call usury wrong. What St. Thomas called it I will wager he never knew.

2. I found in Tunis three years ago that the Mohammedan olive planter wanting to raise a loan for the development of his estate could not get the money from his fellow Mohammedans, but had to borrow from Europeans.

3. Witness the continued interest still paid on bank overdrafts by our failing industries. Another excellent example of the writing off of usurious interest is the scaling down of the French and Italian debts to America.

Source: http://www.catholictradition.org/Classics/belloc2-2.htm

Money-Changers in the Temple: Jews & the Sacred

                      Jewish Tribal Review

           

Carl Heinrich Bloch (1834-1890), Jesus Casting out the Money-Changers

Editor’s Note:

The following essay on the pervasive Jewish tendency to inject money and commerce into religion is excerpted from When Victims Rule, chapter 5, “Yicchus (Status),” formerly on the Jewish Tribal Review website. I have removed the in-text citations for easier reading and added the title.

So great is the Jewish “commercial spirit,” so omnipresent, and so much part of Jewish religious teachings themselves, that, beginning in the nineteenth century, many Jews socializing into “civil” Christian society found themselves embarrassed by the crass behavior that resounded from the Orthodox synagogues. “There were many modern, acculturated Jews,” observes Howard Sachar, “who were increasingly repelled by the synagogue’s cacophony: the nasal singing, the selling of prayers, the gossiping of women in the gallery, the absence of decorum.”

“In Judaism,” says Martin Sklare, “there is no sharp division between the sacred and secular, and consequently little development of separate norms in each area. This system conflicts with the Christian — and American — one which distinguishes between the sacred and profane, defines which situations belong to each category, and provides for special behavior.” In other words, in Orthodox Judaism everything anywhere may be “profaned;” there is no physical sanctuary — including a synagogue — from the ubiquitous prowl of economic exploits (the Sabbath — the day of rest — is, for the religious, the exception). Jay Gonen notes an old joke about Jewish obsession with money even in religious contexts, circulated not by Gentile anti-Semites, but by Jews in Israel:

Two Jews, by a miracle, find time to pause and reflect in front of a holy site, the Wailing Wall, or the western wall of the Second Temple. One of them notices that the other is weeping profusely over the destruction of the Second Temple. “Why are you crying so much?” he says, “True, the Temple has been destroyed, but the lot is still worth something.”

Jewish comedian Joan Rivers explains materialist and ostentatious Jewish identity this way: “I’m Jewish. If God wanted me to exercise he would’ve put diamonds on the floor.” One of Jewish comedian Milton Berle’s jokes went: “A Jewish youngster asked the boy next door to play with him. The boy answered, ‘My father says I can’t play with you because you’re Jewish.’ The Jewish lad answered, ‘Oh, that’s all right. We won’t play for money.’”  Or, “The Israelis have just developed a brand-new car. It not only stops on a dime, it picks it up.” And: “Why did the Israelis win the Six-Day War?” “Because the equipment was rented.” Another joke of the same genre circulated in the American Jewish community runs like this:

And then there was the Jewish Santa Claus. He came down the chimney and said: “Hi, kids. Want to buy some presents?”

Another joke even addresses manipulation of anti-materialist notions of respect in the Gentile world towards Jewish economic advancement:

A wealthy Boston Brahmin was on his deathbed. The end was near, and he asked his three business partners, a Catholic, a Protestant, and a Jew, to come to the hospital to discuss some matters pertaining to his estate.

“You boys know I have no family,” he began, “so I’m dividing my wealth among the three of you, in three equal shares. As a sign of your good friendship, however, I would like each of you to make a token gesture after I’m gone, by putting a thousand dollars into my coffin before it is lowered into the ground.”

Several days later, the funeral was conducted according to the wishes of the deceased. At the appropriate time, the Catholic friend walked up to the coffin and placed in it an envelope containing one thousand dollars. The Protestant friend came forward and did likewise. Finally, the Jew walked up to the coffin, took out the two envelopes, and replaced them with a check for three thousand dollars.

As always in Jewish folklore, Gentiles are — to the wily, down-to-earth Jew — stupid. William Novak and Moshe Waldoks call the following joke “a favorite, found in most collections of Jewish humor”:

A minister, a rabbi, and a priest were discussing how they made use of the funds in the collection plate. The minister said, “I draw a line on the floor, and I throw the money into the air. Everything that lands to the right of the line is for God; everything on the left is for me.”

“That’s pretty much what I do,” said the priest. ‘But instead of a line, I draw a circle. Everything in the circle is for God; everything outside the circle I keep for myself.”

“I, too, have a system,” said the rabbi, “I take the money and throw it up in the air, and whatever God catches He can keep.”

Such observations about Jewish values are acceptable, and common, within the Jewish community itself but, as Jewish scholar Nancy Jo Silberman-Federman notes, such a joke told from a Gentile would flag him or her as an anti-Semite. She notes the self-deprecating (and/or exploitative) tone of many Hanukkah cards sent by Jews to each other:

[In one case] the front of the card pictures a Jewish woman hugging Santa. The copy reads, “Merry Christmas! Thank goodness for Gentiles.” The inside reads, “Somebody has to buy retail!” If certain jokes are told by non-Jews, both the teller and the joke would be considered anti-Semitic. . . . This [celebrating of such jokes in Jewish circles] may be seen socially as a mechanism for in-group solidarity.

Whereas in most — if not all — other religious faiths, adherents seek physical refuge from the anchors of materialist concern while they pray, in Orthodox Judaism, overt pecuniary transactions — involving personal egos and status assertion — are an integral part of the traditional Jewish religious service itself. Jewish sociologist Martin Sklare calls it “commercialism in the synagogue.” This includes

. . . shenodering, the pledging of money for the opportunity of participating in the Torah service . . .  the holding of auctions during holidays and festival services for the purpose of “selling” certain particularly honorific privileges; by stimulating competitive instincts, large amounts may be pledged; and the Yom Kippur appeal: fund raising which takes place during Kol Nidre, a particularly holy service.

To traditional Christian — and other religious temperaments — such vulgarization in a “House of God” inevitably calls to mind the old Christian story of Jesus becoming outraged at the Israelite money changers on Temple grounds. [Matt. 21:12-13; Mark 11: 15-17; Luke 19: 45-46] What kind of religion, non-Jews have found themselves asking through history, is this? In modern times, of course, to ask such a question is to attract assault as an “anti-Semite.” And, however bizarre, Jewish scholar Sara Horowitz’s comments, post Holocaust, in linking Jesus’ outrage at Jewish money-dealing in the sacred Temple to the Nazi persecution of Jewry is typical:

The New Testament [has] multiple descriptions of Jews defiling the Temple and Jesus’ consequent need to purify the holy space by throwing out the Jewish money changers. . . . Historically, the image of the Jewish money changer whose presence defiles sacred space conflates with Jews as money lender, with the typing of the Jew as materialist and avaricious. Jewish attachment to money over attachment to God, to nation, or to other people is repeatedly portrayed in Nazi propaganda newsreels and feature films.

But even when the Zionist “father” of modern Israel, Theodore Herzl, visited (in the late 19th century) the famed Jerusalem Wailing Wall, the supposed last remaining edifice of the ancient Temple itself, so revered in Jewish religious tradition and a magnet to Jewish pilgrims, he could only write with disdain that “we have been to the Wailing Wall. A deeper emotion refused to come, because that place is pervaded by a hideous, wretched, speculative beggary.” Isaac Baer Levinsohn describes the Eastern European synagogue of the nineteenth century:

Each . . .  synagogue abides by . . . only general disorder. . . . This [person] jumps while another shouts; this one moans his loss while another one complacently smokes . . .  One has just begun his prayer as another has finished it . . . this one jokes and pulls another by the ear. Quarrels and fisticuffs often ensue about private as well as public matters. . . . One aspires to be the sixth to come up to the Torah, another seeks the honor of taking the Torah out of the Ark and often they quarrel on that account.

As many Jews, leaving their ghettos and Orthodox Judaism in the nineteenth century attuned themselves to surrounding Christian “civil” society, many became concerned about “embarrassing solicitations” in the synagogue. One American Conservative Judaism publication even chastised its community, saying:

There is no charitable expression in the English language that can connote the desecration of a Torah honor and the degradation of a House of Worship into a market place of vulgar vanities and rude commercialism.

Sklare describes Orthodox religious gatherings:

The Orthodox shul with the accompanying multidinous prayers, jams of people and children, all joined together in a cacophonous symphony of loud and sometimes raucous appeals to the Almighty.

“The Orthodox synagogue,” says James Yaffe, “seemed [to Reform-minded Jews] dirty, shabby, unruly, un-American.” Conversely, even today in America, notes Solomon Poll,

the Hasidim [ultra-Orthodox Jews] noticed the great tendency to imitate the non-Jews. Jewish weddings had bridal processions. The groom was led in by his own parents; the rabbi also participated in the bridal procession; ushers attended the ceremony; the rabbi made a speech during the ceremony; pictures were taken — many times, movies. All these appeared to the Hasidim as mockeries and imitation of the goyim to which they vehemently objected.

Martin Sklare notes that one of the major affectations in the creation of the modern Conservative Judaism movement was a change toward “decorum.” In Orthodox Judaism, he notes, “should a worshiper consistently adopt what would generally be considered a reverent demeanor . . . his deportment might well be the subject of intense criticism. . . . The form of Orthodox worship does seem to be almost unique in its lack of solemnity.”  Although, “when I was a boy,” says Earl Shorris, “I was told that the reason why there was no musical instruments in the synagogue was that we were mourning the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.” The novelist Herman Wouk wrote with fondness about his memories of Orthodox synagogue culture brought to America with Jews from Eastern Europe:

Calls to the Torah, opening of the Ark, and so forth, all went for a price. The auctions were colorful and exciting enough, but the mood of prayer naturally vanished while they went on. They were often pretty long. During the reading of the Torah, moreover, it became the practice of each man, as he was called to his aliya, or reading turn, to announced his contribution to the synagogue’s many charities. For each announcement he or his family received a public blessing by the shamas. Again this was a process of high economic value, but not attuned to the thoughts of the higher world . . . They enabled many tiny congregations to survive and grow into majestic congregations and fashionable temples. With the prospering of the Jewish community, these devices of desperation have gradually given way to conventional fund-raising.

“Five dollars for the third reading!” Nor do I want to forget the historic auction one Yom Kippur afternoon nearly forty years ago, in a synagogue in a Bronx cellar, when my father outbid men with far more money (though they were all poor struggling immigrants) for the reading of the Book of Jonah . . . these auctions are a thing of the past and it is better so, but they served a purpose. Children in such synagogues learned unmistakably what a precious thing a call to the Torah was.

The value of the Torah would seem to suggest a price tag. Auctioning off the rights to recite prayers and announcing in public, each in turn, individuals’ charitable contributions reveals a lot more about Jewish merchant culture — and its pressures, struggles for community status, and symbiotic religious dogma — than it does anything remotely spiritual. Wouk’s fond memories for all the big bills flying around the Torah in his synagogue (albeit for religious intention) reflect a nakedly material concern. Such activity reaffirms what the Torah was largely intended as: recipes, rules, and regulations for Jewish self-advancement in a hostile political world, or — as apologists like to frame it — communal survival through the centuries. Wouk’s childhood memories of high auction recitation prices confirming the Torah’s value are obviously rooted in pride for his father and his status as an economic victor, as well as a general fascination with the wheeling and dealing of a street bazaar. Even the synagogue could function as a forum to celebrate human vanity in one’s ability to pay for something, in this case the right to recite sacred texts. (Synagogue members have even been sued in recent years for not paying membership dues. In Rockaway, New York, for example, in 2001 David Slossberg and three others were sued for back payment by the White Meadow Temple.)  “Conspicuous charity,” wrote Judith Kramer and Seymour Levantman about the Jewish American community in 1961, “is less a matter of religious or ideological commitment than a conventional social obligation serving as a source of status.” Anthony Polonsky notes the Jewish tradition of “ostentatious generosity” in seventeenth century Poland:

Was this piety on the part of a few rich individuals shared by all Jews? To answer this question clearly, one must study the religious attitudes of the time. It seems that participation in services was motivated more by a desire to shine in public than by profound faith. If previously a synagogue seat was a sign of respectability in the community, now unfortunately they were being sold. Indeed, the practice of buying seats, backed by a deed of sale became common.

For an Eastern European Jewish community ever fixated upon worldly accomplishment and the hierarchical status of respective members, even in their most holy religious center “the prosteh yidh [common Jews] sat at the back of the synagogue.” In the late 1950s the American Jewish poet, d. a. levy, wrote:

My father and i
went to a temple to hear
the services
sat down in time
to hear the haunting
language for just a moment
when someone told us we had to stand in the
back — we had chosen “reserved seats”
seats that had been paid for
we left and it was there i completed
my external jewish education

As James Yaffe observed in 1968:

The synagogue charges no admissions fee to services, except on High Holy Day, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hoshanah, when everybody comes to worship. Then most synagogues require worshipers to buy tickets, and many sell reserved seats; the closer to the altar, the higher the price … “Passing the plate” is not a custom in the synagogue. Sometimes a plain white envelope is left on the worshiper’s seat. Inside he finds a slip of paper with his name on it, and a list of suggested contributions, from twenty dollars up; he will put a check next to the amount her prefers, and slip the piece of paper back into the envelope. In old-fashioned Orthodox synagogues the method is often less decorous; the rabbi reads out the member’s names, and each man is expected to call out how much he intends to give.

Jewish student Silja Talvi complains about this Jewish tradition of charging steep admission to the most sacred of Jewish holy days (she blames “capitalism” for this custom, however, and rationalizes that the high prices are somehow useful in keeping “psychopathic anti-Semites” out of synagogues):

It is not a stretch to surmise that many more established synagogues have taken their cues from the capitalist economy that surrounds them, having arrived at the point of valuing finances about kehilla [community]. For all this kvetching about all the lost, unaffiliated Jews, how many among the country’s mainstream Jewish religious leadership have stopped to think about dropping cost-prohibitive barriers to getting in through the front door? . . . In this regard, Jewish religious institutions would do well to take inspiration from the Lubavitchers and Christian churches alike: Free admission, fund-raising drives and donation baskets have a certain logical and friendly appeal, especially for those unaffiliated, lower-income Jews who have reason to feel uneasy about spending close to $100 to be allowed a seat at a temple to spend the day or evening in prayer. Non-Jews who have overheard me in conversation about the fees involved in obtaining tickets for Jewish holiday services have expressed confusion at the very existence of fee schedules and entrance tickets. The tickets, I explain, are a necessary and common-sense precaution for Jewish institutions that hope to make it more difficult for psychopathic anti-Semites to walk through their doors. But why the high cost, they ask? For once, I don’t have a good answer.

Convert to Judaism Lydia Kukoffmn explains the Jewish idea of “paying to pray” like this:

I remember how put off I was at the thought of tickets for religious services. It was so foreign to my way of thinking. Over the years, however, I have come to realize that, although I may still resist the idea of paying to pray, it is the one time of the year when the temple is able to assure its continuity, and thereby its potential for service to its members.

There are even Jewish jokes about such materialism in the synagogue:

It is Yom Kippur. A man comes to the synagogue in a state of obvious excitement. The usher is at the door looking at admission tickets. As the man tries to walk in, the usher stops him: “Let’s see your ticket.”

“I don’t have a ticket. I just want to see my brother, Abe Teitelbaum. I have an important message for him.”

“A likely story. There’s always someone like you, trying to sneak in in for the High Holy Day services. Forget it, friend. Try somewhere else.”

“Honest. I swear to you. I have to tell my brother something. You’ll see. I’ll only be a minute.”

The usher gave him a long look. “All right,” he says, “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. You can go in. But don’t let me catch you praying!”

Paul Cowan recalls the synagogue memories of his father (former CBS-TV president Lew Cowan):

Once, when I was a boy, my father told me that he recalled the Yom Kippurs he went to synagogue and watched Jake Cohen [Lew’s father] weep and beat his breast to atone for his sins. Then, after services, Lou would walk home with his parents and the rest of the huge Cohen clan and listen, appalled, as they fought over status and money; as they gossiped cruelly about siblings who weren’t here. That wasn’t religion, my father would tell me angrily. That was hypocrisy.

In 1982, Earl Shorris recalled his childhood memories of the kinds of men who headed his synagogue:

We arrived at the synagogue as a family, three generations led by my grandfather. . . . My grandfather spoke to his friend Eddie — Big Eddie, he called him. They spoke as members of the board of directors of the synagogue, important men, big donors. My grandfather earned his money from the labor of Italian and Polish women who sewed clothing in his factories. Big Eddie sold cheap wine and whiskey to the poor of the town. We did not approve of Big Eddie. His diamond ring and his fat cigar offended us . . . [H]is business offended us. There were fights in front of his store, stabbings, more than one killing. There were rumors about him. Some people said he dealt with criminals. It as said that he gave so much to the synagogue to atone for the way he made his money. . . He traded donations for a position as a director of the synagogue. My grandfather said Eddie wanted to be president, that he was willing to donate a community center if the directors would elect him president. . . . [When Big Eddie finally strode up at the synagogue to be so honored, “the man our community commended to God” (p.7)] the color of his flesh was as rich and vulgar as his suit. [Grandfather,] you were so small, so pale beside him. Jerusalem was conquered, the Temple was destroyed, and there was no prophet in all of Israel. After the service I asked my father why it had happened. Money, was all he said. Sometimes you have to do these things, my grandfather added. A building doesn’t come cheap.

Norman Podhoretz recalls taking a fellow secular Jewish author, Norman Mailer, to an Orthodox synagogue in New York City:

He asked me to take him to a synagogue on Yom Kippur because he wanted to see theHassid in the flesh. . . . There were wooden benches, and as common in this kind of setup, these were young men, students smoking and dropping cigarettes on the floor. Orthodox Jews, especially Hassidic Jews, don’t treat synagogues like a church. . . . After a short while Norman announced he’d had enough.

Stephen Bloom notes the ultra-Orthodox community of Postville, Iowa, and its raucous religious effect on the tranquil town:

An hour must have passed, and then, as though on cue, a great roar of voices erupted from within the shul. The worship had ended and the men broke into raucous song. These liturgical melodies were booming and boisterous, each lasting twenty to thirty minutes. Soon, the singing was accompanied by banging.

The men were pounding the metal tables with fists. They were stamping the shul’s wooden floor with the heels of their shoes and boots. The collective sound signaled to me that they must have been drunk. . . . I was eavesdropping on some sort of loud, inebriated religious reverie. . . . The sounds shooting out from the shul‘s windows and front door were deafening on this otherwise serene Iowa night.

He also notes, once he is actually among these worshipers, that they “seemed drowned in showmanship — who could wail loudest, bow farthest without falling over, read the longest Hebrew passage fastest and without taking a breath.”  They also get drunk as part of their religious activity: This was an old fashioned chugging contest. Toast after toast followed. . . .  “Rapturous song, powerful drink, and overwhelming body heat was the Holy Communion of these believers. Everything about the day was intense and bodily: the dirtymikveh [communal bath], drinking, singing, the body odor, the pounding of fists and feet.” Secular Jew Howard Jacobson wrote in 1993 about his experiences while waiting to see the famous Orthodox Lubavitcher rabbi, Menachem Schneerson, in New York City. For a decade, the rabbi gave out a dollar (symbolic charity) to each of those who came to wait in lines to see him. As Jacobson notes:

I am taken down — and I stress the preposition: down, down, down — and into theshul of the Lubavitcher headquarters, where the dollar-queue will form, and here I behold a sight which beats even Areyonga in the Central Australian Desert for uncouthness, for outlandishness, for other-worldliness beyond any imaginings of other worlds. The shul teems and shudders with men and boys in every attitude of Hebraic, and to my eyes pre-Hebraic, worship. . . . And here’s the most startling thing of all — men and boys begging, begging in the synagogue, banging for your money, pulling at your sleeves for charity — tsodekeh, tsodekeh — offering to pray for you for money, to pray for your parents for money, selling you raffle tickets, shoving them into your pockets, into your breast pockets — a mitzva, a mitzva — except that that’s not the most startling thing of all, because the most startling thing of all is that they’re selling gold watches down here.

I try to hold on to my nerve. Jesus lost his sense of humor and proportion in the temple, and I am determined not to lose mine.

“We [Jews],” Jacobson consoles himself, “believe there’s no distinction between the world’s business and the business of the spirit.” Leaving his momentary personal audience with the rabbi, “no sooner do you beat back the first wave of beggars [in the synagogue],” recounts Jacobson,

. . . than you find yourself waylaid by tradesmen wanting to sell you polythene sleeves to store your dollar in. For two dollars you can protect the one dollar. Or you can have it sealed and plasticated, turned into a place-mat with a date and a picture of the Rebbe [rabbi].