The Footprints of Abrahamic Religions by W B Vosloo – Wollongong, February 2013

1 The Footprints of Abrahamic Religions by W B Vosloo – Wollongong, February 2013 At the present time, there is no empirical research data available to analyse the role of religion on societies on a comparative and longitudinal basis. The only information available is based on case studies of the historical developments of particular religions in various parts of the world. Judaism and Jewry Judaism is the source of the two largest religions in the world: Christendom and Islam. But where these religions are universalistic and missionary in orientation, i.e. focussed on extending its reach to all communities, Judaism is essentially particularistic and ethnically focussed exclusively on Jewish people. Christianity shares with Judaism its monotheistic roots in the Old Testament but it has extended its universalistic message to the teachings of Christ as set out in the New Testament of the Bible. Islam also shares with Judaism its monotheism and also its Abrahamic history and several precepts and practices but they direct their missionary focus to all communities who are prepared to accept the teachings of Muhammed about Allah as set out in their sacred text, which is the Koran. The Old Testament’s book of Genesis begins with an account of the Jewish creation myth. It begins with a universalistic description of the beginnings of man and everything that is in Heaven and on Earth. But because man is created in the “image of God”, he also carries the divine spirit in him. This sets him apart, over and above the rest of creation. But the remainder of the Old Testament is mainly focussed on the history of the Israelites which it singles out as a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation”. Judaism has a complex relationship with the Jewry. Judaism cannot survive without Jews because only Jews or persons converted to Jewry can become Judaists. Judaism has for centuries been handed down by many generations of Rabbis. Throughout, the Rabbis have acted as the interpreters, articulators and guardians of the Judaic Torah. They decided who qualified to be a Jew and what the text of the Bible meant. This has given Judaism an exclusiveness which is inevitably frowned upon by other communities. After the middle of the second century AD, the diaspora of the Jews took them to many countries. Everywhere they distinguished themselves as an isolated, closed community of assiduous traders with wide-spun family and religious networks. As traders they became stockpilers, hoarders or accumulators of money. They developed a reputation as money lenders which raised the question of usury. Although the practice of charging an interest on loans was common in parts of Mesopotamia and among Phoenicians and Egyptians, Jews were not allowed to charge interest to other Jews. Deuteronomy 23:24 clearly stated “Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury, but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury”. By being permitted to charge interest to strangers but not to Jews, the charging of interest was made synonymous with something hostile. The charging of interest became calamitous for Jews in their relations with the rest of the world: they were disliked and mistrusted. As a result of their concentration on money lending to make a living, the Jews became an element in a vicious circle of money lending and being disliked. The traditional involvement of Jews in a variety of money-lending practices, has given rise to giving Jewry a bad name. “Being a Jew” in a proverbial sense has acquired the meaning of being a reclusive 2 exploiter of other people. Since the expulsion of Jews from Spain, many Jews took their ticket to emancipation or access to society through baptism as Christians. A famous example is the baptism into the Anglican Church of Benjamin Disraeli in 1817 as a result of a quarrel between his father and the local synagogue. Jews were not legally admitted to parliament until 1858, and without his baptism Disraeli could never have become Prime Minister. Karl Heinrich Marx was baptised as a 6-year old in Trier. His grandfather was a rabbi, but his father, Heinrich, was a child of the Enlightenment and a student of Voltaire and Rousseau. But he was also an ambitious lawyer and became a Christian, and in due course, rose to be dean of the Trier bar. His son, Karl, instead of going to the yeshiva attended Trier high school. During much of the first half of the 19th century Jews could not own land or exercise a trade or profession throughout Prussia. It was only after the Prussian Reform Treaty of 1847 and 1848 that civil rights on a non-religious base were established in the German states. Karl Marx himself, paradoxically, reflected the anti-Jewish sentiments of his time. Like the French utopian socialists Fourier and Proudhon who considered Jews as the “incarnation of commerce”, the “source of all evil”, an “unsociable race, obstinate, infernal ... the enemy of mankind”, “a network of commercial conspirators against humanity”, Marx described Jews in utterly pejorative terms. In two essays on “The Jewish Question” which he published in the Deutsch-Francöisische Jahrbucher in 1844, his terminology reflected typical anti-Semitic clichés: “the dirtiest of all races”, “leprous people”, “the Jewish money-men who never soil their hands with toil, exploit the poor workers and peasants”, the “disease of the Jews is the religion of money, and its modern form is capitalism”. Karl Marx expanded anti-Semitism from a conspiracy-theory based on a parasitical race into an anti- capitalist theory of class conflict. Wherever Jews settled as communities, their money lending led to trouble with the locals. The very fact of their constant displacement and resettlement probably had an invigorating effect on their cultural way of doing things and probably sharpened their business skills. They generally added a dynamic input to the areas where they settled. They became “expert settlers” as a result of having been forced to move throughout their history. As strangers and sojourners from their earliest origins, they had, over many generations, and in a variety of circumstances, perfected the skills of concentrating their wealth so that it could be switched quickly from a point of danger to a safer destination. Their outsider status is well demonstrated in their attitude to dealing with money – a double standard for money dealings with Jews and Gentiles. This prepared Jews to take advantage of economic opportunities wherever they settled. They kept on pushing the diaspora further in search of new business opportunities. They have been active over large parts of Asia from early medieval times trading in silks and spices they bought from the East and slaves they brought from the West. They served as bankers in Muslim courts, taking deposits from Jewish traders, while on-lending it to the Muslim caliphs. They thrived in Baghdad, Tunisia and Spain. Expelled Jews went to the Americas where they set up factories and became plantation owners. They were particularly active in Brazil where they controlled the trade in precious and semi-precious stones. The Jews have always been skilful at using and transferring capital. But since they were established in Anglo-Saxon society, the security they enjoyed in law enabled them to accumulate assets. Trading, especially in articles of small volume and high value, such as jewels, easily concealed and whisked from place to place, no longer constituted the sole economic activity in which Jews could engage safely. In New York and elsewhere in America, the Jews soon moved to control the centre of the 3 financial stage. In England the Jews became the founding element in the financial market of the City of London. As argued by Paul Johnson, the Jews made a contribution to the development of modern capitalism quite disproportionate to their numbers. They invented several financial instruments: bearer-bonds, bills of exchange, banknotes and a variety of financial securities. They dominated the Amsterdam stock exchange, held large portfolios in the Dutch VOC and both the British West and East India Companies. They were the first professional stock jobbers and brokers in England. In 1792 they took the lead in creating the New York Stock Exchange. As a people without a country, the world was their home: the further the market stretched, the greater were the opportunities. Jews built the first textile mills in India and acquired control of the first diamond and gold mines in South Africa. The Jewish Randlords in conjunction with Cecil John Rhodes and Lord Milner succeeded in pushing the British Colonial Office into war with the two Boer Republics. Afterwards the trading of gold and diamonds became the mainstay of the City of London trading accounts in the first decades of the 20th century. In modern times the centre of the world’s financial markets shifted to the Jewish bankers in Wall Street, New York. Then in 2008 these bankers and brokers dumped their toxic financial instruments (all kinds of derivatives) onto other financial markets and so precipitated the World Financial Crisis when it brought the fragile European economies into turmoil. These economies, in turn, have been brought to the fringe of insolvency by their practice of chronic deficit spending financed by the unfathomable bond market – also a creature of Jewish financial acumen. In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, Washington demanded no scalps from Wall Street. No directors were brought to book. When the US Congress introduced what actually became the “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act”, the financial interests of Wall Street evidently resolved that reforming Wall Street was too delicate a task to be left to Capitol Hill. The Obama Administration left it to the Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner (a former New York Federal Reserve President and Wall Street confidante) to design a mild overhaul of Wall Street regulation.

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