Does Anti-Semitism Make You Poor? https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/uncategorized/2014/10/does-anti-semitism-make-you-poor/

October 21, 2014 | Walter Russell Mead, et al.
About the author: Walter Russell Mead is a distinguished fellow at Hudson Institute, professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College, and editor-at-large of the American Interest. His books include Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (2004), God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (2007), and The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People (forthcoming 2017).

One of the oldest of anti-Semitic tropes is the image of Jews secretly manipulating the economy and using credit to take advantage of simple folk. It has also been found to correlate with reduced wealth in people who subscribe to it—like today’s radical (and not so radical) Islamists. Walter Russell Mead and his staff explain:

The association that anti-Semites make between “the Jews” and the role of finance would be the kind of simplification that would appeal to jihadis trying to analyze a world that they can’t understand but that frightens and, they fear, dominates them. Linking “the Jews” with Western finance helps jihadis build an all-embracing picture of a shadowy and powerful enemy, and offers the illusion of insight and mastery. . . . It is an expensive and disabling error, but an attractive and glittering one. In any case, the unreflecting credulity which makes crude forgeries like the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion so widely popular in Islamist circles today is itself a sign of cultural decadence and intellectual blight.

Read more on American Interest: http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/10/20/does-anti-semitism-make-you-poor/