Some thoughts about Jews and money. First, it is always dangerous, however cleverly you word it, to say Jews are rich. Jews aren’t rich, particularly. Some are. And some aren’t.
A study by the non-partisan wealth research firm New World Wealth found that 56.2 per cent of the 13.1 million millionaires in the world were Christian, while 6.5 per cent of them were Muslim, 3.9 per cent were Hindu and 1.7 per cent were Jewish.
But either way — and this is very un-Marxist of me — f–k off about money. Because money doesn’t protect you from racism.
As I say, some Jews are rich. My grandparents were: they were industrialists in East Prussia. They owned a brick factory. They had servants. By the time they were fleeing to England with my mother as a baby in 1939, however, that had all been robbed from them. And by the end of the war, most of their family — and therefore a large section of mine — had been murdered.
It doesn’t matter how rich you are, because the racists will smash in the door of your big house that they know you don’t deserve anyway and only own because you’re Jews.
Second, people think it’s not an insult to link Jews with money, because money’s a good thing, isn’t it? In a capitalist society, we admire people with money. Except of course, we don’t. We envy and resent people with money. And we particularly envy and resent people with money around whom we can create narratives, racist narratives, that suggest that there is something dark, ill-gotten and exploitative about how they, and all their brethren they are in league with, got that money.
Read the article by David Baddiel in The Australian.