Hardy...
That's a slippery ground and additionally I'm afraid that we are deviating from our topics. However, from my point of view, usury is not an ethnical phenomenon but a social one. Again I have to refer to Chaim Zhitlowsky, who put it much better than I could (
http://goo.gl/x1vKMo, p. 95):
"The Jewish masses have been numbed to their degraded condition by poverty and ignorance that have dulled their sense of honor and national pride. Atavistic forms of religious fanaticism have translated national aspirations into the unrealizable dreams of a translucent future. The practice of usury and exploitation of the peasantry have elicited a completely understandable hatred toward Jewish exploiters and provided Christian clergy and reactionary groups with fuel to stoke centuries of accumulated religious and national antipathy into fires of implacable hatred for the Jewish masses. This hatred sometimes sparks pogroms as terrible as those we have seen in Russia. For how on earth is a rural farmer supposed to know that the Jewish masses, who have abandoned the transparency of agricultural labor and concealed themselves in the cities, are not part of the same crowd as his exploiter; how, in the heat of the moment, can he possibly realize that he is venting his pent-up rage on someone just as poor and unfortunate as he is!"
Chaim Zhitlowsky's papers, archived by YIVO (
http://digifindingaids.cjh.org/?pID=1278442) are worth to be (re)discovered!
Edgar Hauster
----------------------------------------
From: hardy3_at_bezeqint.net
To: bconcept_at_hotmail.com; fredweisinger16_at_gmail.com
CC: czernowitz-l_at_cornell.edu; sasha_at_raltron.com
Subject: תשובה: [Cz-L] Book of the Month, April 2015: Usury in Bukovina
Date: Mon, 6 Apr 2015 10:27:10 +0300
Usury:
Leaving out the different approaches and credibility,
do you believe that Jews ,more than any others,
were money lenders at outrageous interest rates.
Hardy
-snip-
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Received on 2015-04-06 08:17:07