Dan Michman
processes — and not only in outspoken antisemitic circles, but also
among proletarians who tended to socialism and communism.>! For the
young Karl Marx in the 1840s on the one hand,* and for a variety of
nationalist or Christian-social antisemites such as Heinrich von Trei-
tschke, Adolf Stocker and the like on the other, the Jew personified both
Capitalism and Communism (which was terpreted by its rivals as a
materialist money-oriented ideology which aimed at removing capital
from private to communal hands, i.e. gaining control over the free use of
money by individuals). And in many of the new nationalist movements
— not only the German one — for whom attachment to territory, to the
land, meant rootedness which was a cornerstone of their group identity,
the supposed money-orientation of the Jews represented their lack of
rootedness and cosmopolitanism,* them being Luftmenschen.>*
The Jews, who had been on the margins of society till the end of
the eighteenth century, succeeded in the nineteenth century — thanks to
the economic modernization process (which was based on the financial
market), most clearly in Germany — in climbing the social ladder and
entering the bourgeoisie, which stood at the core of the emerging new
social order, and even in becoming leading personalities in the political,
cultural and media spheres. Those circles who criticized the enormous
economic, social and moral changes that occurred (especially in the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century) and were afraid of them, viewed the
Jews as being both the driving force behind these destructive processes
as well as the major group profiting and benefitting from it.5 These feel-
ings were apparently vindicated by such academic scholarship as Werner
Sombart’s Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, in which he explained the
assumed intricate relationship between capitalism and the Jews.>® If the
51 See Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur; Kotek/Silvain, La carte postale de I’ Affaire
Dreyfus 2 la Shoah; Matard-Bonucci (ed.), ANTISEmythes.
52 Marx, Zur Judenfrage; Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, p. 3; Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession,
pp. 107-115.
53 Aly, Warum die Deutschen? Warum die Juden?, pp. 48-108; Almog, Nationalism
and Antisemitism in Modern Europe.
54 Berg, Luftmenschen.
55 Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, p. 439; Poliakov, Histoire de I'antisemitisme de Voltaire a
Wagner, pp. 404-420.
56 Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben. This book was reprinted many times,
and had an enormous impact on economic thinking about “the Jews”. For the Eng-
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