Despite the Claims of Anti-Semites, Financiers Play a Useful and Productive Role in Society

From the early Middle Ages until the present day, Jews have been associated with banking and financing—often because they played an outsized role in this economic sector. The best-known explanation blames the Christian prohibition on usury, but more recent research has pointed to the advantages and necessities of being a diasporic people, the requirements of Jewish religious life, Jewish involvement in trade during the transition to cash-based economies, and Gentile governments’ prohibitions on Jews engaging in other areas of economic activity. Whatever the causes, the result was the intertwining of anti-Semitism with the belief—rooted in both classical sources and certain readings of the Hebrew Bible itself—that finance and moneylending are intrinsically corrupt.