Money and the Jew is a dark trope pervading western thought. The Anglophone world celebrates Shakespeare, whose moneylender Shylock seeks his pound of flesh, and reveres the Magna Carta, whose original clauses included relief from Jewish moneylenders.
Intertwined with the trope is the recurring theme of rulers exploiting popular suspicion in order to shore up their own finances.
On 9 November 694 the Seventeenth Council of Toledo convened under the auspices of Egica the king of Visigoth Spain. The eighth canon of the synod railed against the treachery of the Jews and in terms of money was quite clear:
They shall be deprived of their property for the benefit of the exchequer and shall be made slaves forever.
The pogrom Kristallnacht took place on 9 November 1938. The conventional narrative is that a young Jew had assassinated a German diplomat in Paris and that the Nazi party’s paramilitary SA and SS forces responded by attacking Jews and destroying property throughout Germany while authorities looked on.
This narrative is compelling but tells half the story. When Goering convened the Meeting on the Jewish Question three days later, the real concern was that demonstrations were an economically irrational way of dealing with the Question. In Goering’s words, “I am not going to tolerate a situation in which the insurance companies are the ones who suffer.”
There is much debate about when the idea of genocide became the policy of the Final Solution. What is clear from the minutes of the meeting – one Goebbels and Heydrich also participated in – is that the policy was not yet contemplated. The primary aims were confiscation, apartheid, and forced emigration. As to the first, Goering echoes the same cause, the benefit of the exchequer, for which the clergy of Toledo had acted 1,244 years before:
The fundamental idea in this program of elimination of the Jew from German economy is first, the Jew being ejected from the Economy transfers his property to the State. He will be compensated. The compensation is to be listed in the debit ledger and shall bring a certain percentage of interest. The Jew shall have to live out of this interest.
