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Jews as the economic scapegoat: how Christians dominated moneylending while Jews
| MASE | 03/17/26 |
| JJC (retired) | 03/17/26 |
Poast new message in this thread
Date: March 17th, 2026 12:21 PM Author: MASE The archae system built visibility bias into institutional infrastructure. Theological doctrine built it into conceptual categories. Expulsion rhetoric built it into political justification. Understanding this transforms how we read both medieval sources and modern antisemitic discourse. The question was never “Did Jews control finance?” The question is: “Who benefits when that myth is maintained?”
Christians dominated medieval credit. That is not interpretation but arithmetic. When historians count all forms of credit rather than only the legally documented forms that infrastructure made visible, Christians constituted 70% of creditors. When we examine who financed royal operations, Italian merchant-bankers dwarfed Jewish lenders. When we trace credit after expulsion, it continued because the infrastructure was never Jewish-dependent.
Yet the myth of Jewish moneylending dominance served too many functions to yield to evidence. It justified expulsion politically. It resolved theological contradictions about usury. Not only that, but it assigned blame for debt burdens without challenging the credit infrastructure that powerful Christian interests controlled. The gap between reality and blame was not an error requiring correction. It was the mechanism, operating as designed. https://eliezeraryeh.substack.com/p/jews-as-the-economic-scapegoat |
Date: March 17th, 2026 12:26 PM Author: JJC (retired) So 1% of the population did 30% of the lending?
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