Racism as a Backhanded Compliment
By Guest Contributor G.D., originally published at PostBourgie
In a post called “Penny-Pinching Jews and South Carolina Republicans,” Jeff Goldberg points to an editorial by two South Carolina Republicans defending Sen. Jim DeMint’s opposition to opening the federal spigot for his state.
Recently your newspaper published a letter from state Rep. Bakari Sellers attacking U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint and his opposition to congressional earmarks.
There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.
To which one of Goldberg’s readers responded:
Perhaps I’m seeing something that isn’t there, but I inferred from the title of this post a suggestion of anti-Semitic bigotry on the part of the two county Republican chairmen.
First, I think there is a difference between stereotypes to be disparaged and stereotypes to be emulated. The chairmen were guilty of the latter. Second, I’ve lived 2/3 of my life in the South/Southwest and the rest in the Northeast. I’ve the noticed that the attitudes about Jews in either place to be remarkably different. In New York, a Jew is some jerk who is dating his sister or a weirdly dressed guy who’s probably hoarding diamonds. In the S/SW and probably in most of the Midwest, a Jew is David or Solomon or Daniel or Jesus or James or Paul.
Ah, yes! Those good stereotypes that we should emulate! They’re always tossed into the bin of “bad” and “racist,” which just isn’t right. Unlike “bad stereotypes,” the good ones are dehumanizing and condescending, but in a well-intentioned sort of way!
The stereotype of the money-hungry Jew has had a pretty good run (Shakespeare!), as stereotypes tend to, what with their being logical fallacies that can’t be disproven. This one really picked up traction in the olden days, back when Europe’s Christians believed that money-lending was a sin. Europe’s Jews were relegated to the bottom of the social ladder because they didn’t believe in salvation through Christ. They were blamed for everything from witchcraft to killing Christian babies to spreading the Black Death, and massacred in violent pogroms. (This suggests that stereotypes are so long-lived because the dangerous stupidity of racists has no apparent ceiling.) Since they were barred from other kinds of labor and had no religious compunctions against it, many Jewish men ended up taking work as money-lenders — which being sinful and all, was held up by Europe’s Christians as another example of Jewish iniquity and duplicity.
(This is textbook racism: a complicated feedback loop of dehumanization used to justify cruelty toward a given group. Por ejemplo: “Blacks are dumb and lazy! We better own, beat, terrorize and rape them, keep them from reading and codify their inferiority into law! By the way, did you know that those Negroes can’t read or advocate for their own humanity? Idiots.”)
Hitler rose to power in part on the idea that there was a secret cabal of shady Jewish bankers wreaking pecuniary havoc on the wider world — a notion that Germans were primed to receive after centuries of European folklore posited the wickedness of Jews as a given. That idea remains a tentpole of global antisemitism.
In trying to flip the script, those two S.C. Republicans miss the point that their “compliment” starts from a position that the money-hungry, penny-pinching Jew stereotype is true and valid.Trying to untether that stereotype from this history, as the guy defending these two Republicans does, takes a lot of arrogance, ignorance or both.
If you scratch down just below the surface, you’ll find this kind of Othering in all “good stereotypes.” The well-worn trope about black men being strong and athletic with huge dicks is supposed to be some kind of compliment, even as it directly recalls the myth of violent, animalistic black male sexuality to which so much of America’s long history of racist terrorism has been a response. The “positive stereotype” of the smart Asian is based on the old idea of Asian folks as crafty, untrustworthy possessors of secret knowledge — an idea whose assumed validity makes it easier to round folks up en masse during wartime and shove them into detention camps.
But those two South Carolinians and their defender at Goldblog weren’t trying to conjure up all that historical ugliness. They’re just some down-home guys, regular schmoes who can’t be bogged down with all that reading and the assumption of basic human dignity of folks who aren’t like them. I mean that in a good way, of course.
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Photo from Wikimedia Commons
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist wrote:
Stereotyping and racism against all groups fucking suck. I’ve often had to yell at my (brown) friends for making anti-Semitic jokes. It’s NEVER ok !!!
Posted 02 Nov 2009 at 12:18 pm ¶
Lola wrote:
My first exposure to this stereotype was this spring during a sewing class. In retrospect I’m sure the woman deliberately waited until we were alone to spew her racism. The instructer had stepped out for a break and the other attendee was absent. So there were are at our sewing machines, mostly working quietly with occasional chit chat. She starts talking about how she has this friend that is great at negotiating, her friend knows how to “Jew them down” and get a good price on reservations.
I was so appalled I didn’t know what to do, I just ignored her comment. I feel bad for not calling her on it but at the same time, as a black woman (with an afro) there is probably nothing I could do to change her mind or not make myself the target. I can’t wait to move out of this town.
Posted 02 Nov 2009 at 1:17 pm ¶
Naomi C wrote:
Like Goldberg’s reader, i spent 18 years of my life in the south and 6 years in the NE. i def have experienced far more stereotypes and othering since coming up north than i did in the south.
i actually never heard the rich jew comment before coming up here except on tv
it always offends me when ppl use it, even when they dont mean it in a bad way (”what? it’s good u guys have money”)
not necessarily from the historical context, but more from the sense of all people of a certain background being lumped together.. that any success i may garner is inherently b/c of my background. that any time i want to save money, i’m bein cheap.. and not just tryin to afford payin off loans and rent
anywayy..
Posted 02 Nov 2009 at 1:56 pm ¶
Matt wrote:
Well, no. I do appreciate the article, but let me clarify something: Most Jews were not money-lenders; most money-lenders were not Jews. The stereotype was built on even older myths about Jews! Were Jews “disproportionately” money-lenders? Maybe — though I doubt we could ever know — but the bigger factor was that Jewish behavior was marked. I think it goes back (which is not to say we can’t go further back) to the Augustine approach to supercessionism, which did nothing to resolve the problem except to give Christians a “post-racial” feeling. Instead, it’s what made antisemitism in Europe so unpredictable, with tremendously tolerant eras alternating with massive ethnic cleansings and genocides, where “positive” stereotypes and “Christian love” for Jews were prominent.
My feelings about these two Republicans is that I’m not the least surprised by their ignorance and bigotry. I do appreciate that their apology was quick and seemingly sincere, but I also think such antisemitism is more common than most people think. Most Jews live apart from most antisemites in this country (weird, huh?), so we tend to underestimate the prevalence of antisemitism.
But at the same time, they don’t bother me the way some other examples do. It’s not hard to find condemnations or allies to fight this sort of thing. When the Socialist Workers’ Party in the UK hosted this guy (I won’t name him, for the sake of our moderators) at their annual Marxism festival for something like six years in a row. That scared the shit out of me, because that’s where I found self-identified anti-racists who said they “love Jews” telling me that I was a hypersensitive, neurotic Jew with dual loyalties selfishly destroying the world.
This isn’t to say this article isn’t a good thing. It is; it’s a mitzvah. But it’s a little easy to criticize Ulmer and Merwin and feel like we’re doing something good. We shouldn’t forget that.
Posted 02 Nov 2009 at 2:06 pm ¶
Jess wrote:
The old stereotype never seems to go away (sigh).
I can, I think, offer several sources for the moneylender trope: first, a lot of Jews were moneylenders, but that was because charging interest was a sin , so Christians couldn’t do it (Barbara Tuchman has a really great bit on this in A Distant Mirror if I remember right). But it was okay for Jews to engage in sinful behavior because they weren’t Christians. Of course, not being a Christian was sort of a sin too… you can see where that leads.
Also, Jews were not, in many places, allowed to own land. That means that you had to have portable wealth. Before paper money there weren’t many options — you had gold or skills. The old legend of the Jew with the gold around his neck dates from that, in part. Of course, most Jews were too poor to have that. That is why a lot of them were in professions that were a) mobile and b) involving ’sinful’ occupations.
(For a neat cross-cultural comparison, look at the discrimination suffered by people in Buddhist countries who are butchers or tanners. See Peasants, Rebels and Outcasts. Similar idea).
Anyhow, the legends arise because there were professions that Jews ended up in because they were not really allowed to do much else. At the same time, many of the professions Jews got into were vital services for a typical pre-modern society — even moneylending. (”Tinker,” by the way, was a noun before it was a verb, and that was one “Jewish” profession. My own ancestors were pushcart repairmen).
But just because such legends/stereotypes arise for real historical reasons, doesn’t alter the fact that they aren’t a good way to refer to people.
The comments by the Senators were simply stupid and the usual crap I have heard since I was a wee tot. I even had a (Haitian from Montreal, of all people) woman say after a dinner “Hand the bill to the Jew (me), he’ll figure it out better than the rest of us.” Um.
So called “positive” stereotypes are anything but. And they ignore things that are screamingly obvious, like the fact that on Shabbat (Sabbath) religious Jews are not supposed to touch money at all.
Matt-cosign on the Augustine reference. And I might also add that I am sick and tired of hearing devout Christians say they worship a man who is a Jew, given that Christians have put a lot of effort into eliminating us from the landscape.
The apologies are nice. But distancing themselves from the wingnut Beckians and Bachmanns that have taken over the GOP would be better.
Posted 02 Nov 2009 at 3:19 pm ¶
chicagorose wrote:
BNP’s steady rise in the UK scares the shit out of me. Mostly I read vitriol aimed at immigrants, Polish and Muslims. But let a person identify themselves as Jewish (or as any race\ethnicity\religion for that matter) and it all comes spewing out.
Posted 02 Nov 2009 at 4:04 pm ¶
RCHOUDH wrote:
It’s quite frightening to see how stereotypes can go from negative to positive and back again in the blink of an eye all depending on the mood of mainstream society. During tough times like the recession now, all minorities are being blamed one way or another (the Jews ran the big banks to the ground, the Asians are stealing precious American jobs, the blacks and Latinos took out those subprime loans, etc).
Posted 02 Nov 2009 at 5:33 pm ¶
RCHOUDH wrote:
I’d just like to add that those same stereotypes I referred to above would be looked as “positive” for the groups they apply during prosperous (the rich Jews who run America’s fine corporations, the smart Asians who come to America and become its future scientists and engineers, the strong and united black (and Latino for their group) community that is trying to pull itself up by the bootstraps and achieve the American Dream.
Posted 02 Nov 2009 at 5:42 pm ¶
Kaviani wrote:
Southern Christians largely subscribe to the prosperity gospel. Per THEIR logic: you’re only rich if god wants you to be rich; Jews are “god’s people”, therefore, the stereotype must be correct since (per the stereotype) Jew’s are rich! So it’s ok to be “jewy” in that sense- in fact, Jesus (King Jew) wants you to be like his people but only in that sense.
An apology from people like these is worthless and even more offensive than the insult since they only apologize to silence others; not because they actually realize and regret the error. Let them all wear their bigotry on their sleeves I say. I at least have *some* respect for a bigot who’s upfront. Meanwhile, it would behoove Christian America to hear stories and see images of impoverished Jews in Iran, Yemen, and YES- even Israel.
Posted 02 Nov 2009 at 6:24 pm ¶
Lainad wrote:
This whole thread kinda confuses me – not because I haven’t wintessed back-handed ‘complimentary’ stereotypes at play, but the shit that comes out of people’s mouths.
When I was 18-19, I met this guy in school whose parents where Holocaust survivors. It wasn’t something that he wore on his sleeve; it was something that he told me after we had known each other for awhile.
Growing up, I had never heard any negative remarks, per se, but they were more like ‘how all Jews were good with money.’ As a kid I thought ‘that’s a bit odd’ – being complimented but being insulted at the same time – but I tell ya, after this guy – and we are still friends 20 years later – told me about his family’s story, it made me really think. I would never,ever consider making a stereotypical remark like that, whether it is meant to be ‘complimentary’ or insulting. Especially to strangers, as though they would automatically think you would agree with them.
What’s wrong with people?
Posted 02 Nov 2009 at 8:11 pm ¶
John John wrote:
“Hitler rose to power in part on the idea that there was a secret cabal of shady Jewish bankers wreaking pecuniary havoc on the wider world — a notion that Germans were primed to receive after centuries of European folklore posited the wickedness of Jews as a given.”
To expand and clarify on the above quote. Most of the people of WW1 Germany did not see or realise that they would lose the war even at the end of it. So there was a feeling that the victory and glory of Germany had been betrayed by their leaders and then Hitler came onto the scene and offered up a specific group that was responsible for the defeat of Germany.
Posted 02 Nov 2009 at 11:04 pm ¶
dersk wrote:
@Lainad: “When I was 18-19, I met this guy in school whose parents where Holocaust survivors. It wasn’t something that he wore on his sleeve… ”
PLEASE tell me that wasn’t trying to be word play. My favorite insane anti-Jew story: one of my college roommates (Jewish, from central Virginia) used to talk about a call-in radio show he listened to. A woman called up, and as an aside mentioned “Well, of course you know the Jews control the weather…”
Posted 03 Nov 2009 at 9:33 am ¶
Lainad wrote:
For the love of god, that wasn’t meant to be ‘word play’. What I meant is that he did not discuss this openly. It was a private and very personal matter to him.
Posted 03 Nov 2009 at 1:59 pm ¶
dejamorgana wrote:
Ah, the “good” stereotype that never dies. I’ve been hearing this one all my life, both the backhanded compliment version and the simply stated belief that all Jews are stingy, and usually rich. It’s widespread, and deeply entrenched. I’ve called people on it a hundred times, and never gotten anywhere – at best, people will tell me that I’m not like the other Jews.
Posted 04 Nov 2009 at 9:26 am ¶
Ain't I an African wrote:
The noble savage (and its relative, the long suffering African woman) is another persistent example of backhanded racism, one which irks me.
Posted 04 Nov 2009 at 12:30 pm ¶