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PARTISAN REVIEW
... What kind of wealth? The kind that is easiest to keep or to save, light
and transportable - nothing other that gold. But better still than gold was
invisible wealth, gold placed in sure hands. If the Phoenicians, as it is said,
invented writing, the Jews almost simultaneously invented the bank
note." Jewish wealth was not located in the material world of land, but
rather in the immaterial world of numbers: the myth of hidden, conspira–
torial Jewish power remained intact.
It is somewhat ironic that Michelet, an intellectual who spent his life
writing and teaching history and who knew little of the world outside the
Sorbonne, hated capitalism because it evoked for him an abstract intellec–
tual system, fatally divorced from industry and production. He never
transcended his nostalgia for the traditional world of the artisan and con–
tinued to view industrial production in such a light, as a vital, material,
creative process that could never have anything in common with the ra–
tional speculation of capitalism. Jews, he imagined, inhabited an inhuman
world in which numbers circulated instead of human beings. Comparing
France's social classes to geological layers, he purported to discover real
warmth and vitality in the lower strata, that is, in the peasant class. But in
the higher strata, populated by Jews, he found only ice. "It is like the cold
of the Alps, the region of snows. Moral vegetation gradually disappears,
and the flower of nationality grows pale. If I ascend one step higher, there
is the pure egotism of the calculator who has no fatherland, where people
are no longer people but numbers. This is a true glacier, abandoned by
nature."
From the vertical vantage point of their invisible, abstract wealth, it is
not surprising that, in the resourceful anti-Semitic imagination, the Jews
ascended to establish themselves as the financial kings of Europe.
According to Michelet, they "solved the problem of volatizing wealth;
liberated by international monetary exchange, now they are free, they are
the masters; after adding insult to injury, there they are, sitting on the
throne of the world." This preposterous idea that the Jews were the fi–
nancial kings of Europe was a commonplace in mid-nineteenth-century
France, disputed by few. It was the thesis of an extremely influential
book,
Les Juifs, rois de I'epoque,
written in 1845 by Alphonse Toussenel, a
follower of the socialist Charles Fourier. Whereas conservatives were not
threatened by capitalism and banking, it was socialists in the mid-nine–
teenth century who were staunchly opposed
to
capitalist finance and who
accused the Jews of creating a retrograde financial feudalism. Although
some socialists were troubled by Toussenel's virulent and obsessive anti–
Semitism, his book was nevertheless reviewed in socialist periodicals as a
serious work that illuminated France's fundamental problem, Jewish fi–
nancial hegemony.
