Death through Work

One of the commonest accusation against the Jews is that they are parasites, that they do not produce anything material and do not like to work. The idea is so deeply rooted that the Nazis established death camps where the killing was done by over-working and under-feeding the Jewish inmates - a way of dedicated revenge. In Auschwitz, work groups went out each early morning to do some physically demanding labor while receiving very low calorie content soup. Inevitably, they died in few weeks, only the young and healthy survived for a few months, and then they became too weak to stand in the reviews and were sent to the gas chambers.

The concept that Jews were parasites always hit me as absurd, because the Jews I knew were very diligent, and they were paid good money for their services - meaning they were valuable. Why financial risk managing (like lending money at interest), or commerce, without which no economy can subsist, can be considered unproductive? Now I am reading classical economic literature, like the "Principles of Political Economy" by John Stuart Mill, and this nineteen century economist proposes this idea that only those activities that produce physical objects add to the wealth of the nations, while all the others subtract from it. And he is not the author of the concept but reflects the economic wisdom of former centuries.

The Nazis had this primitive and incorrect concept of economics, and felt that the academic economists of their generation - most of them Jews - were developing some kind of bizarre "Jewish economic science" aimed only at clearing the Jews of the crime of economic parasitism. They felt in their guts that something was wrong with those decent German peasants producing food (bread) through hard physical work should be poor while the Jewish intermediaries - pure consumers - were prospering. The concept is so deeply rooted that even today, when less than 1% of the population works the land and less than 5% works in factories producing physical goods, when 90% works in offices and other service jobs, Jews are thought (by honest but ignorant non-Jews) as unproductive.

Anti-Semites hang on to an obsolete, wrong, absurd notion, but one so deeply believed that was impossible to refute in the Galut. Early Zionist built a flowering farming sector which by its very existence refutes the antisemites' arguments. I always felt that Zionism's fixation with the "halutz" the Jewish farmer was wrong, but it answered and refuted a very damaging image, that - under the Nazis - actually was physically killing the Jews.