European Anti-Semitism - IV
As capitalism profoundly transformed life in Europe and economically integrated regions from the fifteenth century onward, the figure of the Jewish moneylender also underwent a transformation. The legally precarious figure, positioned on the margins of feudal lords, small principalities, and city communities, and always liable to be sacrificed in times of crisis, was gradually replaced by that of the Jewish banker, who lent to royal courts and states and became embedded in public finance.
In the nineteenth century, the most symbolic embodiment of this new phenomenon was the Rothschild family. Their origins traced back to the Frankfurt ghetto of the sixteenth century. However, the individual who brought the family to the forefront of history was Mayer Amschel Rothschild in the mid-eighteenth century. Mayer, a merchant in the ghetto, traded in coins and antiques and was also involved in small-scale lending and commission-based business. Somehow, he became the banker for the Prince of Hesse-Kassel, taking charge of managing the prince’s fortune, buying and selling bonds and treasury bills, and handling the wartime transfer of cash and precious metals. In this way, the family evolved from small ghetto merchants into“court financiers. Mayer Amschel also established a credit and information network operating across five cities, placing his five sons in key financial centers throughout Europe. The five arrows in the family’s coat of arms would, in fact, come to symbolize the five brothers and their unity.
By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Rothschild financial network had largely taken shape. The eldest son, Amschel, remained in Frankfurt; Nathan was in London; Salomon in Vienna; James (Jakob) in Paris; and Carl in Naples, each managing part of the family’s operations. During the 1810s and 1820s, the scene was dominated by war reparations after the Napoleonic Wars, payments to coalition armies, and the reconstruction efforts of the six major states, all of which created an enormous need for capital. At that time, modern central banks had not yet been established, and international bond markets were still in their infancy. The Rothschild network stood out in this vacuum, thanks to its capacity for rapid information exchange between cities, its ability to transfer foreign currency and precious metals, and its direct access to government negotiations.
A powerful dynasty had now emerged, entrenched in key European capitals and acting as an intermediary for sovereign borrowing. Its capital and influence were rooted in its close ties with governments: it marketed state bonds to international investors and managed public financing during both war and peace.
The family’s simultaneous presence in cities like London, Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt, and Naples added to the image of a “transnational, borderless Jew.” In fact, this was a modern iteration of the eternally exiled Jewish figure, and in this new form, it rendered the deeply embedded, “unpleasant” Jewish archetype within the European imagination even more threatening.
Perhaps the first to frame this figure as a threat was Alphonse de Toussenel. Born in 1803, Toussenel grew up in the circle of French utopian socialist Charles Fourier. He considered himself a “socialist,” but was also a zealous French nationalist and a polemicist with strong Catholic sensibilities. He worked as a journalist, wrote about natural history and zoology, but gained his greatest notoriety for his claims about Jews.
Toussenel laid out his views about Jews in his 1845 book Les Juifs, rois de l’époque (The Jews, Kings of the Time). According to him, feudalism had not ended with the Revolution of 1789. It had merely changed form. The new feudalism, he claimed, was financial feudalism, and its new aristocracy was composed of bankers.
In Toussenel’s framework, Jewish bankers stood at the heart of this new order. French peasants, artisans, and even the industrial bourgeoisie had now become vassals of the financial feudal lords. Everyone, including the king and the government, was now beholden to Jewish money. State debts, railway concessions, stock market speculation: in Toussenel’s narrative, all were driven by the invisible hand of the Jewish financial aristocracy. The market, as an independent mechanism, no longer existed, only Jewish bankers pulling the strings.
Les Juifs, rois de l’époque was one of the earliest and most characteristic expressions of modern antisemitism. For the first time, theological and social prejudices inherited from the Middle Ages were placed within an economic and political framework. But this framework was not grounded in reason, it was built on fear. The Jew was no longer just a person of the “false religion” or a “closed community”; he had become the invisible king of the age. No longer merely an object of hatred or prejudice, the Jew was now the source of deeper anxieties. That is modern antisemitism: not just hatred or bias toward Jews; it is the belief in the Jew as a powerful entity, capable of enslaving states, subjugating peoples, and manipulating politics, economics, and even culture to his will.
Toussenel never gave this reading a name. The term “antisemitism” was later coined by the German nationalist Wilhelm Marr. Marr argued that antisemitism did not stem from a religious dispute but from a racial conflict, an eternal struggle between the “Semitic race” and the “Germanic race.” For Marr, the problem was not Jewish faith, but Jewish blood. Therefore, the solution was not theological compromise or legal emancipation, but the removal of Jews from the body politic and society.
In France, this new language found its most vivid expression in Édouard Drumont’s 1886 book La France Juive (Jewish France). This two-volume work expanded Toussenel’s notion of “financial feudalism” and added an explicitly racist tone and nationalist moralism. Drumont depicted Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews as degenerate factions of the Semitic race, and the Aryan French people as a nation whose economy was controlled by Jewish bankers and stock market speculators, whose press was dominated by Jewish journalists, and whose culture was shaped by Jewish intellectuals. Jews were also portrayed as the bearers of the secular policies of the Third Republic, of moral decay, the decline of Catholicism, urbanization, and cosmopolitanism. The book’s widespread sales contributed significantly to its influence. Antisemitism had now broken out of narrow intellectual circles and been recast as a populist political discourse, capable of mobilizing a broad base of the petty bourgeoisie and Catholic masses. The antisemitic coalition that would later crystallize during the infamous Dreyfus Affair was nurtured on this ideological terrain.
In Austria-Hungary, antisemitism took the form of mass political parties and a supposedly scientific nationalist discourse that mobilized social discontent around a reimagined Jewish figure. In the Russian Empire, the same process, combined with state-sanctioned policies and violent pogroms, resulted in mass destruction.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern antisemitism had begun to interpret virtually all political and economic unrest, ranging from colonial rivalries to labor movements, freedom of the press to secularism, fear of revolution to moral crises, as part of a “Jewish conspiracy.” This narrative would reach its most infamous articulation in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.