Icouldn’t help chuckling this morning over the announcement that Stanley Fischer seems to a shoo-in to become Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve once Janet Yellen finally takes over the reigns from Ben Bernanke. The chuckle comes from knowing what the fringe anti-Semitic wild-man blogs and websites like JewWatch and so many others will say about it. (They probably already have.) Without having looked to find out yet, I could easily make predictions you could take to the bank, so to speak, about the line they will take, all organized around the unshakable conviction that Jewish money secretly controls the entire world. This will be put in portentously hushed Protocols-type language (often misspelled).
But what’s the point? This stuff is silly, and we all have better things to do. And yet there is something especially “out-there”, more evocative of Jewcentric exaggerations than usual, about Fischer and his likely new role.
Fischer, as those familiar with the biographies of this province of American public policy know, is a towering figure. As today’s newspaper summaries attest, he taught for many years at MIT and has had as his students some of the most prominent luminaries in the field of applied economic and finance today: Bernanke himself most famously, but also Mario Draghi, Greg Mankiew, Oliver Blanchard and many, many others. Not all of these folks are Jewish, and some of them aren’t even Americans; but in the addled minds of the conspiracy theorists, that just thickens the plot from soup to stew.
Why is Fischer’s elevation more Jewcentrically “out-there”? Because more than Bernanke, Greenspan, Volcker and others who came before at the Fed, Fischer is definitely more of a “wandering” type, and more vividly a Zionist, too. He was born in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia today), then lived in regular old Rhodesia as a child (Zimbabwe today). As a kid he was a member of Habonim, spent time on an Israeli kibbutz studying language in an ulpan, and considered going to Hebrew University (from whence he received an honorary doctorate in 2006). Born in 1943, Fischer did not become a U.S. citizen until 1976. Yet for eight years long after gaining U.S. citizenship he served as head of the Bank of Israel. More, he’s a member of the Bilderberg Group, which hangs out a lot in St. Moritz. (FYI, JewWatch dudes, that’s in Switzerland.) And he has travelled the globe extensively, as well, as a high-level employee of both the IMF and the World Bank. To a garden-variety insular American bigot, this is way, way too international, and much too uber-Jew, for comfort.
There’s even more to raise the temperature of the already fevered. According to the New York Times article on the Fischer appointment, President Obama is likely to replace a few other of the statutory seven members of the Fed’s Board of Governors before his term ends. Only one prospective new member is mentioned: Lael Brainerd, a former Treasury Department Undersecretary who used to work at Brookings. She is married (I’m assuming is still married) to Kurt Campbell, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia during Obama’s first term. Yes, she is Jewish.
Now, if Janet Yellen had not been tapped by the President to replace Bernanke, Larry Summers might have been. He is Jewish, too. Summers might have taken counsel from his friend and associate, former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin. Jewish, of course. Summers would thus have had at least something in common with Jack Lew, the current Treasury Secretary, who belongs to an Orthodox synagogue. One can go on, and others no doubt will—as I have predicted. But what, after all, does any of this actually mean?
Well, no one knows for sure, but a lot of people have offered theories or pieces of theories. I reviewed many of these in Jewcentricity. Jerry Z. Muller does so in a 2010 book devoted entirely to the matter, Capitalism and the Jews. Muller’s description of the late-19th century debate in Germany involving Georg Simmel, Max Weber and Werner Sombart alone is worth the price of admission. And I could list about thirty other serious books that have taken a swing at the question if I wished. This is not the place to go into all this, and there is plenty to go into. So suffice it to make just two fairly simple points.
First, other minority and/or diasporic trading-based communities aside from Jews have been just as good at capitalism, finance and banking (Huguenots, Chinese, Lebanese, Omanis, Greeks, Armenians, Gujaratis, etc.) So there’s nothing “genetic” or “blood”-driven going on here. It was by happenstance, not blood, that Jews in Europe had possession of “modern” numerals, and with them the concept of “zero”It was by happenstance, not blood, that Jews in Europe had possession of “modern” numerals, and with them the concept of “zero”, thanks to the Spanish-Moorish golden age centered in Córdoba, long before their gentile associates—and what a huge advantage it provided for keeping sales and inventory records, devising joint-stock and insurance arrangements, planning investments and so forth. (Try doing a division problem with Roman numerals and you will soon see why.) Jews were perfect choices to be customs agents for both the Italian city-states and for various Ottoman provinces of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, at the dawn of modern capitalism, in part because they could use Hebrew script to keep records and transaction details in confidence. Examples of these mixtures of happenstance and aptitude could be multiplied for hours.
But second, as to aptitude, being good at this stuff, whether as traders in yesteryear or finance wizards in modern contemporary times, requires a certain facility with a particular class of abstractions, of which math is the core. Not all Jews, but enough of them, are particularly good at this sort of thing. There is ample empirical psychometric evidence for this (I mention some of it in Jewcentricity). So maybe some aspect of epigenetics is in play here, by which I mean a process, not well understood, that yokes culturally learned distillations to child-rearing methods to produce a particular intellectual inheritance and, if properly nurtured educationally, facility. I will not speculate further, at least not here.
Then, not to be overlooked, there is a huge yin-yang factor of reputational dynamics involved here. For reasons also too complex and arcane to go into, a lot of powerful non-Jewish leadersthink Jews are especially adept at this kind of thing (in this country think Bernard Baruch, Henry Morgenthau, even Judah P. Benjamin from an earlier time, and I could go on…), and so they end up magnifying the cumulative optic by repeatedly appointing Jews to do money-related stuff. We then get a kind of rolling, self-fulfilling momentum: Jews have a knack for this stuff, non-Jews let them demonstrate it, which increases the attraction of smart Jews for this line of study and work, which produces more capable candidates relative to other groups, which increases the odds that non-Jews will want to hire up their skills, and so merrily on and on we go.
The bottom line here (pun entirely intended) is that conspiracy mongering anti-Semites do not actually have to make up all their data about Jews and finance capitalism. They make up plenty, to be sure, but there is also for sure plenty of data available for real. Stanley Fischer is just the most recent significant case, or datum, in point.
Just one final note on this. According to pretty much all accounts, Fischer did an excellent job as director of the Bank of Israel. This was a big deal in a small place. The joke in Israel, before Fischer fixed the mess he inherited, was that if Jews are so good as bankers and advisers at handling other people’s money, how come they can’t handle their own, in their own reborn sovereign homeland? It used to be funny, but thanks to Fischer, and people like Bernie Madoff on the other end, that joke, reeking of Jewcentricity as it did, doesn’t work like it used to. Fine with me but, alas, this won’t impress the conspiracy theorists. They will ever believe when it comes to supposed world Jewish conspiracies that, to phrase it in the fairly well-known song-title of Randy Newman, “It’s Money That Matters.” (Yes, he’s Jewish, too.)
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