Fun fact: the anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews having lots of money/being greedy/cheap began in the Middle Ages thanks to Christian laws.
The Christian church began forbidding Christians from having professions that involved lending money, banking, or pawn work. It was because the church believed that money was ultimately unclean so although it was considered a necessity, Christians were instructed to deal with it as little as possible.
But someone still needed to run all of those money-based businesses. So these societies which were already run by Christian leadership basically made it a rule that these businesses had to be run by Jews since they were already “unclean”. Furthermore, due to other restrictions on Jewish people in these areas, these money-based positions were pretty much some of the only jobs Jews could legally hold.
This eventually led to numerous stereotypes involving Jews and money. And the acidity of these stereotypes grew when Christian people and leaders became resentful of the livelihood Jews were able to achieve for themselves with these jobs.
So to sum up: Christian society forces Jews to hold down money-centered jobs since, according to the church, Jews were already going to Hell. Then, once they made lives with these roles they were forced into, Jews were mocked and hated for being successful.
History major here, just want to add details to emphasize how damaging these stereotypes are, even to a modern audience. To do so, I need to quote the introduction to “The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous” by Asa Simon Mittman.
In his class, Mittman was teaching his students about the negative portrayals of Jewish people in medieval works, specifically “Demons, Saracens and Jews” which depicts them as literal monsters. Hooked noses, fangs, grimaces, the whole she-bang. He then recounts this anecdote.
“One of my students raised her hand after this discussion, with a look of confusion and anger on her face. She said that she did not understand what I was ‘trying to get at.’ She said, with a quaver of emotion in her voice, that I was making too much out of nothing, since this is what Jews look like, more or less. And anyway, she continued, the Jews are Christ-killers. She then screamed out the text of John 19:15, saying “the Jews shouted, ‘Kill him! Kill him! Crucify him!’
She was quoting, interestingly, from the “God’s Word Translation,” the most violent English translation i have been able to find, since most read ‘take him’ or ‘away with him,’ where this one reads ‘kill him.’ […] The resulting impression, conveyed by my student, was that the Jewish monster was real. The impact of these imagined monsters has all been too real, form the middle ages onward.
I was struck temporarily speechless, but as I soundlessly worked my jaw to formulate a reply, I saw in the eyes of all the other students a shocked recognition that, in essence, answers the question posed at the outset: all of this matters. All of this is relevant. I was trying to show how medieval images were designed to allow medievals to confuse one group of Jews from the first century with all Jews in their own day, and here, in twenty-first-century America, my students saw this same notion quite alive. “
All of this matters.
All of this is relevant.
Things Jewish people were not allowed to do in Europe throughout most of the middle ages (specific laws varied from place to place, but these are fairly standard):
1) own/rent farmland. So, in an agrarian society where most people are farmers, the most common way of making a living is denied them
2) join guilds. Every skilled job from weaver to tailor to smith to paper-maker to carpenter to damn near ANYTHING that you could do that would make you a living that WASN’T farming required joining a guild. And let’s remember that stores weren’t like they are today, there were very few places where you had someone with a shop to sell things they did not personally make. Those things came with industrialization. So, if you are not permitted to take up a trade to make things, chances are you won’t be able to sell them, either. This neatly prevents Jewish people from doing like 90% of the non-farming jobs in the community.
3) live outside ghettos, or walk outside them without a badge that marked them as Jewish.
4) Go to university/become a clerk/lawyer/other bureaucrat. See, “clerk” (i.e. secretary/paper-pusher) and “cleric” (i.e. priest/religious leader) come from the same root word, there really WASN’T any such thing as a secular higher education, the main course of study in universities was theology. So that blocks Jewish people from half the stuff that is neither farming nor guild-related.
5) Own anything even vaguely weapon-like.
This leaves Jewish people with EXTREMELY few options for “how do I make a living.” You could go into money-lending, but it was extremely high-risk. Make a loan to the wrong person, and instead of paying you back he’d kill you and laugh to his friends about how horrible those grasping greedy jews are, and everybody would agree with him. This was a regular occurrence. You could find some sort of other job–probably backbreaking and degrading, but less dangerous. If you lived in a city with enough other Jewish people, you could run some sort of specialized business (a kosher butchery, for example) that only served Jewish people.
Most Christians were pretty cold-blooded about using and abusing Jewish people. For example, in the middle ages, lots of the Christian nobles in Eastern Europe used Jewish people as go-betweens to collect rent. The nobles own the land, the peasants work the land (and get oppressed by a culture of REALLY TERRIBLE NOBLES, I mean, seriously, even for medieval times they were horrible in every way imaginable). Jewish people are the ones coming around and collecting the rents because, see above, they aren’t allowed really any other jobs and it’s this or starve. So, what happens when there’s an uprising, whether peasants revolting or minor nobles revolting against the people above them? KILL THE JEWS! Never mind that the Jewish people aren’t the ones who set up the system and they’re not the ones profiting from it. So the vile exploiters at the top of the system mostly get through unscathed, while the people they’re using and oppressing get massacred. The largest and worst example of this is the Chmielnicki Pogrom of 1648-1649.
Also, it wasn’t uncommon (and the post touches on this a little, but I want to make it explicitly clear) for nobility, who were often land-rich but cash-poor, to take out large loans from Jewish moneylenders and then expel or kill every Jew in their territory to avoid having to repay the debt. A number of European regions that expelled or killed Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance did so, ultimately, for this reason, sometimes whole countries at a time.
Jews also weren’t allowed to bake bread, because that was too similar to the Eucharist. Hence boiling rings of dough, creating bagels.
There are a lot of examples of European laws that resulted in modern Ashkenazi culture. There’s just… so many examples of this.
You can find a lot more if you read Jewish and European history.
Additional note: Jews were the first victims of modern racism, which is outlined in A Short History of Racism by George Fredrickson (which I highly recommend). To be clear, modern racism considers race to be inherent and a part of your blood.
In early catholic history, as the church grew in power, Jews wanted to convert. Catholics allowed Jews into the church, but separated them since they were still technically Jewish converts. But, then the kids of the converts asked why they were still being treated as lesser, despite being catholic their entire lives. The response from the Catholic Church was that their blood was still Jewish, and that they could never be truly catholic.
This thought process infiltrated all racist ideology, where your blood or family history is what makes you a certain race. It’s not about where you were born, it’s about how you look or what your history was.
