Why People Think Jews Love Money

The stereotype didn’t come from Jewish behavior, but from almost everyone else’s anxieties.

photo: Engin Akyurt/Unsplash

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Few stereotypes have shown as much persistence, or caused as much harm, as the idea that Jews are uniquely attached to money. It appears everywhere: medieval sermons, 19th-century caricatures, modern conspiracy theories, even casual jokes that people repeat without thinking.

Yet the stereotype has nothing to do with Jewish values or Jewish economic behavior. It is a story created by non-Jews, maintained by political elites, and powered by societies looking for someone to blame when life becomes difficult.

To understand why people think Jews “love money,” we have to understand how Europeans constructed this idea and why it still functions today.

1) The stereotype was manufactured by Christian laws, not Jewish culture.

The roots are not cultural at all; they are legal.

For much of European history, Jews were deliberately barred from owning land, joining craft guilds, holding public office, or entering most professions. These bans weren’t accidental; they were engineered by Christian rulers who wanted Jews economically useful but socially isolated.

At the same time, the Church banned Christians from lending money with interest. But economies still required credit; kings needed to finance wars, nobles needed to manage estates, peasants needed loans to survive winter.

So rulers effectively forced Jews into the one role that society needed but Christians could not legally perform.

In other words, Jews didn’t “choose” finance; they were pushed into it.

When you take an excluded minority and funnel them into an unpopular economic task, especially one involving debt, you create the perfect conditions for resentment. People began associating Jews with money not because Jews were obsessed with it, but because Christian society made Jews the visible face of its own financial system.

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2) Economic resentment made Jews convenient scapegoats.

Money-lending is the kind of profession people appreciate only when they need it. When the repayment date comes, gratitude turns into anger. This is where psychology enters the story: It is emotionally easier to blame the lender than the loan.

Medieval peasants, struggling under feudal systems and impossible taxes, might not dare criticize their lords. But criticizing “the Jews” was safe — and often encouraged. Rulers leveraged this resentment strategically: if people were angry about taxes, kings could point to Jewish moneylenders who simply collected what the king ordered them to collect.

In other words: The stereotype protected the powerful and punished the powerless.

Blaming Jewish moneylenders redirected anger away from aristocrats, clergy, and monarchs — the real architects of the economic system.

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3) Jewish literacy created upward mobility (and jealousy).

Another factor poured fuel on the fire: education.

For centuries, Jews had a near-universal expectation of literacy because religious life required reading, studying, and community interpretation of texts. One of the most overlooked facts about Jewish history is this: Jews were the first society in the world to demand near-universal literacy from every member of the community, not just elites.

Most ancient cultures reserved reading and writing for priests, scribes, aristocrats, and rulers. Literacy was a tool of power, and keeping the masses illiterate was a way to maintain that power. Judaism flipped that model entirely.

Jewish life revolves around texts: Torah, Mishnah, Talmud, commentaries, legal codes, liturgy. From ancient times onward, Jewish law treated literacy not as a luxury but as a commandment. “Teach them diligently to your children” (Deuteronomy 6:7) was interpreted by the rabbis as requiring all Jewish parents to educate their kids.

The Talmud mandates that every community must appoint teachers, even if it means taxing the poor. If a community failed to provide education, scholars considered it a moral failing, even grounds for excommunication. This was radical. No other ancient or medieval culture required every child (rich or poor) to learn to read. Jewish literacy wasn’t merely cultural; it was a legal responsibility.

While most medieval Europeans could not read, Jewish boys (and often girls) could. Literacy created mobility. Jews became traders, physicians, accountants, and administrators — professions requiring reading, math, and record-keeping. They were often more economically stable than their neighbors, not because of greed, but because they lived in communities that treated learning as a sacred duty.

But in societies built on hierarchy and scarcity, the visible success of a minority doesn’t inspire admiration. It inspires jealousy. That jealousy becomes myth-making, and myth-making becomes stereotype.

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4) Antisemitic propaganda spread and modernized the myth.

Once resentment existed, culture reinforced it.

Christian art portrayed Jews as greedy. Preachers described them as enemies of Christ tied to “usury” (the illegal action or practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest).

When people talk about how Jews came to be associated with greed, money, and cold-heartedness, few cultural artifacts loom as large as William Shakespeare’s Shylock, a character from “The Merchant of Venice.” Although Shakespeare lived in a country with no Jews at all (they had been expelled from England in 1290) his portrayal of Shylock had an outsized influence on European and American views of Jews for the next four centuries.

Before Shakespeare, Christian Europe had already spent centuries developing the idea of the greedy, cruel, money-obsessed Jew: Medieval Church teachings equated Jews with “usury” (charging interest). Passion plays portrayed Jews as Christ-killers who loved money more than morality. Folklore stories cast Jews as scheming financiers who “bled” Christians dry.

Shakespeare borrowed these motifs, but because “The Merchant of Venice” became one of the most widely performed works in the world, his version became the definitive one. Shylock became the face of Jewish villainy.

In the play, Shylock is a moneylender who demands a “pound of flesh” as collateral for a loan — an image so grotesque and memorable that it branded Jewish economic life for centuries. No Jew in history ever demanded flesh as payment. No Jewish law would ever permit such a thing. But the symbol stuck.

After Shakespeare, Jewish bankers were imagined as predatory. Jewish merchants were imagined as cunning. Jewish financial success was interpreted as exploitative rather than earned. Shylock gave a literary body to the stereotype that Christian Europe had been psychologically preparing for centuries.

Ultimately, the audience saw Shylock as a caricature, not a person. Some modern readers argue that Shakespeare gives Shylock moments of humanity, especially in the famous speech: “Hath not a Jew eyes?” And that’s true: Shakespeare wrote with more nuance than most writers of his time.

But to his original audience, the message was not “perhaps we misunderstand Jews.” The message was: “Even the Jew admits he is vengeful, bitter, and driven by hatred.” The contemporary audience didn’t leave the theater thinking, “What a tragic figure.” They left thinking, “What a Jew.” This matters because for most English-speaking people up until the 19th century, Shylock was their first and only “Jew.”

By the 18th and 19th centuries, the character had fully merged with the antisemitic stereotype. Politicians accused rivals of acting like “Shylocks.” Newspapers described Jewish bankers as “Shylocks of finance.” Posters and pamphlets depicted Jews with Shylock’s hooked nose, dark clothing, and sinister posture. The name “Shylock” even entered the English language as a synonym for a ruthless moneylender. A fictional character became a social category.

In the 19th century, especially during periods of financial upheaval, Shylock was invoked everywhere. Russian pogrom propaganda used Shylock-like imagery. French antisemites during the Dreyfus Affair used Shylock caricatures. Nazi Germany performed “The Merchant of Venice” hundreds of times to stir hatred. The Nazis were obsessed with Shylock; they staged the play prominently in the early 1930s because it reinforced the image of Jews as parasitic, manipulative, and inhuman.

In one infamous German production, Shylock was portrayed with grotesque prosthetics — long hooked nose, exaggerated moneybags, claw-like hands — to shock audiences into disgust. Shylock had become not just a character, but a propagandistic weapon.

Even if Shakespeare intended some level of sympathy, the character functioned very differently in culture. To centuries of readers and theatergoers, Shylock represented Jewish greed, Jewish legalism, Jewish vengeance, Jewish foreignness, Jewish economic power, and Jewish cold-heartedness. His most famous scene (the demand for a pound of flesh) became a metaphor for Jewish cruelty specifically. This endured long after actual Jewish communities modernized, integrated, and diversified.

Even today, when people imagine “the Jewish banker” or “the cunning financier,” the visual DNA often traces back to Shylock: the stooped posture, the counting of money, the vindictive obsession with debt, the cold legalistic mindset, the dark clothing, the hooked features, the foreign accent Shylock is the ancestor of countless antisemitic caricatures, from political cartoons to conspiratorial memes about global finance. He is arguably the most recognizable fictional Jew in Western history — and the most damaging.

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5) The stereotype survives because it simplifies complex problems.

People like simple explanations for complicated realities.

Economic systems are confusing. Markets rise and fall. Inequality grows. Inflation hits. Most people don’t have the tools, or time, to understand the complexity. So they reach for stories that feel intuitive or emotionally satisfying.

“Banks are corrupt” becomes “bankers are corrupt,” which becomes “the people who run the banks are corrupt,” which finally lands — through centuries of conditioning — on “Jews.”

Conspiracy theories flourish because they turn chaos into narrative and suffering into blame. Antisemitism is always a story about someone else causing your problems. That’s because, at least in part, human beings hate uncertainty. We hate randomness. We hate the feeling that the world is too complex for us to control. When societies struggle (economically, socially, politically), people instinctively search for a story that explains their pain.

Conspiracy theories thrive because they take the overwhelming chaos of life and compress it into a simple narrative: “Someone is doing this to you — on purpose.” This belief is far more emotionally satisfying than the truth, which is usually: systems are complex, problems have multiple causes, life includes randomness, and suffering often has no villain. Conspiracy theories always arise when people feel powerless. And historically, no group has been more repeatedly cast as the convenient villain than the Jews.

Why Jews? Because antisemitism is never about Jews. Antisemitism is a flexible conspiracy engine. It can turn Jews into whatever the society resents or fears most. If a society fears wealth, Jews are portrayed as financiers. If a society fears poverty, Jews are portrayed as parasites. If a society fears revolution, Jews are communists. If a society fears capitalism, Jews are bankers. If a society fears outsiders, Jews are eternal foreigners. If a society fears insiders, Jews are infiltrators. If a society fears decadence, Jews are corrupting the culture. If a society fears control, Jews are manipulating governments.

The same small minority becomes the villain in completely contradictory ways. That is the hallmark of a conspiracy narrative: it doesn’t need coherence. It only needs emotional usefulness. Antisemitism isn’t based on Jewish behavior; it is based on the needs of the audience. And so conspiracy theories describe not reality, but anxiety. A conspiracy may not solve a problem, but it solves an emotion. When someone feels: economically insecure, politically disoriented, culturally threatened, socially marginalized, or personally resentful, they are vulnerable to narratives that give their suffering a plot structure.

Antisemitism provides: a villain (Jews), a motive (control, money, corruption), a method (secret influence), a global network (the “Jewish cabal”), and a sense of righteousness (you are resisting “them”). It turns amorphous fear into a focused target.

And because Jews historically have been minority communities that were visible but small, successful but vulnerable, integrated but distinct, they became ideal scapegoats. Unlike other prejudices, antisemitism is not primarily about race, culture, or even religion. It behaves like an all-purpose explanatory myth — a worldview. It asserts: “There is a hidden power behind the scenes. It is Jewish.” This story is powerful because it explains inequalities, political disappointment, modernity itself, personal failure, national decline, cultural shifts, and any crisis. No evidence is required.

In fact, evidence against the conspiracy is interpreted as proof of how sneaky and powerful the Jews supposedly are. Logic cannot defeat it because the conspiracy functions like a self-sealing belief system.

Moments of instability — plague, war, economic crises, political upheaval — almost always lead to spikes in antisemitism. The pattern is consistent across 2,000 years. Why? Because when people suffer, two impulses emerge: Find someone to blame, and find someone who may not fight back. Jews have oftentimes fit that role perfectly. Throughout history, Jews have been a minority, without armies, without political power (until Israel), living in diaspora communities, economically visible, culturally distinct. This made them both symbolically potent and practically defenseless.

In chaotic times, societies reach for the oldest conspiracy theory they know. Antisemitism is a story societies tell themselves to avoid responsibility This is the most critical insight: Antisemitism flourishes not because of Jewish actions, but because of non-Jewish failures. When societies mismanage their economies, lose wars, fight internally, experience inequality, face demographic shifts, or collapse politically, they often externalize blame onto the Jews.

It’s easier to believe in a secret Jewish plot than to confront corruption, incompetence, or structural problems within one’s own culture or leadership. This is why antisemitism can appear in liberal democracies, fascist dictatorships, communist regimes, Islamic theocracies, and secular states. It is not tied to any ideology; it is a psychological reflex.

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6) Jewish teachings on money emphasize responsibility, not obsession.

Here is the irony: Jewish tradition does have a serious framework for handling money — but it is the opposite of the stereotype.

Wealth is not inherently good or bad; it is a tool for moral responsibility. Giving to the less-fortunate (tzedakah) is not optional; it is obligatory. Business ethics are woven deeply into Jewish law: honesty in weights, fair wages, fair trade, and prevention of exploitation. Hoarding or flaunting wealth is discouraged; generosity is praised.

In other words: Judaism regulates money; it does not glorify it.

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