![]() ![]() ![]() This charge has rung out against innumerable middleman minorities, from the villages of India to black ghettos in the United States. ![]() “Bloodsuckers” is another epithet expressing the notion that middleman minorities do not add anything to the wealth of a community or nation but simply manage to extract a share of the existing wealth for themselves, at the expense of others. “Parasites” has been another epithet applied to middleman minorities because, as retailers or money-lenders, they do not produce any physical product but are simply intermediaries between manufacturers and customers. ![]() What is chilling is what other things these groups have been called. These and other similarities among middleman minorities in countries around the world have caused the overseas Chinese to be called “the Jews of Southeast Asia,” the Ibos to be called “the Jews of Nigeria,” the Parsees to be called “the Jews of India,” and the Lebanese to be called “the Jews of West Africa.” According to Victor Purcell’s landmark study, The Chinese in Southeast Asia, “Immigrant Chinese arriving in Indonesia usually brought nothing but a bundle of clothes, a mat, and a pillow.” It was much the same story with Lebanese immigrants to colonial Sierra Leone and, in a later era, Korean immigrants and Vietnamese refugees to the United States. During that same era, Chinese immigrants typically arrived in Southeast Asian countries in similar rock-bottom poverty. A 1908 study, for example, found that about half the families on the Lower East Side slept three or four people to a room, nearly one-fourth slept five or more to a room, and fewer than one-fourth slept two to a room. People on welfare in America today live better than the immigrant Jews did on New York’s Lower East Side. What has been remarkable about such groups has not been simply their eventual prosperity but the utter poverty from which their prosperity arose over the years or generations. In America, Jewish storekeepers often lived in back of their stores or over the stores, as Milton Friedman’s family did. In India, Marwaris were often missed by census takers because they did not live in any residential neighborhood but in their own little shops in business districts. At one time Lebanese storekeepers in Sierra Leone simply slept on their counters at night. In their early stages, these shop owners often lived in their little establishments. A similar pattern of petty retailing could be found among the Lebanese in Brazil and among the Chinese in Southeast Asia, as well as among other middleman minorities in countries around the world. The next step up was often owning a little retail shop. Even such large enterprises as Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Levi Strauss among the Jews, and Haggar and Farah among the Lebanese, began at the level of the lowly peddler.īeginning as a peddler was a very widespread experience among Jewish men who emigrated from Eastern Europe to nineteenth-century America. Often these middleman minorities began at the petty level of a peddler with a pack on his back or a little pushcart. These groups have all been, at some point in their history, “middleman minorities”-that is, people whose work takes place somewhere between producers and consumers, whether in retail trade or money-lending. What these other groups-the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Ibos in Nigeria, Marwaris in Burma, overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, and Lebanese in a number of countries-have had in common with the Jews has not been religion, race, or language, but their economic and social roles. Yet many of the same attitudes and actions-and some of the very same words and phrases-have been directed at other groups which have had none of the factors which are said to explain anti-Jewish attitudes and actions among Christians and Muslims. Many of the explanations of anti-Jewish attitudes and actions over the centuries, including mob violence and mass expulsions, have focused on things unique to Jews or unique to the Christian-Jewish relationship in Europe or the Muslim-Jewish relationship in the Middle East. How much of this is due to a growing Muslim population in Europe is a question for which there is no ready answer. The horrors of the Holocaust should have permanently discredited anti- Semitism but that ancient and venomous hatred has had a recent resurgence in Europe. ![]()
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