Jewish interest

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Jewish interest has two different meanings:

On the one hand, it was a protective levy that Jews had to pay to the Christian authorities on the basis of the Jewish shelves ; The official confiscation of Jewish property with the simultaneous expulsion of Jewish communities was also called "Judenzins".

On the other hand, “Judenzins” was an anti-Judaistic term for usury . The historical background for this was the medieval ban on interest , which portrayed commercial money lending as condemnable and applied to Christians but not to Jews. When all loan interest was no longer considered unchristian, only excessive interest was presented as "Jewish". The term was also used beyond purely anti-Jewish polemics. In Friedrich Schiller's Die Räuber (1st act, 2nd scene), Karl Moor depicts Christian clerics as bigoted in his "[Disgust] before this ink-splattering seculum", they "calculate their Jewish interest at the altar".

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Max Weber: Economy and Society. 1922, pp. 316-317 ( books.google.de ).
  2. Friedrich Schiller: Complete Works. Volume 1, Munich 1962, pp. 502-516 ( zeno.org ).