“…. there has to be something in it!” a woman once told me at the end of a talk concerning the Nazi era. Not hard to guess that she meant: “there’s got to be a genuine reason for antisemitism.”
In this time of upsurge in antisemitism and hatred of “foreigners’ ‘ – even among people who’ve never met a Jew – this question is troubling. I’ve often pointed to the small size of the Jewish minority – 15 million of 7 billion humans (with 2.4 billion Christians, 1.8 billion Muslims) – and questioned how this handful of millions could possibly conspire to rule the world. Quite apart from Herr Hitler’s conviction that they were “Germany’s misfortune”, though in 1914 Jews represented less than 1% of the population.
Naturally academics have presented studies that concerned themselves with some issues that have a bearing on this. Whatever did we do before the Internet? One turns to it for – well, almost everything. As I had several times been asked why I’d made a banking family the subject of the family saga “The Loews” – I said because they belonged to the elite – I recently googled Jewish bankers in Germany’s Weimar days until 1933.
I was rewarded with a study by Paul Windolf, sociology Professor at Trier University: “The German-Jewish Economic Elite (1900-1933)”, January 6, 2015, Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte 56 (2011), pp. 135-162. The Herr Professor wrote that in the early 20th century “a dense corporate network was created among the large German corporations” (“Germany Inc.”). About 16% of this network had a Jewish background. Of the “big linkers” at its core centre, 25% were Jews.
The study posed the question as to the comparative advantage Jews possessed, that enabled them to reach such positions – and it rejected three alleged reasons: that Jews (who had been literate throughout the centuries) enjoyed a better education; because they worked in finance and banking; that Jews formed their own tight network apart from the corporate network.
Let me say at once that the study’s data does not support these hypotheses! It could not find that Jewish success was based on their higher education, “embeddedness” in their separate social network or because they were bankers. True, banking families were often founded by former Court Jews such as Warburgs in Hamburg or the Frankfurt Rothschilds. Their ability in banking dated back to the Middle Ages, with skills passed down the generations. These members of the Jewish elite also tended to intermarry, adding the dowries to their capital and adding international links through marriage. Just as I’d portrayed the Loews. Also like these, they financed railroads, raised international loans thanks to their international connections and furthered industrialisation. Nonetheless none of this accounted for their success.
The study quotes several examples of inter-class marriages: Jacob Schiff of Kuhn & Loeb investment bank was related to the Salomon Loeb family, whose son married a daughter of Sigmund Neustadt of the investment bank Hallgarten & Co. Paul Warburg also married a daughter of Salomon Loeb, while Felix Warburg married Jacob Schiff’s daughter. It was also a fact that Jews represented 8.6% of students at Prussian Unis in 1886/7 though Jews then accounted for merely 1.3% of Prussia’s population. Big companies in 1885 recruited their qualified staff from the pool of higher education.
The study examined the banking network as well as the big stock-owned companies and large family-owned businesses. This enabled the writers to establish how often pairs of men met each year at board meetings. Thus 1914 Eugen Gutmann and Oscar Oliven sat together on six different boards, “while Carl Fürstenberg and Emil Rathenau served simultaneously on eight.” Paul Silverberg, the most prominent industrial leader of Jewish origin sat on 25 boards and thus met 171 of the elite annually. This part of the study shows the integration of non-Jews and Jews in the dense corporate network.
Taking into account education, Jewish origin, aristocrats, honorary business titles and bankers of the composition of the network’s core, showed that in 1914 nobility, banker, honorary business titles were significant for Core A membership. By 1928 this group was barely significant, with Jews over-represented. The study’s findings made it clear that they did not owe their position to education or banking but because they were directors of corporations. Needless to say, they no longer mattered by 1938.
The study of the corporate network showed the Core A members numbered 398 of whom 98 were Jews. A single Jew on average had 35.1 ties with other Jewish members, while the 300 had 14,694 ties with each other, an average of 48.7 per person. In 1928 the Jews had an average of 60.4 ties to non-Jews and of the 300, 188 non-Jews an average of 19.7 ties to Jews. Thus the networks were virtually identical and as other stats showed, were integrated completely with each other in Germany Inc.
Illuminating! Still: I doubt that any study, no matter how detailed, will persuade anti-Semites that Jewish achievement is based on personal ambition, dedication, ability and often on family support as well as on a good education. Without a conspiracy to rule the world. It has also to be remembered that often peddlers had arrived in an asylum such as America penniless, poorly educated and without knowledge of the local language – yet had made it to grocery and chain-store kings. Without a conspiracy to rule the world in sight.