Brasil precisa de mais interesse nacional', embaixador Rubens Barbosa (CB)

'Brasil precisa de mais interesse nacional', diz ex-embaixador nos EUA

Membro do Grupo de Análise da Conjuntura Internacional (Gacint), da Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Barbosa alerta para os riscos do que ele chama de "ideologização" do atual governo brasileiro

Correio Braziliense, 23/08/2020 06:00 

https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/politica/2020/08/4870554--brasil-precisa--de-mais-interesse-nacional.html

(foto: L.NOVA)

Um dos mais destacados representantes da diplomacia brasileira, o embaixador Rubens Barbosa concluiu carreira no Itamaraty há 16 anos e, hoje, dedica-se a discutir os temas mundiais como diretor-presidente do Instituto de Relações Internacionais e Comércio Exterior (Irice), sediado em São Paulo. Embaixador em Londres, de 1994 a 1999, e em Washington, D.C., de 1999 a 2004, ele concedeu entrevista ao Correio, na qual analisou os posicionamentos adotados pelo Brasil em importantes questões globais, como a pandemia, o meio ambiente, a economia e a geopolítica.

Membro do Grupo de Análise da Conjuntura Internacional (Gacint), da Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Barbosa alertou para os riscos do que ele chama de “ideologização” do atual governo brasileiro no alinhamento automático com os Estados Unidos. “A política externa não pode estar a serviço de partidos nem de ideologias; a política externa tem que refletir o interesse nacional”, frisou, citando uma frase de José Maria da Silva Paranhos Júnior, o Barão de Rio Branco, patrono da diplomacia brasileira.
Barbosa também mencionou vários casos que, segundo ele, demonstram que o apoio incondicional a Washington tem empurrado o Brasil para um isolamento, cada vez maior, no cenário mundial, além de ser um desgaste para a relação com a China, principal parceiro comercial do país.

Que desafios a pandemia trouxe para as exportações brasileiras?
A maneira como o governo, nos três níveis — federal, municipal e estadual —, tratou essa questão da pandemia acrescentou mais um elemento de incerteza e de crítica no exterior em relação ao Brasil. Acredito que, além da política ambiental, a política de saúde, a maneira como, nesses sete ou oito meses, a pandemia, foi tratada aqui no Brasil acrescentou mais um elemento que afetou, que está afetando, a credibilidade do Brasil, no exterior, porque se desconsideraram as opiniões científicas sobre como tratar a pandemia, como tratar a questão do isolamento, como tratar a questão da saída do isolamento. Isso foi muito notado no exterior.

Há poucos dias, a China detectou o novo coronavírus em asas de frango congeladas que foram importadas do Brasil. Quais são os reflexos disso para o Brasil?
Essa questão da China é discutível. A notícia chegou truncada, não se sabe se era dentro do frango, na asa, fora do frango, tanto que, até agora, não houve nenhuma consequência em relação à suspensão ou à proibição de exportação de frango para a China. Vamos aguardar, a gente não sabe exatamente o que pode acontecer. Agora, de qualquer maneira, essa questão da fiscalização e do controle sanitário, nós vamos ter de aumentar muito, porque a gente já sofreu no passado, com a vaca louca, por falta de resposta a um formulário do Canadá de questões técnicas sanitárias.

Qual é a importância da política ambiental do Brasil para as exportações do país?
A gente tem de reconhecer que a questão ambiental está incluída na agenda global. Quem não aceitar isso, não está entendendo o que está acontecendo. Isso quer dizer que apareceu um novo personagem, que não existia há 40, 50 anos, nessa questão ambiental: o consumidor. Ele, hoje, tem uma influência muito grande na área comercial e na área governamental, inclusive, nos países que compram do Brasil. Há uma onda verde na Europa. Acho que nos Estados Unidos também. No caso das empresas industriais, que compram, vendem para o Brasil, há disposições, e nós vimos isso até com os bancos, agora. Há disposições contra negócios com produtos brasileiros que sejam de áreas que impliquem no desmatamento da Amazônia. Já há cláusulas contratuais.

O senhor acredita que a política ambiental brasileira pode inviabilizar a ratificação do acordo de livre comércio entre o Mercosul e a União Europeia?
A política ambiental passou a ser parte das negociações comerciais. O acordo entre Mercosul e União Europeia tem um capítulo novo, que se chama desenvolvimento sustentável. Nele, estão incluídos todos os acordos de meio ambiente que o Brasil assinou no passado. O governo atual os referendou. Então, há compromissos de meio ambiente, de mudança de clima, de proteção à floresta, proteção ao indígena. E o fato de você aceitar a necessidade de cumprimento desses acordos faz com que o descumprimento acarrete consequências.

Essa pressão também tem vindo de representantes do Partido Democrata dos EUA. O que pode acontecer ao Brasil, nessa área, com uma eventual vitória de Joe Biden nas eleições americanas?
As manifestações foram de democratas e de republicanos também. O Departamento de Estado, o Congresso, vários deputados dos dois partidos e, agora, Kamala Harris (senadora democrata, candidata a vice na chapa de Biden) manifestaram-se publicamente criticando a política ambiental brasileira. Então, se Biden ganhar essa eleição, certamente os Estados Unidos vão mudar sua política ambiental. Eles vão entrar no Acordo de Paris, que Donald Trump não quis, e vão passar a defender uma política econômica com grande componente ambiental, de preservação do meio ambiente. E, aí, eles vão ser muito críticos de países que não preservem o meio ambiente. Então, aqui, você vai ter um elemento adicional de pressão sobre a política brasileira; não só à política, mas, também, à retórica ambiental brasileira.

Quais são as falhas da política ambiental brasileira?
Você tem as políticas públicas que foram adotadas pelo governo que enfraqueceram a fiscalização, que negligenciaram o combate às ilegalidades, porque o mais grave dessa questão ambiental é que o problema ambiental está ligado a ilegalidades, e o governo tem obrigação de coibir. Ilegalidade no desmatamento, ilegalidade nas queimadas e ilegalidade no garimpo. E também cuidar, porque, no exterior, tem muito foco disso: cuidar dos indígenas. Está na legislação, na Constituição. Essa posição negacionista do governo é um problema aqui, não é um problema lá de fora. No momento em que você corrigir os problemas que estão aqui, acaba a disputa lá fora.

Como deve ficar a relação entre Brasil e Estados Unidos com uma eventual vitória de Joe Biden?
Eu acho que se o Biden for eleito, primeiro, você vai ter uma mudança no relacionamento entre os presidentes. Quer dizer, o presidente Bolsonaro não vai ter a intimidade que ele tem com Trump, porque (a candidata) a vice-presidente tem uma posição muito forte sobre o Brasil, e Biden tinha ligação com o Brasil quando ele era vice-presidente. E, certamente, vai delegar para Kamala a relação com a América Latina, porque o presidente, nos Estados Unidos, não tem uma função específica. Então, delega funções. Se o Biden delegar a Kamala o acompanhamento das relações com a América do Sul, é ela que vai cuidar do Brasil. Kamala tem uma posição muito crítica, há uma nota dela criticando a posição do Brasil na política ambiental e na destruição da floresta.

Acredita que o isolamento do Brasil na comunidade internacional vai aumentar com uma eventual vitória de Biden?
Os Estados Unidos vão mudar de posição em relação aos organismos internacionais — a ONU (Organização das Nações Unidas), a OMC (Organização Mundial do Comércio), a OMS (Organização Mundial da Saúde), enfim, todas as organizações. Nós vamos ficar mais isolados, porque, hoje, nas questões do Oriente Médio, a gente só fica do lado de Israel e dos Estados Unidos. Se os Estados Unidos mudarem de posição, o Brasil vai ficar ainda mais isolado.

Os interesses nacionais estão preservados nesse alinhamento automático com os EUA?
Aconteceu um fato, que é objeto de um artigo que eu estou escrevendo, que é uma coisa atual, porque saiu uma nota do Itamaraty, em conjunto com o Ministério da Economia (de 17 de junho de 2020), que, até o momento, não provocou reações. É uma nota sobre a presidência do BID (Banco Interamericano de Desenvolvimento). Essa questão da presidência do BID é muito importante, por quê? O BID foi criado em 1959. Os Estados Unidos são o maior contribuidor do BID, com 30% do capital. O Brasil é o segundo. A União Europeia está lá em cima também. E ficou acertado que a sede do BID seria em Washington, que a vice-presidência seria sempre dos Estados Unidos, e a presidência do BID seria sempre de um latino-americano. Então, nesses 60 anos, todos os presidentes do BID foram latino-americanos. Agora, era a vez do Brasil. O Brasil apresentou um candidato. Paulo Guedes (ministro da Economia) comunicou ao secretário do Tesouro americano que o Brasil ia ter um candidato. Acontece que, agora, Trump resolveu quebrar essa tradição de 60 anos e atropelou o Brasil apresentando um candidato americano. E o Brasil emitiu nota apoiando a posição americana e abrindo mão da candidatura brasileira!

Há disputa EUA x China por trás dessa polêmica na eleição para o BID?
Eu acho que sim. Eles estão trazendo, aqui para a região, a questão geopolítica. A razão desse interesse de Trump pela presidência do BID é porque o BID financia projetos aqui na América do Sul sem nenhuma politização, sem nada, só baseado em projetos. Agora, eles vão financiar de acordo com os países que boicotarem a China. O Brasil não pode entrar nessa disputa geopolítica, porque não é um país pequeno. O Brasil é uma das 10 maiores economias, é o quinto ou o sexto maior território, quinta ou sexta maior população. Então, nós temos interesses variados, nós somos global player. Os Estados Unidos vão exigir lealdades. Isso contraria o interesse brasileiro. O Brasil precisa de menos geopolítica e ideologia e de mais interesse nacional.

Como avalia o apoio do Brasil à proposta dos EUA de discutir se países que não são economia de mercado podem ser membros da OMC, o que, na prática, excluiria a China da organização?
Essa proposta foi apresentada no último dia útil de trabalho da OMC. Não foi discutida. Ela foi apresentada, e nenhum outro país apoiou, só o Brasil. E, aí, se suspenderam os trabalhos, porque entraram de férias. Agora em setembro, esse assunto vai voltar, e a gente vai ter de ser coerente e defender essa posição, que vai desgastar o Brasil perante a China. Acho que essa proposta não vai prosperar, porque não há acordo. Os Estados Unidos querem é que se mudem as regras da OMC para permitir que somente economias de mercado possam ser membros da OMC, porque havia um período de transição para a China se tornar uma economia de mercado, e passou o período de transição, e a China é considerada uma economia de mercado. Os Estados Unidos querem reabrir esse assunto para que a China possa ser considerada uma economia não de mercado, e como uma economia não de mercado não pode pertencer à OMC. É um desgaste desnecessário do Brasil perante a China.

O alinhamento automático do Brasil com os EUA trouxe mais benefícios ou prejuízos?
A relação institucional entre as burocracias dos dois países continuam com o trabalho. Em termos de resultado, eu não vejo nem grandes vantagens nem grandes desvantagens, porque o relacionamento institucional segue com as qualificações que as duas burocracias fazem. Por exemplo, do lado do que não aconteceu: o Brasil queria ter uma posição especial na questão de vistos para os Estados Unidos. Isso não aconteceu. O lado positivo que houve foi a aprovação do acordo de salvaguardas tecnológicas que vai permitir o uso da Base de Alcântara (no Maranhão).

E a defesa de Trump pela entrada do Brasil na OCDE (Organização para a Cooperação e Desenvolvimento Econômico)? Como o senhor avalia?
O Brasil pediu (ingresso na OCDE), e Trump apoiou a Argentina. Depois, com a eleição de Cristina Kirchner como vice de Alberto Fernández, aí, os Estados Unidos mudaram, mas não por causa do Brasil, por causa da Argentina.

A implantação da tecnologia 5G é outro campo de disputa entre EUA e China na América do Sul. Como analisa a postura do Brasil?
O Brasil não deveria tomar partido e deveria abrir a licitação para todos os países. E o resultado da licitação deveria ser o que fosse mais favorável ao Brasil. Acho que esse é o exemplo mais forte dessa questão geopolítica sendo trazida aqui para a região. Acho que o adiamento dessa licitação não resolve; ao contrário, a licitação deveria ser feita imediatamente, porque, quanto mais cedo o 5G entrar no nosso cenário, mais rapidamente o Brasil vai sair da crise. O 5G poderia ajudar o Brasil a sair da crise porque ia modernizar, mais rapidamente, a economia e as indústrias, para a indústria nacional chegar ao 4.0, porque há redes privadas que as indústrias poderão utilizar imediatamente.

O presidente Jair Bolsonaro prometeu acabar com o que chamou de “viés ideológico” na diplomacia brasileira. Essa promessa foi cumprida?
Estou à vontade para falar sobre isso, porque fui um dos críticos mais fortes da política externa do PT enquanto eles partidarizaram e ideologizaram a política externa. Agora, está havendo a mesma coisa; está havendo ideologização da política externa com sinal trocado. Mas, você tem as prioridades da política externa, que não se alteraram, nem com os governos anteriores nem com este. Se você fizer uma listagem das principais prioridades, elas são as mesmas. O problema é a questão da ideologização e da partidarização. Eu acho que, como Rio Branco (patrono da diplomacia brasileira) afirmava: ‘A política externa não pode estar a serviço de partidos nem de ideologias; a política externa tem de refletir o interesse nacional’. Eu disse isso durante os anos do PT e estou continuando a repetir agora.

Os judeus e o dinheiro: mitos, historia e preconceitos - Museu judeu de Londres

A Terribly Durable Myth

Sara Lipton

The New York Review of Books, June 27, 2019 Issue

Jews, Money, Myth

an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, London, March 19–July 7, 2019

National Archives, LondonDetail of an Exchequer receipt roll showing the oldest known anti-Jewish caricature, 1233

In 2006 much of French society was divided over a strange and painful question: Is it anti-Semitic to assume that a Jew is rich? The debate was sparked by the kidnapping, torture, and murder of a twenty-three-year-old Jewish cell phone salesman from Paris named Ilan Halimi. The details of the torture, which extended over a three-week period as the kidnappers made various demands for ransom, were horrific enough. But when their ringleader, who was quickly apprehended, publicly stated that they had targeted Halimi, who was of modest background and means, because Jews were “loaded with dough,” a brutal crime morphed into a political crisis.

Prosecutors wavered over whether to invoke France’s hate crime statute. Defense lawyers claimed that money, not anti-Semitism, was the suspects’ motive, and the police and much of the public seemed to agree. The Halimi family, however, insisted that Ilan would not have died if he had not been Jewish, and tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to support them. Politicians, historians, and philosophers offered dueling definitions of anti-Semitism; an eminent sociologist suggested that one must distinguish between beliefs about Jewish wealth, even if based on discredited stereotypes, and “Jew-hatred.”¹

The exhibition “Jews, Money, Myth” at the Jewish Museum in London makes such a distinction hard to maintain. It examines its theme through a wide range of documents, artworks, portraits, posters, and souvenirs. The very first item on view is a copy of The Oxford English Dictionary from 1933, whose entry for “Jew” includes the definition: “1. Jew: trans. and offensive. As a name of opprobrium: spec. applied to a grasping or extortionate person.” Object after object testifies to the persistence and the toxicity of the association of Jews and money, from a 1790s print entitled “I’ve got de Monish,” which mocks the pretensions, profile, and accent of a gentleman Jewish banker, to the Mafia IIvideo game, whose characters are harassed by a Jewish loan shark. By the end of this short but shattering survey, it becomes painfully clear that economic assumptions and personal and societal animosity are inextricably intertwined.²

“Jews, Money, Myth” seeks both to document and to refute the stereotype of the moneyed Jew. The subject is distressingly timely. Propelled by rising nationalism on the right and antiglobalism on the left, in the past two years anti-Semitism has come back into the headlines. Politicians and activists on all sides now implicitly endorse or even repeat accusations of Jewish greed and financial power. The Labour Party in the United Kingdom has instituted a complaints procedure to deal with allegations of anti-Semitism in its leadership and ranks, which has resulted in the expulsion of a dozen members. In 2017, hate crimes against Jews in the US rose by 37 percent from the previous year (accounting for almost two thirds of all religious-based hate crimes), and across Europe in 2018 almost one in three Jewish people experienced anti-Semitic harassment.

Although these developments are presumably the impetus for mounting this exhibition, the first substantial section in “Jews, Money, Myth” takes a positive tone. The Oxford English Dictionary is immediately followed by a wall panel emphasizing the centrality of economic ethics in Judaism and a selection of objects illustrating Jews’ commitment to tzedakah, or assistance to the poor (literally “righteousness”). A letter written in Hebrew on papyrus in eleventh-century Egypt on behalf of a poor blind man asks his congregation for financial aid to help his family journey from Alexandria to join him in Fustat (Cairo); a seventeenth-century Dutch painting commissioned by a wealthy Jewish merchant exalts anonymous giving by depicting a disembodied hand offering a coin to another outstretched hand (see illustration on below).

The misconceptions concerning Jewish rapaciousness are perhaps widespread enough to justify opening with this theme. But a pitfall of doing so is that it echoes the anti-Semitic suggestion that Jews have a particular preoccupation with money, albeit one driven by philanthropy rather than avarice.

The show then takes a second approach to refuting the myth of the moneyed Jew: it examines Jews’ economic status in various periods, primarily in British history. A panel introducing a section on Jews in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Britain notes that far more Jews were poor peddlers and beggars than affluent, influential bankers. An early-twentieth-century soup kitchen tally board vividly conjures the struggles of destitute Eastern European immigrants in London’s East End.

The focus on Jews in Britain, though, somewhat undermines the force of the argument, since British Jewish communities, unlike those in many other places, were in fact almost exclusively urban, and were fairly narrowly occupied in finance, shopkeeping, and trade. This was for specific historical reasons: Jews arrived in England only after the Norman Conquest, when merchants and minters were invited from the Continent by the new rulers and settled in royal towns in order to promote commerce and provide economic expertise.³ Though these medieval communities were expelled from the kingdom in 1290, the basic pattern was repeated after Jews were readmitted to Britain in the seventeenth century. Elsewhere in Europe and the Mediterranean, medieval, early modern, and modern Jews lived more varied economic lives, engaging in agriculture, manual labor, and a wide range of crafts.

The power of the exhibition lies not in such well-intentioned correctives but in its relentless documentation of the reach and virulence of the stereotype of the money-grubbing Jew. Sections on stock characters of anti-Jewish propaganda and political satire from across the centuries, such as Judas and the figure of the Jewish moneylender, expose the malignity and menace of the myth. In the thirteenth century, Christian artists modified existing symbols of sin to develop a visual convention for embodying Jews’ supposed bestial and devilish greed that far outlived its original inspiration.⁴ The same hooked nose, thick lips, and dark scowl appear in a doodle of a Jewish businessman on an English court document from 1277, in an 1825 English print suggesting that Jews caused and profited from a financial crash, on a 1944 Italian poster that blames the bloodshed of World War II on Jewish bankers, and on a 2012 mural painted on the wall of a London building criticizing “class and privilege.” (This mural, which has since been painted over, became a cause célèbre in 2018 when it was found that the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, had posted his sympathy for the artist on Facebook after protests demanding its removal; Corbyn subsequently apologized for failing to notice its anti-Semitic tenor.)

As the curators’ selection of objects makes clear, the fleshy features in nineteenth-century English caricatures and the intimations of moral turpitude they convey were not reserved for the wealthy. They are shared by a destitute Jewish beggar in an 1824 cartoon lampooning the charitable activities of Nathan Meyer Rothschild and by a shabbily dressed dealer in secondhand clothes mocked on the cover of The London Saturday Journal in 1841. Contradiction was inherent in the stereotype: Jews were despised for being both rich and poor, capitalist and communist, and they have been portrayed as gross-featured and blatantly different, yet distrusted for supposedly being adept at assimilation and disguise.

What “Jews, Money, Myth” does not, perhaps cannot, do (given the limitations of a small museum exhibition) is explain the origins of the stereotype of the money-grubbing Jew or the intensity of the hatred it has inspired. A display headed “Medieval Commerce,” which includes medieval Jewish loan and lease documents, and another called “The Figure of the Jewish Moneylender,” which explores negative representations of Shylock, suggest that Jewish financial activities are at the root of anti-Jewish hostility. Because “the Catholic Church regarded [usury] as sinful,” we are told in a wall panel, Jews were pushed into occupations forbidden to Christians, such as moneylending, and then excoriated for it.

It is true that economic resentments did often provoke and exacerbate Jew-hatred, but the stereotype considerably predates the development of such resentments. Jews were labeled materialistic and corrupt centuries before the Catholic Church began to worry about usury, or even about the sin of avarice. Moreover, throughout the Middle Ages many more Christians than Jews engaged in lending at interest—a fact that was well known and openly acknowledged by Church authorities, who in the decades around 1200 outlawed moneylending for Christians, and thereafter regularly castigated Christians’ attempts to disguise now-illicit financial transactions.

The figure of the Jewish moneylender is the product, not the source, of the myth of the worldly, greedy Jew. The seeds of that myth were planted in the earliest surviving Christian texts, the letters of Saint Paul. Paul of Tarsus was a Hellenized Jew from Asia Minor who, in the decades following Jesus’s death, appointed himself “apostle to the gentiles.” Paul believed that anyone who insisted on continuing to observe the “letter” of Judaic law, or who refused to recognize Christ’s true, salvific nature, was mired in the flesh and the material world. A series of oppositions emerges in Paul’s attempts to reconcile ancient Hebrew scripture with the new faith: literal versus allegorical, material versus spiritual. Jews (meaning not necessarily people born Jewish but anyone, gentiles included, who obeyed Jewish law) were aligned with the former, Christians with the latter. But Paul’s polemic against “Jewish” materialism was therefore about biblical interpretation and religious practice and had nothing to do with Jewish wealth or economic activities.

A second source for the myth of the materialistic Jew is the Gospels themselves, written slightly later than the letters of Paul. The central episode occurs when Jesus, recently arrived in Jerusalem for the Passover festival, drives merchants and moneychangers from the Temple forecourt, saying, according to Matthew, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer; but you are making it a den of robbers.’”

Jewish Museum, LondonDetail of a painting by Benjamin Senior Godines, commissioned by a Jewish ­merchant, that depicts an act of ­anonymous giving, 1679–1681

This scene is frequently cited as a source of anti-Jewish economic animus, and medieval and early modern illustrations of the episode often employ anti-Jewish motifs, as in a sixteenth- century stained glass panel from Germany in “Jews, Money, Myth” that shows a righteously angry Jesus threatening two men with a cudgel—one a merchant selling a lamb for sacrifice, the other a bearded, frowning moneychanger balancing a treasure chest on his head as he flees. But the dispute was, in fact, a religious rather than economic one—Jesus was not objecting to business per se or articulating any kind of commercial morality. He was, rather, incensed by the presence of commerce near the sanctuary. It is for this reason that in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’s actions are opposed by “the chief priests and the scribes,” guardians of ritual, not financial authorities—the currency exchange and selling of animals allowed pilgrims to offer Temple sacrifices.

Neither the letters of Paul nor the Gospels were intentionally anti-Semitic. Jesus, Matthew, and Paul were all Jews, addressing audiences who were either Jewish themselves or sympathetic to Judaism. But texts outlive the people who write them, memory of their initial purpose fades, and words take on new meaning and power. Paul’s division of humankind into “spiritual” believers and “carnal”—that is, Jewish—unbelievers and Jesus’s tarring of trade around the Temple proved to be immensely influential. When Saint Jerome wanted to contrast Christian faith with Jewish error, he repeated Paul’s condemnation of Jewish materialism and insisted that the idols in Isaiah 2:8 signified Jewish (though also Roman) avarice. When Augustine of Hippo wanted to attack Jews’ rejection of the New Testament, he wrote, “Jews do not grasp [its] meaning and as a result they prove themselves indisputably carnal.”

Although Jews were firmly established in Christian polemic as avaricious and carnal unbelievers, anti-Jewish polemics had little to say about the Jews’ economic activities until around the eleventh century. A commercial and urban revolution was then altering the landscape of Christendom, and the traditional tripartite division of society into nobles, clerics, and peasants was supplemented by a nascent fourth estate: a prosperous urban bourgeoisie. Church authorities finally felt the need to articulate a Christian economic morality. They naturally turned to Scripture. There they found not just Old Testament injunctions against lending at interest—though church leaders did not at first adopt them, preferring instead to regulate interest rates—but also Paul’s denigration of “Jewish” materialism and Jesus’s (apparent) condemnation of commerce.

A conflation of these various Jewish trespasses (overly literal biblical interpretation, unspiritual ritualism, and crass mercantilism) infuses the most celebrated artwork in the exhibition: Rembrandt’s Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver (1629), which has rarely been displayed in public. Though the curators rightly note the hint of sympathy in the portrayal of a repentant Judas, Rembrandt betrays no equivalent understanding of the Jewish priests, shown as fat-bellied, hard-hearted servants of their massive book of the Law, arrogantly adorned in gold turban, silver crown, and fur cloak.

In order to shame churchmen and laypeople alike into being less focused on wealth and luxury, moralists mobilized all the rhetorical weapons at their disposal. The great Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux applied the old word “judaizer”—used by Paul for followers who practiced circumcision, and by John Chrysostom for congregants who celebrated the Sabbath on Saturday instead of Sunday—to Christians who lent money at interest. The twelfth-century abbot of the great monastery of Cluny, drawing on Chrysostom’s fiery oratory, called pawnshops “Synagogues of Satan.” Through such new applications of the age-old linkage of Jews to “filthy lucre,” a perception began to form that commerce and the money trade were characteristically Jewish endeavors. This wasn’t because Jews monopolized the money trade, but precisely because they did not. Although many Jews did indeed participate in the new economy, Jewish and Christian financial activities were not distinct, a fact of which Christian moralists were all too aware and that they were determined to change. And so the stereotype of the Jewish usurer first appears.

Preachers began to tell anecdotes about deceitful Jewish misers who consorted with the devil; artists began to visualize such tales in grotesque and frightening detail, endowing their Jewish villains with distinctively fleshy and bestial features. The aim was to intensify the negative connotations of “Jew” and thereby create a more negative attitude toward usury, so that it would be shunned by Christians, or so that Christians who practiced usury would be shunned by others. They achieved neither goal, but they did impel moneylending Christians to cloak their loans with various subterfuges, thereby reinforcing the stereotype by leaving Jews as among the only people openly charging interest.

Because “Jews, Money, Myth” focuses on Jews, it does not discuss Christian biblical interpretation or, for that matter, Christian economic activities. Yet this is the essential background for understanding the images and objects in the exhibition. The oldest Jewish caricature in the show appears on an English tax receipt roll dating to 1233 (see illustration above). The label correctly identifies the three Jews who are mocked in a kind of doodle drawn in ink at the top, and rightly notes its anti-Jewish import. But as I have argued elsewhere, Jewish usurers were probably not the sole, or even primary, targets of this cartoon.⁵They appear as proxies for the main object of the scribe’s bile: his new boss, a much-despised and famously rapacious royal favorite who used his control over Jewish moneylenders to fleece Jews and their Christian clients alike. Indeed, the favorite’s behavior generated such anger that the king ultimately dismissed him and deflected further criticism by turning viciously on the Jews.

Acknowledging the political message underlying the caricature does not lessen its anti-Judaism. Rather, it underscores the dangers inherent in anti-Semitic scapegoating. Royal courtiers, medieval Christian merchants, and nineteenth-century British bankers were all guilty of the vices imputed to Jews. To defend Jews from such slanders was to risk being lumped together with them. It was easier to scapegoat, expel, and continue to lend money.

The effects of the anti-Jewish rhetoric and imagery devised in the Middle Ages are all too vividly still with us. “Jews, Money, Myth” closes with a film by the artist Jeremy Deller in which he has spliced together recent cartoons, memes, speeches, interviews, and advertisements that spew hatreds and flaunt falsities that many people hoped were deeply buried, if not long dead. Some are the work of deranged conspiracy theorists, but others appear on successful media outlets (the Trinity Broadcasting Network) or feature respected pastors (Pat Robertson) and leading politicians (Donald Trump, Nigel Farage). Just as rage and anxiety about royal policy and economic change were deflected onto Jews in the Middle Ages, so now Jews are identified with the ill effects of globalization, inequality, and immigration. Just two months ago, a tree planted in Paris in memory of Ilan Halimi was hacked down by anonymous vandals.

1. 1
   See “Inside France’s ‘Barbarians’ Trial,” BBC News, July 10, 2009: “But Michel Wieviorka, the author of a book on anti-Semitism in France, says the motive for the murder was money first. “Anti-Semitism added to what happened,” he told journalists at the start of the trial. “Initially it wasn’t about expressing hatred of Jews…. The target was a Jewish man because Jews are supposed to have money and are believed to look after their own, so they’ll pay up.” ↩
2. 2
   There is also a companion volume, Jews, Money, Myth, edited by Joanne Rosenthal and Marc Volovici (Jewish Museum/Pears Institute/Birkbeck University, 2019), to which I contributed a short essay. ↩
3. 3
   William probably encouraged Jews from his duchy of Normandy to settle in England because Jews, who had no separate power base, were more dependent on the king or duke for privileges and protections than most Christians. He therefore could tax Jews readily, whereas kings and dukes had difficulty taxing Christians.  ↩
4. 4
   I discuss these developments in my essay “Jewish Money and the Jewish Body in Medieval Iconography” in Jews, Money, Myth. See also my “The Invention of the Jewish Nose,” NYR Daily, November 14, 2014. ↩
5. 5
   See my “The First Anti-Jewish Caricature?,” NYR Daily, June 6, 2016. ↩

Rio Branco Chair at King's College - London

Rio Branco Chair at Brazil Institute

King’s College – London

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/newsevents/news/newsrecords/2011/10October/Rio-Branco-Chair-at-Brazil-Institute.aspx

Posted on 11/10/2011

Principal Professor Rick Trainor signed an agreement yesterday at the Brazilian Embassy, creating the Rio Branco Chair, a prestigious international position at the College.

The Chair is supported by Brazilian higher education research council CAPES (a Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior) and the Rio Branco Institute of Brazil's Foreign Ministry, and represents a step forward in the collaboration between the College and Brazilian institutions. Principal Professor Rick Trainor signed the agreement at the Brazilian Embassy on Monday 10 October alongside Brazilian Ambassador, His Excellency Roberto Jaguaribe, and the President of CAPES Jorge Almeida Guimarães.

The Chair is in commemoration of José Paranhos, Baron of Rio Branco; one of Brazil’s most prominent statesmen who was appointed foreign minister of Brazil in 1902 and served until 1912, under four different presidents. He negotiated territorial disputes between Brazil and its geographical neighbours to consolidate the country’s modern borders, and was one of the most important architects of Brazilian foreign policy in the twentieth century.

The Chair will be filled for the first time in September 2012, and holders of the chair can stay for a term, even up to one year. The individual will teach in the Brazil Institute about Brazilian foreign policy and international relations, give public lectures, and conduct research in their area of expertise.

Anthony Pereira, Director of Brazil Institute, commented: ‘We are delighted by the agreement to create the Rio Branco Chair at King's. This year the Brazil Institute has welcomed its first cohort of MA and PhD students, and it is very exciting to know that we shall soon welcome an annual visitor from Brazil who is a specialist in international relations. This will boost our programme enormously, allowing us to benefit from the expertise in Brazil's international relations community. Each year the holder of the Rio Branco Chair will be able to contribute to knowledge about Brazil's new global initiatives in areas such as peacekeeping, international development, food security, climate change, alternative energy, and social policy.’

Principal Professor Rick Trainor stated: ‘It is with great pleasure that I sign this agreement between King's College London, CAPES, and the Rio Branco Institute of Brazil's Foreign Ministry. We at King's are delighted by the creation of a new visiting professorship that bears the name of Brazil's most renowned and accomplished diplomat, the Baron of Rio Branco.

‘At King's we have created the Brazil Institute because we recognize Brazil's growing global influence and want to partner with Brazilian institutions in higher education, the creative and cultural industries, business, government, and civil society. It will be a great benefit to King's to be able to count each year on the presence of a Brazilian scholar of international relations. We hope that this succession of specialists will spread awareness, here in London and beyond, of the changing global role of Brazil.

‘We hope that while the holders of the Rio Branco Chair spread awareness of Brazil's global presence in London, they will also get to know the academic community at King's College London, and develop long-lasting partnerships that lead to new research on some of the challenges facing Britain and Brazil. These partnerships will strengthen our already-growing relationships with some of Brazil's best universities.’

For more details about King's, see our 'King's in Brief' page.

King's College, Londres: Wanted, a Lecturer on Brazil

LECTURESHIP AT THE KING’S BRAZIL INSTITUTE, KING’S
COLLEGE LONDON
*********************

The details of our lectureship are now in the job vacancies list
on the King’s website at
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/pertra/vacancy/external/pers_detail.php?jobindex=9214

The King's Brazil Institute was created in 2008 to encourage the development of stronger Brazil-related teaching and research capabilities within King's College London, as well as paving the way for firmer links with Brazilian organizations in education, the cultural and creative sectors, business and government. The Institute now wishes to appoint a Lecturer. The field for the appointment is open, but themes of particular interest for the Institute are Brazil and global politics; creative and cultural industries; environmental policy; the political economy of energy; law, justice, and human rights; public health and social policy; and Brazilian history. Full details of the vacancy are available on the King’s website.
For an informal discussion of the post please contact Professor
Anthony Pereira, Director of the King's Brazil Institute, at
e-mail or on +44 (0)20 7848 2146.

www.kcl.ac.uk/brazilinstitute