A decadencia auto-induzida do imperio americano - Fareed Zakaria (Foreign Affairs)

The Self-Destruction of American Power

Washington Squandered the Unipolar Moment

Fareed Zakaria

Foreign Affairs, July-August 2019

Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. It was born amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The end, or really the beginning of the end, was another collapse, that of Iraq in 2003, and the slow unraveling since. But was the death of the United States’ extraordinary status a result of external causes, or did Washington accelerate its own demise through bad habits and bad behavior? That is a question that will be debated by historians for years to come. But at this point, we have enough time and perspective to make some preliminary observations.

As with most deaths, many factors contributed to this one. There were deep structural forces in the international system that inexorably worked against any one nation that accumulated so much power. In the American case, however, one is struck by the ways in which Washington—from an unprecedented position—mishandled its hegemony and abused its power, losing allies and emboldening enemies. And now, under the Trump administration, the United States seems to have lost interest, indeed lost faith, in the ideas and purpose that animated its international presence for three-quarters of a century.

U.S. hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire. Writers are fond of dating the dawn of “the American century” to 1945, not long after the publisher Henry Luce coined the term. But the post–World War II era was quite different from the post-1989 one. Even after 1945, in large stretches of the globe, France and the United Kingdom still had formal empires and thus deep influence. Soon, the Soviet Union presented itself as a superpower rival, contesting Washington’s influence in every corner of the planet. Remember that the phrase “Third World” derived from the tripartite division of the globe, the First World being the United States and Western Europe, and the Second World, the communist countries. The Third World was everywhere else, where each country was choosing between U.S. and Soviet influence. For much of the world’s population, from Poland to China, the century hardly looked American.

The United States’ post–Cold War supremacy was initially hard to detect. As I pointed out in The New Yorker in 2002, most participants missed it. In 1990, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher argued that the world was dividing into three political spheres, dominated by the dollar, the yen, and the deutsche mark. Henry Kissinger’s 1994 book, Diplomacy, predicted the dawn of a new multipolar age. Certainly in the United States, there was little triumphalism. The 1992 presidential campaign was marked by a sense of weakness and weariness. “The Cold War is over; Japan and Germany won,” the Democratic hopeful Paul Tsongas said again and again. Asia hands had already begun to speak of “the Pacific century.”

U.S. hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire.

There was one exception to this analysis, a prescient essay in the pages of this magazine by the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer: “The Unipolar Moment,” which was published in 1990. But even this triumphalist take was limited in its expansiveness, as its title suggests. “The unipolar moment will be brief,” Krauthammer admitted, predicting in a Washington Post column that within a very short time, Germany and Japan, the two emerging “regional superpowers,” would be pursuing foreign policies independent of the United States.

Policymakers welcomed the waning of unipolarity, which they assumed was imminent. In 1991, as the Balkan wars began, Jacques Poos, the president of the Council of the European Union, declared, “This is the hour of Europe.” He explained: “If one problem can be solved by Europeans, it is the Yugoslav problem. This is a European country, and it is not up to the Americans.” But it turned out that only the United States had the combined power and influence to intervene effectively and tackle the crisis.

Similarly, toward the end of the 1990s, when a series of economic panics sent East Asian economies into tailspins, only the United States could stabilize the global financial system. It organized a $120 billion international bailout for the worst-hit countries, resolving the crisis. Time magazine put three Americans, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, on its cover with the headline “The Committee to Save the World.”

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Just as American hegemony grew in the early 1990s while no one was noticing, so in the late 1990s did the forces that would undermine it, even as people had begun to speak of the United States as “the indispensable nation” and “the world’s sole superpower.” First and foremost, there was the rise of China. It is easy to see in retrospect that Beijing would become the only serious rival to Washington, but it was not as apparent a quarter century ago. Although China had grown speedily since the 1980s, it had done so from a very low base. Few countries had been able to continue that process for more than a couple of decades. China’s strange mixture of capitalism and Leninism seemed fragile, as the Tiananmen Square uprising had revealed.

But China’s rise persisted, and the country became the new great power on the block, one with the might and the ambition to match the United States. Russia, for its part, went from being both weak and quiescent in the early 1990s to being a revanchist power, a spoiler with enough capability and cunning to be disruptive. With two major global players outside the U.S.-constructed international system, the world had entered a post-American phase. Today, the United States is still the most powerful country on the planet, but it exists in a world of global and regional powers that can—and frequently do—push back.

The 9/11 attacks and the rise of Islamic terrorism played a dual role in the decline of U.S. hegemony. At first, the attacks seemed to galvanize Washington and mobilize its power. In 2001, the United States, still larger economically than the next five countries put together, chose to ramp up its annual defense spending by an amount—almost $50 billion—that was larger than the United Kingdom’s entire yearly defense budget. When Washington intervened in Afghanistan, it was able to get overwhelming support for the campaign, including from Russia. Two years later, despite many objections, it was still able to put together a large international coalition for an invasion of Iraq. The early years of this century marked the high point of the American imperium, as Washington tried to remake wholly alien nations—Afghanistan and Iraq—thousands of miles away, despite the rest of the world’s reluctant acquiescence or active opposition.

Iraq in particular marked a turning point. The United States embarked on a war of choice despite misgivings expressed in the rest of world. It tried to get the UN to rubber-stamp its mission, and when that proved arduous, it dispensed with the organization altogether. It ignored the Powell Doctrine—the idea, promulgated by General Colin Powell while he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, that a war was worth entering only if vital national interests were at stake and overwhelming victory assured. The Bush administration insisted that the vast challenge of occupying Iraq could be undertaken with a small number of troops and a light touch. Iraq, it was said, would pay for itself. And once in Baghdad, Washington decided to destroy the Iraqi state, disbanding the army and purging the bureaucracy, which produced chaos and helped fuel an insurgency. Any one of these mistakes might have been overcome. But together they ensured that Iraq became a costly fiasco.

After 9/11, Washington made major, consequential decisions that continue to haunt it, but it made all of them hastily and in fear. It saw itself as in mortal danger, needing to do whatever it took to defend itself—from invading Iraq to spending untold sums on homeland security to employing torture. The rest of the world saw a country that was experiencing a kind of terrorism that many had lived with for years and yet was thrashing around like a wounded lion, tearing down international alliances and norms. In its first two years, the George W. Bush administration walked away from more international agreements than any previous administration had. (Undoubtedly, that record has now been surpassed under President Donald Trump.) American behavior abroad during the Bush administration shattered the moral and political authority of the United States, as long-standing allies such as Canada and France found themselves at odds with it on the substance, morality, and style of its foreign policy.

OWN GOAL

So which was it that eroded American hegemony—the rise of new challengers or imperial overreach? As with any large and complex historical phenomenon, it was probably all of the above. China’s rise was one of those tectonic shifts in international life that would have eroded any hegemon’s unrivaled power, no matter how skillful its diplomacy. The return of Russia, however, was a more complex affair. It’s easy to forget now, but in the early 1990s, leaders in Moscow were determined to turn their country into a liberal democracy, a European nation, and an ally of sorts of the West. Eduard Shevardnadze, who was foreign minister during the final years of the Soviet Union, supported the United States’ 1990–91 war against Iraq. And after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia’s first foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, was an even more ardent liberal, an internationalist, and a vigorous supporter of human rights.

The greatest error the United States committed during its unipolar moment was to simply stop paying attention.

Who lost Russia is a question for another article. But it is worth noting that although Washington gave Moscow some status and respect—expanding the G-7 into the G-8, for example—it never truly took Russia’s security concerns seriously. It enlarged NATO fast and furiously, a process that might have been necessary for countries such as Poland, historically insecure and threatened by Russia, but one that has continued on unthinkingly, with little concern for Russian sensitivities, and now even extends to Macedonia. Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive behavior makes every action taken against his country seem justified, but it’s worth asking, What forces produced the rise of Putin and his foreign policy in the first place? Undoubtedly, they were mostly internal to Russia, but to the extent that U.S. actions had an effect, they appear to have been damaging, helping stoke the forces of revenge and revanchism in Russia.

The greatest error the United States committed during its unipolar moment, with Russia and more generally, was to simply stop paying attention. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans wanted to go home, and they did. During the Cold War, the United States had stayed deeply interested in events in Central America, Southeast Asia, the Taiwan Strait, and even Angola and Namibia. By the mid-1990s, it had lost all interest in the world. Foreign-bureau broadcasts by NBC fell from 1,013 minutes in 1988 to 327 minutes in 1996. (Today, the three main networks combined devote roughly the same amount of time to foreign-bureau stories as each individual network did in 1988.) Both the White House and Congress during the George H. W. Bush administration had no appetite for an ambitious effort to transform Russia, no interest in rolling out a new version of the Marshall Plan or becoming deeply engaged in the country. Even amid the foreign economic crises that hit during the Clinton administration, U.S. policymakers had to scramble and improvise, knowing that Congress would appropriate no funds to rescue Mexico or Thailand or Indonesia. They offered advice, most of it designed to require little assistance from Washington, but their attitude was one of a distant well-wisher, not an engaged superpower.

Shamil Zhumatov / REUTERS

Unmarked Russian soldiers near Sevastopol, Crimea, March 2014

Ever since the end of World War I, the United States has wanted to transform the world. In the 1990s, that seemed more possible than ever before. Countries across the planet were moving toward the American way. The Gulf War seemed to mark a new milestone for world order, in that it was prosecuted to uphold a norm, limited in its scope, endorsed by major powers and legitimized by international law. But right at the time of all these positive developments, the United States lost interest. U.S. policymakers still wanted to transform the world in the 1990s, but on the cheap. They did not have the political capital or resources to throw themselves into the effort. That was one reason Washington’s advice to foreign countries was always the same: economic shock therapy and instant democracy. Anything slower or more complex—anything, in other words, that resembled the manner in which the West itself had liberalized its economy and democratized its politics—was unacceptable. Before 9/11, when confronting challenges, the American tactic was mostly to attack from afar, hence the twin approaches of economic sanctions and precision air strikes. Both of these, as the political scientist Eliot Cohen wrote of airpower, had the characteristics of modern courtship: “gratification without commitment.”

Of course, these limits on the United States’ willingness to pay prices and bear burdens never changed its rhetoric, which is why, in an essay for The New York Times Magazine in 1998, I pointed out that U.S. foreign policy was defined by “the rhetoric of transformation but the reality of accommodation.” The result, I said, was “a hollow hegemony.” That hollowness has persisted ever since.

THE FINAL BLOW

The Trump administration has hollowed out U.S. foreign policy even further. Trump’s instincts are Jacksonian, in that he is largely uninterested in the world except insofar as he believes that most countries are screwing the United States. He is a nationalist, a protectionist, and a populist, determined to put “America first.” But truthfully, more than anything else, he has abandoned the field. Under Trump, the United States has withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and from engaging with Asia more generally. It is uncoupling itself from its 70-year partnership with Europe. It has dealt with Latin America through the prism of either keeping immigrants out or winning votes in Florida. It has even managed to alienate Canadians (no mean feat). And it has subcontracted Middle East policy to Israel and Saudi Arabia. With a few impulsive exceptions—such as the narcissistic desire to win a Nobel Prize by trying to make peace with North Korea—what is most notable about Trump’s foreign policy is its absence.

Lista de diplomatas promovidos em junho de 2019: cumprimentos

Publicada a lista dos diplomatas promovidos neste primeiro semestre de 2019.
A todos eles meus cumprimentos.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Diplomatas promovidos no primeiro semestre de 2019

A MINISTRO DE PRIMEIRA CLASSE

Márcia Donner Abreu
Paulo Roberto Soares Pacheco
Juliano Féres Nascimento
Pedro Gustavo Ventura Wollny
Fabio Mendes Marzano
Kenneth Félix Haczynski da Nóbrega
Nestor José Forster Junior

A MINISTRO DE PRIMEIRA CLASSE DO QUADRO ESPECIAL

José Antonio Gomes Piras

A MINISTRO DE SEGUNDA CLASSE

Alan Coelho de Séllos
Luiz Maria Pio Corrêa
José Eduardo Bernardo dos Santos
Caio Mário Renault
Erika Almeida Watanabe Patriota
Mauricio Medeiros de Assis
Maria Angélica Ikeda
Marcus Rector Toledo Silva
Otávio Gabriel de Carvalho Santos Briones
João Carlos Beato Storti
Rodrigo de Oliveira Godinho
Paula Aguiar Barboza
Braz da Costa Baracuhy Neto

A MINISTRO DE SEGUNDA CLASSE DO QUADRO ESPECIAL

Ricardo José Lustosa Leal

A CONSELHEIRO

Bernardo Henrique Penha Brasil
Pablo Braga Costa Pereira
Camila Silva Leão D`Araújo Olsen
Marcela Pompeu de Sousa Campos
Guillermo Esnarriaga Arantes Barbosa
Carolina de Cresce El Debs
Ronaldo Lima Vieira
Rodrigo Oliveira Govedise
Carlos Ribeiro Santana
Ruy de Freitas Ciarlini
Henrique Choer Moraes
Luis Alberto Fernández y Sagarra
Wagner de Andrade Alves
Beatriz Augusta de Sousa Vasconcelos Goes
Gilsandra da Luz Clark
Marcos Mauricio Toba
Guilherme Marquardt Bayer

A CONSELHEIRO DO QUADRO ESPECIAL

João Luiz de Medeiros

A PRIMEIRO SECRETÁRIO

Tiago Ribeiro dos Santos
Igor da Silva Barbosa
Pedro Henrique Fleider Wolanski
Eduardo Minoru Chikusa
Edison Luiz da Rosa Junior
Marcela Magalhães Braga
Vitor Puech Bahia Diniz
Filipe Abbott Galvão Sobreira Lopes
Paulo Thiago Pires Soares
Felipe Dutra de Carvalho Heimburger
Marianne Martins Guimarães
Fernando de Azevedo Silva Perdigão
Joaquim Aurélio Correia de Araújo Neto
Luis Pinto Costa
Leandro Santos Teixeira
Leonardo Dutra Rosa
Marcelo Brandt de Oliveira
André Campos Ferreira Makarenko
Fabiano Burkhardt

A SEGUNDO SECRETÁRIO (POR ANTIGÜIDADE)

Pedro Ivo Ferraz da Silva
Laura Paletta Crespo
Alexandre Vieira Manhães Ferreira
Hugo Freitas Peres
Gustavo Fortuna de Azevedo Freire da Costa
Andrezza Brandao Barbosa
Luiz de Andrade Filho
André Luís Bridi
Lucas Hage Chahine Assumpção
Geórgenes Marçal Neves
Alexandre Piana Lemos
Felipe Neves Caetano Ribeiro
Leticia dos Santos Marranghello
Maria Lima Kallás
Caio Grottone Teixeira da Mota
João Marcelo Costa Melo
Pedro Piacesi de Souza
Pedro Meirelles Reis Sotero de Menezes
Guilherme Rafael Raicoski
Filipe Brum Cunha

Prata da Casa: 12 livros de ou sobre diplomatas - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Reproduzo abaixo as páginas da Revista da ADB que publicaram minha dúzia de mini-resenhas de livros de diplomatas ou sobre eles.
Já estou preparando a nova safra.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

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. ↩

Boris Johnson como primeiro ministro da GB? Non, merci - Editorial Le Monde

Poderia ser um pequeno Trump no comando de um dos países mais importantes da Europa, a sexta economia mundial. Le Monde se inquieta.
De vez em quando, grandes mediocridades chegam ao comando de certos países. Nenhum está imune a esses desastres, como sabemos muito bem...
Grato a Pedro Luiz Rodrigues, por esta transcrição.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Le Monde, Paris – 13.6.2016 - Editorial

Boris Johnson à la tête du Royaume-Uni ? Non merci !

Pour l’Union européenne, l’accession de M. Johnson au poste de premier ministre équivaudrait à l’installation à Londres d’un Trump au petit pied se consacrant à la saboter.

En juin 2016, au lendemain de la victoire de la campagne en faveur du Brexit qu’il avait conduite, Boris Johnson avait disparu, passant le week-end à jouer au cricket. Dépassé par un succès non anticipé, lâché par son compère Michael Gove, il avait renoncé à briguer Downing Street et à gérer la sortie de milité. Trois ans après, alors que le divorce avec l’UE tourne au cauchemar pour le Royaume-Uni, revoilà Boris Johnson en pole position pour succéder à Theresa May, dont il n’a cessé de savonner la planche.l

Une partie de la biographie de Boris Johnson ressemble à celle d’un leader nationaliste ordinaire, comme l’Europe mais aussi les Etats-Unis en produisent désormais en quantité. Correspondant du Telegraph à Bruxelles dans les années 1990, souvent à coup de bobards sur de prétendues décisions de l’UE, il a largement contribué à la transformation de l’europhobie en cause populaire au Royaume-Uni et en arme redoutable pour le Parti conservateur, jusque-là pro-européen. Qu’il prenne enfin aujourd’hui la responsabilité du Brexit pourrait découler d’une certaine logique. Mais Boris Johnson n’a rien à faire de la logique ni des convictions. Il a même théorisé son absence de principes en se vantant d’avoir préparé deux lettres ouvertes avant de se jeter dans la campagne de 2016, l’une pro-européenne, l’autre favorable au Brexit. Depuis lors, la liste de ses impostures, de ses bévues et de ses échecs n’a cessé de s’allonger. Mensonges sur le juteux rapatriement de « l’argent donné à l’Europe » sur son bus de campagne, promesse que le Royaume-Uni obtiendrait « le beurre et l’argent du beurre » dans la négociation sur le Brexit, comparaison de l’UE avec le IIIe Reich et de François Hollande avec un kapo. Nommé à la tête du Foreign Office par Mme May, qui voulait ainsi l’éloigner, il tente d’humilier les dirigeants européens et ridiculise son pays sous toutes les latitudes par son amateurisme, sa légèreté et sa méconnaissance des dossiers.

Rhétorique chauvine

C’est cet homme-là qui prétend aujourd’hui prendre la barre du paquebot Britannia en détresse. Rivalisant de populisme avec l’extrême droite de Nigel Farage, qui prospère sur la colère suscitée par l’impasse du Brexit, Boris Johnson jure qu’avec lui le pays sera sorti de l’UE d’ici au 31 octobre, même sans accord avec Bruxelles. La catastrophe économique consécutive à un « no deal » ne lui fait pas peur. Sa rhétorique chauvine promet aux Britanniques un avenir radieux et « mondial » une fois qu’ils seront délivrés du carcan européen.

Sa démagogie va jusqu’à menacer de ne pas acquitter les 39 milliards d’euros que le Royaume-Uni s’est engagé de verser aux Vingt-Sept dans le cadre du budget pluriannuel en cours. Une décision aux conséquences incalculables, puisqu’elle entacherait la crédibilité internationale d’un pays qui se veut le champion de la primauté du droit. Pour l’UE, l’accession de M. Johnson au pouvoir à Londres équivaudrait à l’installation d’un Trump au petit pied outre-Manche se consacrant à la saboter. Le Royaume-Uni ne se contenterait plus de cultiver son malaise européen, voire d’entraver le développement de l’UE. Il deviendrait une principauté hostile fondée sur la déréglementation sociale, fiscale et environnementale. « Boris » doit cesser d’être vu seulement comme un bouffon. Son entrée au 10, Downing Sreet serait une calamité pour son pays et pour l’Europe.