Since medieval times, antipathy to Jews has been linked with anti-market sentiments. Anti-market sentiments run deep. Jean-Paul Carvalho and I wrote an essay that explored the conflict between our evolved instincts (which support cooperation in a small-scale group) and the market order that built on the insights of F.A. Hayek. We observed that:

“relations amongst members of a large and dispersed and anonymous society characterized by a complex division of labor are qualitatively different from the kinds of relationships that comprise a small-scale society.

This is necessarily true, as Hayek realized, because of the divided and dispersed nature of knowledge occasioned by the division of labor. The information required to achieve coordination between agents is never “‘given” to a single mind which could work out the implications, and can never be so given” (Hayek 1945, 519).

Hayek observed that the market order is complex and intangible “based on purely abstract relations which we can only mentally reconstruct’’ (Hayek 1973, 38). This is a marvel:

“We do not see or know all of those who benefit from the exchanges we make; nor do we see how or understand how all the goods we consume are produced; the visible link between inputs and outputs is obscured”.

However, Hayek’s insight into the workings of the price system also explains antipathy towards markets, merchants, traders, moneylenders, and bankers. The benefits of the market order are not legible and this, Jean-Paul and I noted,

. . . is precisely what is alienating and discomforting; markets seem chaotic, unordered, inequitable, even random. Their arbitrary nature offends and demands management or correction. Market-based societies are open-ended, vast yet disparate networks utterly unlike anything our Pleistocene ancestors would have known. Hayek located the atavistic longing Rousseau, Marx, Marcuse articulated in precisely this incongruity. It is often impossible to keep track of all the different agents involved in even a simple market transaction, to count who is benefiting and who is losing out. All we see is the overall pattern, how the system seems to reward winners and losers”.

Middlemen and merchants become natural targets of resentment. After all: What do they make or produce?

Antisemitism became the insidious conspiracy theory that it is now because, over centuries, Jews became seen as the quintessential middleman, trader, merchant, and banker. It is this that animates modern antisemite slurs about “the Rothschilds” or “Jewish banksters” (see this).

Not only are Jews resented as merchants, traders, financiers, and bankers. But in their role as traders and bankers, they are not just any old traders or bankers; they are seen as puppet masters who secretly control the world. The antisemitism of Karl Marx epitomizes this: