It used to be said that, “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” Now, the same can be said of global anti-Semitism which is again rearing its ugly head from South Korea to Argentina: with Wall Street financier Paul Singer as the target.
In South Korea, a struggle worthy of Shakespeare’s King Lear is taking place with a significant anti-Semitic wrinkle. In Shakespeare’s play, the old, addled King Lear foolishly gives up his kingdom to his two flattering, false daughters. In South Korea’s version, Lear’s opposite number it its richest man, 73 year old Lee Kun-hee, chairman of the Samsung Group. Aging but no Lear-like fool, Lee is trying for corporate immortality through a merger of SamSung C&T, his mega construction company, with Cheil Industries. Cheil is one of the 80 subsidiaries of Samsung Group, South Korea’s largest chaebol, or dominant family-owned conglomerates.
Here comes into the story Paul Singer, whose Wall Street hedge fund, Elliott Associates, owns 7 percent of Samsung C&T. Leading a group of non-Korean investors and Korean investors including 2,500 retirees, professionals and others, Singer charges that the merger is at the expense of Samsung C&T shareholders and in favor of Cheil whose largest owner is the Lee family. The Singer camp also charges that the merger would be inimical to opening up the South Korean economy to international investment and global transparency.
What does this have to do with anti-Semitism? Nothing until Kim Ji-ho, a journalist writing for Mediapen.com, a fawning front for the Lee family, played the Jewish card. As reported by Haviv Rettig Gur in The Times of Israel, Kim charged that “Jews are known to wield enormous power on Wall Street and in global financial circles. It is a well-known fact that the US government is swayed by Jewish capital.” Kim’s column includes a picture of Singer, captioned with “greedy, ruthless head of a notorious hedge fund.” When the corporate advisory firm, Institutional Shareholder Services or ISS published an analysis of the merger that agreed that C&T was undervalued, Kim shot back that ISS also represented “Jewish money.” The Korean publication MoneyToday volunteered the information to its readers that “Elliott is led by a Jew, Paul E. Singer, and ISS [an advisory firm that analyzed the merger] is an affiliate of Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI), whose key shareholders are Jewish. According to a source in the finance industry, Jews have a robust network demonstrating influence in a number of domains.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center takes no position on the merger, but has long tracked anti-Semitism in East Asia. The Center points out in a news release this ugly turn in corporate politics and media is not an aberration for South Korea. In Seoul, a restaurant, the Fifth Reich (formerly, the Third Reich), featured a small photo of Hitler at the entrance and a larger one across from the bar. Waiters and waitresses with swastika armbands serve mixed drinks to young people who also buy Nazi paraphernalia. Said regular patron Chung Jae Kyung, 22, of the Nazis: “I don't hate them; I don't like them. But at least they dressed well.”
The Wiesenthal Center dressed down anyone in the current Samsung affair responsible for injecting anti-Semitism into it.
Halfway across the world, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner—widely suspected of complicity in the death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman who was reportedly on the verge of issuing an arrest warrant for her in connection with official Argentina’s nexus with the Iran and Iran-supported Hezbollah agents responsible for the murderous 1994 attack on Buenos Aires’ Jewish Community Center—recently evoked the Shylock stereotype at the center of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in an explaining Argentina’s national debt to school children. When the children told her they were reading Romeo and Juliet, Kirchner—according to her own tweet about the incident—told them that you have “to read the ‘Merchant of Venice’ to understand the vulture funds. She followed with another tweet: “No, don’t laugh, Usury and bloodsuckers have been immortalized in the greatest literature for centuries.”
Not coincidentally, Kirchner’s Minister of Economy Axel Kicillof have accused Paul Singer of behaving like a “vulture” for successfully suing Argentina in U.S. courts for the $1.5 billion that the country owes his hedge fund.
In Shakespeare’s play, the rapacious blood-thirsty Jewish merchant, Shylock sues the good Christian Antonio for a pound of flesh. Shylock is undone—losing his wealth as well as his daughter—when Antonio’s lawyer Portia, disguised in male attire as a Doctor of Law, asks the Venetian Court: “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?” Shakespeare uses nice touches to “humanize” the villain Shylock (“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? . . . If you prick us, do we not bleed? . . . And if you wrong us, do we not revenge?”) that are played up in sentimentalizing versions of “The Merchant” like Al Pacino’s in the 2004 movie (called by one critic “The Usurer on the Roof”).
Despite this, astute critics including Stephen J. Greenblatt, James Shapiro, Janet Adelman, and David Nirenberg have shown that Shakespeare’s overarching purpose in exploring permeable early modern boundaries of religion, race, and nationality is ultimately to re-harden them these distinctions in an anti-Semitic trope that locks Shylock on the ignominious side of the distinctions between redeemed and reprobate, citizen and alien, generous soul and vengeful scoundrel. In the politics as well as the literature of the UK, Portia’s question was transmuted into: “Who is the Englishman and who the Jew?” to the disadvantage of Jews over the centuries. Now, it's: “Who is the Argentinian and who the Jew?”
The UK and Argentina fought in 1982’s Falkland’s War, but the worst elements of both have shared anti-Semitic obsessions—in Argentina, going back to the Nazi Era and the Perons. Now, unfortunately, South Korea has entered the new—or renewed global obsession with Jew hatred personified by malicious caricatures of Paul Singer. He may be the immediate target, but we are all threatened by this resurgence of the world’s oldest hatred.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.