Carville, Jews and Money

Democratic strategist James Carville would not appreciate being compared to Republican president Richard Nixon. But apparently Carville and Nixon have at least one thing in common: antisemitic views concerning Jews and money.

In a June 4 podcast, Carville railed against “really wealthy Jewish fundraisers” who have told him they will no longer make donations to Columbia University, because of the rising antisemitism there. But according to Carville, the real reason for the Jewish donors’ position is quite different. He said he has admonished them, “No, you just want your [expletive] tax cut now’.”

Apparently Carville believes those Jewish donors support the Trump administration’s actions against Columbia because the president is proposing tax cuts from which they would benefit. Carville did not present any evidence to support his claim.

Fifty-four years ago, President Nixon expressed somewhat similar sentiments about Jews and money. In tape-recorded White House conversations in 1971, Nixon instructed his senior aides to have the Internal Revenue Service investigate “big Jewish contributors” to the Democratic Party.

The “rich Jews” were “stealing in every direction,” Nixon asserted, evidently assuming that since those Democratic donors were Jews, they must be cheating on their taxes or engaging in some other financial misbehavior.

Ugly claims about Jews and money became widespread in the Middle Ages. Employment restrictions that were imposed on Jews in Europe forced some of them to become money lenders; antisemitic borrowers who failed to repay their loans then found Jews to be convenient scapegoats. Shakespeare solidified the stereotype with his notorious depiction of the Jewish money lender Shylock, who demanded a “pound of flesh” from a client who defaulted on a loan.

Bigotry has never been limited by borders. Antisemitic slurs about Shylocks and Jewish financial practices long ago spread far beyond Europe and the United States. In recent decades, they have been featured prominently in the propaganda arsenal of the Palestinian Authority.

Raymonda Tawil,  Yasir Arafat’s longtime adviser (and mother-in-law) once claimed that Israel’s tax policies in Arab-populated regions reflect “the Jewish money-lender’s mentality.”

On official PA Television in 2014, self-described journalist Akram Attalah claimed that Israel was using its search for three kidnapped teenagers as an excuse to harm Arabs. “Israel is a state that seizes opportunities in the style of Shylock, and it knows how to seize opportunities,” Atallah said.

Mahmoud al-Assadi, who is currently the PA’s consul general in Saudi Arabia, likewise has invoked the Bard to attack the Jews. In an op-ed circulated by Fatah, the PA’s ruling faction, in 2018, al-Assadi wrote: “The greatest playwright, William Shakespeare, correctly described the deceitful, greedy, trickster, extortionist, and lowly character of the Jews in the story The Merchant of Venice in the 16th century.”

Yahya Rabbah, a regular columnist for the official PA daily newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, has suggested a more convoluted connection between Shylock and Israel. After comparing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s agreements with his political allies to the bargaining tactics of Shylock, Rabbah wrote that “there is one essential difference [between Netanyahu and Shylock], which is that the modern Shylock doesn’t lend to anyone, but rather owes everyone—without exception—his ability to survive.”

In the PA’s eyes, however, it is not Netanyahu alone who resembles Shylock, but all Jews, as PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas made clear in an infamous speech two years ago.

Addressing the 11th session of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, on August 24, 2023, Abbas offered this antisemitic history lesson: “They say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true. [Europeans were hostile to  Jews] because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money, and so on and so forth.”

(Translations courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI.)

While separated by continents, decades and political philosophies, Abbas, Carville, and Nixon nevertheless are linked by common gutter sentiments about Jews—and by the failure of their political allies to take them to task for their bigotry.