Jews and Credit Cliche Traced to 17th-Century France

Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the old anti-Semitic specter of the Jew as a financial international manipulator and money-grubber persists, from Moscow and Budapest to Des Moines, Iowa. Hungary's neo-authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán prospers politically by portraying the financier George Soros and Jews in general as shadowy, “ungenerous” figures who fight “by stealth,” who are not “honorable, but unprincipled; they are not national, but international; they do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs.” In October 2018, Chuck Grassley told Fox News that he believed Soros uses his “billions” to secretly manipulate politics.