Legal Weapon

Chapter 821: Legal Weapon

It was not only the Austrian Government taking action; governments across Europe had joined this feast.

Jewish capital had indeed drawn resentment, but that was only a secondary factor. After all, capitalists these days were all birds of a feather—none was any nobler than the next.

The essence of anti-Semitic movements had always boiled down to a few things:

First, social conflicts intensified, and the rulers sought to redirect those contradictions in order to consolidate their rule;

Second, their pockets were empty and they could not repay the usurious loans from Jewish capital. The rulers did not want to bear the stigma of defaulting, so they waved the banner of anti-Semitism to renege on their debts—and make a fortune in the process.

Religious factors and the resentment drawn by Jewish capitalists were also among the reasons anti-Semitic movements erupted, though by modern times they had mostly become secondary factors.

Naturally, there were exceptions. Sometimes Jewish capital truly courted death, often having no bottom line in the face of profit, sparking quite a few anti-Semitic movements. But those were mostly local affairs.

The essence of this anti-Semitic movement was very simple: the French Government had run out of money, while the other European countries were merely following the trend.

Take the Tsarist Government as an example. After the anti-Semitic movement erupted across Europe, Alexander III confiscated the property of a large number of Jewish capitalists, especially in banking. Anything with Jewish capital behind it was nationalized wholesale.

Well, that last rule had been added by the bureaucrats afterward.

The main reason was that more than a decade earlier, the Russian Empire had just carried out a massive anti-Semitic movement. The Jewish capitalists in Russia had not yet had time to recover, and their family fortunes simply were