Of all the stereotypes about Jews in the lexicon of antisemitism, none is as commonplace or enduring as the one about Jews and money. From Shylock and Fagin to Joe Rogan’s podcast and TikTok videos about the Rothschilds, the idea that Jews have a unique taste for acquiring wealth is the one thing that people think they “know” about them. Yet this historic anti-Jewish trope seems able to hide in plain sight, in the most surprising of places.
The Lehman Trilogy, which has returned to the London stage, tells the story of the Lehman Brothers bank from its origins as a fabric store in Alabama to its collapse in the 2008 financial crash, the ultimate symbol of unregulated and uncontrollable banking. This award-winning, acclaimed play is an enthralling piece of theatre with five star reviews and a clutch of Tony awards. Unfortunately, it is also profoundly antisemitic. Not in a crude way – a clumsy turn of phrase here, a jarring stereotype there – but in its innermost essence, connecting a modern audience to malevolent beliefs about Jews and money that are buried deep within western thought. Most striking of all, none of the people responsible for writing, acting, directing or producing this play seem remotely aware, and most reviews have missed it entirely. I’m happy to accept that none of them are antisemitic, but it is as if the idea that Jews love money and power is – to use an appropriate phrase – priced in.
The Lehman Trilogy is, on one level, a morality tale about modern capitalism, a story of greed and financial trickery that left countless ordinary people impoverished or homeless. It is also saturated with Jewishness. We are told in the opening lines that Henry Lehman is “a circumcised Jew”. The brothers repeatedly cry “Baruch Hashem” (“Blessed is God”) as they build their fortune. They “sit shiva” when someone dies, pray, quote Talmud, dream about Jewish festivals. When Philip Lehman chooses a bride, he assigns the name of a Hebrew month to each of the 12 candidates. Their children excel not just at school, but at Hebrew school – where some of their fellow students, naturally, bear the names of other famous Jewish banking families. It is gratuitous and overwhelming, far beyond what is necessary to convey the biographical fact that the Lehmans were Jewish. It leaves you feeling that this is not only a play about bankers who are Jews, but a play about Jews who are bankers. And what does it tell us about these Jews?
Mainly that they love money and will do anything to get more of it. “We are merchants of money”, says Philip Lehman. “We use money to make more money.” Mayer Lehman is not just a millionaire, but “a Jewish millionaire”. Emanuel Lehman woos his bride by claiming “I’m one of the richest Jews in New York”. Bobby Lehman declares: “Our objective should be nothing more or less than a planet upon which no-one buys out of need. They buy out of instinct.” And if this happens: “We will become all powerful.” It’s Jews, money and power, over and over again. This ought to ring alarm bells for anyone with even a passing knowledge of antisemitic stereotypes.
You first see the Lehmans’ callously acquisitive nature in an early scene set in 1853, when they are running a small shop in Montgomery selling farming supplies. As the brothers light candles for the Chanukah festival and say the appropriate Hebrew blessing, they learn of a fire burning all the surrounding plantations. All the cotton, the basis of Alabama’s economy, is destroyed. It is a catastrophe – but not for the Lehmans: “Everything is lost… And yet… at the same time… Baruch Hashem!” It is a miracle, for these three Jews at least, because where others suffer devastation the Lehmans smell a financial opportunity. They become middlemen, inserting themselves as brokers between buyers and sellers of cotton and creaming off a profit in the process. It is the great insight that “would change the lives of everyone”, setting them on their path to success. And as the plan forms in the minds of the three brothers, they repeat their Chanukah blessing for the festival of light. It is as if this time they are not blessing the gentle flames of their Chanukah, but the fire that raged outside. Their lack of compassion is chilling, and it is portrayed through overtly Jewish means.
The Lehman Brothers did not invent the role of middlemen or brokers and they weren’t the only ones to perform this role, but you wouldn’t know that from the play. The charge that Jews are economic parasites, generating unproductive profit from the honest toil of others, has been a staple of anti-Jewish propaganda for centuries.
As Europe emerged from the Middle Ages and stock markets began opening in its main trading centres, the idea grew that money, shares, interest, and the whole world of material value was “Jewish”, in contrast with the Christian sphere of spirit, mercy and love. How to control the dramatic spread of this “Jewish” practice in a Christian society became a pressing issue for some of Europe’s greatest thinkers. According to historian David Nirenberg, “it is difficult to think of a financial innovation, practice, or crisis that was not discussed in terms of Judaism in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century”. Karl Marx, in his 1844 essay On The Jewish Question, wrote that money had become the “worldly God” of the Jews, and that through Jews “money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations… The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew.”
Coincidentally, 1844 is also when Henry Lehman, the eldest of the original three brothers, first set foot in the United States, a moment immortalised in the play’s opening scene. The play depicts the gradual secularisation of the family, their financial ambitions expanding as their religious practices decline. Their secularising trajectory is interrupted in the final scene, when Lehman Brothers finally closes for good in September 2008. The brothers gather on stage to recite the Kaddish mourning prayer that is said at every Jewish funeral, but they are not praying for the lives they have ruined, or to lament the global financial meltdown they have caused. Kaddish is a prayer for the dead, and the only thing that has died is their bank. The inference is that the bank itself – this monstrous institution that triggered economic disaster through its own reckless greed – is a Jew. It is a scene that vividly brings to life Marx’s antisemitic dictum that for secularised Jews, the “real god” of money has replaced Hashem as the focus of their faith; and that these Jews have, in turn, made money “the god of the world”.
This is where the true antisemitism of The Lehman Trilogy lies. Not because it tells you that the Lehmans were Jewish, but in reviving this old belief that a form of banking that rewards greed and exploitation is Jewish in both origin and character, and that the way Jews relate to money shapes our world.
It is not inevitable that writers will depict Jews and finance in antisemitic ways, but this framing is readily available for those who do not know any better, woven into our understanding of these concepts over centuries by some of our greatest thinkers and in our most celebrated literature. The Lehman Trilogy works so well as a play partly because it falls squarely within this tradition in European thought, in which money and the trading of abstract value are imbued with a “Jewish” essence. It offers a contemporary continuity of this very old anti-Jewish calumny, and it does so at a time when 34 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds in this country believe that “Jewish people have an unhealthy control over the world’s banking system”. This does not happen in a vacuum.
I am not interested in calling for plays to be cancelled or for people to be condemned. This play was not written by a bunch of Jew-haters but by thoughtful people reflecting some of the most powerful beliefs with which our world was built, and that tells us something important about how antisemitism works. The “suitability” guidance for The Lehman Trilogy on the National Theatre website warns that the play includes “infrequent mention of death, war and slavery”, but omits the frequent representation of one of the oldest antisemitic stereotypes of them all. I have been struck by how few of the reviews of this play, in the UK or the US, even mentioned this aspect of it. The association of Jews, money and power is so familiar that it resonates with audiences without them even realising. All I am asking – and it doesn’t seem like much – is that more people start to notice.
Dave Rich is author of Everyday Hate: How antisemitism is built into our world and how you can change it (Biteback)
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