 But welcome to the Lute Church, the annual Lute Church Memorial Lecture in Religion and Economics. We're pleased to have this lecture every year as a result of a generous gift from the Lute Church Memorial Foundation, Dr. Robert Hemholt Chairman. Lute Church was a Florida businessman and a champion of liberty. He started out as a swimming pool cleaner, eventually built a great business in swimming pool construction and the restaurant and the travel industries. He was a dedicated libertarian all his life and he understood that government was a threat not only to entrepreneurship, to prosperity and to freedom but to everything that was good. Today the lecturer, the Lute Church lecturer is Dr. David Gordon. David is an historian, a philosopher, really is an economist too. He got his PhD at UCLA in intellectual history. He's the editor of the Mises Review. I might say one of the most feared book reviewers in America. He's the author or the editor of eight books. He's a senior fellow at the Mises Institute. And I'm just gonna tell one story related to David. After Murray Rothbard's death, Joey asked me to go through all his papers and other belongings in Las Vegas and ship back what was necessary to New York. And in going through the letters, I came upon one that Murray had written in 1979 and he was saying he'd been at a conference but by far the most exciting thing that happened to him was to meet this young man, David Gordon. He said, David is the closest thing to a universal genius that I've ever encountered. And when Murray Rothbard says that about you, that's something quite extraordinary because all of us have gotten to know David, no Murray was not exaggerating. So today it's great to have David talk about Judaism and Capitalism in the Lew Church Memorial Lecture. Dr. Gordon. Thank you. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it's a great honor to be asked to give the Lew Church lecture. I cannot help thinking though that as I'm talking about on Judaism and Capitalism, it might have been more appropriate to call it this year, the Lew Synagogue Lecture. The subject Judaism and Capitalism needs to be addressed in two related but separate parts. In one of these, the question up for discussion is, what is the relation between Judaism taken as a body of religious doctrine and Capitalism? In the other, the issue that confronts us is, what is the relation between Jews taken as a particular ethnic group and Capitalism? Obviously, the two questions are related. One way of identifying at least some Jews is as those who practice the Jewish religion. Certainly, many of those ethnically Jewish are estranged from their ancestral faith. Nevertheless, there exists a connection between the two parts of our topic is clear. I propose to consider both of these parts in the remarks that follow. I shall take the Capitalism in our title as not requiring an extended venture in definition or analysis. By it, I intend nothing controversial. I mean the economic system in place over much of the world since the Industrial Revolution characterized by the most part, for the most part by private ownership of the means of production. I should note that contemporary left libertarians often use Capitalism to designate a partnership between government and big business which they contrast with a truly free market. That is not the usage of Capitalism that I'm having in mind here. Theories that endeavor to connect Judaism and Capitalism often, though not invariably, spring from distaste for one or both of the paired terms. This was notoriously the case in Karl Marx's famous essay on the Jewish question written in 1844. In this early work, Marx said that Capitalism was Jewish in that both, both Capitalism and Judaism were egoistic. In his important book, Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Muller says, I quote, were Jews egoistic as Bauer had charged? By Bauer, he's referring to Bruno Bauer, who was one of the left Hegelians who had been a friend of Marx's and who had written a book saying that Jews shouldn't be accorded political rights in Germany until they renounced Judaism because Judaism was a particularistic religion that really was inconsistent with civil society. So Muller says, were Jews egoistic as Bauer had charged? Certainly Marx answered, but in bourgeois society, everyone was egoistic. Marx embraces all of the traditional negative characterizations of the Jew repeated by Bauer and for good measure adds a few of his own. But he does so in order to stigmatize market activity as such. For Marx's strategy is to endorse every negative characterization of market activity that Christians associated with Jews, but to insist that those qualities have now come to characterize society as a whole, very much including Christians. That's the end of the quote. Marx's argument is a simple one. Capitalism is based on the pursuit of profit. Each person is supposed to act to secure his self-interest. This makes universal the traitor ethics, characteristics since the middle ages of Jewish peddlers and money lenders. Marx, of course, did not advance this view as a purely theoretical account. He deplored this sort of society. In it, human beings lived alienated both from one another and from their own essence. Marx expresses his argument in unmistakable terms. Criticizing the right of private property in the French Constitution of 1793, he says, the right of man to private property is therefore the right to enjoy one's property and to dispose of it at one's discretion, without regard to other men independently of society, the right of self-interest. This individual liberty and its application form the basis of civil society. It makes everyone see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it. So what Marx is saying here is that the idea of rights, of having a right to property is really one that expresses hostility between one person and another because in property you're saying, this belongs to me and not to you. And Marx thought that was not really a way of reflecting a true harmony between people. It is precisely the attitude toward others here described that according to Marx, constitutes the essence of Judaism. And now in a famous quotation he says, what is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical needs, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of a Jew, huckstering? What is his worldly God, money? Marx didn't intend that as very complimentary. How are we to evaluate Marx's argument? It suffers from two main problems. First, Marx fails to establish a connection between selfish, egoistic behavior and the Jewish religion. Why is egoistic behavior distinctively Jewish? It is no doubt true that Judaism looks favorably on a person's pursuit of his own interests. In the famous saying of Rabbi Hillel in the first chapter of the Ethics of Our Fathers, that's a famous compilation of rabbinical sayings that's included in the Talmud. If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But an approval of self-interest, as expressed in this saying by Rabbi Hillel, by no means signifies a selfish disregard for the well-being of others. When I only recall the continuation of Hillel's saying, if I am only for myself, what am I? One could easily amass other citations on the role of regard for others in charity in Judaism, but one more must here suffice. Jewish sources often view the principal sin of Sodom, the city that God destroyed by firing brimstone as lack of charity. As Rabbi Myer Tamari notes in his authoritative exposition of Jewish law regarding economics, and this is a quotation from Rabbi Tamari, the Mishnah, the Mishnah is the first part of the Talmud, defined one who said, what's yours is mine and what's mine is mine as an evil man. He who says what's yours is yours and what's mine is yours is a righteous person, but what's yours is yours and what's mine is mine, some say that is the mark of Sodom. So go over what this account of the mission is saying, what's criticized here is the mark of Sodom is not sort of the obviously evil attitude where someone would say, what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine, but here a strict adherence to your own property where you're not going to be charitable to others, they say what's mine is mine and what's yours is yours, where you refuse all charity is disapproved of. So it seems like Marx was clearly mistaken to think that egoism is in this kind of sense of selfish behavior is intrinsic or essential to Judaism. A defender of Marx might reply by recalling a distinction made earlier. At the outset, I distinguished the claim that Judaism as a body of doctrine that is related to capitalism from the claim that Jews as a group are so related. One is saying there's something in the body of doctrine that's led to capitalism or is identical with capitalism and the other is saying it's the Jews as a particular group that are capitalistic or produce responsible for capitalism. Has the objection just raised to Marx's account ignored this distinction? Perhaps Marx is not best taken as making a point about Jewish religious doctrine. Rather, is he not claiming that the behavior found in the economic activities of certain Jews, namely the traders and money lenders, best expresses the essence of capitalism? I just add here just incidentally a difficulty with both readings of Marx, which is if Judaism is capitalism, how can it be at the same time true that Judaism gave rise to capitalism? Obviously, Marx does not use is here to denote strict identity, but to return to this possible defense of Marx he was really not talking about Jewish religion, but rather about particular Jews, namely the traders and money lenders. If this is what Marx had in mind, it is no more satisfactory than the earlier version of his claim. What is supposed to be specifically Jewish about either selling or lending money? Marx nowhere informs us. A more deep-seated failing besets Marx's account of Judaism and capitalism. Marx characterizes both capitalism and Judaism as based on self-interest, practical need, selling and money. Surely it would be difficult to find throughout recorded history, many large-scale and complex societies in which these features did not play a prominent role. Contrary to Marx, neither self-interest nor the pursuit of money is distinctively either capitalist or Jewish. I should say this is a point that Max Weber realized when he investigated the origins of capitalism, his famous work Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, is what he said is, well, we find trading throughout history, but what we have to do is account what's distinctive about capitalism. So Weber is really making the same point I'm making here against Marx, that Marx hasn't come up with anything distinctive about capitalism when he's talking about people trading or being interested in pursuit of their own self-interest. In seeking to exercise self-interest as a feature of the human condition, Marx is beguiled by a fantasy in which human beings abandon all antagonism. If you remember the passage I quoted from Marx's criticism of the 1793 French constitution, he says that the idea of talking about an individual right is suggesting that one person is opposed to someone else and who thinks in a truly human society that wouldn't be a feature. And Rothbard remarks to Marx any differences between men and therefore any specialization in the division of labor is a contradiction. And the communist goal is to replace that contradiction with harmony among all. This means that to the Marxist, any individual differences, any diversity among men are contradictions to be stamped out and replaced by the uniformity of the anthill. And quotation, Murray Rothbard had always had a characteristically excellent way of getting to the heart of an issue. I think it comes out very well in that quotation. Jerry Muller, who when I quoted earlier on Marx's Jewish question has insightfully drawn attention to the importance of Marx's essay, but in one respect he goes too far. Muller says, for on the question of the Jews contains in embryo, most of the subsequent themes of Marx's critique of capitalism. If Marx had one big idea, it was that capitalism was the rule of money, itself the expression of greed. The rule of capital was fundamentally immoral because it deprived the vast majority of the capitalist society of their humanity, requiring labor that enriched a few capitalists while impoverishing the workers physically and spiritually. So Muller thinks that Marx's basic criticism of capitalism was that it's a society based on money making in which people's humanity is trampled on, so it's fundamentally a moral criticism of capitalism. Muller here fundamentally misconceives Marxism. Marx in Das Kapital has principally in mind a scientific criticism of capitalism based primarily on the labor theory of value. Of course, when I say scientific criticism, I don't mean the criticism is correct. Of course, the labor theory value is wrong, but what Marx intent Marx thought it was correct. He intended what he said as a scientific criticism. The book Das Kapital contains fierce moral invective directed against capitalism, some of which makes reference to Jewish themes, but this is rhetoric rather than the core of the book. One such reference to a Jewish theme, incidentally, occurs in the famous passage of chapter 24 of Das Kapital which says accumulate, accumulate, that is Moses and the prophets. The Jewish reference here is not just the obvious one to Moses, but the entire expression Moses and the prophets refers to two out of the three divisions in the Jewish arrangement of the books of the Bible. Marx is saying that for the capitalist accumulation is the Bible. I should mention that in Das Kapital, Marx by no means confines his invective against religion to remarks about the Jews. For example, he says referring to the 39 articles of the Church of England, which is the defining body of doctrine for the Anglican church, he says the Church of England would sooner give up 38 of the 39 articles than 139th of its income. The crucial point that Marx intended his project to science rather than ethics was made long ago by Werner Zombart, whom we shall be discussing later. Before turning from Marx on capitalism and the Jews, I allow myself one conjecture. Marx said that the essence of capitalism was egoism. Could awareness of this claim have influenced the young Ein Rand who after all grew up in Soviet Russia where the writings of Marx were abundantly available in Russian translation? I ask because she of course also thought that capitalism was in essence egoism, though she embraced exactly what Marx deplored and ignored his identification of Judaism with capitalism. What lessons should we draw from the failure of Marx's attempt to link Judaism with capitalism? Should we abandon altogether all inquiries along the same lines as fundamentally misguided? Such a course was urged by Ludwig von Mises. He remarks in socialism, today the Islamic and Jewish religions are dead. They offer their adherents nothing more than a ritual. They know how to prescribe prayers and fasts, certain foods, circumcision and the rest, but that is all. They offer nothing to the mind, completely de-spiritualized all they teach and preach are legal forms and external rule. They lock their follower into a cage of traditional usages in which he is often hardly able to breathe, but for his inner soul they have no message. They suppress the soul instead of elevating it and saving it. For many centuries in Islam for nearly 2,000 years in Jewry there have been no new religious movements. Today the religion of the Jews is just as it was when the Talmud was drawn up. So to make obvious how this would relate to our topic, since capitalism is a feature of the modern world Mises would have to hold that Judaism is irrelevant to it since he thinks that Judaism has nothing to say to the modern world so it couldn't have anything to say. So capitalism one of the essential features of the modern world. I do not think that Mises' remarks by themselves settle the questions that issue even if one accepts Mises' highly dubious characterization of Judaism as pure ritual devoid of appeal to the mind. Mises' comments do not exclude the possibility that legal regulations of the kinds Mises described in such unflattering terms influence the development of capitalism either by their content or by the qualities of mind and character that people who adhered to the rituals tended to develop. But these are no more than possibilities where these regulations in fact had such effect is another question. So if we don't accept that Mises' remarks say that we shouldn't consider the question of Judaism and capitalism at all, I think I want to go on and we want to turn now to another attempt to connect Judaism and capitalism and this one the most significant of all, Werner Zombark's The Jews in Modern Capitalism which appeared in 1911. Zombark conforms to the pattern mentioned earlier that those who ascribe to the Jews' primary responsibility for capitalism tend to be hostile to both Judaism and capitalism. In Zombark's case, this is hardly surprising. Zombark began his academic career as a convinced Marxist and in fact, Friedrich Engels took Zombark very seriously. Very seriously, remember after the only volume of Das Kapital was published in Marx's lifetime, the first volume which came out in 1867 and there was a peer to be a contradiction in the volume between how the labor theory of value said that prices, what prices would be and what actual market prices were, the actual market prices didn't conform to their labor values. So Marx's attempt to deal with that came out only when the volume three of the book was published by Engels but before that happened, various writers tried to come up with solutions in what they thought how Marx might have solved this problem, Zombark was one of these in Engels' praise Zombark for what he had come up with even though he didn't get the same analysis as the one Marx actually had but Engels thought it was significant. So when they say he began his career as a convinced Marxist, though he veered to the right, he remained a socialist to the end, albeit of a peculiar kind and at the end of his career he was somewhat of a supporter of Hitler although exactly how much his disputed he favored a return to an anti-indul... It was sort of an agricultural system that wouldn't put much emphasis on industry. Like Marx, he stressed the Jewish involvement in trade as the essence of capitalism. The Jews with their trader ethic had succeeded in transforming the more static values of the Middle Ages and he liked the more static values. The broad outlines of this theory will already be familiar from our discussion of Marx's essay but Zombark developed the position with enormously greater learning in the Jewish sources and in Jewish history. Zombark himself says that Marx in his essay, quoting Zombark, looked deep into the Jewish soul. After mentioning two other writers, he says what has been said about the Jewish spirit since these men, all Jews, wrote is either a repetition of what they said or a distortion of the truth. His favorable reference to Marx's essay should be sufficient to suggest that Zombark was an unfriendly critic of Judaism since of course Marx's essay is very hostile to Judaism but Milton Friedman descends. He writes, Zombark's book has had in general a highly unfavorable reception and indeed something of an aura of antisemitism has come to be attributed to it. There is nothing in the book itself to justify any charge of antisemitism though there certainly is in Zombark's writing and behavior several decades later. Several decades later and what he's referring to there when he says several decades later is Zombark's support for the Nazis. Indeed, if anything, I mean, Friedman, I interpret the book as phylo-semitic. Friedman has, I suggest, been deceived by his own strong approval for the behavior and attitudes that Zombark depicts. Zombark was not praising the Jews, for example, when he ascribed to them the traitor's mentality. The great strength of his book is that he goes beyond the generalities to be found in Marx's essay and offers specific evidence from Jewish religious sources and history. He points out, for example, that though a Jew is forbidden to lend money at interest to another Jew, he is permitted, and according to some opinions required to do so to non-Jews. The majority opinion is that Jew is permitted to lend money to non-Jews, but there is a view that Jew is required to, not that he has to lend money to non-Jews, but that if he does do so, he has to charge interest. The ban on taking, Jewish law sees nothing intrinsically wrong with lending at interest. The ban on taking interest from fellow Jews stems from the bonds that ought to link fellow believers. Incidentally, the prohibition on taking interest from a fellow Jew is more than a negative requirement, more than just saying you're not allowed to take interest. It is a positive duty to lend money without interested Jews in need, and free loan societies have long been a part of the Jewish community. Zombart expresses the point about taking interest from non-Jews in typically colorful language. If you read Zombart, it's much easier to read than Max Weber, for example. It tends to be very dull and abstract. Zombart is a very colorful writer who always gives great many historical examples, and this is what he says. He says, now think of the position in which the pious Jew and the pious Christian, respectively, found themselves in the period in which money lending first became a need in Europe, in which eventually gave birth to capitalism. The good Christian who had been addicted to usury was filled with remorse as he lay dying ready at the 11th hour to cast from him the ill-gotten gains which scorched his soul. As you just say, when he's talking about usury, that doesn't mean as people use it today, charging exorbitant rates of interest. Usury refers to interest of any kind, so usury is a synonym for interest. So Zombart has talked about how the Christian who lent money at interest would be remorseful when he's dying, and then he says, in the good Jew, in the evening of his days, he gazed upon his well-filled caskets and coffers overflowing with sequins of which he had relieved the miserable Christians and Mohabitans. It was a sight which warmed his heart for every penny was like a sacrifice which he had brought to his heavenly father. Zombart does not see the law regarding interest is standing alone. To the contrary, he maintains that Judaism is a religion of calculative rationality, peculiarly suited to success under capitalism. He says, the kinship between Judaism and Kaplan is further illustrated by the legally regulated relationship. I had almost said the business-like connection except that the term has a disagreeable connotation between God and Israel. I should just say there, that's a very interesting rhetorical device. He's saying, I don't wanna say this, but by saying, I don't really wanna say that, he is saying it. So he says the contract usually sets forth that man is rewarded for duties performed and punished for duties neglected. Two consequences must of necessity follow. First, a constant weighing up of a loss and gain which any action needs must bring. And secondly, a complicated scheme of bookkeeping as it were for each individual person. So Zombart is saying in Judaism, great new emphasis is given on requirements that the believer is supposed to do or prohibitions and you would have to, when the believer is judged, his good deeds are weighed against his bad deeds. So for Zombart, this encouraged calculating frame of mind, which he thinks is essential to capitalism. Zombart makes clear his evaluation of Judaism and capitalism in a passage that evidently escaped Milton Friedman's attention. In all its reasoning, it, referring to Jewish religion, appeals to us as a creation of the intellect, a thing of thought and purpose projected into the world of organisms, destined to destroy and to conquer nature's realm and to reign itself in her stead. Just so capitalism, just so does capitalism appear on the scene. Like the Jewish religion, an alien element in the midst of a natural created world like it to something schemed and planned in the midst of teeming life. This was a theme of German Romanticism, the abstract alienated intellect was contrasted with the natural world. So the view was the intellect, if it was taken apart from the natural world was a destructive force. Probably the greatest expression of this was in a book by the German philosopher Ludwig Klage that had the spirit as the adversary of souls. So the spirit would be the rational intellect, would be the adversary of the soul, which would be acting in accord with nature. What is one to make of all this? The main problem with Zombart's thesis is obvious. Though he is right that calculative rationality is integral to capitalism, this disposition is by no means peculiar to Jews. If so, capitalism cannot be considered Jewish in essence though Zombart may well be right that certain traits in mind equip Jews to prosper under capitalism. Zombart could hardly ignore this point. Only a few years before his own book, Max Weber had issued his famous The Protestant Ethic in the Spirit of Capitalism that I mentioned before. In that book, Weber ascribed some of the same traits that Zombart thought especially Jewish to the Puritans. Weber suggested the Puritans were very interested in calculating their good deeds against their bad deeds. It cannot be said that Zombart's way of coping with the objection is entirely satisfactory. He writes, I, let's say Zombart, have already mentioned that Max Weber's study of the importance of Protestantism for the capitalistic system was the impetus that sent me to consider the importance of a Jew. And now here's his answer to the claim, well, isn't Puritanism, doesn't that have the same calculative rationality that you're saying is Jewish? And his answer is Puritanism is Judaism. Zombart rightly stressed the importance for capitalism of lending money at interest, but allowing this practice is hardly peculiar to Judaism. It is great an Austrian perspective on the history of economic thought, Rothbard remarks. Calvin's main contributions to the usury question was in having the courage to dump the prohibition altogether. To Calvin then, usury is perfectly illicit, provided it is not charged in loans to the poor who would be hurt by such payment. Rothbard continues about a later Calvinist. The honor of putting the final boot to the usury prohibition belongs to Claudius Salmezius, who finished off this embarrassing remnant of the mountainous eras of the past. In short, Salmezius pointed out that money lending was a business like any other, and like other businesses, was entitled to charge a market price. Salmezius also had the courage to point out that there were no valid arguments against usury either by divine or natural law. Incidentally, you may recall, Salmezius was the object of an attack by one of the greatest of all masters of invective, John Milton. Anyone, I urge people to look up what Milton said about Salmezius. No doubt, Zombart would respond by declaring Calvin and Salmezius to be Jews. We have so far considered and found largely inadequate attempts to connect Judaism with capitalism, but we have also to examine the views of those who find a Jewish impetus behind opposition to capitalism. Especially at the beginning of the 20th century, a common view held at the Bolshevik Revolution was largely a Jewish enterprise. Winston Churchill wrote in 1920, there is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism in the actual ring about of the Russian Revolution by these international, and for the most part, atheistical Jews. It is certainly a great one. It probably outweighs all others. With a notable exception of lending, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. It's come out since Churchill wrote that Lenin did have, there was Jewish ancestry in his background self, when he shouldn't have said with a notable exception of Lenin. Churchill by no means thought that all Jews were Bolsheviks. To the contrary, he contrasted the internationalist Jews behind World Revolution with nationalist Jews, for example, Zionists. He said, the struggle which is now beginning between the Zionists and the Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people. Churchill was but one of many writers of his time with similar views. As he notes in his article, he had read Nesta Webster, a popular historian of a time who studied conspiracy theories of revolution in among other books, the French Revolution, a study in democracy, world revolution in secret societies and subversive movements. Contrary to general belief, Webster did not defend the authenticity of the notorious protocols of the elders of Zion. She discusses the question extensively in her book, The Secret Societies, but she doesn't say it was authentic. Webster was probably the formal source for the view that communism was Jewish. Backers of the theory like Churchill appealed to the fact that Jews occupied a high number of positions in the Bolshevik government. The Irish priest, Father Dennis Fahy, published a pamphlet, The Rulers of Russia, containing long lists of Bolsheviks with Jewish sounding names. In Germany, the Nazi writer Alfred Rosenberg sometimes read out such lists over the radio, which led to the joke that he considered that he thought everybody named Rosenberg was Jewish except him. In recent years, the German writer Johannes von Beberstein has devoted a long book to the topic Jewish Bolshevism, myth and reality. Before we turn to evaluate this theory, it should be noted that it's possible, however unlikely it may seem, for someone to hold this view and the view that the Jews are behind communism, main opposition to capitalism, together with the position we earlier examined that Jews are responsible for capitalism. This is more than a bare possibility. Hitler, for one, believed precisely this. The main failing of the view that connects Judaism and communism is a simple one. It confuses two questions. First, why looking at the historical circumstances that led to the Russian Revolution where many Jews attracted to revolution and is there anything intrinsic to Judaism that leads to support for communism? The first question is readily answered when one recalls a long history of anti-Jewish measures taken by the Tsarist Russian government in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A similar appeal to particular circumstances would, I think, explain such other instances of Jewish support for socialist revolutionary groups as the historical record discloses. Absent the existence of special circumstances, there is no more Jewish support for the overthrow of capitalism. Jerry Muller is right when he says, Milton Friedman's contention that Jews vilified capitalism while profiting from it is highly distorted. To the extent that Jews identify themselves with socialism, it was largely a phenomenon of Eastern European Jews in their immediate descendants in the years from the late 19th century through the 1930s. And even if one is inclined to think the association between Jews and communism greater than Muller allows, it is clear that any such affinity has its limit. Even during the period when Jewish radicalism was at its height, most Jews were not communists and most communists were not Jews. It would be difficult to consider the Chinese communist movement an instance of Jewish Bolshevism. Although I have read a book by anti-Semitic writer, I won't mention who it is thought that Shanghai Shek was Jewish. To show a close intellectual connection between Judaism and communism would require some derivation of communist ideas from Jewish religious doctrine and that is not in the offing. True enough, radicals have appealed to Jewish texts to support their views. Michael Walzer has traced the role of the Exodus narrative on revolutionary thought. He says, I, Walzer have found the Exodus almost everywhere often in unsuspected places. It is central to the communist theology or anti-theology of Ernst Bloch, who was a Marxist writer who wrote on Utopias. It is the subject of a book called Moses in Red by Lincoln Steffens published in 1926, a detailed account of Israel's political struggles in the wilderness and the defense of Leninist politics. And in his book, he lists many more such instances of the influence of the Exodus story. Others have found in the Jewish prophets an inspiration for socialist schemes for reform of the world. A once famous book of the 1920s, a religion of truth, justice and peace by Isadora Singer, the editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia standard reference work, argued that, quote, the world leadership of the social justice movement is offered to the Jew. Singer based his argument on an appeal to the words of Amos, Isaiah, Micah, and other prophets. Walzer and Singer to the contrary, notwithstanding, the claim that Judaism teaches socialism or communism as a general political program cannot succeed. The basic reason such an attempt must fail is the same one that dooms the theories that link Judaism and capitalism. The religious precepts of Judaism are meant to apply only to Jews. They do not constitute an ethical system that prescribes the best social order for all of humanity. And to avert an objection, the Jewish sources did not prescribe socialism for the Jewish community. Either fact quite the contrary, the Jewish sources strongly support private property although the system elaborate for the Jewish community is not identical to free market capitalism, either but the basic point is that the Jewish laws are intended only for the Jewish community. As Myer Tamari, the rabbi quoted earlier was written the authoritative account of Jewish law and economic says, for centuries Jews enjoyed autonomy in many countries and maintained rabbinic codes of law which regulate and govern their economic activity, thereby preserving its specifically Jewish characteristics. The Bible and the homiletical literature establish an ethical moral framework within which Jewish communities operated. So he's saying these are laws just for the Jewish community. I conclude then that although Mises radically underrated the intellectual merit of the Jewish sources, he was not far from the truth in thinking that there are no direct connections to be drawn between Judaism and capitalism. Thank you.