I always found it interesting how the same group that gave us the backbone of capitalism - investment, finance, banking - also gave us communism.
I believe Rabbi Spiro comments on that. Come on, Shabbos just ended, everyone grab your headphones and your dish soap.
Engels and Marx, both German. Funny how people forget that Germany gave us communism. And their Lenin stunt in WWI gave us the misery of the USSR.
Matter of fact, a totally ‘gentile’ group waded ashore at Plymouth Colony with “community” riding on their backs. Governor William Bradford attributed the ‘starving winter’ to the colony having had a form of socialism forced upon them by their financial backers.
In his words, “This community was nearly our undoing.” He used ‘community’ as we would used ‘communism’ or ‘socialism’.
The argument between the individual and the collective really came into serious discussion and societal trail in America, and Bradford accurately described the options and the consequences of those options.
Another FReeper authored “Shemitta, For The Land Is Mine” and posted it on the internet. It is an interesting look at Old Testament on land ownership/management and the urban/rural relationship in terms of long term land productivity and societal survival.
These issues far predate the Russian and German Jewish migration into America.
The earliest Jewish communities were in Neu Amsterdam (Stuyvesant's era) and in Savannah. Those were not socialism impaired.
Well, the idea might go back to Plato, so it is not an innovation, and Christians practiced a true form of "Communism" in the sense that they freely shared all that they had, but this was a matter of free-choice, and everyone was expected to do their part. It was not a practice based on resentment and entitlement.
Communism as Marx created it was merely a system of envy and thievery that has always appealed to the trash of every race, whether Greek or Jew, Barbarian or Civilized. Russia in particular is a sort of trash bin of humanity, attracting the worst of everywhere into its Babylon. Today they are still at their old games, but there aren't any Jews running things over there anymore. Same thing with the Chicoms or other dictatorships of the world.
I had always understood that modern finance was an invention of Italian Catholics in the 14th century.
But the moral foundation that is the basis for honest dealings is, of course, Biblical.
Marx borrowed most of his ideas from Frenchmen like Fourier and even a Scot like Robert Owen, neither of whom was Jewish (and neither was Marx, in any educational or cultural sense).
Communism embodies a parent - child relationship. Capitalism in contrast assumes a relaltionship of equals with voluntary association.
Two individuals did, not the whole Jewish people.