Jewish parasite
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The "Jewish parasite" is a notion that dates back to the Age of Enlightenment. It is based on the notion that the Jews of the diaspora are incapable of forming their own states and would therefore parasitically attack and exploit states and peoples, which are biologically imagined as organisms or "peoples bodies". The stereotype is often associated with the accusation of usury and the separation of "creative", i.e. productive, and "raffling", non-productive financial capital ("High Finance").
In the Nazi period, it served to legitimize the persecution of Jews up to the Holocaust. Some representatives of Zionism also took up the motif. They regarded a "parasitic" way of life in other cultures as an inevitable consequence of the diaspora and contrasted it with the establishment of a Jewish state as an ideal.
