The association of Jews with satanism provided justification throughout the Middle Ages and well beyond for constraining Jews as second-class citizens, corralled in ghettos and excluded from owning agricultural land and from participating in key trades. Jews were therefore street peddlers and merchants, as well as moneylenders, a profession they were permitted largely because it allowed the Christian ruling class to keep this ungodly activity at arm's length. By the 1700s, small lenders grew into larger banks, and it was this development—itself born of anti-Semitism—that would sustain the more modern and ongoing forms of anti-Semitism, those focused on the figure of the money-grubbing Jewish banker, responsible for all the woes and hardships of working people—and plotting, in an international cabal of similarly scheming Jews, to do far worse.

XREF: Connects to the broader history of scapegoating and how economic roles are shaped by prejudice, echoing themes from other analyses of group persecution.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 933