Postville: When Two Religious Ghettos Collide

Postville: When two religious, cultural and economic ghettos collide, love and justice disappear.  Correction: Love and justice may never have been present in the first place.

Both the OT (Law and the Prophets) and NT Christianity held high standards for social conduct: love and justice, with a special concern for the poor and oppressed.  Certainly not the exploitation of the poor and oppressed.  As Bloom discusses in some detail both the German Lutheran and Hasidic Jew ghettos, he does not mention the high standard of justice and love as the distinguishing characteristic of either religious community.  Much love and care within each community, but not love and justice for those outside their respective communities.

Religion and capitalism were comfortably combined in each community, but with no demand for equal time for love and justice.  When Pastor Miller of St. Paul's Lutheran Church gently began to raise love and justice issues in his sermons, many of the relatively rich Lutherans frowned on such an uncomfortable gospel.  Pastor Miller soon left town.

When the beautiful mega-church St. James Lutheran cathedral was built, this is how the Postville Review described the event:

"The erection of this church, more than any other cause, has tended to raise the price of land around Postville.  It has brought large numbers of wealthy Germans here, and they all want a house within reach of this elegant house of worship, and they are willing to pay more than anybody else for lands in this vicinity.  The result is that nearly every farm that is sold is sold to a German;"

"When the Jews began arriving in the mid-1980s, Postville, as it had always been, was a closed, insulated, solidly Christian community---as much a shtetl (ghetto) as the Hasidim's ancestors had created in Eastern Europe, as much as the one the Lubavitchers has created in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.  Shtetlach were incubators and fortresses of Jewish tradition where religious values were preserved and embellished.  That's what Postville had been for a century for the Lutherans, a kind of goyishe shtetl [Gentile ghetto]."

For the negative side of religious ghettos, read Luke 11 and Matthew 23---"full of greed . . . neglected justice and the love of God."

In the sense of entrepreneurial, hardworking, legitimate profit to survive, feed the family, etc. capitalism is a good economic system.  But without a strong emphasis on love and justice, prosperity can quickly degenerate into greed, to creating economic systems that oppress, exploit cheap labor.  In America, capitalism has often been tied to Indian genocide, Indian land theft, theft of black labor, theft of half of Mexico's land, etc.  It is extremely dangerous to sideline the biblical requirements on love and justice.

Some quotations which reflect Hasidic Jewish greed:

"That the Jews had made so much money in Postville made matters worse."

"But instead of arriving at the lowest rung of the economic ladder, these Jews had arrived already on top. . . . many brought with them large sums of money."

"They wanted their piece of the American economic pie and they helped themselves to it."

The perverse combination of religion, wealth and culture is a dangerous combination; it usually crowds out love and justice.  In this sense, Postville is the best bad book I have read recently, redeemed only by the remarkable Jewish doctor, the Jewish "good Samaritan" who lived among Gentiles, loved Gentiles and served Gentiles for a lifetime.