Jews and Indians in Antwerp’s diamond business
9th July 2010
Steve Sailer is always worth reading.
The secret to the diamond business is arranged marriages and the threat of ostracism, as dawned on me while having the diamond ring appraised to make sure the retailer hadn’t cheated me. The appraiser on Wabash spent about 20 minutes squinting at it through a microscope before telling me about its microscopic flaws.
That’s a big transaction cost. It’s much more efficient to be able to trust somebody you are doing business with when he tells you orally that the diamond is flawless. But how do you trust him? Because if he gets a reputation for cheating his relatives, his children will never find spouses.
In addition to being a fascinating story, it also serves to limn Sailer’s oft-propounded thesis that a ‘race’ is merely a large extended family that practices endogamy. This is an idea worth exploring, but which doesn’t get a lot of attention from the Crust. And there are implications:
But, I was struck while reading Michael Chabon’s 2007 alternative history bestseller, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, that the book is pretty dull until the villains in black hats are finally introduced. And the villains are literally in black hats: they’re ultra-Orthodox men who wear black hats. The book takes wing when Chabon — who is quite representative of mainstream modern American Jewish ethnocentric sentiments (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) — gets to indulge his fine, fierce hatred of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Sure, there are a few pages about how much his Yiddish policemen heroes despise American Republican goyim, but Chabon’s heroes really, really hate the black hats.Chabon is a 21st Century Jew — all that 20th Century Jewish teamplay might be falling apart.