We have a wonderfully informative copy-paste answer I often see mods posting on this site which addresses the history of antisemitism throughout the ages, but there's a point in it I find extremely odd. I have seen this question asked before, but since the person posting the passage is not generally the one (or one of the ones) who wrote it, I've yet to see a good response. I hope it's alright to make it its own question like this.
The answer includes this brief description:
Christian leaders instituted a policy that ... subjected [Jews] to discriminatory measures such as restrictions where they could live and what professions they could practice.
But follows it up shortly with:
Similarly, religious, ideological, and economic reasons were often interwoven in the expulsion of Jews to whom medieval rulers and kings owed a lot of money; in fact, one intersection of crisis-blaming and financial motive occurred during the Black Death, when local rulers were able to cynically blame Jews for the plague as an excuse for murdering and expelling them.
(Emphasis mine.)
I am having trouble reconciling these two facts. Were the restrictions on Jewish professions not designed to stop them from becoming too rich (and therefore influential)? From my modern perspective, that seems like it would be an obvious goal of dictating what a minority I wanted to keep in check could and couldn't do. Further, why was money borrowed from Jews in the first place, rather than seized through excessive taxes or fines (since it was the rulers of these lands doing the borrowing)? What recourse did Jews have for ensuring debts were repaid that made expelling or murdering them necessary to avoid payment rather than simply going "actually I just don't think I'll pay you and there's literally nothing you can do about that so ha"? (And yes, I do understand this wasn't the sole motivation for the expulsion/murder, but that rulers were ever in such a position that it was even a factor is baffling to me.)
I am familiar with the stereotype of the Jewish money lender, and I assume this is where it sees its origin, but the entire situation seems so bizarre and counter-intuitive. I would love some context on it.
Thank you!
Hey! As one of the people who wrote that (though u/commiespaceinvader was the big mover and shaker) I'm happy to give more insight into this.
As you noted in the quoted sections above, Jews were restricted in terms of the professions that they could practice- but one of those professions was moneylending. In fact, Jews made remarkably SAFE moneylenders because they were barred from many of the business endeavors which they financed, which prevented them from being competition. While the field of medieval Jewish history is currently experiencing something of a reevaluation of the extent to which Jews were limited to moneylending in practice, and the extent to which moneylending can be seen as having been uniquely Jewish, it was still a notable industry for Jews, particularly in northern Europe.
The restrictions were only partly meant to prevent Jews from becoming "too rich." (Most Jews were not rich at all.) A lot of this depended on the particular locality, of course, but it wasn't strictly about economics- it was about how the restrictions placed on Jews in this era and this general place were intended to enforce Jewish submissiveness, to make sure that they understood their place in the world relative to the Christian majority. Jews were to be protected but at the same time made to feel their inferiority. So, for example, a Jew might be able to become a merchant, but could never join a guild; Jews were not part of the governmental structure of the nation but were subject to their own internal structure, often directly under the control of the ruler. So since the goals were about subjugation, but not SPECIFICALLY about economic subjugation, and since Jews being moneylenders was convenient (partly due to their not being subjected to Christian dicta about usury), this wasn't seen specifically as a problem- but if a Jew did end up becoming too wealthy, or too powerful, then that could become its own problem for them as individuals, as they'd have targets on their back from resentful Christians.
In answer to your questions... well, Jews were generally heavily taxed as well. Not mutually exclusive, and in fact a major factor as an answer to your question. Rulers benefited from borrowing money, not just from confiscating it (which they certainly did as well- in fact, in medieval England the king was quite literally seen as "owning" the Jews), and they benefited from having moneylenders to provide capital for projects not just to them but to other subjects. This is because Jewish moneylenders were often, in fact, taxed based on their income (in addition to other taxes levied on the community as a whole), and their income of course benefited from their lending money and it being paid back. If Jews knew that the threat of confiscation lay over them, they would be less likely to lend money, making taxation of Jewish moneylending profits an incentive for rulers not to confiscate their assets. If the rulers did do that, they'd end up with a bunch of promissory notes which Church edicts against usury would make it difficult for them to cash. (The economics article I read on this had a lot of charts and graphs that made my eyes glaze over, but that was the general thrust of it.)
In short, for as long as Jews provided economic benefit to the nation in which they resided, their ability to amass money (which would allow this benefit to continue and would be heavily taxed) was not inherently a problem. They could live in a state of social and religious subjugation without it being inherently a problem for there to be a rich Jew, so long as a rich Jew served the monarch's purpose. However, all this could end once a shift occurred in the balance- if, for whatever reason (such as competition from other moneylenders) it would be more lucrative for a ruler to confiscate from Jewish subjects rather than to collect a tax on Jewish moneylenders' income, then that could soon become their course of action.