the yiddish word luftmentshn, from luft (“air”) + mentshn (“men”), can be used to mean people who are idealistic, abstract, intellectual, as well as people who perpetually unemployed. i can’t think of another word that blends intelligentsia and lumpenproletariat into a single concept but i think it’s really interesting
@anarchist-caravan actually we both got it from german!
twobyforesight: I always thought that a luftmensch was someone who made money from thin air – like a speculator or a small trader with no money who seems to figure out a profit. Frankly a classic capitalist.
That’s not what luftmensch means. OP had it right. But it’s not weird that you’d think that, the image was created and has been spread on purpose for about a century. The fact that the stereotype ‘luftmensch = capitalist’ exists is because antisemitism has always been very efficient at blending capitalist images and images of Jewishness to create the suggestion that the big baddy expoiting you isn’t your boss, or the state, it’s an evil jewish conspiracy.
‘Luftmenschen’ comes from Yiddish Eastern Europe where the vast majority of Jewish people lived in extreme poverty and as such it did mean ‘people who live from thin air’ in the sense that it meant very poor Jewish people who travelled from place to place, took whatever work they could find, traded what could be traded and relied on the solidarity of the rest of the poor Yiddish speaking community who also shared what scraps they had so that a Jewish person in a Yiddish neighbourhood in the 1920s could usually find half a bowl of watery soup somewhere and could survive.
It was also within this Jewish proletariat that intellectual conversations and great ideals – especially socialist ideals – thrived. Revolutionary Yiddish schools set up for and by the Jewish proleratiat combined basic reading, writing and math skills with conversations about religion and literature and debates about socialism. From this scene of poor idealists grew the double meaning of the word Luftmenschen. Which is about as far from the capitalist villain stereotype as it gets.
It was from this that antisemites created two fictions which could both be used when convenient: that of Jewish people as evil capitalists and as barbarian communists. Depending on which lie they wanted to use at the time, a Jewish butcher that gave a piece of meat to another hungry Jew was either a dangerous communist, or a greedy cheat overcharging the non-Jews. And Luftmenschen were either classic capitalists or the mouth pieces of a global ‘judeo-bolshevist’ conspiracy to destroy civilisation. Both lies were spread extensively and in many subtle forms so that no matter whether the target of this propganda hated capitalism or hated communism, they could be made to hate Jewish people.
QueerAnarchism 