When societies begin to unravel the people look increasingly desperately for a scapegoat and the Jews are the traditional one. They and the Han Chinese are higher IQ on average than the rest of us and unlike the Chinese the Jews are innovative and the upper reaches of industry and finance tends# to have a larger proportion of Jews than other ethnicities, thus all sorts nefarious activities are imputed to them by people whose livelihoods and sureties are slipping away in developing chaos.
Indeed. Much the same way Armenians were scapegoated in Turkey-I read Thomas Sowell’s works, and he references the necessary “middleman” in societies that have any kind of prosperous societies, as you said, it was Jews in many countries.
Middlemen are essential to prosperity, yet when things go bad and economies crash, middlemen are often one of first groups that are demonized, thought of as blood-suckers and leeches, contributing nothing to the product except making it more expensive (this in the minds of people who are likely to persecute them)