Stereotypes do not work necessarily because they are true; they work because the characteristics they play on are perceived to be true.

For example, to support claims of 'the Jew' as being criminal, the Nazis who had outlawed all occupations for Jewish people then reasoned that if they were able to remain alive and fed, they MUST be law breakers by virtue of the fact they hadn't starved to death.

In England, there has been a history of Jew hating, mostly based on stereotypes that were unfounded in anything we recognize as reality today. We have Shakespeare for example who was unlikely to have met any Jewish people in his time. Nor is it likely that Marlowe or Chaucer did either. Yet they drew on an established stereotype and were able to play to the audiences' prejudices, prejudices that resulted from the stereotypes leading to further stereotypes resulting from the prejudices ad nauseam.

The miser stereotype results from church dogma that disallowed Christians to lend money. Because Jews were not included in that, an area of business they were able to work in was money lending. So for this, they were misers. Oy!

The question of whether Chaucer, Marlowe and Shakespeare were anti-Semites is puerile. None of them knew any Jews, so how could they have spoken from experience?

Fagin was a crook, plain and simple--well, maybe not so plain and not so simple, but a crook he was. But there are no handy stereotypes for crooks, and there's the rub.

I think that perpetuating the 'myth' actually perpetuates hatred towards Jewish people. It continues a long tradition of that in England, a tradition that led to more modern writers (Eliot, Chesterton, Belloc) getting sucked in, also. At some point it has to stop.

I do not use terms like 'to welsh on a bet' or 'gyp someone'. Nor do I use the phrase 'to jew someone down'. Nor do I allow those terms to be used in my presence or household by people with whom I speak or guests at my door.

The use of stereotypes can also be seen as laziness on the part of the author, and in many cases it is, for it is far more difficult to create a character from scratch--good or bad--than it is to call upon old prejudices and stereotypes.

IMO