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> In America, people ask 'Do the Ferengi represent Jews?' In England, they ask 'Do the Ferengi represent the Irish?' In Australia, they ask if the Ferengi represent the Chinese[…] The Ferengi represent the outcast… it's the person who lives among us that we don't fully understand.[19]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi#Comparisons_with_anti-...

Or you could view them as the anthropomorphization of the vice of greed or stinginess/miserliness/parsimony.

As a Jew, I always just considered them space goblins...

So did I.

I forgot where I read it, but I believe Roddenberry modeled the Ferengi after New England traders in the 1800's.

This is stated directly in the episode that introduced them.