Culture and Money: The Economic Dimension of Cultural History and What It Can Teach Us

At the end of a letter to Rabbi Moses Isserles in Kraków, dated Monday 12 Nissan 1559 (5319), Rabbi Samuel Judah Kaztenellenbogen of Padua added a personal note: “A Jew has arrived here who has bought up the copies of Isaac Alfasi’s book, published in Savionetta. They are very beautiful and I think that he will give them to me for four and a half of our scudi. Please let me know: should I buy them and send them to you? And how much you would be able to sell them for there if I were to send you fifty? I will act as you advise.”¹ The significance of this note exchanged between two of the heroes of David Ruderman’s new book, Early Modern Jewry: A Cultural History, is that it sheds additional light on a number of issues he raises and so will allow us to examine his conclusions from a slightly different perspective—that of economic history.

In his study, Ruderman argues that while the Jews in each of the settings where they lived developed in different ways, there were five major cultural phenomena that connected them and thus allow us to look at the Jews in the early modern world as something of a coherent unit.² Central to his argument is the decline of rabbinic authority caused by, among other things, the rise of a strong and self-confident lay leadership, the printing revolution and subsequent democratization of knowledge, the subversive nature of early modern Jewish messianism, and the blurring of the religious boundaries between Jews and Christians. His narrative examines the ways these themes played out in the different Jewish centers and so, in a deft comparative presentation, it allows the reader to perceive for her or himself the connections that joined early modern Jewry. The nature of these connections is further elucidated in an opening chapter on Jewish mobility and in periodic reference to Jewish—especially Sephardic and New Christian—mercantile networks.

At heart, then, Ruderman’s study is of the cultural transformations caused, undergone, and resisted by early modern Jewish cultural elites, rabbinic and nonrabbinic, as is illustrated by a wealth of biographical details on the heroes of this story. Yet, I would argue, underlying these developments was an economic reality that did not just exist alongside the Jews’ cultural life but actually played a crucial role in shaping it. In these brief comments, I should like to examine this reality and demonstrate its significance for the development of Jewish culture. It is fitting, then, that I start with two key rabbinic figures, one in Italy and one in Poland, and think about the connection between them revealed by the letter quoted above. It gives a glimpse of a rather unknown side of the two great rabbis. They were not just prominent intellectuals or members of the communal elite; they were also businessmen, interested in exploiting the nascent Hebrew publishing business to make a profit. Sadly, we do not know the outcome of the book deal that Katzenellenbogen proposed to Isserles, but just the fact that it was made is enough to open our eyes to the economic background to the Jews’ intellectual lives, which, by the later sixteenth century, increasingly revolved around the printed Hebrew book.

In terms of book culture, the economic dimension is particularly important. Books were not just texts, forms of organizing knowledge, or artistic artifacts—they were also a commodity³—and as such, they can only be understood in terms of the market they served. Once this is grasped, we can begin to understand not only Katzenellenbogen’s business proposition but in fact the cultural significance of early modern Hebrew publishing in general: clearly, the importation of fifty copies of Alfasi’s work (or of any Hebrew book) to Poland could not have had a huge impact on this major center of Jewish life.⁴ And, to be sure, Katzenellenbogen’s deal [End...