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  • The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848
  • Jonathan Israel
The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848. By Jonathan Karp (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2008) 376 pp. $80.00

The Politics of Jewish Commerce is an important and stimulating contribution to at least three areas of study—Jewish history, modern economic thought, and the Enlightenment. Its value lies in the originality of its perspectives, which flow from the author's excellent decision to adopt an intellectual-historical approach to European economic thought in the period 1650 to 1850 insofar as it relates to the political debate about the place of Jews in modern society. It is a study of how economic debates, and innovations in economic thought, shifted paradigms relating to the Jews, thus affecting both the status of the Jews in European life and the long process of Jewish emancipation.

With regard to the materials on which his discussion is based, the author gives particularly detailed attention to a number of discussions about Jews from the period: Simone Luzzatto's Discourse on the Jews of Venice (1638), perhaps the first work to discuss the Jews primarily in terms of their role in commerce; John Toland's Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland (1714); the pamphlets written by Josiah Tucker (1713–1799); Christian Wilhelm von Dohm's On the Civic Improvement of the Jews (1781); the debate about the Jews within the French Revolution; Johann Gottlieb Fichte's hostile discussion of Jewish emancipation; and the stance regarding Jewish commerce in the early Karl Marx. Most of this is familiar material but it is assembled within a frame of reference different from that with which we are familiar. The discussion of the work of Dohm (1751–1820), for instance, is more judiciously nuanced than usual. Karp is entirely right to say that "by portraying Jewish economic life as profoundly distorted, while laying the blame on oppressive conditions imposed on Jews rather than their own natures or religion," Dohm introduced a new paradigm. He clearly shows how this point relates to Enlightenment concerns more generally and why this text dominated debate about Jewish commerce and the question of Jewish emancipation for several decades.

The book is subject to two main criticisms. First, there is something wrong with the balance. Karp pays a lot of attention to economic debates in Britain and Germany, but the equally important economic debates in France are largely ignored (except for those of the Revolution). Denis Diderot inclined to a generally philosemitic stance while also promoting [End Page 589] laissez-faire and physiocratic economic doctrines in the Encyclopédie. The status of commerce in the eighteenth century and notions about the way in which governments should regulate commerce were profoundly influenced by the work of the French économistes as well as by Jacques Turgot, Guillaume Thomas Raynal, and Condorcet (Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat), all of whom go largely unmentioned in this book. These writers might have had relatively little to say directly about Jews, but the same is true (to a remarkable extent) of Adam Smith who does, however, figure prominently in Karp's discussion.

The second criticism concerns the way in which Karp contrasts the thought of Dohm with that of such conservative German Enlightenment thinkers as Justus Moser and August Wilhelm Rehberg. Karp sees clearly that Dohm not only takes a position on the Jewish question that is fundamentally different from theirs but also that this disagreement is anchored in divergent conceptions of Enlightenment. But owing to his failure to take account of the Enlightenment's own internal splits—especially the broad primary division between conservative and radical Enlightenment—Karp fails to make the crucial connection between Dohm and the radical Enlightenment tradition. If he had examined Dohm's other writings in addition to On the Civic Improvement and taken account of his links with Mirabeau (Honoré Gabriel Riqueti), Friedrich Christian Diez, and Johann Friedrich Struensee, he would have brought Dohm into his proper intellectual context.

Jonathan Israel
Institute for Advanced Study
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