The Economy in Jewish History: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship between Ethnicity and Economic Life (review)

Economics is commonly perceived as an area for expertise in such matters as costs and rewards, production and consumption, market exchange, and the marshalling of data for analyzing options and forecasting outcomes. Seldom do these imperious and anonymous categories intersect with issues of personality, identity, and culture, let alone whim, prejudice, and other irrational forces. Indeed, to an economist, it would seem inherently counterintuitive, if not absurd, to inquire into the “Jewish” characteristics of labor participation, market development, entrepreneurship, or consumption.

However, there has been a marked increase lately in the production of scholarly material about Jews and the economy, deriving mainly from academics drawn from the liberal arts in general and Jewish studies in particular. The questions commonly addressed in this emerging body of work are not “economic” in the narrow sense but more broadly social, often privileging cultural interpretation over the gathering and analysis of statistical data. In that sense, these studies do not represent a true meeting ground between cultural historians and economists.

The volume under review is a signal contribution to this recent wave of new research. Ambitious in its terms of reference, it contains contributions from scholars dealing with venues as distinct and diverse as Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Bordeaux, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and New York, as well as South Africa, Switzerland, Hungary, the nineteenth-century colonial Levant, and pre-1948 Palestine. The book, however, is organized not according to historical era or geographical focus but discursive, cross-cultural sections—“Rethinking the Economy in Jewish History,” “Jews in the Marketplace,” and “Jewish Economies in National and Transnational Contexts.” The intent, therefore, is to seek phenomenological insight through the juxtaposition of inherently separate case studies.

As the volume editors put it, their purpose is to remap the terrain of what they call “Jewish economic uniqueness”—a phrase that not only challenges economics-based theories (in which, as noted, “uniqueness” is hardly a valid conceptual tool) but also requires the authors to pit their ideas against long-discredited tropes of essentialism. The editors view Jews as economically engaged actors whose individual and collective footprint is a traceable artifact in the history of trade, economic thought, and social relations, though they do not argue that distinct behaviors or perceptions add up to a pre-determined set of “Jewish” traits. The result is rewarding for readers interested in thematic explorations about society, culture, and money, as seen from an insider/outsider perspective.

Seeing the economy as “organically linked . . . with political, religious, cultural, [and] family” activities (1–2), Reuveni assesses the extant corpus of scholarship on Jews in the modern economy, defending the “economic turn” in emergent research on Jews in the modern world. Jonathan Karp extends his research on the notional Jew in Western economic thought, to show how the Jews of early modern Europe constituted a paradigm-challenging case in the framing of either commerce-or industry-based conceptions of economic modernization.

In the second section, illuminating essays are presented by Susanne Bennewitz, on the social and cultural embeddedness of urban commercial culture; Helen Davies, on the Sephardic-Jewish, Bordeaux-to-Paris network that provided the context for the rise of the Pereire Brothers and their Crédit Mobilier; and Wobick-Segev and Paul Lerner, respectively, on German coffee houses and department stores as sites of contested social status and social control. Similarly enlightening are the contributions by Michael Miller, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Adam Mendelsohn, and David De Vries that together elucidate examples of transnational, ethnic networking in the modern, global economy from the early nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century (the third section of the book). Essays by Kirill Postoutenko and Anthony Kauders that purport to delve into the question of stereotype and representation fall short of contributing new, analytical clarity to a sorely vexed set of problems.

It may be indicative of the current crop of studies about Jews in the...