The Economic Turn in American Jewish History: When Women (Mostly) Disappeared

A transformation in American Jewish history has appeared in the changing tide of scholarship devoted to the study of capitalism and economy. Scholars of American Jewish history find in the study of ethnic economic niches, kinship ties and capital, and global Jewish networks and flows of resources, among other topics, a more rigorous approach to historical scholarship. Setting aside culture and identity, issues that many of them argue have sent the field in the wrong direction, they navigate a sea change for historians.

Scholars of Jewish history were initially slow to turn their spotlight on economy more broadly, and capitalism in particular, for reasons relating to antisemitism. The classic antisemitic stereotypes of Jews' acquisitiveness and perfidy, not to mention their unsavory reputations as capitalists par excellence, appear to have rendered the topic of Jews and the economy taboo, consciously or not, for previous generations of Jewish historians.² Scholarly work in this area was readily politicized in Germany and elsewhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when discussions of Jews and economy served antisemitic ends.³

Both the study of capitalism and economy have re-emerged with the fall of this self-censorship, and have given way to new questions in American Jewish history, and modern Jewish history more generally.⁴ Historians of American Jewry, in particular, engage interdisciplinary approaches that integrate labor history and studies of transnational capitalism, in addition to studies of philanthropy, supply chains, and, as mentioned, ethnic niches and credit and kinship. These questions have also reshaped the study of many classic topics, which include immigration, kinship, mobility, and Judaism and Jewish practices, among others. They demonstrate not only how Jews were shaped by capitalism, but by how capitalism was reshaped by Jews' encounter with the American economy.⁵

As welcome and productive as this scholarship is, its consequences require a careful and systematic appraisal. Simply put, virtually all scholars writing in the vein of the economic turn in American Jewish history have marginalized or simply erased women as subjects and actors in history.⁶ When women appear on the historical stage, they are primarily there as bit players who are present to illustrate larger principles, which are cut off from understanding how gender and economy are intertwined. Understanding this connection has transformed our understanding of society. Feminist scholars' hard-won battles integrated women into historical narratives as actors capable of agency. In addition, they centered gender within analytic frameworks that are increasingly disappearing as historians focus on markets, lending practices and credit in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁷

With this economic focus, Jewish men emerge again not only as the assumed norm, but as the primary actors in history, notwithstanding the barriers and limitations that they faced. These historians overlook a fundamental reality of Jewish history, indeed all history, that humans differentiated by gender, class, race and sexuality, among other social realities, encounter the world differently and also live with its consequences differently. They also overlook the significance and power of relationships within households and the market where women act, but are often invisible in certain analytic frameworks.

Two binaries, intertwined with the economic turn, are now vying to shape the writing of American Jewish history—production versus consumption, and structure versus culture. The first binary is an economic one, which juxtaposes an analytic focus on production against a concern with consumption, including consumers' tastes. Many of these studies examine the garment industry, and the exclusion of women and their tastes removes a critical feature of its economy. The second dualism is more complex. Structure refers to the social contexts and relationships in which Jews and others must negotiate their economic relationships. However, structures are often narrowed in the "economic turn," to exclude, for example, households in favor of other relationships.

Culture, by contrast, may include values, home life, religious practices, and gender relationships. However, it also includes representations and discourses that are encompassed by what scholars call "the linguistic turn." More ambiguous, "culture" is one of the key terms in the binaries created about what does or does not drive changes...