Gender and the Economic History of the Jews

As scholars, we are cursed by living at a time when each successive "turn" of academic discourse seems to be in a competition for some ultimate truth, in a zero-sum game that seems to demand successionist slogans. One discursive "turn" seeks to establish itself at the expense of some (or all!) other paradigms. In her essay, Riv-Ellen Prell airs her sense that something like this may be happening in the sphere of Jewish social history. She argues that in undertaking a reexamination of economic and social-class relations, almost an entire school of thought (with particular and worthy exceptions duly noted) has implicitly seen fit to turn back the scholarly clock to a time before gender studies mattered.

If true, that would indeed be unfortunate. However, as one of those named by Prell as a participant in that discussion, I submit that an interpretive scheme can be intended simply to be read in tandem with—and not against—other, already existing models. I believe that aggregating the varied experiences of Jews of different sorts (including their gendered differences) in order to pursue a different line of inquiry is a way of highlighting what may be common to them in general, despite their specified status differences and perspectives. Needless to say, gender-sensitive scholars of women's history do something quite similar, insofar as they aggregate the infinite variety of individual women's lives under one generic, common denominator.

The point of aggregating "Jewish experience" (over and above existing internal distinctions among them) is to ask something generic about Jewish/non-Jewish relations. In our case—including but not limited to production, consumption, marketing, entrepreneurship, occupational change, and political-economic policy—we want to know if the material sphere reveals anything about Jews in general, vis-à-vis the rest of society. While Jewish men, women, and youths of both sexes undoubtedly experienced the world of the workplace and the marketplace differently, in accordance with their respective generational, class, and gendered positions in the household and in society, all of them may be susceptible to influences and trends that they shared in common.

At this point, it may be as well to state that, as far as I know, none of the authors surveyed by Prell has neglected to read and internalize the extensive and influential corpus of writing on women's history and on gender relations in general. Indeed, it is because that has already been taken on board that the questions of whether or not women possess historical agency seem relatively settled. It is not a proposition that appears to be seriously contested or in need of constant defense; indeed, it has been more than amply demonstrated. But is that the only issue at stake? Questions come to mind, beyond the issue of agency, about defining Jews as a social sector in their relations with non-Jews in the marketplace. This entails a move that is not backward (to a "pre-gendered" history), but lateral, to a different plane of reference.

Efforts to differentiate Jews as a category in any analytical framework seem implicit in their very naming as a subject. Nonetheless, it is precisely here that the history of Jewish economic relations faces serious conceptual challenges and, thus, requires theoretical intervention, particularly for those of us working on the late modern era. Historians of Jewish life in feudal societies do not face conceptual obstacles of similar magnitude, for they have "only" to follow the paper trail of the "privileges" and "charters" that laid down specifically how Jews might exist (literally) and carry on economic activities, particularly in medieval urban life. As for the early modern period, various scholars have identified "transitional" subgroups and paradigms that help us to account for the way Jews fit into crossover functions ("port Jews," "trading diasporas," "middleman minorities," and the like), thus bridging the era of ghettos and "Jewry laws" on one hand and the age of Atlantic trade and of "emancipation" on the other hand.

For the late modern (post-1800) period, in contrast, the prospect of discovering whether anything warrants treating the Jews as a special...