Beyond Production vs. Consumption and Structure vs. Identity: The Case for a Renewed Jewish Economic History

When Riv-Ellen Prell points out that "virtually all of the 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" (484), she raises an important issue that speaks to a wider academic community. At a minimum, it is not a coincidence that to make her case for the importance of women's history and gender analysis, she draws on the work of Marion Kaplan on imperial Germany and on Paula Hyman's study of both North America and Western Europe. My remarks point into an even further geographical, temporal, and thematic direction and highlight the potential implications of Jewish economic history beyond the field of North American Jewish studies.

In Prell's diagnosis, women are the casualty of the recent economic turn in (American) Jewish history because of its tendency to privilege production over consumption and structure over culture. I expand on her argument to suggest two ways in which Jewish economic history can afford us the opportunity to move beyond these binaries and become more relevant for all scholars of Jewish studies and all economic historians. Building on Prell's case, I suggest that Jewish economic history needs not only to incorporate women and gender more systematically in its analysis but also to become more comparative. By doing so, it can pursue the dual goals of ascertaining what is specifically Jewish about the experience of Jewish women in the marketplace and of demonstrating to so-called general economic historians the relevance of taking Jewish particularism into consideration when writing the grand narratives about the rise of Western capitalism and modernity.

My first point is that Jewish economic history should become more economic and more comparative. There is a plethora of work in economic history that addresses the role of women, their economic contributions, and the discrimination they suffered. This is particularly the case for US history, a subject for which data are more plentiful than for other times and places. The study of the gender gap in US wages, for example, has a venerable tradition, and scholars of Jewish economic history would benefit from engaging with it more directly.¹ Did Jewish women enter the labor force in the same proportion as other women in their neighborhoods, cities, regions, and nations? How did their wages compare with those of other women and men? What impact did the gender gap have in the sectors and tasks in which Jewish women specialized? These are some of the questions for which numbers can be compiled, and even if numbers are not sufficient to answer all our questions, they do often reveal important patterns of discrimination and change over time that otherwise are hard to account for with precision.

Prell rightly stresses how women figure more in studies of consumption than production and praises work such as Sarah Abrevaya Stein's Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (2010) for keeping all three dimensions—production, distribution, and consumption—together. I would add that an emphasis on consumption need not eschew larger causal questions. Scholarship on pre-industrial Europe has yielded provocative interpretations of the chronology and causes of the British Industrial Revolution by focusing on the role of women in the family unity of production and consumption. In a series of influential contributions, culminating in The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (2008), Jan de Vries has made the case that an increasing desire to consume goods available on the market led families in north-western Europe to increase their labor input during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this account, peasant women are the protagonists of a gradual but steady process of technological and capital expansion that ushered in industrialization. By contrast, during the Victorian age, class concerns about gender propriety once again relegated women to the domestic sphere.² In early modern England and the Netherlands—the areas where de Vries locates the epicenter of this industrious revolution—Jews were almost exclusively an...