Why Structure? Contextualizing Jewish Economic Historiography

In recent years, Jewish Studies has seen a revival of interest in economic matters. Work on the economic history of Jews in America is but a small offshoot of a growing subfield that has substantially revised our understanding of the place of Jews in the economic world of the early modern and modern periods. That subfield did not begin in 2001 with Derek Penslar's Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe; Penslar and others built upon an older historiography with roots in the first decades of the twentieth century. One of the animating questions that has shaped much of this scholarship—both old and new—has asked whether Jewish economic experience has been driven by the particular characteristics and propensities of Jews as a group, or, alternatively, whether the vagaries of place, time, and situation have been decisive in molding the economic trajectory of Jews. Some have pointed to continuities in the Jewish economic experience across time and place as indication of distinctive group features, while others—drawing on institutional economic theory—have argued that the Jewish experience must rather be viewed within the context of the particular economy in which it was situated. This is no idle argument: it gets to the heart of the question about what, if anything, is particular to Jews.

The relative significance of context vs. culture as determinant factors in explaining patterns within Jewish economic experience is not settled. Several prominent works—Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein's The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492 (2012), Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century (2004), not to mention more popular titles like Amy Chua's The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011)—have lined up in the "cultural" camp, favoring Jewish propensities and proclivities over other explanations for the distinct economic experience of Jews.¹ This is the approach that I (in Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era [2017]) and Adam Mendelsohn (in The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire [2016]) engaged and disagreed with. Instead of crediting an immutable Jewish essence (or particular Jewish characteristics) as the key explanatory tools for understanding the trajectory of Jews within the American economy, we have offered economic histories that are intensely focused on the importance of time and place. We certainly do not overlook cultural factors in the economic niches we explore. When we signal our attentiveness to structural forces (and our unease with the arguments of the "cultural" camp) we do not devalue culture. Our work is textured with an acute awareness of the interplay between the cultural cargo carried by Jewish immigrants and of the culture of their neighbors and of broader American society.

This openness to both culture and structural factors reveals what I have long believed and what I have begun to argue more explicitly: this dichotomy has been drawn too starkly. We have much to learn by comparing Jews with other middleman-minorities that have exhibited features and characteristics not dissimilar from Jews. William R. Kerr and Martin Mandorff, for example, note that Korean entrepreneurship in dry cleaners is thirty-four times that of other immigrant groups, and Gujarati-speaking Indians are over one hundred times more concentrated in motel management. They argue that "occupational stratification along ethnic lines, [is] consistent with the reoccurring phenomenon of small, socially-isolated groups achieving considerable economic success via concentrated entrepreneurship."² Are American Jews particular or exceptional in this regard? If so, how and why? Likewise, attention to the importance of trust and ethnic solidarity adds an important layer to the new institutional economic theory. Greek merchants in Egypt's cotton industry, for example, demonstrate strikingly similar patterns of trust and ethnic solidarity to Jewish merchants in the American cotton industry.³ How are Jews different? Therefore by drawing from both the middleman-minority and new institutional economic theories, and then integrating the Jewish experience into the study of other ethnic and religious minorities, I believe that we can reconceptualize our understanding of the ways in which Jews shaped, and...