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Writing in the 1977 AJSNewsletter, BenjaminBraude noted that Jewish

history has been compared to a“head without a body,” a history ofthe Jews’ spiritual and intellectualachievements rather than of theirmaterial and economic experience.The criticism was not new. As early asthe 1910s the Polish-Jewish historianIgnacy Schipper lamented the factthat Wissenschaft des Judentums hadconcerned itself only with the“spiritual riches” of the scholars andintellectuals while ignoring thecommerce and labor of the workadayJew. Bernard Weinryb, a later studentof Polish Jews, similarly decried thefailure of Jewish historians to engagewith economic realities in an honestand unapologetic fashion. And inrecent years, Derek Penslar hasreasserted the grim diagnosis of aJewish historiography still essentiallydisembodied from the economicdomain.

While somewhat overstated, thesecomplaints do reflect a longstandingproblem: a cloud of embarrassedsilence has persistently hovered overthe topic of Jewish commercial

livelihoods. Shylock has cast a longshadow of defensiveness over Jewishself-perceptions. In making thisassessment, however, it ought first tobe acknowledged that the list ofexceptions to this general tendency issubstantial—in fact enough nearly todisprove the rule. To the four namesmentioned above could be addedthose of numerous others scholarswho have advanced ourunderstanding of Jewish economichistory: Raphael Mahler, Selma Stern,and Arcadius Kahan, to mention justa few. Yet despite their individuallyimpressive achievements, there hasnever been a systematic andprogrammatic effort to construct asubfield of economic scholarshipwithin Jewish studies. Today, forinstance, there are institutes forSephardic studies, Yiddish languageand culture, and a variety of otherimportant areas, but no institute orcenter for the study of Jewisheconomic life. No journal specializingin this topic exists today either. Theolder, multivolume economichistories of the Jews, although stillworth reading, are dated and remainuntranslated into English.

Yet the long wait may finally be at anend; in this last decade there have

been notable rumblings of change.Whatever larger culturaldevelopments underpin this apparentshift, it is the work of two scholars inparticular, Jonathan Israel and DerekPenslar, that deserves much of thecredit. Israel’s wide-ranging yetmeticulous renderings of theSephardic trading diaspora succeededbrilliantly in fleshing out FernandBraudel’s earlier impressionisticinference of a massive Sephardicimpact on early modern trade. Incontrast to all other contemporarytrading diasporas, the Sephardimalone, insists Israel, “managed tobridge the gulf between all four ofthe main early modern religiousspheres of Europe and the NearEast—that is Protestantism,Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Islam;all six of the western maritimeempires; and America North andSouth as well as the old World.” InIsrael’s depiction the Sephardicmerchants of Salonika, Amsterdam,and Recife appear as veritableharbingers of our currentglobalization. Penslar’s Shylock’sChildren (published in 2000),although focusing on mentalities farmore than on commercial networks,makes similarly broad claims. Thebook places economic anxieties—prompted by successive efforts ofJewish elites to reshape theoccupational profile of the benightedJewish masses—at the very heart ofmodern Jewish identity formation.The hypothesis entails a fundamental

AN “ECONOMIC TURN”IN JEWISH STUDIES?Jonathan Karp

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reevaluation of the impetus thatdrove many political movements inmodern Jewish life, includingterritorialism and Zionism, as well asa reconsideration of the importanceof Jewish philanthropy (includingprojects of occupationalrestructuring) in forging a secularsense of purpose and belonging forcountless Jews.

An impressive sequence ofconferences and publicationssucceeded the publication of Israel’sand Penslar’s books. A 1997conference sponsored by the JohnCarter Library onSephardic cultureand commerce inthe WesternHemispheresought to joinJewish history withthe burgeoningfield of “Altanticstudies” andresulted in a 2001collection of essaysentitled, The Jewsand the Expansion of Europe to theWest, 1450 to 1800. In 2003, JohnsHopkins University hosted asymposium entitled, “AtlanticDiasporas: Jews, Conversos, andCrypto-Jews in the Age ofMercantilism, 1500–1800,” featuringthe work of Israel along with that ofsome of his students and critics. Thisconference, too, has occasioned a(similarly titled) volume of importantessays. In 2005 the George L. MosseProgram at the University ofWisconsin–Madison sponsored a two-day “international workshop”entitled, “Jewish History EncountersEconomy” (likewise the basis of aforthcoming volume). In thisinstance the focus was not onSephardic networks but rather thehistoriography and imagery of Jewsin commerce.

One of the peculiarities of Jewisheconomic historiography is that someof its landmark studies have beenwritten in order to advance large,

metahistorical claims about theoverarching significance of Jews toWestern economic development.Such was certainly the case withWerner Sombart’s early twentieth-century work and, to some degree,with the recent book by YuriSlezkine, The Jewish Century. Bothare boldly creative and unabashedefforts to identify Jews with the spiritof modern capitalism, if notnecessarily to credit them with itsconcrete creation. Both yield genuineinsights about the special roles Jewscame to play within the economicconstellation of Christendom and the

prodigious longevity of theirmiddleman activity. At best, however,both of these works glimpse theforest but miss the trees; that is tosay, they heap up numerous examplesand statistics while ignoring ordiscounting contrary evidence; andthey eschew comparative analyseswith non-Jewish trade networks thatcould provide essential perspective.Their effect on the course ofscholarship is similarly mixed. Theyusefully puncture the academicsilence that obscures a criticallyimportant topic, but do so in amanner that lends unfortunatecredence to overreactive responses.They thus tend to provideammunition to those who wouldargue that any effort to present amaster narrative of Jewish economymust inevitably lead to dangerousovergeneralizations and“essentialism,” that bogeyman ofcontemporary academic discourse.

Nevertheless, in the short term, these

works have stimulated debate andgenerated fresh scholarship. LikeSombart’s book, Slezkine’s tour deforce prompted a burst of lectures,interviews, roundtables, symposia,and colloquia. As the dust settledover Slezkine’s thesis that Jews havebeen the archetypal cultural andeconomic moderns, the progress thatmore quotidian scholarship had inthe meantime made became evident.One of the clearest indications of theburgeoning field was the decision ofthe University of Pennsylvania’s KatzCenter for Advanced Judaic Studiesto devote the entire fellowship year

2009–10 to thetopic of “Jews,Commerce, andCulture.” TheCenter hostedtwenty-four fellowswho presentedweekly seminarpapers on topics inmedieval ormodern Jewisheconomic history.A three-day

international colloquium followed,featuring some twenty-five presenters,whose research will serve as the basisfor a future volume.

As further evidence of heightenedactivity, during the year-long periodof the Katz Center FellowshipProgram, no less than fourmonographs were published onaspects of Jewish economic history:Francesca Trivallato’s The Familiarityof Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora,Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade inthe Early Modern Period; SarahAbrevaya Stein’s Plumes: OstrichFeathers, Jews, and a Lost World ofGlobal Commerce; Eli Lederhendler’sJewish Immigrants and AmericanCapitalism, 1880–1920; and my ownThe Politics of Jewish Commerce:Economic Thought and Emancipationin Europe, 1638–1848.

Trivellato harnesses her phenomenalmastery of the mechanisms andmentalities of early modern

ONE OF THE PECULIARITIES OF JEWISH ECONOMIC

HISTORIOGRAPHY IS THAT SOME OF ITS LANDMARK

STUDIES HAVE BEEN WRITTEN IN ORDER TO ADVANCE

LARGE, METAHISTORICAL CLAIMS ABOUT THE

OVERARCHING SIGNIFICANCE OF JEWS TO WESTERN

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT.

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commerce to negotiate a judiciousmiddle ground between competingclaims about trading diasporas ingeneral and Sephardic commerce inparticular. She sees Sephardic tradersas neither examplars of a decidedlypremodern form of long-distancecommerce nor a hermetically sealedethnic corporation (as depicted bymiddleman minority theorists).Rather, her study suggests that strictethnic boundaries actually enhancedeconomic openness, opportunism,and flexibility while ties of cultureand kinship supplied merely a generalframework of “familiarity” but noguarantee of trustworthiness incommercial transactions.

Trivellato rejects that cardinaldoctrine of both Weberian theoryand neoclassical economics that withthe triumphant march to modernmarket society, ethnic niches mustinevitably succumb to the calculativeforce of rationalistic individuals. SarahAbrevaya Stein’s study of theinternational feather trade makes asimilar point: ethnic networks notonly can survive in a moderneconomy but may even possesscertain advantages. Stein’s book is ahistorical detective story mining cluesfrom Jewish communities andcommercial sites in Lithuania, SouthAfrica, Morocco, London, New York,and California. What her intrepidresearch uncovers is not a crime(although that sometimes occurred,too) but rather the disappearance andrapid forgetting of a once vitalinternational trade largely controlledby Jews. Unlike many studies ofethnic niches, Jewishness is notmerely incidental to the tale she tells.Rather, as Stein emphasizes, it“functioned as the glue that boundtogether a global market.” Jews weregeographically well situated (or insome cases actively resituatedthemselves) to play instrumental rolesin all aspects of the worldwideproduction, transport, refining, andsale of these luxury goods. Theapposite division of Jewish laborwithin this particular industry makes

it appear as a microcosm of thatlarger interdependency, ethnicsolidarity, and internal classantagonism that characterized Jewryas a whole at the time.

If there is a dissenting voice amidstthis chorus celebrating Jewishcommerce, it is that of EliLederhendler. Stein, for instance,argues that Lithuanian Jewssucceeded in the feather businessbecause they possessed a “humancapital” derived from an alreadyexisting commercial culture in easternEurope. Although he does not denythat east European Jews may oncehave comprised a kind of middlemanminority, Lederhendler regards thisfact as irrelevant to evaluating theirstatus in the late nineteenth century.By that time, he observes, the Jewishmasses had become largely declassed(rather than proletarianized), as wellas de-skilled and pauperized.Lederhendler thus repudiates thewidespread notion that Jewishimmigrants to the United States werebetter prepared for modern economiclife than other contemporary ethnicgroups. Rather, it was their gradualincorporation into the Americanworking class, their transition fromcaste to class, that made possible theireventual upward mobility. AlthoughLederhendler is less interested inJewish commerce than Jewishconformity, his call for a renewedhistory of Jewish work life andmaterial circumstance echoes a themecommon to the other worksdiscussed here.

That call might well be heeded,assuming that the ghosts of Marx,Sombart, and Shylock on the JewishQuestion have been finally laid torest. My own book, The Politics of

Jewish Commerce, returns to theseand many other now spectralrepresentations of Jewish economy toask what exactly the economic imageof the Jews might have meant to theevolution of European politicalculture. Jews were overwhelminglyidentified with novel economicbehaviors and transactions during anera when modern conceptions ofcitizenship were first forged. Hencetheir situation suggested to manycontemporaries a nexus betweeneconomic and political change. Jewsserved as emblems of rapidlyexpanding networks of finance andexchange that, depending on one’sperspective, either threatened classicalideals of the virtuous polity orpromised to broaden and revitalizecriteria of civic membership. Jewishcommerce thus took on a theoreticalimportance that both directly affectedthe Jews’ own statuses and helpedtransform European economic andpolitical thought.

Still, if there is to be a real economicturn in Jewish studies, scholars willprobably wish to focus more on theactual than the symbolic meanings ofthe Jewish economic past. This hasbeen the repeated argument of theeconomic historian Michael Toch,who has for years been challenginglongstanding assumptions about thepioneering importance of Jews in thecommerce of medieval Europe.Toch’s goal—as manifested in aforthcoming multivolume economichistory of medieval Jewry—is to showthat Jews were rarely the economictrailblazers or the occupationallyanomalous agents of historians’imaginations, but rather typically justone among a number of commercialpopulations seeking to eke out anexistence within European life.

STILL, IF THERE IS TO BE A REAL ECONOMIC TURN IN

JEWISH STUDIES, SCHOLARS WILL PROBABLY WISH TO

FOCUS MORE ON THE ACTUAL THAN THE SYMBOLIC

MEANINGS OF THE JEWISH ECONOMIC PAST.

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Indeed, for too long emphasis onwhat appears anomalous in Jewisheconomic life has deflected attentionfrom a question that is fundamentalto the history of any group: how didtheir economic behaviors both reflectand reshape their communalinstitutions, their beliefs, theirinternal and external relationships,

and their day-to-day lives? As thefollowing essays on American Jewisheconomy demonstrate, it is aquestion that historians are nowaddressing in a variety of ways. I amvery pleased to have had theopportunity to assemble such a finecollection.

Jonathan Karp is associate professor inthe Judaic studies and historydepartments at BinghamtonUniversity. He is the author of ThePolitics of Jewish Commerce:Economic Thought andEmancipation in Europe, 1638–1848(Cambridge University Press, 2008).

THE AJS IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE RECIPIENTS OF THE 2007 CAHNMAN GRANTS:The Association for Jewish Studies is pleased to announce the recipients of the

2009 JORDAN SCHNITZERBOOK AWARDS

In the Category of Jews and the Arts:STEVEN FINE

Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology

(Cambridge University Press)

In the Category of Biblical Studies, Rabbinics, and Archaeology:

BENJAMIN D. SOMMERThe Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel

(Cambridge University Press)

Please join the AJS for a reception in the authors’ honor onSunday evening, December 20, at 9:30 pm at the AJS Conference.

Information and application procedures for the 2010 competition will be availableon the AJS website (www.ajsnet.org) in February of 2010.

Support for this program has been generously provided by theJORDAN SCHNITZER FAMILY FOUNDATION OF PORTLAND, OREGON.

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THE AJS IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE RECIPIENTS OF THE 2007 CAHNMAN GRANTS:

The Association for Jewish Studies is pleased to announce the recipients of the

2009 CAHNMAN PUBLICATION SUBVENTION GRANTS

in support of first books

Eugene M. Avrutin(University of Illinois)

Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist RussiaTo be published by Cornell University Press

Yaacob Dweck(Princeton University)

The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena's War on Jewish MysticismTo be published by Princeton University Press

Natan Meir(Portland State University)

Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859–1914To be published by Indiana University Press

Marcy Brink-Danan(Brown University)

Cosmopolitan Ethnography: Writing Jewish Difference in IstanbulTo be published by Indiana University Press

Support for these grants has been provided by The Cahnman Foundation of New York.

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