TY - CHAP
T1 - Anxieties of Distinctiveness
T2 - Werner Sombart’s The Jews and Modern Capitalism and the Politics of Jewish Economic History
AU - Sutcliffe, Adam
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - The relationship between capitalism and the Jews does not lend itself to easy discussion. The association of Jews with commercial and financial power has long been a stock trope of anti- Semitic stereotyping, and both Jewish community leaders and scholars of Jewish history have generally been careful not to lend any sustenance to the conspiracy theories and ripples of resentment into which this topic readily plays. The financial crisis of autumn 2008, featuring the highly ethnically marked fall of Bernie Madoff as its most dramatic sideshow, perhaps reinvigorated old stereo types, and certainly reinvigorated Jewish anxieties about them.1 In recent years a sequence of important and excellent books have appeared by Derek Penslar, Jonathan Karp, and Jerry Muller, which together signal a renewed willingness by historians to engage with the importance of economics and economic relations in the Jewish past. All three of these studies, however, focus on debates, representations, and perceptions relating to the place of Jews in economic life, rather than the more sensitive topic of underlying economic realities. All three scholars also very appropriately note the shadow cast over their subject by the central calamity of the twentieth century.2 The depiction of the Jews as parasitical capitalists featured prominently in the prelude to their genocide, and the field of Jewish economic history Anxieties of Distinctiveness 239 remains haunted by this fact. Careful microstudies and cautious qualifications abound; ambitious syntheses and broad generalizations are very rare.3 A century ago, the question of the economic significance of Jews was subject to no such caution or constraint. This was particularly the case in Germany , where the leading luminaries of the emerging interdisciplinary field of sociology focused much attention in the first decade of the twentieth century on the role of particular religious and cultural groups in the emergence and development of capitalism. The two major studies to emerge from this debate have had very different scholarly fates. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) continues to inspire animated discussion and further research more than a century after its publication, and it is a core text in historical sociology.4 Weber’s famous ascription of a key role in the rise of capitalism to a “Protestant ethic” of industriousness and thrift is certainly much contested, but it is by no means a discredited thesis. The Protestant Ethic was strongly influenced by Werner Sombart’s work earlier in the decade on capitalism, and it in turn stimulated a direct response from Sombart: his The Jews and Modern Capitalism, first published in Leipzig in 1911 as Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben and appearing in English translation two years later. Sombart was explicit about his debt to Weber. “Max Weber ’s researches are responsible for this book,” he declared, while arguing that the traits Weber had identified with the most austere strains of Protestantism more correctly belonged to Judaism—indeed, that “Puritanism is Judaism.”5 Sombart’s text, in marked contrast to Weber’s, has acquired an aura of infamy . Read today, if at all, largely as an artifact in the history of anti-Semitism, the recoil from The Jews and Modern Capitalism is arguably largely responsible for Sombart’s broader disappearance from the sociological canon.6 The reasons for this, in the light of the fate of German Jewry, scarcely require explication. Although the attitudinal stance toward the Jews suggested by Sombart’s study was, as I shall argue below, not as straightforwardly hostile as many critics have assumed, his arguments were eagerly taken up by avowed anti-Semites such as Theodor Fritsch, who did not have to labor much to recast his arguments in a more trenchantly polemical form.7 Sombart’s own ideological outlook was fluid, subtle, and somewhat elusive. The son of a Protestant parliamentary deputy and Saxon estate owner, he sought to mark his distance from his father’s patrician perspective but was clearly formatively influenced by his landowning values and concerns. While Sombart was a prominent socialist in his youth, a quasi-nationalist strain is nonetheless present in some of his early work. In old age he accommodated himself without difficulty to the rise of Nazism. He accepted public honors on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday in 1938...
AB - The relationship between capitalism and the Jews does not lend itself to easy discussion. The association of Jews with commercial and financial power has long been a stock trope of anti- Semitic stereotyping, and both Jewish community leaders and scholars of Jewish history have generally been careful not to lend any sustenance to the conspiracy theories and ripples of resentment into which this topic readily plays. The financial crisis of autumn 2008, featuring the highly ethnically marked fall of Bernie Madoff as its most dramatic sideshow, perhaps reinvigorated old stereo types, and certainly reinvigorated Jewish anxieties about them.1 In recent years a sequence of important and excellent books have appeared by Derek Penslar, Jonathan Karp, and Jerry Muller, which together signal a renewed willingness by historians to engage with the importance of economics and economic relations in the Jewish past. All three of these studies, however, focus on debates, representations, and perceptions relating to the place of Jews in economic life, rather than the more sensitive topic of underlying economic realities. All three scholars also very appropriately note the shadow cast over their subject by the central calamity of the twentieth century.2 The depiction of the Jews as parasitical capitalists featured prominently in the prelude to their genocide, and the field of Jewish economic history Anxieties of Distinctiveness 239 remains haunted by this fact. Careful microstudies and cautious qualifications abound; ambitious syntheses and broad generalizations are very rare.3 A century ago, the question of the economic significance of Jews was subject to no such caution or constraint. This was particularly the case in Germany , where the leading luminaries of the emerging interdisciplinary field of sociology focused much attention in the first decade of the twentieth century on the role of particular religious and cultural groups in the emergence and development of capitalism. The two major studies to emerge from this debate have had very different scholarly fates. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) continues to inspire animated discussion and further research more than a century after its publication, and it is a core text in historical sociology.4 Weber’s famous ascription of a key role in the rise of capitalism to a “Protestant ethic” of industriousness and thrift is certainly much contested, but it is by no means a discredited thesis. The Protestant Ethic was strongly influenced by Werner Sombart’s work earlier in the decade on capitalism, and it in turn stimulated a direct response from Sombart: his The Jews and Modern Capitalism, first published in Leipzig in 1911 as Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben and appearing in English translation two years later. Sombart was explicit about his debt to Weber. “Max Weber ’s researches are responsible for this book,” he declared, while arguing that the traits Weber had identified with the most austere strains of Protestantism more correctly belonged to Judaism—indeed, that “Puritanism is Judaism.”5 Sombart’s text, in marked contrast to Weber’s, has acquired an aura of infamy . Read today, if at all, largely as an artifact in the history of anti-Semitism, the recoil from The Jews and Modern Capitalism is arguably largely responsible for Sombart’s broader disappearance from the sociological canon.6 The reasons for this, in the light of the fate of German Jewry, scarcely require explication. Although the attitudinal stance toward the Jews suggested by Sombart’s study was, as I shall argue below, not as straightforwardly hostile as many critics have assumed, his arguments were eagerly taken up by avowed anti-Semites such as Theodor Fritsch, who did not have to labor much to recast his arguments in a more trenchantly polemical form.7 Sombart’s own ideological outlook was fluid, subtle, and somewhat elusive. The son of a Protestant parliamentary deputy and Saxon estate owner, he sought to mark his distance from his father’s patrician perspective but was clearly formatively influenced by his landowning values and concerns. While Sombart was a prominent socialist in his youth, a quasi-nationalist strain is nonetheless present in some of his early work. In old age he accommodated himself without difficulty to the rise of Nazism. He accepted public honors on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday in 1938...
KW - Jews
KW - Capitalism
KW - Economics
KW - History
M3 - Chapter
SN - 9780812247305
T3 - Jewish Culture and Contexts
SP - 238
EP - 258
BT - Purchasing Power
A2 - Kobrin, Rebecca
A2 - Teller, Adam
PB - University of Pennsylvania Press
CY - Philadelphia
ER -