Julie Mell | North Carolina State University (original) (raw)
Papers by Julie Mell
Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism, ed. by Steven Katz, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022
The trope of the Jewish moneylender has taken different forms over the centuries: the Jewish "usu... more The trope of the Jewish moneylender has taken different forms over the centuries: the Jewish "usurers" of medieval England and France, the "Shylocks" of Renaissance Italy, "Jud Süss" and the Court Jews of Central Europe, and the "Rothschilds" of 19th-century international banking. There is little empirical evidence for Jewish preeminence in moneylending. 1 Yet the association of Jews with money has been pervasive, figuring in anti-Jewish accusations from medieval expulsions to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, from the Holocaust to Le Happy Merchant memes. This essay will trace the emergence of the stereotype in medieval Europe. The trope of the Jewish moneylender also has its philosemitic versions. For well over a century, liberal historians, sociologists, and political economists have described medieval Jews as modernizers fulfilling a special economic function: Jews provided creditthe ingredient necessary for economic developmentat a time when Christians could not or would not. Jews, in consequence, suffered a tragic antisemitic backlash. The liberal-economic narrative counters antisemitic economic stereotypes by inverting them, making the "Jewish predilection for moneymaking" a contribution to the nation. Antisemitic or philosemitic, the assumption of an association between Jews and money remains a dangerous trope, a stereotype disconnected from economic realities. Jews were neither medieval Europe's chief moneylenders nor the credit engine for emergent commercial capitalism. Jews did loan money, but the majority of professional moneylenders, money changers,
A Companion to Crime and Deviance in the Middle Ages, ed. Hannah Skoda, (Arc Humanities Press), Dec 31, 2023
EuropEan JEws wErE first collectively labelled, then criminalized as "usurers" between the twelft... more EuropEan JEws wErE first collectively labelled, then criminalized as "usurers" between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Even when involved in financial loans, Jews were only engaged in the same economic activities as Christian "merchants" who were valued as contributing to the public good. In fact, large numbers of Jews were too poor to have actively traded or loaned. Ironically, this new category of Jewish deviance originated out of a social movement to reform Christian usury. The labelling of Jews as usurers is the end result of a campaign against Christian usurers and Christian usury. In the mid-twelfth century, church councils decreed new legislation against usury aimed at lay Christians-not Jews. But by the sixteenth century, large numbers of Jewish communities had been expelled from western Europe under the charge of usury, and those that remained in the more politically fragmented Holy Roman Empire and Italian peninsula were being expelled from city centres and enclosed in suburban ghettos. Late medieval Christian economic thought resulted in a new dualism: "Christian merchants" versus "Jewish usurers" immortalized in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. The merchant was an upright member of the civic commune and Christian community, whose business increased the wealth of the community by circulating wealth. The moneylender was an enemy of Christ, his church, and the Christian community, whose lending drained the wealth of the commune and hoarded it for private ends. 1 Sociological theories of deviance offer a useful way to analyse the social construction and criminalization of Jews as usurers. 2 The social status of the individual in a society tends to determine whether their rule-breaking is considered deviant or not; stigmatization both propels, and results from, the labelling. This paradigm fits well late medieval Italy where Jewish merchant-bankers were labelled "faithless usurers" hoarding wealth, because they were Jews, and Italian merchant-bankers were labelled "Christian merchants" increasing the wealth of all, because they were Christian citizens. However, this was a process of dynamic historical change. The very categories of "usury" and "usurer" shifted over several hundred years. To further complicate matters, the category of "the Jew," considered religiously deviant since late antiquity, was applied 1 Parts of this article overlap with my "Jews and Money: The Medieval Origins of a Modern Stereotype," in Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism, ed. Steven Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). But this article takes a broader perspective, examining both Christian and Jewish usury in relation to social deviance. Both articles build on my Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender, 2 vols.
Nowhere in medieval Europe are Jews thought to have been more wholly sunk in moneylending than in... more Nowhere in medieval Europe are Jews thought to have been more wholly sunk in moneylending than in Anglo-Norman England.2 Rapid growth of royal administration in England generated copious records of Jewish loans and Jewish litigation over loans, Jewish tallages, and fines. An entire department of the Royal Exchequer was devoted to Jewish matters.3 These records seem to confirm the assumptions that Jews were rich, that their riches were gained from illicit usury, and that medieval kings used them as a sponge to sop up the surplus wealth of the country and squeeze it into the royal coffers. This is the interpretive framework used to make sense of the difficult and fragmentary medieval sources. But the legitimacy of this interpretive frame can be questioned from the English sources, as it can for the less-well-documented communities of Capetian France and central Europe.
Economic Record, Dec 1, 2014
Book Reviews / 633 policyholders, companies may have faced pressure (political or otherwise) to t... more Book Reviews / 633 policyholders, companies may have faced pressure (political or otherwise) to treat their customers with more leniency. Regarding the failure of most stock companies in the U.S. to pay dividends to their policyholders, one reason might lie in the existence, often within the same company, of other investment opportunities for such customers. To this end, more discussion of the "trust" side of New York Life and Trust's business would have been helpful, as would have, more generally, some material on the investment activities of these early insurance companies. (In her brief mention of investing, Murphy suggests that she did not pursue this line of inquiry owing to gaps in the archival record.) Murphy claims in her introduction to Investing in Life that she originally intended to revisit the history of American life insurance during the Gilded Age. Her decision to focus instead on an earlier periodbefore the rise of New York Life, Equitable, and Mutual of New York, before the dominance of industrial fi rms such as Met Life, John Hancock, and the Prudential, and before the consolidation of state insurance commissioners made them important bastions of federalism-will surely prove invaluable to the historian who does tackle that topic. As she persuasively argues, most of these features of Gilded Age fi nance found their start in the less showy, but no less interesting, history of antebellum American life insurance.
Religions, Jun 27, 2012
This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of Euro... more This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The é migré s form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan and Robert Lopez) identified as Jews, but worked as European historians. The last (Karl Polanyi) was Jewish only by origin, identified as a Christian socialist, and worked first as an economic journalist, then in worker's education and late in life as a professor of economics. All five dealt with the origin of European capitalism, but in different veins: Kisch celebrated and Oelsner contested a hegemonic academic discourse that linked the birth of capitalism to Jews. Postan and Lopez contested the flip-side of this discourse, the presumption that medieval Europe was pre-capitalist par excellence. In doing so, they helped construct the current paradigm of a high medieval commercial revolution. Polanyi contested historical narratives that described the Free Market as the natural growth of economic life. This essay explores the grounding of these paradigms in the shared crucible of war and exile as Jewish é migré s. This shared context helps illuminate the significance of their intellectual contributions by uncovering the webs of meaning in which their work was suspended.
Religious Studies Review, Jun 1, 2018
At the end of the nineteenth century, the prominent Zionist thinker Max Nordau stated that "Zioni... more At the end of the nineteenth century, the prominent Zionist thinker Max Nordau stated that "Zionism has nothing to do with religion" but Yadgar explains why he was wrong in more than one way. It is not only that Zionism was constructed out of the Jewish tradition and could never fully disengage itself from it, but that the very definition of Zionism as secular Jewish nationalism owes its existence to the era of emancipation's conception of Judaism as "religion." Yadgar's important book joins other works (such as those by Talal Asad and Russell McCutcheon) intent on questioning the usefulness, indeed the very validity, of the concept of "religion," while applying his analysis specifically to the Jewish case. Following Leora Batnitzky's pathbreaking work on the creation of "Jewish religion" as part of Judaism's passage through the prism of Protestant-made modernity, Yadgar examines the way the Jewish national movement employed the modern distinction between "religious" and "secular" as a basis for its own project of building a novel Jewish identity, that is, a national, secular one. Judaism, however, does not fit neatly, if at all, into this model, leading, as Yadgar demonstrates, to varied ideological and political inner contradictions. Studying the writings of such prominent Zionist thinkers as Aḥad Ha'am, Berdyczewski, Syrkin, and Brenner, Yadgar points to the remainder ever hanging over the supposedly neat summation of Judaism as nationality. Realizing this allows one, for example, to understand the never-ending tensions between "religion and state" in Israel not as a lamentable series of political skirmishes but as part of continuous and unavoidable efforts at identity construction both on the "secular" and the "religious" sides. For Yadgar, the way to better grasp Jewish existence is by viewing it as a tradition having multifaceted ethnic, national, ethical, and religious dimensions. This work is a natural extension of Yadgar's former insightful writings on the complex existence of tradition and traditionists in Israel, and it is recommended to scholars of religion and Jewish studies.
Jewish History, Apr 18, 2014
This article explores the cultural history of money in medieval Judaism and Christianity. In doin... more This article explores the cultural history of money in medieval Judaism and Christianity. In doing so, it reassesses a historical narrative describing the emergence of a “new money economy” in the High Middle Ages. In the prevailing narrative, money is positioned as a causal agent: it is said to effect and symbolize the “profit motive,” becoming a locus for anxiety about the new money economy. But a close reading of moral literature suggests that money per se was not a locus of anxiety. Moralists had a sophisticated understanding of economic value and its relation to moral economy. Anxiety among Jewish and Christian moralists focused on the possible disjuncture between moral and economic values, not on economic value per se. Through close readings of medieval exempla, this article demonstrates that moralists regarded the economic act of acquisition as creating a moral value. When “bad” moral value adhered to coins, they sought to devise means for redeeming that value through penitential acts. This ideology, which was shared by Jewish and Christian authors, suggests that cultural assumptions about money were more sophisticated than a straightforward fear of the profit economy and profit motive and that the narrative of European economic development as a shift from gift economy to profit economy ought to be problematized. Binary oppositions between gift and profit and between an altruistic Christianity (linked to a gift economy) and a modernizing Judaism (linked to a profit economy) ought to be broken down.
Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2017
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism
Religions, 2017
Furst grew up in Vienna, and emigrated with her parents to England, via Belgium, after the German... more Furst grew up in Vienna, and emigrated with her parents to England, via Belgium, after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. The family spent World War II in Manchester, England. Furst earned her BA in Modern Languages from the University of Manchester and went on to Cambridge to complete a doctorate in German in 1957. She taught for more than a decade at Queen's University in Belfast, and then became the head of the Comparative Literature Program in Manchester. After her mother passed away in 1969, she moved with her father to the U.S., and taught in several programs, holding, among others, visiting appointments in leading universities. She ended up, in 1986, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she taught until her retirement in 2005. Brought up in a traditional Jewish family, Furst was never a practicing Jew, or a member of the Jewish community, but she retained a robust sense of her Jewish identity and fate. An intellectual adventurer, whose work tied together diverse academic cultures and national literatures, Furst found no intellectual home. In Home is Somewhere Else: An Autobiography in Two Voices (1994), she paired her memories of emigrating from Austria to England with those of her father. The Autobiography became the most widely read of her more than twenty books, which ranged from Romanticism and Naturalism to illness in modern literature. Furst's story is one of a generation of Central European émigrés who became the makers of postwar culture, and of the alienation from home and nation that was the source of their innovation. She was a pioneer of comparative literary studies, and hoped that U.S. academic life would help her break out of the confines of national culture she experienced in Austria and even in Britain. She broke through professionally, but, personally, the U.S. academy never became a home. After her father passed away in 1983, a group of friends, students, and a family of teddy bears she collected and named were her closest company. A genetic illness, impacting also her vision, made her final years difficult, but she carried through with her usual dignity and good humor. She was buried next to her father according to Jewish rite but without a funeral. This writer may be the single reciter of kadish and yizkor after her. The nexus between innovative intellectual contributions and the émigré experience was at the center of the conference in Furst's memory. European Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany and Europe have become in the last two decades a major interdisciplinary research field, and their contributions to twentieth-century culture are well known. This conference focused on the émigrés' role in the formation of postwar transAtlantic culture. We asked: How, why, and in what fashion did émigré dislocation, identity dilemmas, and Holocaust experience shape intellectual paths and utopias promising new homes that have, ironically, become highlights of European culture? We were mindful that we needed
Encyclopedia of the Bible Online
Jewish History, 2014
This article explores the cultural history of money in medieval Judaism and Christianity. In doin... more This article explores the cultural history of money in medieval Judaism and Christianity. In doing so, it reassesses a historical narrative describing the emergence of a “new money economy” in the High Middle Ages. In the prevailing narrative, money is positioned as a causal agent: it is said to effect and symbolize the “profit motive,” becoming a locus for anxiety about the new money economy. But a close reading of moral literature suggests that money per se was not a locus of anxiety. Moralists had a sophisticated understanding of economic value and its relation to moral economy. Anxiety among Jewish and Christian moralists focused on the possible disjuncture between moral and economic values, not on economic value per se. Through close readings of medieval exempla, this article demonstrates that moralists regarded the economic act of acquisition as creating a moral value. When “bad” moral value adhered to coins, they sought to devise means for redeeming that value through penitential acts. This ideology, which was shared by Jewish and Christian authors, suggests that cultural assumptions about money were more sophisticated than a straightforward fear of the profit economy and profit motive and that the narrative of European economic development as a shift from gift economy to profit economy ought to be problematized. Binary oppositions between gift and profit and between an altruistic Christianity (linked to a gift economy) and a modernizing Judaism (linked to a profit economy) ought to be broken down.
Religions, 2012
This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of Euro... more This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The é migré s form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan and Robert Lopez) identified as Jews, but worked as European historians. The last (Karl Polanyi) was Jewish only by origin, identified as a Christian socialist, and worked first as an economic journalist, then in worker's education and late in life as a professor of economics. All five dealt with the origin of European capitalism, but in different veins: Kisch celebrated and Oelsner contested a hegemonic academic discourse that linked the birth of capitalism to Jews. Postan and Lopez contested the flip-side of this discourse, the presumption that medieval Europe was pre-capitalist par excellence. In doing so, they helped construct the current paradigm of a high medieval commercial revolution. Polanyi contested historical narratives that described the Free Market as the natural growth of economic life. This essay explores the grounding of these paradigms in the shared crucible of war and exile as Jewish é migré s. This shared context helps illuminate the significance of their intellectual contributions by uncovering the webs of meaning in which their work was suspended.
This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of Euro... more This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The é migré s form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan and Robert Lopez) identified as Jews, but worked as European historians. The last (Karl Polanyi) was Jewish only by origin, identified as a Christian socialist, and worked first as an economic journalist, then in worker's education and late in life as a professor of economics. All five dealt with the origin of European capitalism, but in different veins: Kisch celebrated and Oelsner contested a hegemonic academic discourse that linked the birth of capitalism to Jews. Postan and Lopez contested the flip-side of this discourse, the presumption that medieval Europe was pre-capitalist par excellence. In doing so, they helped construct the current paradigm of a high medieval commercial revolution. Polanyi contested historical narratives that described the Free Market as the natural growth of economic life. This essay explores the grounding of these paradigms in the shared crucible of war and exile as Jewish é migré s. This shared context helps illuminate the significance of their intellectual contributions by uncovering the webs of meaning in which their work was suspended.
Chapters 4 and 5 refuted the “economic function of the medieval Jew” with data from the economic,... more Chapters 4 and 5 refuted the “economic function of the medieval Jew” with data from the economic, legal, and political histories of Anglo-Jewry. Chapter 6 traced the emergence of the stereotype of the Jewish usurer in the interstices of the ecclesiastical campaign against Christian usury, crusading, and an anti-Judaism program in northern France. It is time to return to the broader question of medieval economic history. For as Part 1 clarified, the “economic function of the Jew” was grounded in a view of medieval European economy as static and agrarian, developed by the German Historical School. Two scholarly currents in the interwar and postwar periods challenged this perspective. One recovered “medieval capitalism,” or what later came to be called the commercial revolution of the High Middle Ages. The other recast early medieval economy as a gift economy, which transformed with the commercial revolution into a profit economy. Yet, the “Jewish economic function” did not wither away...
This chapter recounts the evolution of the narrative of the “Jewish economic function” from its o... more This chapter recounts the evolution of the narrative of the “Jewish economic function” from its origins in nineteenth-century liberal German scholarship. I aim to show that the narrative was fashioned out of nineteenth-century discourses on Jews and commerce in response to the issues of Jewish emancipation and German capitalism and shaped in accord with German scholarly methods and theories. This public discourse moved research on Jewish economic history from the backwaters of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Scientific Study of Judaism) into mainstream German scholarship. The principal figures responsible were leaders or students of the German Historical School of Political Economy (GHS)—Wilhelm Roscher, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber. Through these scholars, the narrative of the “Jewish economic function” was stamped with the organic folk model of the German Historical School, based upon the Historical School’s theory of economic stages, and shaped in relationship to the scholarly s...
The image of Jews as a “royal milch cow” has been sustained by a web of interpretations linking J... more The image of Jews as a “royal milch cow” has been sustained by a web of interpretations linking Jewish taxation, the exchequer of the Jews, and Jewish legal status. In the most schematic accounts, tallage works to extort, and the exchequer of the Jews, to protect. The exchequer of the Jews and its subsidiary system of local loan chests are seen as protecting and privileging Jewish moneylending. By registering loans to Jews and providing them with a special court to collect their loans, the crown allowed Jewish moneylenders to swell with profit. The crown milked the Jews’ profits on moneylending by extorting arbitrary taxes, in other words, tallages. Several metaphors have been deployed by historical interpreters. Cecil Roth favored the domesticated cow swollen with milk after chewing the green grass of merry old England. Other less sympathetic imagery has drawn on the stereotype of the blood-sucking capitalist.
Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism, ed. by Steven Katz, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022
The trope of the Jewish moneylender has taken different forms over the centuries: the Jewish "usu... more The trope of the Jewish moneylender has taken different forms over the centuries: the Jewish "usurers" of medieval England and France, the "Shylocks" of Renaissance Italy, "Jud Süss" and the Court Jews of Central Europe, and the "Rothschilds" of 19th-century international banking. There is little empirical evidence for Jewish preeminence in moneylending. 1 Yet the association of Jews with money has been pervasive, figuring in anti-Jewish accusations from medieval expulsions to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, from the Holocaust to Le Happy Merchant memes. This essay will trace the emergence of the stereotype in medieval Europe. The trope of the Jewish moneylender also has its philosemitic versions. For well over a century, liberal historians, sociologists, and political economists have described medieval Jews as modernizers fulfilling a special economic function: Jews provided creditthe ingredient necessary for economic developmentat a time when Christians could not or would not. Jews, in consequence, suffered a tragic antisemitic backlash. The liberal-economic narrative counters antisemitic economic stereotypes by inverting them, making the "Jewish predilection for moneymaking" a contribution to the nation. Antisemitic or philosemitic, the assumption of an association between Jews and money remains a dangerous trope, a stereotype disconnected from economic realities. Jews were neither medieval Europe's chief moneylenders nor the credit engine for emergent commercial capitalism. Jews did loan money, but the majority of professional moneylenders, money changers,
A Companion to Crime and Deviance in the Middle Ages, ed. Hannah Skoda, (Arc Humanities Press), Dec 31, 2023
EuropEan JEws wErE first collectively labelled, then criminalized as "usurers" between the twelft... more EuropEan JEws wErE first collectively labelled, then criminalized as "usurers" between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Even when involved in financial loans, Jews were only engaged in the same economic activities as Christian "merchants" who were valued as contributing to the public good. In fact, large numbers of Jews were too poor to have actively traded or loaned. Ironically, this new category of Jewish deviance originated out of a social movement to reform Christian usury. The labelling of Jews as usurers is the end result of a campaign against Christian usurers and Christian usury. In the mid-twelfth century, church councils decreed new legislation against usury aimed at lay Christians-not Jews. But by the sixteenth century, large numbers of Jewish communities had been expelled from western Europe under the charge of usury, and those that remained in the more politically fragmented Holy Roman Empire and Italian peninsula were being expelled from city centres and enclosed in suburban ghettos. Late medieval Christian economic thought resulted in a new dualism: "Christian merchants" versus "Jewish usurers" immortalized in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. The merchant was an upright member of the civic commune and Christian community, whose business increased the wealth of the community by circulating wealth. The moneylender was an enemy of Christ, his church, and the Christian community, whose lending drained the wealth of the commune and hoarded it for private ends. 1 Sociological theories of deviance offer a useful way to analyse the social construction and criminalization of Jews as usurers. 2 The social status of the individual in a society tends to determine whether their rule-breaking is considered deviant or not; stigmatization both propels, and results from, the labelling. This paradigm fits well late medieval Italy where Jewish merchant-bankers were labelled "faithless usurers" hoarding wealth, because they were Jews, and Italian merchant-bankers were labelled "Christian merchants" increasing the wealth of all, because they were Christian citizens. However, this was a process of dynamic historical change. The very categories of "usury" and "usurer" shifted over several hundred years. To further complicate matters, the category of "the Jew," considered religiously deviant since late antiquity, was applied 1 Parts of this article overlap with my "Jews and Money: The Medieval Origins of a Modern Stereotype," in Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism, ed. Steven Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). But this article takes a broader perspective, examining both Christian and Jewish usury in relation to social deviance. Both articles build on my Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender, 2 vols.
Nowhere in medieval Europe are Jews thought to have been more wholly sunk in moneylending than in... more Nowhere in medieval Europe are Jews thought to have been more wholly sunk in moneylending than in Anglo-Norman England.2 Rapid growth of royal administration in England generated copious records of Jewish loans and Jewish litigation over loans, Jewish tallages, and fines. An entire department of the Royal Exchequer was devoted to Jewish matters.3 These records seem to confirm the assumptions that Jews were rich, that their riches were gained from illicit usury, and that medieval kings used them as a sponge to sop up the surplus wealth of the country and squeeze it into the royal coffers. This is the interpretive framework used to make sense of the difficult and fragmentary medieval sources. But the legitimacy of this interpretive frame can be questioned from the English sources, as it can for the less-well-documented communities of Capetian France and central Europe.
Economic Record, Dec 1, 2014
Book Reviews / 633 policyholders, companies may have faced pressure (political or otherwise) to t... more Book Reviews / 633 policyholders, companies may have faced pressure (political or otherwise) to treat their customers with more leniency. Regarding the failure of most stock companies in the U.S. to pay dividends to their policyholders, one reason might lie in the existence, often within the same company, of other investment opportunities for such customers. To this end, more discussion of the "trust" side of New York Life and Trust's business would have been helpful, as would have, more generally, some material on the investment activities of these early insurance companies. (In her brief mention of investing, Murphy suggests that she did not pursue this line of inquiry owing to gaps in the archival record.) Murphy claims in her introduction to Investing in Life that she originally intended to revisit the history of American life insurance during the Gilded Age. Her decision to focus instead on an earlier periodbefore the rise of New York Life, Equitable, and Mutual of New York, before the dominance of industrial fi rms such as Met Life, John Hancock, and the Prudential, and before the consolidation of state insurance commissioners made them important bastions of federalism-will surely prove invaluable to the historian who does tackle that topic. As she persuasively argues, most of these features of Gilded Age fi nance found their start in the less showy, but no less interesting, history of antebellum American life insurance.
Religions, Jun 27, 2012
This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of Euro... more This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The é migré s form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan and Robert Lopez) identified as Jews, but worked as European historians. The last (Karl Polanyi) was Jewish only by origin, identified as a Christian socialist, and worked first as an economic journalist, then in worker's education and late in life as a professor of economics. All five dealt with the origin of European capitalism, but in different veins: Kisch celebrated and Oelsner contested a hegemonic academic discourse that linked the birth of capitalism to Jews. Postan and Lopez contested the flip-side of this discourse, the presumption that medieval Europe was pre-capitalist par excellence. In doing so, they helped construct the current paradigm of a high medieval commercial revolution. Polanyi contested historical narratives that described the Free Market as the natural growth of economic life. This essay explores the grounding of these paradigms in the shared crucible of war and exile as Jewish é migré s. This shared context helps illuminate the significance of their intellectual contributions by uncovering the webs of meaning in which their work was suspended.
Religious Studies Review, Jun 1, 2018
At the end of the nineteenth century, the prominent Zionist thinker Max Nordau stated that "Zioni... more At the end of the nineteenth century, the prominent Zionist thinker Max Nordau stated that "Zionism has nothing to do with religion" but Yadgar explains why he was wrong in more than one way. It is not only that Zionism was constructed out of the Jewish tradition and could never fully disengage itself from it, but that the very definition of Zionism as secular Jewish nationalism owes its existence to the era of emancipation's conception of Judaism as "religion." Yadgar's important book joins other works (such as those by Talal Asad and Russell McCutcheon) intent on questioning the usefulness, indeed the very validity, of the concept of "religion," while applying his analysis specifically to the Jewish case. Following Leora Batnitzky's pathbreaking work on the creation of "Jewish religion" as part of Judaism's passage through the prism of Protestant-made modernity, Yadgar examines the way the Jewish national movement employed the modern distinction between "religious" and "secular" as a basis for its own project of building a novel Jewish identity, that is, a national, secular one. Judaism, however, does not fit neatly, if at all, into this model, leading, as Yadgar demonstrates, to varied ideological and political inner contradictions. Studying the writings of such prominent Zionist thinkers as Aḥad Ha'am, Berdyczewski, Syrkin, and Brenner, Yadgar points to the remainder ever hanging over the supposedly neat summation of Judaism as nationality. Realizing this allows one, for example, to understand the never-ending tensions between "religion and state" in Israel not as a lamentable series of political skirmishes but as part of continuous and unavoidable efforts at identity construction both on the "secular" and the "religious" sides. For Yadgar, the way to better grasp Jewish existence is by viewing it as a tradition having multifaceted ethnic, national, ethical, and religious dimensions. This work is a natural extension of Yadgar's former insightful writings on the complex existence of tradition and traditionists in Israel, and it is recommended to scholars of religion and Jewish studies.
Jewish History, Apr 18, 2014
This article explores the cultural history of money in medieval Judaism and Christianity. In doin... more This article explores the cultural history of money in medieval Judaism and Christianity. In doing so, it reassesses a historical narrative describing the emergence of a “new money economy” in the High Middle Ages. In the prevailing narrative, money is positioned as a causal agent: it is said to effect and symbolize the “profit motive,” becoming a locus for anxiety about the new money economy. But a close reading of moral literature suggests that money per se was not a locus of anxiety. Moralists had a sophisticated understanding of economic value and its relation to moral economy. Anxiety among Jewish and Christian moralists focused on the possible disjuncture between moral and economic values, not on economic value per se. Through close readings of medieval exempla, this article demonstrates that moralists regarded the economic act of acquisition as creating a moral value. When “bad” moral value adhered to coins, they sought to devise means for redeeming that value through penitential acts. This ideology, which was shared by Jewish and Christian authors, suggests that cultural assumptions about money were more sophisticated than a straightforward fear of the profit economy and profit motive and that the narrative of European economic development as a shift from gift economy to profit economy ought to be problematized. Binary oppositions between gift and profit and between an altruistic Christianity (linked to a gift economy) and a modernizing Judaism (linked to a profit economy) ought to be broken down.
Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2017
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism
Religions, 2017
Furst grew up in Vienna, and emigrated with her parents to England, via Belgium, after the German... more Furst grew up in Vienna, and emigrated with her parents to England, via Belgium, after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. The family spent World War II in Manchester, England. Furst earned her BA in Modern Languages from the University of Manchester and went on to Cambridge to complete a doctorate in German in 1957. She taught for more than a decade at Queen's University in Belfast, and then became the head of the Comparative Literature Program in Manchester. After her mother passed away in 1969, she moved with her father to the U.S., and taught in several programs, holding, among others, visiting appointments in leading universities. She ended up, in 1986, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she taught until her retirement in 2005. Brought up in a traditional Jewish family, Furst was never a practicing Jew, or a member of the Jewish community, but she retained a robust sense of her Jewish identity and fate. An intellectual adventurer, whose work tied together diverse academic cultures and national literatures, Furst found no intellectual home. In Home is Somewhere Else: An Autobiography in Two Voices (1994), she paired her memories of emigrating from Austria to England with those of her father. The Autobiography became the most widely read of her more than twenty books, which ranged from Romanticism and Naturalism to illness in modern literature. Furst's story is one of a generation of Central European émigrés who became the makers of postwar culture, and of the alienation from home and nation that was the source of their innovation. She was a pioneer of comparative literary studies, and hoped that U.S. academic life would help her break out of the confines of national culture she experienced in Austria and even in Britain. She broke through professionally, but, personally, the U.S. academy never became a home. After her father passed away in 1983, a group of friends, students, and a family of teddy bears she collected and named were her closest company. A genetic illness, impacting also her vision, made her final years difficult, but she carried through with her usual dignity and good humor. She was buried next to her father according to Jewish rite but without a funeral. This writer may be the single reciter of kadish and yizkor after her. The nexus between innovative intellectual contributions and the émigré experience was at the center of the conference in Furst's memory. European Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany and Europe have become in the last two decades a major interdisciplinary research field, and their contributions to twentieth-century culture are well known. This conference focused on the émigrés' role in the formation of postwar transAtlantic culture. We asked: How, why, and in what fashion did émigré dislocation, identity dilemmas, and Holocaust experience shape intellectual paths and utopias promising new homes that have, ironically, become highlights of European culture? We were mindful that we needed
Encyclopedia of the Bible Online
Jewish History, 2014
This article explores the cultural history of money in medieval Judaism and Christianity. In doin... more This article explores the cultural history of money in medieval Judaism and Christianity. In doing so, it reassesses a historical narrative describing the emergence of a “new money economy” in the High Middle Ages. In the prevailing narrative, money is positioned as a causal agent: it is said to effect and symbolize the “profit motive,” becoming a locus for anxiety about the new money economy. But a close reading of moral literature suggests that money per se was not a locus of anxiety. Moralists had a sophisticated understanding of economic value and its relation to moral economy. Anxiety among Jewish and Christian moralists focused on the possible disjuncture between moral and economic values, not on economic value per se. Through close readings of medieval exempla, this article demonstrates that moralists regarded the economic act of acquisition as creating a moral value. When “bad” moral value adhered to coins, they sought to devise means for redeeming that value through penitential acts. This ideology, which was shared by Jewish and Christian authors, suggests that cultural assumptions about money were more sophisticated than a straightforward fear of the profit economy and profit motive and that the narrative of European economic development as a shift from gift economy to profit economy ought to be problematized. Binary oppositions between gift and profit and between an altruistic Christianity (linked to a gift economy) and a modernizing Judaism (linked to a profit economy) ought to be broken down.
Religions, 2012
This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of Euro... more This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The é migré s form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan and Robert Lopez) identified as Jews, but worked as European historians. The last (Karl Polanyi) was Jewish only by origin, identified as a Christian socialist, and worked first as an economic journalist, then in worker's education and late in life as a professor of economics. All five dealt with the origin of European capitalism, but in different veins: Kisch celebrated and Oelsner contested a hegemonic academic discourse that linked the birth of capitalism to Jews. Postan and Lopez contested the flip-side of this discourse, the presumption that medieval Europe was pre-capitalist par excellence. In doing so, they helped construct the current paradigm of a high medieval commercial revolution. Polanyi contested historical narratives that described the Free Market as the natural growth of economic life. This essay explores the grounding of these paradigms in the shared crucible of war and exile as Jewish é migré s. This shared context helps illuminate the significance of their intellectual contributions by uncovering the webs of meaning in which their work was suspended.
This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of Euro... more This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish é migré s to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The é migré s form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan and Robert Lopez) identified as Jews, but worked as European historians. The last (Karl Polanyi) was Jewish only by origin, identified as a Christian socialist, and worked first as an economic journalist, then in worker's education and late in life as a professor of economics. All five dealt with the origin of European capitalism, but in different veins: Kisch celebrated and Oelsner contested a hegemonic academic discourse that linked the birth of capitalism to Jews. Postan and Lopez contested the flip-side of this discourse, the presumption that medieval Europe was pre-capitalist par excellence. In doing so, they helped construct the current paradigm of a high medieval commercial revolution. Polanyi contested historical narratives that described the Free Market as the natural growth of economic life. This essay explores the grounding of these paradigms in the shared crucible of war and exile as Jewish é migré s. This shared context helps illuminate the significance of their intellectual contributions by uncovering the webs of meaning in which their work was suspended.
Chapters 4 and 5 refuted the “economic function of the medieval Jew” with data from the economic,... more Chapters 4 and 5 refuted the “economic function of the medieval Jew” with data from the economic, legal, and political histories of Anglo-Jewry. Chapter 6 traced the emergence of the stereotype of the Jewish usurer in the interstices of the ecclesiastical campaign against Christian usury, crusading, and an anti-Judaism program in northern France. It is time to return to the broader question of medieval economic history. For as Part 1 clarified, the “economic function of the Jew” was grounded in a view of medieval European economy as static and agrarian, developed by the German Historical School. Two scholarly currents in the interwar and postwar periods challenged this perspective. One recovered “medieval capitalism,” or what later came to be called the commercial revolution of the High Middle Ages. The other recast early medieval economy as a gift economy, which transformed with the commercial revolution into a profit economy. Yet, the “Jewish economic function” did not wither away...
This chapter recounts the evolution of the narrative of the “Jewish economic function” from its o... more This chapter recounts the evolution of the narrative of the “Jewish economic function” from its origins in nineteenth-century liberal German scholarship. I aim to show that the narrative was fashioned out of nineteenth-century discourses on Jews and commerce in response to the issues of Jewish emancipation and German capitalism and shaped in accord with German scholarly methods and theories. This public discourse moved research on Jewish economic history from the backwaters of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Scientific Study of Judaism) into mainstream German scholarship. The principal figures responsible were leaders or students of the German Historical School of Political Economy (GHS)—Wilhelm Roscher, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber. Through these scholars, the narrative of the “Jewish economic function” was stamped with the organic folk model of the German Historical School, based upon the Historical School’s theory of economic stages, and shaped in relationship to the scholarly s...
The image of Jews as a “royal milch cow” has been sustained by a web of interpretations linking J... more The image of Jews as a “royal milch cow” has been sustained by a web of interpretations linking Jewish taxation, the exchequer of the Jews, and Jewish legal status. In the most schematic accounts, tallage works to extort, and the exchequer of the Jews, to protect. The exchequer of the Jews and its subsidiary system of local loan chests are seen as protecting and privileging Jewish moneylending. By registering loans to Jews and providing them with a special court to collect their loans, the crown allowed Jewish moneylenders to swell with profit. The crown milked the Jews’ profits on moneylending by extorting arbitrary taxes, in other words, tallages. Several metaphors have been deployed by historical interpreters. Cecil Roth favored the domesticated cow swollen with milk after chewing the green grass of merry old England. Other less sympathetic imagery has drawn on the stereotype of the blood-sucking capitalist.
Palgrave, 2018
his book challenges a common historical narrative, which portrays medieval Jews as moneylenders w... more his book challenges a common historical narrative, which portrays medieval Jews as moneylenders who filled an essential economic role in Europe. Where Volume I traced the development of the narrative in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and refuted it with an in-depth study of English Jewry, Volume II explores the significance of dissolving the Jewish narrative for European history. It extends the study from England to northern France, the Mediterranean, and central Europe and deploys the methodologies of legal, cultural, and religious history alongside economic history. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of key topics, such as the Christian usury campaign, the commercial revolution, and gift economy / profit economy, to demonstrate how the revision of Jewish history leads to new insights in European history.
PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, 2017
This book challenges a common historical narrative, which portrays medieval Jews as moneylenders ... more This book challenges a common historical narrative, which portrays medieval Jews as moneylenders who filled an essential economic role in Europe. It traces how and why this narrative was constructed as a philosemitic narrative in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in response to the rise of political antisemitism. This book also documents why it is a myth for medieval Europe, and illuminates how changes in Jewish history change our understanding of European history. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of central topics, such as the usury debate, commercial contracts, and moral literature on money and value to demonstrate how the revision of Jewish history leads to new insights in European history.