The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe 1638-1848 (original) (raw)
Article Twentieth-Century Jewish Émigrés and Medieval European Economic History
2012
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.
Political Economy as a Test of Modern Judaism
Religions, 2019
According to a common narrative, Jews entered the modern world at a steep price. From an autonomous corporation, ruling themselves internally according to their own standards and law, Judaism became a “religion,” divested of political power and responsible only for the internal sphere of “faith” or belief. The failure of this project, in turn, gave rise to the sharp split between Jewish nationalism and religion-based conceptions of Judaism. Many modern Jewish thinkers sought to resolve this antinomy by imagining ways for Judaism to once again form the basis of a “complete life”. This essay seeks to challenge this narrative by examining the extent to which economics, another one of the “spheres” emerging together with modernity and often considered under the same broadly Weberian process of rationalization, ever truly formed part of the holistic, self-contained Jewish autonomous life for which modern thinkers expressed so much nostalgia. It will argue that rather than forming part of...
Jewish History -- Economic History, with Roxani Margariti
Jewish History , 2018
As the densest single corpus of documents pertaining to everyday life in the medieval Middle East and Islamic world before the 1250s, the Cairo Geniza material has been mined to investigate not only the economic roles of Jews in the Islamicate world they inhabited but also the relationship between merchants and the state, the structure of business ties, the nature, market share, and circulation of specific commodities, monetization, and geographies of trade connecting the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Building on more than half a century of Geniza scholarship on the medieval economy, recent work has highlighted the role of legal institutions in economic transactions, has elaborated on the question of the typicality of Jewish economic actors in the Islamicate marketplace, and has deepened the inquiry into regional and transregional economies.
The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2012
tions of the medieval sources and the subsequent philosophical development of the problems in question, the study not only succeeds in pointing to the philosophical importance of Cornelius Martini, but also shows that the revival of Aristotle included both a return to an earlier methodology and a decisive reevaluation of the status of logic that paved the way to the Enlightenment. The study is completed by the critical edition of Martini's Prolegomena on the Nature of Logic, a comprehensive bibliography and a detailed index.
Judaism and Economics: The Link between Judaism and Economic Life
This article deals with the relationship of Judaism to economic activity. The subject is the typical approach of Jewish ethical thought, concerning the understanding of money, wealth, jobs and economic initiatives. Issues related to fundamental economic life are shown to be covered in the books that the Jewish community considers sacred. Particularly important are the Old Testament and the Talmud. Also important are references to the cultural interpretation of Judaism, including the classical works on the subject-Jacques Attali and Werner Sombart. The key concept is the subject of "wealth," the meaning of which is derived from the Bible's Book of Exodus and the Talmud. Finally, the foundations for Jewish economic thought can be expressed as the product of an embedded culture, which is founded on religion, in which property acquires ethical legitimacy. The argument is crowned with historical examples of the noble economic activity of the Jewish people, which also give evidence of the interrelatedness of religion and the proper use of wealth.