European Journal of Jewish Studies The Jewish Economic Elite. Making Modern Europe (Guido Bartolucci) (original) (raw)
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The German-Jewish Economic Elite (1900 – 1930)
In the early twentieth century, a dense corporate network was created among the large German corporations (Germany Inc.). About 16% of the members of this corporate network were of Jewish background. At the center of the network (big linkers) about 25% were Jewish. The percentage of Jews in the general population was less than 1% in 1914. What comparative advantages did the Jewish minority enjoy that enabled them to succeed in the competition for leading positions in the German economy? Three hypotheses are tested: (1) The Jewish economic elite had a better education compared to the non-Jewish members of the network (human capital). (2) Jewish members had a central position in the corporate network, because many of them were engaged in finance and banking. (3) Jewish members created a network of their own that was separate from the overarching corporate network (social capital). The density of this Jewish network was higher than that of the non-Jewish economic elite (embeddedness). Our data do not support any of these hypotheses. The observed correlation between Jewish background and network centrality cannot be explained by a higher level of education, a higher level of social capital, or a higher proportion of Jewish managers engaged in (private) banking.
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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 mobility of the Jewish population in the early modern and modern period is usually taken as a given, though much historical research is, nevertheless, done according to political boundaries. This article examines the possibilities to link biographical studies of members of the Jewish mercantile elite in eighteenth-century continental Europe with a transgeographical approach to mobility. Using examples of Ashkenazic merchant families from Amsterdam, Frankfurt (Oder) and Warsaw, the article looks at the creation of familial and commercial connections among merchants, the role of women in these networks, and the influence of this geographical mobility in the cultural realm. It argues that the study of transgeographical connections -familial, commercial and otherwise -of families or groups of merchants will allow for new insights into the strategies of network building and mobility beyond the highest strata of the Jewish population, like early modern Court Jews.
Changing Perceptions of the Jewish Economic Role: The Case of the Boryslav Oil Industry
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During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Galician oil industry became an important part of Austrian economics and the object of rapid change. The industrializa- tion of the region caused different changes in social life, among them, the formation of new Jewish elites who dominated the business in its first stages. The other result was the emergence of Jewish workers. The situation attracted the attention of numerous observers who perceived and used its Jewish character in their own way. Mining inspectors con- demned the Jewish industry as backward but Polish economists, Jewish Western philan- thropists and Viennese Zionists tried to find in the Boryslav example possibilities for overcoming the “unproductiveness” of the Jews. Socialist observers did not share this optimistic approach to the Galician oil industry, but regarded it as a double oppression for the Jewish workers, for both class and ethnic reasons. An analysis of this case will elucidate how the true example of the Jews participating in this new economic branch was influ- encing conceptions and the creation of the image of Galician Jewry.