ABSTRACT
Modern anti-Semitism has always been critical of the Jewish share in economic life. The ancient and medieval theme of a predatory, conspiratorial and avaricious foreign nation active in the midst of an innocent Christendom received a modern articulation among thinkers of all stripes. From Karl Marx on the left to Werner Sombart on the right, the critique traced ostensibly deplorable features of economic life in contemporary society to incorrigible or ineradicable features of “the” Jewish character, mentality or race. 1 Jews, as an economic factor, were given an inordinate share of the blame for the woes of the modern world. Jews, of course, reacted defensively but sometimes in agreement with such criticism as well. When the critique was raised from the gutter and dressed in a theoretical guise, as in Sombart’s 1911 The Jews and Economic Life, Jewish responses were mixed. By locating, unlike Weber, the impetus for capitalism in the ethos of rabbinic Judaism, Sombart won some plaudits from the Jewish community. Leaders of Berlin Jewry applauded him when he claimed, before a spellbound audience that “the idea of maximizing turnover and minimizing profit ‘is a specifically Jewish contribution, for the Jews are the fathers of the idea of free trade.’” 2 The honeymoon with Sombart was not to last, however. Many central European Jewish intellectuals came to discern and to reject his more radical, anti-Semitic premises. Yet even thinkers as astute as Julius Guttmann continued to affirm the main thrust of his thesis that Jewish traits and values incubated a proto-capitalism in pre-modern times and led to mature capitalism in modernity.
