ABSTRACT
The problem of the significance of the Jewish participation in the development of modern capitalism has been treated differently by different authors. Some, like Werner Sombart, have focused their attention on what Sombart called the “spirit of capitalism,” namely, the restless striving after commercial profit. But the profit motive, that is, the calculation of advantage and disadvantage in monetary terms, is nearly universal, not tied to a particular time or place. It is impermissible inside a tribal society, but typical of outsiders to a society, that is, of “strangers.” We have seen that the Jews, who in their dispersion were cast in the role of ubiquitous outsiders and who devoted themselves to commercial pursuits, are prototypical strangers. However, modern capitalism arose inside European societies, when the wholesale trader became pitted against the guild merchants and craftsmen, who were interested in securing a “living,” not making a profit. When Jacob Fugger of Augsburg, the head of the most potent commercial and banking enterprise of his time, at an age where he could have conveniently retired, said he “wanted to make a profit as long as he could,” he expressed what one may call the “spirit” of capitalism. At that time, in the sixteenth century, there was, far and wide, no Jew who could have competed with him. But other authors, such as Karl Marx and Max Weber, define the rise of modern capitalism differently, namely as a phenomenon inherent in the growth of industry. The position of Marx, to be sure, is not clear. On the one hand, in an often-quoted passage Marx considers the profit motive as specifically “Jewish” and capitalism as the “Judaization of the Christian world,” but a statement of this kind is hardly to be reconciled with Marx’s general position which derives profit from the exploitation of labor, that is from the ever-increasing employment of a propertyless working class in the industrial process. 98It is precisely the conspicuous absence of Jews from entrepreneurial activities of this kind which led Max Weber to the statement that “hardly a Jew is found among the creators of the modern economic situation,” namely the continuing and rationally conducted enterprise. But Max Weber’s position, in which politically secured commercial and financial operations, as contrasted to economic activities of an independent “bourgeois” nature, are designated as “pariah capitalism,” is not satisfactory either. First, a statement of this nature comes suspiciously near to the proto-Nazi contradistinction between schaffendes (creative) and raffendes (rapacious) capital, of which one is supposedly “Aryan” and the other “Semitic.” Second, the Jewish purveyors and agents of the Baroque age, men who were proud of their achievements and of haughty demeanor, did not conceive of themselves as “pariahs.” Finally, the disparaging term “pariah capitalism” fails to do justice to the twin phenomenon of modern entrepreneurial capitalism, namely modern bureaucracy. The emergence of industrial society, as Max Weber himself emphasized is predicated on the establishment of unified law over a sufficiently large territory, that is, on the growth of a central governmental apparatus and of orderly financial procedures to sustain that apparatus on a continuing basis. It was at this point that the Jewish contribution became conspicuous and highly relevant.
