ABSTRACT
The recent reissuance of Werner Sombart's classic work, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, is a welcome event—both in itself and for making available once again this significant effort to understand the relationships between religion and the economy. The apparent success of the Jews under capitalism is attributed by Sombart to four factors: their dispersion over a wide area, their treatment as perennial strangers, their semicitizenship, and their liquid wealth. The aim here is less the formal properties of the major systems in the world or a quick recitation of competing frameworks of East-West relations, than the condition of Jews under modern communism. The question of Jews in modern capitalism must be critically examined from a comparative point of view, that is to say how they fare with respect to Jews living under modern communism. To reify discourse in terms of modern capitalism versus a more modern communism is wasteful and a dangerous form of abstract polarization over the Jewish Question.
