ABSTRACT
Max Weber’s writings on the sociology of world religions are in large part an attempt to trace the long-forgotten and tangled roots of this modern conviction, ‘the spirit of capitalism’. Weber intended that ideal types should be treated, to quote Fritz Ringer, as ‘simplifications or “onesidedly” exaggerated characterizations of complex phenomena that can be hypothetically posited and then “compared” with the realities they are meant to elucidate’. A pariah community in Weber’s sense was a group whose position of social subordination was a result only partially of exclusion enforced by hostile external circumstances. According to Israel, the period from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the eighteenth was the high point of early modern Jewish life in western Europe. Jewish and Anabaptist contemporaries suffered and reacted in similar ways to similar pressures. Anabaptists have in some ways acted as Weber claimed Jews did.
