The supposed characteristics of the ubiquitous medieval Jewish moneylenderder ewige Jude, the fictional merchant Shylock, the Jew of Malta, long associated not only with usury but with demonic powers and the subversion of Christian society-were recast and universalized in the nineteenth century and identified with a new notion, that of the capitalist. Capitalism, or the capitalist era, to use Marx’s designation, was a phase-the penultimate-in a developmental series of historical stages marked by their distinctive economic arrangements. One of the aims of this chapter is to explore and explicate the vital historical, albeit asymmetrical, links between Judaism and Capitalism, both terms of comparatively recent coinage.