Capitalism and the Jews

January 18, 2010
In four fascinating essays, Muller (The Mind and the Market
) sensitively examines how centuries of nomadism and diaspora have shaped Jewish financial life. Particularly intriguing is his essay “The Long Shadow of Usury,” which traces the roots of Jewish financial life to the time when Christians were banned from lending at interest, but Jews, following the law in Deuteronomy, were allowed to charge interest to gentiles (but not each other). Farmers and laborers could not understand the value—economic or social—of gathering and analyzing information, and Jewish usurers were cast as suspicious and parasitic figures. Muller explores why Jewish populations have been both disproportionately successful in capitalist societies and the system's loudest critics. Of paramount interest is his portrait of a people driven by exile and oppression to emphasize strong social networks, self-sufficiency, and higher education. Muller backs up his bold assertion—that capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world—with elegance and care.

May 1, 2010
Muller (history, Catholic Univ.; "Adam Smith in His Time and Ours"), a well-established historian of capitalism, is brave to tackle this subject, laden as much with the place of Jewish people in the markets as with the trappings and traps of anti-Semitism. Eschewing a grand narrative, Muller instead provides four essays connected by an introduction. He draws on an array of sources impressively diverse even for an intellectual historian, but the argument he works toward is difficult to discern. Two of the four essays only indirectly address Jews and capitalism as experienced by Jews in a peak epoch of capitalism, the first primarily dealing with the money-lending tradition of Jews in precapitalist Europe and the third with the high profile of Jews in Eastern European Communist parties and regimes. The second essay examines Milton Friedman's contention that Jews acted against their own self-interest when embracing socialism, and finds it unpersuasive, but the concluding section suggests that the assimilating success of European Jewish communities from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries fated the Holocaust. VERDICT Amorphous but stimulating essays only for the academically committed historian of modern European culture and thought.Scott H. Silverman, Earlham Coll. Lib., Richmond, IN

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