Jonathan Karp: The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848

Abstract

The Politics of Jewish Commerce is a learned, subtle, and at times penetrating study. Its premise is that Jews are a revealing lens through which to dissect the many controversial, multilayered, and perennially fascinating questions about the rise of capitalism in Europe. This premise holds particularly true for the period before the mid-nineteenth century, when the legal status of Jews in Christian Europe was often linked to their perceived economic utility and danger, and when the power of money to shape society, politics, and culture was not taken for granted and elicited ambivalent responses. In Karp's lucid prose, "A central argument of this book is the notion that a specifically Jewish commerce served a vital function in Western thought. It served to abstract various types of activities from the generality of economic life and, through their association with stigmatized Jews, make them vehicles for expressing widely felt anxieties about commerce in a manner that was politically safe and psychically tolerable" (p. 2). Karp examines how Jewish and Christian authors between 1638 and 1848 depicted Jews' economic roles in medieval and early modern Europe. At the same time, he connects these authors' images of "Jewish commerce" to heated debates about the legal status and political rights of Jews. One of Karp's considerable merits is thus to have shown the interdependence between economic and political ideologies, the economic dimension of political debates about Jewish emancipation, and, more generally, the didactic function that Jewish history played in the history of European political and economic thought. The parade of authors Karp analyzes begins with the seventeenth-century Venetian rabbi Simone Luzzatto a clear indication that Jewish scholars participated in these debates and that their voices influenced both coreligionists and gentiles in the years and centuries to come. Luzzatto made an "ingenious argument" (p. 22) that both exalted the beneficial effect of Jewish commerce on the Christian polity and downplayed Christian fears by emphasizing Jews'