Rebecca Kobrin and Adam Teller, editors. Purchasing Power: The Economics of Modern Jewish History.

Abstract

This timely collection gathers eleven excellent essays prefaced by an informative introduction. The first six chapters address the extent and role of Jewish “economic power” in the early modern and modern periods by investigating implications of Jewish economic activities in Italy, the Pyrenees, eighteenth-century Central European lands, nineteenth-century Polish cities and the British Empire, and the twentieth-century Anglo-American music industry. The next four chapters are more closely focused on shifts in Jewish philanthropy and transnational activism in the modern period, with attention to Europe and Israel. The final chapter offers a reassessment of Werner Sombart’s The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1905). The introduction by Rebecca Kobrin and Adam Teller, two of the most innovative historians currently working on Jews and the economy, provides a thorough overview of historiographic takes on Jewish economic history from the early nineteenth century to recent developments. It is an essay that could be fruitfully assigned in graduate seminars. Although the volume interrogates the relationships of Jews to, and their place within, the early modern and modern economy, several of its essays do not deal directly and explicitly with traditional questions of economic history or with material concerns. Rather, it is the concept of “power”—its pursuit, its negotiation, its uses—that serves as a more cogent unifying thread for the various chapters. The editors ask “how Jews have amassed, contested, and deployed power through economic means” (3). Until recently this was a fraught and delicate topic, subject to politicization and the charge of antisemitism. Indeed, scholarly interest in Jewish economic activities started resurfacing only in the mid-1980s after a hiatus of several decades following the Holocaust. The volume should thus be commended for its bold emphasis on the need to reinsert an economic perspective into Jewish history.