The Jewish Economic Elite: Making Modern Europe by Cornelia Aust

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Jewish Economic Elite: Making Modern Europe by Cornelia Aust Verena Kasper-Marienberg Cornelia Aust. The Jewish Economic Elite: Making Modern Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. 218 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000199 Two narratives circulate about the central role that Jewish elites played in the structural change of Europe's economies from feudal to modern capitalist systems. [End Page 216] One tells of court Jews who turned international bankers and draws a direct line between the Jewish economic elites of the eighteenth century and those of the nineteenth century. Another, competing, narrative is about a newly emerging Ashkenazic middle class, rising to wealth from the ashes of European ghettos in the early nineteenth century after a decline in the influence of the old Jewish elites in the mid-eighteenth century. Both narratives obscure our profound lack of data on how Jewish economic elites were affected by the multitude of European conflicts (the Seven Years, Russo-Turkish, Revolutionary, and Napoleonic Wars) during the second half of the eighteenth century, the decline of economic centers like Amsterdam and Leipzig, and the dissolution of long-standing political entities like the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Cornelia Aust chose case studies of Ashkenazic economic elites from this transitional period, which ranges from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Contrasting five European cities and regions and three Jewish mercantile families, her work casts a wide geographical and multigenerational net to trace continuities and changes in the profile of these representative members of the Jewish economic elite. Her core methodologies are a transregional perspective from western to eastern Europe and a focus on family networks rather than individual biographies. The book centers around three urban case studies: Amsterdam (chap. 1), Frankfurt an der Oder (chap. 2), and Warsaw (chap. 5). The inclusion of the shifting borderlands between Prussia and Poland (chap. 4), as well as Praga, a smaller settlement then still outside Warsaw (chap. 5), are important addenda, since they widen the perspective to less-urban and suburban spaces of Jewish life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The first chapter traces the family network of the Ashkenazic Symons family in mid-eighteenth-century Amsterdam, their marriage patterns across Europe (especially towards Frankfurt an der Oder), and their strategic use of family networks for credit and mercantile activity. As Aust explains, the key economic function of Amsterdam-based Ashkenazic merchants was to connect their colleagues or family members in central and eastern Europe to Amsterdam's credit market, via jointly liable and repeatedly endorsable bills of exchange. Without them, this credit market was hardly accessible to eastern European Jewish mercantile elites who were still navigating cash-based economies. At the same time, the Symons, like other merchants from Amsterdam, deliberately expanded their family network eastwards in order to access the booming textile trade in eastern Europe. In chapter 2, the Schlesinger family in Frankfurt an der Oder serves Aust as an example of the central position of Jewish economic elites in communal hierarchies. Using the pinkas, a type of communal record book, Aust shows that Jewish merchants with the largest assets were also leaders within their communities, confirming the plutocratic nature of Jewish communal leadership in Ashkenaz. Their credit potential through networks via Hamburg to Amsterdam was put into use for communal purposes as well, serving their communities in situations of financial threat. Aust further argues that the Seven Years War and the partitions of Poland set in motion an eastward migration of Jewish mercantile elites from [End Page 217] Frankfurt an der Oder and the borderlands between Prussia and Poland. She describes the challenges, but also the opportunities that arose for Jewish merchants from the repeated changes in political authority, including the opportunity to supply several armies during wartime. Following the traces of these Jewish elites' migration to the East, the third case study (chaps. 4 and 5) is set in Praga and Warsaw. It follows the Jakubowicz family, which rose from being all-round merchants to army suppliers, leaseholders, and finally bankers. While family founder Szmul represented yet another group of immigrants from Polish villages who were drawn to urban spaces like Warsaw...