How the fate of the Jews has been shaped by the development of
capitalism The unique historical relationship between capitalism and
the Jews is crucial to understanding modern European and Jewish
history. But the subject has been addressed less often by mainstream
historians than by anti-Semites or apologists. In this book Jerry
Muller, a leading historian of capitalism, separates myth from reality
to explain why the Jewish experience with capitalism has been so
important and complex—and so ambivalent. Drawing on economic,
social, political, and intellectual history from medieval Europe
through contemporary America and Israel, Capitalism and the Jews
examines the ways in which thinking about capitalism and thinking
about the Jews have gone hand in hand in European thought, and why
anticapitalism and anti-Semitism have frequently been linked. The book
explains why Jews have tended to be disproportionately successful in
capitalist societies, but also why Jews have numbered among the
fiercest anticapitalists and Communists. The book shows how the
ancient idea that money was unproductive led from the stigmatization
of usury and the Jews to the stigmatization of finance and,
ultimately, in Marxism, the stigmatization of capitalism itself.
Finally, the book traces how the traditional status of the Jews as a
diasporic merchant minority both encouraged their economic success and
made them particularly vulnerable to the ethnic nationalism of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a fresh look at an
important but frequently misunderstood subject, Capitalism and the
Jews will interest anyone who wants to understand the Jewish role in
the development of capitalism, the role of capitalism in the modern
fate of the Jews, or the ways in which the story of capitalism and the
Jews has affected the history of Europe and beyond, from the medieval
period to our own.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781400834365
Publisert
2013
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter