Jewish Economic History

Jewish economic history comprises the economic activities of Jews, their economic and social position as a minority within the surrounding societies, and the perception of and reaction to their economic activities and position. With some exceptions in the first third of the twentieth·century, economic history has been a rather marginal topic within Jewish historiography until recent years. While the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in 19th-century Germany focused on the study of Jewish intellectual history, Jewish historians in eastern Europe had a stronger interest in social and partly economic history, though often from a national, Zionist, or Marxist point of view. The Jews’ specific role as a minority within the economy of their host societies, and especially their alleged affinity to money and dominance in moneylending, commerce, and later banking, increasingly persuaded non-Jewish scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to examine the role of Jews within economic history. It was especially the Jews’ alleged contribution to the emergence of modern capitalism that generated these studies, often enough with an anti-Semitic undertone. Since the late 1980s, Jewish economic history has been of an increasing interest to scholars of Jewish history, characterized by attempts at a better contextualization of Jewish economic activities and the integration of these activities within general developments, as well as a turn to new approaches such as the study of consumption in the wake of cultural history or the examination of transnational phenomena. This article will cover the literature on Jewish economic history and the perception of Jewish economic activities from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. As most general volumes on the history of the Jews of a certain territory, state, or time period contain some information on economic history, only literature that deals explicitly with Jewish economic history has been included. This bibliography focuses only on works that take Jewish economic history as their central concern; other studies that have Jewish economic concerns as ancillary topics, particularly those about the United States, are not included.