The same increase in the importance of distant and abstract relations lay behind a development without which many people, especially bourgeois, could not have developed more liberal sexual attitudes, namely the still far from complete but growing displacement of the family from the dominant position it had long held in providing the assets individuals needed to survive and advance. Margaret Hunt pointed to the part family membership played in generating the early modern turn to a more “puritanical” morality when she identified it with a particular juncture in the history of middle-class life, characterized by a growing involvement of commercial people in distant activities and relations but at a time when assembling personal and material resources for business still depended on linkages between family members. The moment she identified stood somewhere between the two identified by Sarah Hanley, a first one in which individuals could seldom maintain, much less improve their position in society without drawing on means provided by connections, patronage, and marriage alliances to which kin and clan gave access, and the now-familiar situation in which impersonal institutions both public and private “underwrite the life chances of individuals,” reducing their dependence on family patrimony.56 In the intermediate juncture identified by Hunt, the Enlightenment and later Revolutionary vision of human beings as able to put the impress of their will on society and history worked to encourage belief that the more stringent requirements embodied in the notion of “character” could be met, producing the “age of principles” portrayed by P. S. Atiyah as well as what Michael Mason calls “progressive anti-sensualism.” By the end of the nineteenth century the same developing modern emphasis on human autonomy was working in the opposite direction, extending the Enlightenment and romantic call to respect human feeling and foster happiness toward sexuality, nurturing the dawning awareness of individual and social responsibility in this domain given expression by Gustave Droz, George Drysdale, and Léon Blum, as well as by the movement to provide a serious study of sexuality and recognize its power in which Kraft-Ebbing, Edward Carpenter, Helene Stöcker, and Freud were all exemplary figures. In all these ways, the growing impact of involvement in distant relations that had contributed to making moral norms more rigid during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century now worked instead to make them more open and flexible. Behind the moral liberalization of the nineteenth century’s end there stood the elaboration of a form of life shaped by all the expanding networks of means of modern social existence.
11 Jews as bourgeois and network people
Communities, networks, and capitalism
Of all the phenomena that call attention to the relations between modernity, bourgeois life, and the growing importance of extended networks and distant connections, none is more momentous and few more revealing than the role played by Jews in European history. That Jews have a singular connection to bourgeois life (despite the fact that many of them have been too poor to take much part in it), and to modernity (despite Jewish preservation of ancient traditions), is evident from the positions, actual and imagined, that many of them acquired between the eighteenth century and the twentieth, by the enmity that came to be focused on them, and finally by the fate to which they were subjected by German National Socialism. The outcome of this story lies beyond the scope of this book, but we cannot avoid trying to make sense of the relationship between Jews, modernity, and bourgeois life.
Jews have lived in Europe from ancient times, but have often been made to feel unwelcome there, repeatedly becoming objects of suspicion, hostility, persecution, violence, expulsions, exclusion from many occupations, and confinement in ghettoes. The instability such an existence imposed gave added importance to the ties Jews in particular countries felt and maintained with those in others, giving Jewish life an early and continuing reliance on extended chains of connection, and a cosmopolitan character unlike that of any other comparable population (I will come back to this point in a moment).1 These features of Jewish life, alongside differences in language, culture, belief, and the role attributed to them as deicides in Christian tradition, became motifs of the animosity directed against them, as rootless and detached from the rest of society, inhabiting a separate and private space of their own, and representing a form of life at odds with the one sanctioned by communal and religious authority. By the nineteenth century the most powerful briefs against Jews stressed what linked them to modernity’s most disruptive powers and impulses: on the one hand the economic and cultural transformations that threatened traditional life and its values; on the other the leftist radicalism that projected a different but equally challenging mutation.
Both in reality and in the images attached to it, Jewish existence shared important ground with bourgeois life. Even after bourgeois ceased to signal their separateness from the world around them by walling themselves off inside towns and claiming some degree of independence from outside authority, they still drew wealth and power from the distant connections these enclosures had originally been designed to protect, acting in ways that could seem mysterious and suspect to others. The aura of a life organized around fluid and unstable money relations clung to both groups. These resemblances have often been recognized, sometimes with a mix of insight and myopia. In 1911 the prominent German economist and historian Werner Sombart became an early theorist of the link, in a book later translated as The Jews and Modern Capitalism. At the time he wrote it Sombart located himself on the left, close to Marx and his followers, while taking inspiration from Max Weber as well; later, during the crisis years of the 1920s and 1930s, he would move far to the right, supporting the National Socialists. The book portrays Jews as pioneers of capitalism on grounds that blended admiration and reproof, leading some readers to dislike it as too favorable to its subject and others to tax it for anti-Semitism, a mix that seems to foreshadow its author’s later orientation from within his earlier one.
Stressing the Jews’ geographic dispersal as the foundation of their special role, Sombart noted that Jewish trading families exiled from Inquisitorial Spain and Portugal established themselves elsewhere (notably in such relatively tolerant places as Amsterdam, Bordeaux, or Hamburg), bringing with them the knowledge and some of the connections they had acquired before. Eighteenth-century observers somewhat begrudgingly acknowledged the power and importance this afforded them; a writer in the London paper The Spectator in 1712 noted that
they are so disseminated through all the trading Parts of the World, that they become the Instruments by which the most distant Nations converse with one another and by which mankind are knit together in a general correspondence. The are like the pegs and nails in a great building, which though they are but little valued in themselves, are absolutely necessary to keep the whole frame together.
The writer’s sense that what particularly gave Jews their advantage was their ability to gather and exchange information was shared by others; for instance a French ambassador in the low countries who maintained that Jews devoted Sundays (when, unlike pious Christians, they could do ordinary work) to absorbing reports sent to them by correspondents and sharing these with their associates, making them ready to seize commercial opportunities on the fly when Monday came. Their special knowledge about suppliers and markets in a wide variety of places gave them a boost when goods had to be acquired quickly, for instance in order to participate in the profitable trade of provisioning armies.2
To these reasons for Jewish commercial precocity Sombart added some others. Taking a leaf from Weber’s account of the contribution made to early capitalist development by the Calvinist ethic of unceasing work and self-discipline, Sombart noted (as had Weber) its similarity to the Jewish focus on a kind of holiness directed more toward sanctifying life in this world than achieving salvation in the next. Both ethics generated a search for rational, methodical kinds of behavior well-adapted to rein in unruly impulses (in particular sexual ones), and thus to impose order and structure on life, directing energy toward distant goals. In the case of the Jews, Sombart added, this
ethic gained an extra dimension of economic efficacy by virtue of the separation they felt from the people around them, which justified reserving the strict probity called for by biblical morality to relations with relatives and associates, leaving a margin of impunity in their interactions with others (whom experience taught them to see, although Sombart gives the point little heed, as enemies or oppressors). Such a margin was closed to Christians, at least in principle, by the moral strictness, attachment to traditional methods, and spirit of communal solidarity imposed by guilds (whose power persisted in some places into the nineteenth century), but Jews were excluded from guilds, and thus freer to follow economic interest. Being barred from citizenship worked in the same direction, allowing them to do business with both sides in a conflict, or to switch rapidly from one to another.3
Whether or not one reads parts of Sombart’s argument as providing fuel for anti-Semitic attitudes, there is much in it that needs to be taken seriously. The ties that Jews scattered throughout Europe (and beyond) maintained with each other were indeed the foundation for some striking successes. One recent historian attributes the important role Jews played in the Amsterdam stock exchange in the later seventeenth century to the circumstance that their “far-flung network of contacts” (even after its connections to Spanish American had been much reduced) surpassed “those of every other trading diaspora of the age in range and perhaps cohesion,” and another notes that Jewish connections were strengthened by the tendency of governments in some countries to rely on their ability to transmit information for official purposes.4 These relations provided roots for enterprises such as the Rothschild bank (whose operations we discussed in Chapter 8) by way of its predecessors the “court Jews” of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (about whom I will have something to say in a moment).
The habits formed in connection with such relations, strengthened by the kind of worldly and rationalizing orientation Sombart noted, doubtless played some part in the remarkable rise in economic position achieved by Jews during the nineteenth century. Statistics tell the story, even if they do not provide the same kind of information in every place. In London the economic status of Jews rose markedly between 1850 and the early 1880s (when mass migration of poor Jews from Eastern Europe skewed the numbers downwards): at the earlier date around 30% of Jews in the capital had middle-class incomes, with a sixth of that number belonging to the upper echelons of finance and commerce, proportions higher than the general population but not hugely so; thirty years later 42% were solidly middle-class (having incomes between £200 and £1,000) and nearly 15% belonged to the business elite whose members enjoyed annual family incomes of over £1,000: this at a time when only 3% of all families in England and Wales had £700 or more a year and under 9% earned between £160 and £700.5 In Germany the proportion of Jewish families active in commerce or finance greatly exceeded that of the population as a whole, hovering around 50% in Prussia, Württemberg, and Bavaria in the 1850s and 1860s, when only 2% of non-Jews were so engaged. This occupational profile underlay the remarkable economic transformation of German Jewry between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth. Around 1800 the aggregate was made up of a few wealthy and renowned families surrounded by a large number who barely scraped by on peddling, small-scale crafts, or worse pursuits; such traditional ghetto Jews were much less in evidence by 1848 when, as David Sorkin notes, a majority of Prussian Jews belonged to the middle class, nearly a third of them in its central or upper sections. In 1816, only 38% of Jews in Hamburg were well-off enough to pay taxes; by 1832 the number was 65%, rising to 93.2% in 1848. At the time of unification in 1871 over half of Jews in many cities were solidly bourgeois, a proportion that grew still larger in the following years.6
These developments testify to the remarkable rapport between Jewish life and bourgeois life; were there space here for individual case histories, it seems likely they would support Sombart’s attempt to understand this accord at once in connection with Jews’ diasporic habituation to distant relations and the exchanges they encouraged, and in the orientation toward worldly activity fostered by a religious ethic that emphasized sanctification rather than salvation. All the same, there is much that is problematic in any attempt to establish a close relationship between Jews and modern capitalism.
To begin with, the kind of link Weber made between religion and capitalism cannot so simply be shifted from Protestants to Jews. Weber regarded the Calvinist ethic as primarily relevant at an early stage in economic development (his examples were chiefly from the seventeenth century), when rationalization and expansion were hindered by a widely shared sense that work ought to cease once income was sufficient to maintain a customary level of well-being. It was in regard to this situation that Weber argued for the transformative power of the Puritan orientation toward continuous and methodical activity, building up an enterprise through honest work, and plowing the profits back into it as testimony to the self-denial that virtue required (and which believers might take as a sign of election to God’s chosen). Whether or not we think him right that modern capitalism owed something to this Puritan ethic, we need to remember that Weber did not attach the same degree of significance to it under developed modern conditions, when markets and industrial organization had advanced to a point where they imposed their discipline on individuals regardless of their personal orientations: “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling, we are forced to do so.”7 In modern times other and external factors did much of the motivational work religion had once accomplished.
Giving heed to this distinction helps to highlight two kinds of gaps between Jews and modern capitalism. First, Jews were of very little importance in the kinds of early enterprises Weber had in mind, which were ones located in traditional communities beginning a process of self-transformation. Where Jewish enterprise played an important historical role in the seventeenth century it took different forms, lending money to rulers to finance wars, supplying armies, organizing colonial trade, or taking advantage of international connections in order to import cheaply produced goods from one place into another. All these activities could be very profitable, but they belonged to a kind of enterprise that had long existed and had little to do with the rationalized and methodical species of capitalism on which Weber focused; they were often highly speculative, sometimes predatory and rapacious, and oriented toward sporadic and unpredictable opportunities rather than toward the steady, driven pursuit of profit for its own sake that Weber identified as modern. By the nineteenth century many Jews were as likely to behave in these more rationalized ways as others, and the success they achieved doubtless owed much to their doing so. But whether such behavior was important in giving birth to a modern capitalist spirit or not, by this later period even Weber thought it no longer significant, compared to the power of markets, modern means of transport and communication, and eventually machine technology. Jews were at best minor actors at the points where these factors made their impact, whether in the beginnings of the factory system in England in the years around 1800 (where none of the most prominent innovators were Jewish) or in the transformation of continental economies by railroad building half a century later (sometimes involving Jewish bankers but fostered by governments with their own reasons for encouraging better transport and over whose long-term policies Jews had little influence). As we saw earlier the methods that made the Rothschilds so powerful and remarkable relied on the same kinds of personal connections that made notables prominent in politics before around 1870; they grew less relevant with the spread of modern industry and modern communications, leading finance, like politics, to involve previously excluded sections of the population, drawing them in by way of thicker networks whose threads penetrated into hitherto unintegrated regions of society.
These considerations all suggest that, however important Jews have been in European history, their role in creating modern capitalism, especially in industry, was never so great as was supposed either by the anti-Semitic m
ovements that grew up at the end of the nineteenth century or by work such as Sombart’s that in some way reflected their concerns. To grasp the roles Jews played, and the shifting fortunes they encountered, we need to look in a different direction.
Jews and states: an equivocal partnership
In his illuminating account of early modern Jewish life, Jonathan Israel makes clear that Jewish prominence before the nineteenth century had less to do with economic innovation than with connections between Jews and states, and with the ways the projects pursued by rulers drew the two groups together. These links became powerful during the seventeenth century, when the needs of warfare (first in the Thirty Years War that ended in 1648, then in the wars of Louis XIV that began in the 1660s) made the Jewish advantage in assembling finance from widely scattered resources of great importance to governments. In the previous century the intense religious concerns unleashed by the Reformation had subjected Jews to expulsions from many territories in Germany (although they were sometimes protected by needy rulers), as they had been from Spain and Portugal at the time of the Christian victory over the Muslims; combined with the earlier expulsions from England and France these brought Jewish life in Europe to a low point. Seventeenth-century warfare, endemic and larger in scale, provided grounds for a recovery, as the benefits Jews were thought able to provide encouraged rulers to receive them back into places from which they had been banished before. It was a fragile comeback, since the privileges granted were sometimes rescinded under the pressure of popular anti-Semitism that rulers could or would not resist, as occurred in Habsburg Vienna in 1669. But such reverses were often temporary, and elsewhere the gains held. Jews were allowed back into England from the 1650s; in France a liberal policy favored by politiques opposed to religious warfare was rescinded by Louis XIV after 1680, but even then the Jewish presence in the country was tolerated. In northern Germany both Prussia and Hannover provided havens.
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