THE JEWS AND MODERN CAPITALISM
All this poses the question whether the failure (if that's the right word) to develop capitalism in Russia and the exclusion of the Jews might be related. Which brings us into the territory of Werner Sombart's book The Jews and modern capitalism. Although this was to prove useful to the Nazis and has therefore fallen out of favour, it was not written with antisemitic intent. (7) Sombart saw it as a development of the argument developed in Max Weber's book, The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Weber was a friend and colleague:
'Max Weber’s study of the importance of Puritanism for the capitalistic system was the impetus that sent me to consider the importance of the Jew, especially as I felt that the dominating ideas of Puritanism which were so powerful in capitalism were more perfectly developed in Judaism, and were also of course of much earlier date.'
(7) Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, originally published in 1911. My quotations are from a badly transcribed Kindle edition, using a translation by 'M.Epstein' published in 1913. Sombart died in 1941. According to his Wikipedia entry: 'In 1934 he published Deutscher Sozialismus where he claimed a "new spirit" was beginning to "rule mankind". The age of capitalism and proletarian socialism was over, with "German socialism" (National Socialism) taking over ... The antithesis of the German spirit is the Jewish spirit, which is not a matter of being born Jewish or believing in Judaism but is a capitalistic spirit. The English people possess the Jewish spirit and the "chief task" of the German people and National Socialism is to destroy the Jewish spirit. However, his 1938 anthropology book, Vom Menschen, is clearly anti-Nazi ...' The source given is Abram L. Harris: 'Sombart and German (National) Socialism', Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 50, No. 6 (Dec., 1942), pp. 805-835.
Whether one sees the argument as antisemitic or not depends rather on one's attitude to capitalism, or to liberalism as its political complement. Sombart, admittedly, is less than enthusiastic:
'He [the Jew] is the born representative of a “liberal” view of life in which there are no living men and women of flesh and blood with distinct personalities, but only citizens with rights and duties. And these do not differ in different nations, but form part of mankind, which is but the sum-total of an immense number of amorphous units.'
He quotes numerous complaints from rivals of the Jews that the Jews cheat in their business dealings but he distinguishes between practises (theft, false balances etc) that both Christian and Jew would regard as immoral and certain competitive practises that pre-capitalist Christians would regard as immoral, but Jews would not - advertising, price-cutting, wholesaling (selling a wide variety of goods rather than a single speciality).
In broad historical terms he argues that the transference of economic power from Spain to Northern Europe was a consequence of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain: 'Israel passes over Europe like the Sun; at its coming new life bursts forth; at its going, all falls into decay':
'The first event to be recalled, an event of world-wide import, is the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1492) and from Portugal (1495 and 1497) ...
'Numerous Jews remained behind as pseudo-Christians (Marannos), and it was only as the Inquisition, from the days of Philip II onwards, became more and more relentless that these Jews were forced to leave the land of their birth. During the centuries that followed, and especially towards the end of the 16th, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews settled in other countries. It was during this period that the doom of the economic prosperity of the Pyrenean Peninsula was sealed. With the 15th century came the expulsion of the Jews from the German commercial cities — from Cologne (1424–5), from Augsburg (1439–40), from Strassburg (1438), from Erfurt (1458), from Nuremberg (1498–9), from Ulm (1499), and from Ratisbon (1519). The same fate overtook them in the 16th century in a number of Italian cities. They were driven from Sicily (1492), from Naples (1540– 1), from Genoa and from Venice (1550). Here also economic decline and Jewish emigration coincided in point of time. On the other hand, the rise to economic importance, in some cases quite unexpectedly, of the countries and towns whither the refugees fled, must be dated from the first appearance of the Spanish Jews. A good example is that of Leghorn, one of the few Italian cities which enjoyed economic prosperity in the 16th century. Now Leghorn was the goal of most of the exiles who made for Italy. In Germany it was Hamburg and Frankfort that admitted the Jewish settlers. And remarkable to relate, a keen-eyed traveller in the 18th century wandering all over Germany found everywhere that the old commercial cities of the Empire, Ulm, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Mayence and Cologne, had fallen into decay, and that the only two that were able to maintain their former splendour, and indeed to add to it from day to day, were Frankfort and Hamburg. In France in the 17th and 18th centuries the rising towns were Marseilles, Bordeaux, Rouen - again the havens of refuge of the Jewish exiles. As for Holland, it is well-known that at the end of the 16th century a sudden upward development (in the capitalistic sense) took place there. The first Portuguese Marannos settled in Amsterdam in 1593, and very soon their numbers increased.'
Unfortunately, he has little to say about Poland, but he does observe that 'For every 500 Christian merchants in the Polish towns of the period there were to be found 3200 Jewish merchants' and the picture Poliakov draws of the activities of the Jews in Poland fits into his thesis.
Sombart attaches particular importance to money-lending:
'modern capitalism is the child of money-lending. Money-lending contains the root idea of capitalism; from moneylending it received many of its distinguishing features. In money-lending all conception of quality vanishes and only the quantitative aspect matters. In money-lending the contract becomes the principal element of business; the agreement about the quid pro quo, the promise for the future, the notion of delivery are its component parts. In money-lending there is no thought of producing only for one’s needs. In money-lending there is nothing corporeal (i.e., technical), the whole is a purely intellectual act. In money-lending economic activity as such has no meaning; it is no longer a question of exercising body or mind; it is all a question of success. Success, therefore, is the only thing that has a meaning ...
'But historically, too, modern capitalism owes its being to moneylending. This was the case wherever it was necessary to lay out money for initial expenses, or where a business was started as a limited company. For essentially a limited company is in principle nothing but a matter of money-lending with the prospect of immediate profit.'
The peculiar economic strength of the Jews, he argues, was that money-lending, and consequently an understanding of credit, came naturally to them:
'The time has really arrived when the myth that the Jews were forced to have recourse to money-lending in mediaeval Europe, chiefly after the Crusades, because they were debarred from any other means of livelihood, should be finally disposed of. The history of Jewish moneylending in the two thousand years before the Crusades ought surely to set this fable at rest once and for all. The official version that Jews could not devote themselves to anything but money-lending, even if they would, is incorrect. The door was by no means always shut in their faces; the fact is they preferred to engage in money-lending.'
We might be reminded of Pipes's observations on the state of Russia: 'Capitalism without credit is a contradiction in terms; and business ignorant of credit is no more capitalist than urban inhabitants without self government are bourgeois ... Risk capital, the sinew of capitalist development, was absent; what there was of it came either from the state treasury or from foreign investors. As late as the early twentieth century, the Russian middle class regarded the investor as the lowest species of businessman, far below the manufacturer and merchant in prestige.'