History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Jewish financial and trading activities in the eighteenth century became so widely diffused that economic historians have sometimes been tempted to regard them as the primary force in creating the modern capitalist system. In 1911 the German sociologist Werner Sombart published a remarkable book, Die Juden und das Wirtschlaftsleben, in which he argued that Jewish traders and manufacturers, excluded from the guilds, developed a destructive antipathy to the fundamentals of medieval commerce. These were primitive and unprogressive: the desire for ‘just’ (and fixed) wages and prices, for an equitable system in which shares of the market were agreed and unchanging, profits and livelihoods modest but guaranteed, and limits placed on production. Excluded from the system, Sombart argued, the Jews broke it up and replaced it with modern capitalism, in which competition was unlimited and pleasing the customer was the only law.