41845358-Antisemitism

HOMO JUDAICUS ECONOMICUS
167
sial book published in 1994 by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray seeks
to correlate intelligence, race/ethnicity, class structure, and environment. Although
it is really not possible to say—only to speculate—that genetics and/or
environment bestowed “superior” intelligence on Jews, Mark Twain thought
that relentless economic competition had selected superior Jewish brains. Despite
all obstacles put in their way, he said, the Jew “found ways to make
money, even ways to get rich. ...[T]he Jew without brains could not survive,
and the Jew with brains had to keep them in good training and well sharpened
up, or starve. Ages of restriction to the one tool which the law was not able to
take from him—his brain—have made that tool singularly competent.” How
that brain power was transmitted and nurtured also has been a subject of discussion.
Invoked to explain Jewish success and creativity are: child-rearing
practices, universal education, the prestige of scholars and the preference for
scholars as husbands, and marriage and family incumbent on men instead of
celibacy enjoined on Christian clergy. 110
Nowhere in Sombart’s work is there so much as a hint that other peoples—the
Armenians, Parsees, Chinese in Southeast Asia—functioned in similar
ways. He eschewed any kind of comparative method, which would have
shattered his whole interpretative scheme. Rather, he persisted in an a priori
racial-religious explanation of Jewish economic behavior as well as in his
Marxian formula that capitalism is nothing more than the workings of the
“spirit of Judaism.” Nor did Sombart consider some obvious factors. The sociological
fact that for centuries they were barred from artisan guilds and excluded
from agriculture by being deprived of land might be expected to
explain, in large part, why Jews concentrated their efforts on those aspects of
economic activity that utilized “human” rather than “natural” forces, with a
decided preference for “mental” and “intellectual” over “physical” labor as
well as for self-employment in the professions and private businesses over
wage employment. 111 A much sounder answer to these questions is that of
Thorstein Veblen, an American economist and economic historian who was a
contemporary of Sombart. He attributed the Jews’ startling creativity, first, to
their being “a nation of hybrids” rather than Sombartian “inbreds,” and, second,
to their minority status. It was the creative tension of “divided [cultural]
allegiance,” one foot in the Jewish community and the other “within the gentile
community of peoples,” that generated “the skeptical frame of mind,” the
“release from the dead hand of [the] conventional,” that are fertile, according
to Veblen, of innovation and pioneering. 112
Sombart began with far greater knowledge of Judaism, of Jewish history and
texts than Marx did, but he also began with Marx’s ideological presuppositions