Anti-semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present

HOMO JUDAICUS ECONOMICUS
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tion of 1688 that brought a Dutch prince to the throne as William III—“is
perhaps more apparent than in the case of Amsterdam.” In London they made
stockbroking a profession. The Rothschilds are cited for the scale of their operations.
With them “the stock market has become international,” great international
loans and transactions being treated by the Rothschilds as a family
affair. “The age of the Rothschilds” was under way, and for Sombart the saying
of the mid-nineteenth century, “There is only one power in Europe and that
power is Rothschild,” is simply the plain truth. The Jews were the railway
kings as they were the monarchs of company promotion and the creators, in
Sombart’s mistaken view, of the joint-stock bank that lay behind all this activity.
The inception of “this special banking activity” was “Jewish,” namely, the
Péreires’ Crédit Mobilier and all their Jewish backers. Sombart invidiously
points to the large number of Jews in the management of German industry by
the end of the nineteenth century. Industries’ dependence on the largely Jewish
banks was, he explains, “the gap in the hedge through which the Jews could
penetrate into the field of the production and transport of commodities, as
they had done earlier in commerce and finance.” Thus, continues Sombart,
nearly a seventh of the board directors and nearly a quarter of board members,
in a population where they are barely a hundredth, were Jews. 99 Much of what
Sombart says is true enough and will be found in standard economic histories,
but the role of the Jews is blown all out of proportion and the explanations offered
of that role are unsubstantiated and undemonstrated, straying into popular
stereotype and antisemitic myth: No Jews, no capitalism.
Sombart’s eleventh chapter, “The Significance of the Jewish Religion in
Economic Life,” is where he is most clearly in Marx’s ideological grip. He
“avow[s] it right away: I think that the Jewish religion has the same leading
ideas as Capitalism. I see the same spirit in the one as in the other.” 100 Accordingly,
the Jewish capitalist ethic requires that Eros be suppressed. Sombart—
echoing Marx’s dictum in the 1843 essay that Jewish marriage is an object of
“commerce,” women of “barter”—proceeds to reduce Jewish law and ritual to
a mechanism for pressure-molding the family into an optimum unit for capitalist
activity. Sexuality and marriage are regulated to sublimate libidinal desire
into capitalist energy. As proof, though neither this nor the other numerous
texts cited bear him out, Sombart quotes the famous statement, “A man should
not be without a wife, nor a woman without a husband; both shall see to it that
God’s spirit is in their union.” There is on the subject of sex and much else,
Sombart goes on, “an almost unique identity of view between Judaism and Puritanism.”
For all its seeming cleverness, none of this stands up to analysis:
Jewish attitudes toward love, marriage, and sex are not—as the pathbreaking