Abstract
Despite the many thousands of books written about why Jews have played such an outsized, mostly negative role in the imagination of Christians and Muslims, it still remains somewhat puzzling because there have never been that many Jews. The facts are well established. Christians thought that Jews should have recognized Christ as their savior, and Muslims wanted Jews to accept Muhammad as God’s greatest and final prophet. Many did one or the other, but those who resisted remained forever suspect as familiar but alien interlopers who are forever damned because they did not.
Those of their descendants who became mercantile middlemen and urban artisans for many generations were able to take advantage of capitalism better than most peasants or noble warriors so that in the industrializing West this advantage made Jews particularly visible as carriers of capitalism. This success plus the Jews’ traditional emphasis on being literate allowed many to become professionals and intellectuals once they were emancipated. Combined with prior religious prejudice, this relative success made Jews ideal modern scapegoats who could be blamed for all the sins of disruptive modernization. To this was added the misinterpretation of Darwinian theory that turned Jews into polluters of healthy races who had to be exterminated to prevent them from insidiously infecting and mongrelizing the superior pure nations.
Chad Alan Goldberg’s interesting Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought cites many of the best works on why this happened but takes a more specialized and focused look at how the analysis of the Jews’ situation became a key analytic concern for the founders of sociology in France, Germany, and the United States. He pays particular attention to Marx, Durkheim, Sombart, Simmel, Weber, and to the leaders of the early twentieth-century Chicago school: Thomas, Park, Wirth, and Stonequist. His conclusion is that Jews came to symbolize vastly contradictory aspects of modernity. For Sombart, who became a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite, it was Jews who created all the negative aspects of capitalism and modern alienation. For Simmel and Durkheim, who were born into Jewish families, Jewish religion, particularly its more orthodox forms, was regressive, even an archaic leftover from the past, though emancipated Jews could also be carriers of modernity. The Chicago sociologists saw Jews positively as strangers who nevertheless had adapted to modern urban life so successfully that they could be models of emerging modernity and assimilation into American life.
Karl Marx, whose father had converted to Protestantism to get a bureaucratic job in Prussia but who remains identified as a Jew, is more problematic. It has always been difficult for those who think of Marx as one of the greatest of all thinkers to admit that his early essay on the Jewish Question is a model of vicious anti-Semitism unredeemed by the conclusion that Jews had no real religion other than money and therefore were archetypal capitalists whose salvation would only come when capitalism itself was abolished.
There is no doubt that Jews have indeed played an outsized role in the popular and intellectual imagination. The French far right (before being disgraced by its collaboration with the Nazi occupiers during the Second World War) not only denied the legitimacy of the French Revolution but claimed that the Revolution itself was part of a Jewish plot to take over the world. Anti-Semites took it for granted that somehow less than one half of one percent of the population, still hemmed in by legal restrictions, could pull this off. But of course the Revolution, and in fact the entire Enlightenment that reshaped Europe and was foundational for the new United States, did liberate Jews, in large part because it rejected the superstitious dogmas and resulting prejudices of traditional religions. And liberated Jews in the West benefited hugely, with the result that their detractors could blame them for the destruction of community and greed of modern capitalism.
Nevertheless, Golberg’s book may go too far in making Jews so central to the creation of modern sociology. Durkheim was certainly a supporter of the French Revolution’s ideals and did not mind being identified as a Jew, but it is hard to see in most of his writing that Jews played a key role. His analysis of religion was central, as was his interpretation of modernity, but Jews did not feature prominently in his major works; and he had little respect for traditional Judaism’s archaic rituals or beliefs. Weber analyzed the Jewish religion but did not make the Jews key carriers of modern capitalism in either a positive or negative sense. Even Marx in his mature study of capitalism came to pay little attention to Jews.
More of a case can be made for Simmel and the Chicago School in the analysis of Jews as paradigmatic urban strangers. The Americans, however, were equally interested in all kinds of other urban migrants trying to assimilate into American life, and they mostly viewed Jews as a very positive example of successful adaptation to modern life.
As for Sombart, there is no question that his anti-Semitism played up many of the negative stereotypes of Jews as capitalists who contributed to the destruction of community wrought by modernity.
In contemporary sociology, analysts of what some call “Essential Outsiders,” middleman minorities who play a crucial role at a certain stage of economic modernization, continue to use Jews as an important example. Jews are not the only such people. Chinese in Southeast Asia, Lebanese in West Africa, Indians in East Africa, and many others are also studied, but Jews do remain the basic model of that phenomenon.
In his conclusion, Goldberg is particularly useful when he goes beyond the history of sociology to point out that Jews are still viewed in contradictory ways. They spread capitalism but remained attached to bizarre ancient Oriental ways. In the eyes of anti-Semites they were both fabulously rich financiers and communist revolutionaries. A century ago it was the Rothschilds, today it is the multi-billionaire, the great humanitarian Hungarian-American Jew George Soros who is plotting to take over the world and destroy western civilization. Zionism was an Enlightened secular socialist project that has turned into a fascist, oppressive state. Israel is the best friend of religious right-wing Americans, but that is because they are going to convert to Christianity, as Martin Luther once thought before he also turned into a disabused anti-Semite. And so on. The stereotypes remain as politically powerful as ever.
So perhaps Goldberg is right after all. If Jews no longer play a central role in sociological theorizing, perhaps it is time to go back and uncover the reasons for such long-lasting fascination with that less than one quarter of one percent of the global population.