The Origins of Jewish Political Economy

In pre-modern Jewish thinking, religion and economics were inextricably linked. From the mid-seventeenth century, economic life in Western Europe began to remove itself from the sphere of Jewish religious authority. This separation of the religious and economic spheres was an important harbinger of Jewish modernity, because it marked the diminution of communal authority and a secularization of Jewish consciousness. In the later phases of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) in Germany, the two spheres were rejoined but in an entirely modern form that constituted a distinctly Jewish political economy. At first, speculation about Jewish political economy came from the assimilated periphery of the Jewish intellectual community. By the mid-1800s, however, the notion of a Jewish political economy had migrated from the periphery to a core of Jewish communal leaders committed both to acculturation and to the preservation of Judaism and the Jews. This article will trace the dialectical process, taking place between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, of unity, rupture, and fusion between Judaism and the economic practices of Jews. Our subjects will be the intellectual and mercantile elites among West and Central European Jewry, particularly in Germany. Whereas medieval apologists had, in response to Christian attacks, focused on the defense of Jewish scriptural interpretation, their seventeenth-century counterparts stressed the Jews' economic usefulness. Economic arguments are central to the two most significant producers of Jewish apologetic texts of the century: Simone Luzzatto (1583-1663), a rabbi in Venice, and Menasseh ben Israel (1604-57), a Sephardic scholar in Amsterdam. Luzzatto's Discorso circa il stato de gl'hebrei et in particolar dimoranti nell'inclita città di Venetia was an appeal for continued Jewish rights of residency in the face of opposition from [Gentile] merchants on Venice's Board of Trade. Like Luzzatto, Menasseh ben Israel also petitioned for Jewish residency rights, in this case in the form of readmission to Britain, in his Humble Addresses to Oliver Cromwell (1655). The similarities between the works derive not only from the analogous environments in which they were produced but also from the fact that Menasseh ben Israel read and was influenced by Luzzatto's Discorso.(26) Both works placed the issue of Jewish rights squarely within the framework of utility, although the Humble Addresses are undergirded by the millenarianism