What Great Transformation? Continuity, Rupture, and Capitalism in Twenty-First-Century Jewish Studies

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Issue Date
2020Author
Brody, Samuel Hayim
Publisher
University of Pennsylvania Press (Penn Press)
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
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Copyright © 2020 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of scholarly citation, none of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. For information address the University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112.
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When it comes to Jewish politics and religion, contemporary scholarly trends broadly—if cautiously—favor the classic interpretation of modernity as a moment of rupture. When it comes to Jews and economics, however, continuity appears to be preferred. Taking up this disparity as it manifests in Jewish economic history and ethics, this essay argues that greater attention to the concept of capitalism would point back toward rupture, and that such a direction should be considered despite its checkered past.Both poles of Jewish economic history’s essentialist/contextualist divide affirm Jewish economic continuity, albeit in different ways. Essentialists claim that Jews were ushered by historical circumstances into economic niches that prefigured capitalist dynamism and fluidity, while contextualists reinforce liberal ideological notions of an unchanging “economic sphere” even as they attempt to avoid grand narratives. Capitalism, for the former, is seen as having always existed in nuce, even though fettered by environmental, technological, and political factors; for the latter, capitalism is intentionally left underdetermined in order to avoid being drawn back into old debates. If, however, we consider capitalism (with Polanyi and others) a qualitative “great transformation,” both of these descriptive orientations appear problematic.A similar problem appears in Jewish economic ethics, considered here through the example of the Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Economics. Biblical and rabbinic texts on topics defined today as “economic” are read in ways that suggest the perennial existence of contemporary categories. Taking a historical view of capitalism as a qualitatively determinate phenomenon might assist this field’s normative work.
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Citation
Brody, Samuel Hayim. "What Great Transformation? Continuity, Rupture, and Capitalism in Twenty-First-Century Jewish Studies." Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 110 no. 2, 2020, p. 343-372. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/jqr.2020.0012.
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