Economy of Strangers (eBook)

Jews and Finance in England, 1650-1830

Avinoam Yuval-Naeh (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
264 Seiten
University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc. (Verlag)
978-1-5128-2506-0 (ISBN)

Infos

One of the most persistent, powerful, and dangerous notions in the history of the Jews in the diaspora is the prodigious talent attributed to them in all things economic. From the medieval Jewish usurer through the early-modern port-Jew and court-Jew to the grand financier of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and contemporary investors, Jews loom large in the economic imagination. For capitalists and Marxists, libertarians and radical reformers, Jews are intertwined with the economy. This association has become so natural that we often overlook the history behind the making and remaking of the complex cluster of perceptions about Jews and economy, which emerged within different historical contexts to meet a variety of personal and societal anxieties and needs.In An Economy of Strangers, Avinoam Yuval-Naeh historicizes this association by focusing on one specific time and place-the financial revolution that England underwent from the late seventeenth century that coincided with the reestablishment of the Jewish population there for the first time in almost four hundred years. European Christian societies had to that point shunned finance and constructed a normative system to avoid it, relying on the figure of the Jew as a foil. But as the economy modernized in the seventeenth century, finance became the hinge of national power. Finance's rise in England provoked intense national debates. Could financial economy, based on lending money on interest, be accommodated within Christian state and society when it had previously been understood as a Jewish practice?By projecting the modern economy and the Jewish community onto each other, the Christian majority imbued them with interrelated meanings. This braiding together of parallel developments, Yuval-Naeh argues, reveals in a meaningful way how the contemporary and wide-ranging association of Jews with the modern economy could be created.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 19.1.2024
• Reihe/Serie: Jewish Culture and Contexts
• Reihe/Serie: Jewish Culture and Contexts
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Schlagworte: 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill • Anglo-Jewish History • Antisemitism and the economy • British Economic History • Campaign for Emancipation • Commercialism • Cumberland The Jew • economic culture • English civil society • European Jewry • Financial History • Financial Revolution • history of capitalism • History of Finance • Investing • Jewish-Christian relations • Jewish economic history • Jews and money economy • Jews in England Britain • joint stock company • lending money on interest • Luxury • modern economy • seventeenth eighteenth century • Shylock • usury
• ISBN-10: 1-5128-2506-9 / 1512825069
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5128-2506-0 / 9781512825060