An Economy of Strangers

Jews and Finance in England, 1650-1830

Avinoam Yuval-Naeh (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

264 Seiten

2024
University of Pennsylvania Press (Verlag)
978-1-5128-2505-3 (ISBN)

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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.

Avinoam Yuval-Naeh is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Haifa. He is the author of articles in The Journal of Early Modern History and Historia. This is his first book.

Introduction

Part I. Usury

Chapter 1. Jewish Usury, Jewish Historiography, and the Readmission Polemic of the 1650s

Chapter 2. Usury and the Re-narration of the Ancient Israelite Society

Chapter 3. English Ethnography and the Economy of the Jews

Part II. Finance

Chapter 4. Jews and the Financial Revolution

Chapter 5. The 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill and the Polemic over Public Credit

Chapter 6. Jews, Finance, and Gender on the Stage and Beyond

Chapter 7. Finance and the Eschaton

Part III. Reform

Chapter 8. Economic Crime and Criminal Economy

Chapter 9. Jews and English Civil Society: Between Cumberland’s The Jew and the Campaign for Emancipation

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Erscheinungsdatum	21.12.2023
Reihe/Serie	Jewish Culture and Contexts
Zusatzinfo	11 b/w
Verlagsort	Pennsylvania
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Wirtschaftsgeschichte
ISBN-10	1-5128-2505-0 / 1512825050
ISBN-13	978-1-5128-2505-3 / 9781512825053
Zustand	Neuware