Judaism, Capitalism, and Communism

Wednesday, February 13, 2013 by David Gordon

 [Part 2 of "Judaism and Capitalism: Friends or Enemies?" The Lou Church Memorial Lecture in Religion and Economics, presented at the 2012 Austrian Scholars Conference (Click here for part 1)]

Let us turn then to another attempt to connect Judaism and capitalism, and this one the most significant of all, Werner Sombart’s The Jews and Modern Capitalism, which appeared in 1911. Sombart conforms to the pattern mentioned earlier that those who ascribe to the Jews primary responsibility to capitalism tend to be hostile to both Judaism and capitalism.

In Sombart’s case this is hardly surprising. Sombart began his academic career as a convinced Marxist. Though he veered to the right, he remained a socialist to the end, albeit of a peculiar kind. Like Marx, he stressed Jewish involvement in trade as the essence of capitalism: The Jews with their trader-ethic had succeeded in transforming the more static values of the Middle Ages. The broad outlines of this theory will already be familiar from our discussion of Marx’s essay; but Sombart developed the position with enormously greater learning in the Jewish sources and in Jewish history. Sombart himself says that Marx, in his essay, “looked deep into the Jewish soul”. After mentioning two other writers, he says, “What has been said about the Jewish spirit since these men (all Jews!) wrote is either a repetition of what they said or a distortion of the truth.”  To Read More....