Jews as Capitalists, Communists, Zionists, and Victims of Nationalism

Review of Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010) ISBN 978-0-691-14478-8, 267 pages, Hardcover $24.95.

How can a man be both a capitalist and a communist? This was a question I wrestled with from an early age. As a young teenager, my immigrant father, after a conversation in Yiddish with a man I never remembered seeing before, declared with some amazement, “that man is both a millionaire capitalist and a communist.” His utterance was during the Cold War, when capitalism and communism were presented as polar opposites. They had spoken in a language I only knew a few words of and I puzzled over the comment for several decades as I studied American labor history, explored Communist Russia, and earned a doctoral degree in modern European history. Muller both confirms my understanding of what I learned about the subject and offers additional insights regarding the complex relationship of Jews to capitalism, communism, economic activity, ethnic identity, socialism, and the sociology of religion.

Jerry Muller is an erudite professor of Modern European intellectual history at Catholic University in the American capital. His primary foci are Jews as capitalists and communists and as the victims of modern nationalism. He

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starts with “the conspicuous presence” of Jews “in the history of capitalism” as both a symbol and as a reality (p. 8). In “The Long Shadow of Usury,” he presents evidence that Christianity stigmatized commerce and economic enterprise in general, especially money lending, whereas Judaism did not. Talmudic law, unlike Canonic (Church) law, did not find poverty ennobling. Kings of England and France even established the legal fiction that Christian moneylenders were Jews so as to be under their royal authority, rather than that of Church law (p. 24).

In writing about common characteristics of Jews and Christians over historical periods, always an emotional minefield, Professor Muller makes it very clear up front that only some Jews are good at capitalism, and that communists and other revolutionaries have typically been only a tiny minority of the Jewish population. Lots of useful endnotes are provided. He argues that “the People of the Book” were predisposed by their commercial tradition and high rate of literacy to do well in modern capitalist societies out of proportion to their numbers. Oriented to this life, not an afterlife, Jews were open to private property, markets, and profits. Their “religious intellectualism” meant continuous contact with books and a culture inclined to abstractions, personal discipline, fine distinctions in argumentation, oral disputation, and finding commonalities (p. 87). All of these traits could be easily transferred from the religious sphere to the secular sphere. Furthermore, he argues Jews showed “a propensity for discovering new wants and for bringing underused resources to the market” including illicit ones (p. 88).

In 1972, the Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006) argued that Jews benefited enormously from “free enterprise and competitive capitalism,” yet “have been consistently opposed to capitalism and have done much on an ideological level to undermine it” (p. 72). Muller thinks Friedman is at least half right since,

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politically, Jews favored left-of-center, mostly liberal parties. The historian argues this was for a variety of reasons, including that these parties offered equal citizenship to all, were not based on Christianity as were the rightist parties, and fostered a desire to disprove the stereotype of Jews as greedy money-grubbers through philanthropy and governmental programs to level the economic playing field.

In the last century, anti-Semitism has often been justified by the charge of Jewish communism. The small element of truth in the myth of Judeo-Communism was based upon some Jews and those of Jewish origin, although only a tiny minority of the Jewish population and always a minority of Communists, playing a salient role in communist movements, especially in the Bavarian and Hungarian revolutions at the end of WWI. Early in the Bolshevik Revolution, Moscow’s Chief Rabbi is alleged to have prophetically told the revolutionary Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronstein), “The Trotskys make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins pay for it” (p. 140). The intensity of the pogroms amidst the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) that killed 70,000 Jews in the Ukraine alone, led most Jews in Russia to see the Communists as the lesser evil, even though many were soon stigmatized and prosecuted as capitalists. There is also the fact that Karl Marx was of Jewish origin and seen as a Jew by his society even though he was baptized as a Christian and wrote the anti-Semitic “On the Jewish Question” in 1844. The communists installed by Russia as the leaders of the Soviet satellite nations after WWII contained some Jews in prominent positions, heightening anti-Semitism in these countries. As Stalin’s anti-Semitism became more overt during the Doctors’ Plot, Communist leaders of Jewish descent were not above using anti-Semitism to please Moscow, attempt to nationalize their communist regimes, and hold on to power. Overall, Muller does a good job of describing the complexities of Jews as Eastern European Communists and victims of

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communist anti-Semitism.

The author, who writes for The New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Wall Street Journal, believes that capitalism is the basis of modern nationalism. Muller’s approach fits in with the modern ideological defense of capitalism, although I find him to be a solid historian in most respects. However, to me as a modern historian, his assertion that capitalism is the foundation of the development of modern nationalism is unconvincing in this case.

When Professor Muller was asked to write for this special issue he declined the invitation, declaring that he had “neither the time nor talents to contribute.” Despite his disclaimer, even more than most historians he wanders into a psychological approach to his subject, although to the best of my recollection, he only uses the term “psychological” twice (pp. 207, 214). He finds Jews to be the Christian “Other,” describes the cases of denial, acknowledges the importance of considerable Jewish investment in their children, writes of national identity, and declares the greedy Voltaire’s anti-Semitism to be partly “a classic case of projection” (p. 31). Importantly, the professor is quite aware of the role of fantasy in human relations.

Despite Muller’s disclaimer, it is my impression that with a slight change of focus and vocabulary, Capitalism and the Jews could be presented as a work of psychological history. By refocusing the approach and adding concepts such as ambivalence, empathy, identification, the narcissism of minor differences, reaction formation, and splitting to the present use of the concepts of denial, fantasy, and projection, this could be a psychohistorical work. But, of course, that is not the interest of this intellectual historian, who draws most of his materials from economics, sociology, and other well-established disciplines.

Despite the author’s limitations regarding psychohis-

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tory and following from his ideological commitment to capitalism, this book is worth reading for its insights and treatment of a difficult and insufficiently examined subject.

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