Twentieth-Century Jewish Émigrés and Medieval European Economic History
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2012, Vol 3, Issue 3
Abstract
This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish émigrés to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The émigrés form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan and Robert Lopez) identified as Jews, but worked as European historians. The last (Karl Polanyi) was Jewish only by origin, identified as a Christian socialist, and worked first as an economic journalist, then in worker's education and late in life as a professor of economics. All five dealt with the origin of European capitalism, but in different veins: Kisch celebrated and Oelsner contested a hegemonic academic discourse that linked the birth of capitalism to Jews. Postan and Lopez contested the flip-side of this discourse, the presumption that medieval Europe was pre-capitalist par excellence. In doing so, they helped construct the current paradigm of a high medieval commercial revolution. Polanyi contested historical narratives that described the Free Market as the natural growth of economic life. This essay explores the grounding of these paradigms in the shared crucible of war and exile as Jewish émigrés. This shared context helps illuminate the significance of their intellectual contributions by uncovering the webs of meaning in which their work was suspended.
Authors and Affiliations
Julie Mell
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25256
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel3030556
- Views 364
- Downloads 17
Rethinking Material Religion in the East: Orientalism and Religious Material Culture in Contemporary Western Academia
This paper reviews the historical development of the modern discourse of “Orientalism” and the emergence of material culture as a self-reflexive theoretical transition in the West. Further, it investigates new types of...
Marital Naming Plans among Students at Four Evangelical Colleges
Despite increasingly egalitarian gender roles in the United States, when the wedding bells ring for heterosexual couples, husband and wife still commonly emerge sharing the man’s last name. Largely missing from previou...
A Political End to a Pioneering Career: Marianne Beth and the Psychology of Religion
Although forgotten in both Religionswissenschaft (the Science of Religion) and psychology, Marianne Beth (1880-1984), initially trained as a lawyer and already in 1928 called a “leading European woman”, must be conside...
Deposito Diademate: Augustine’s Emperors
To assist colleagues from other disciplines who teach Augustine’s texts in their core courses, this contribution to the Lilly Colloquium discusses Augustine’s assessments of Emperors Constantine and Theodosius. His pre...
The Paranormal in Jane Jensen’s “Gray Matter”
The main research issue of this article is to determine the extent to which Western esotericism influences the formation of computer game plots. The methodological framework is the occultural bricolage theory (C. Partr...