Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 2015 The Jewish Encounter With Capitalism By Jerry Z. Muller
The Great Jewish Migration to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way By Hasia R. Diner (Yale University Press) Recent years have seen an efflorescence of the newly christened "history of capitalism." In fact, the history of capitalism has long been the mainstay of both economic and business history. What is new is the rediscovery by social and cultural historians of the centrality of capitalism to the development of the modern world. While economic historians, business historians, and labor historians long tended to emphasize the history of production, recent historians have increasingly focused on the history of consumption. Still relatively underexplored are the history of marketing and distribution, which lie between production and consumption. Now we have Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way, by one of the foremost historians of American immigration, Hasia R. Diner, a professor at New York University. The book focuses on distribution, connects the social and cultural history of capitalism with the history of Jewish migration, and paints on a global canvas. It also reflects the rebirth of Jewish economic history, which is bringing Jews into the new history of capitalism. As Heinrich Heine put it, "Wie es sich christelt, so jüdelt es sich"—as the Christians go, so go the Jews. Jewish economic history thrived in the interwar years of the 20th century, but was then kept alive in the decades after World War II by only a handful of practitioners, like the Nobel-winning economist Simon Kuznets (whose essays on Jewish economic history, first published from the 1950s to the 1970s, have been collected and republished in two volumes as Jewish Economies: Development and Migration in America and Beyond). In the last decade, a younger generation of historians has produced impressive studies of the involvement of Jews in numerous industries, as well as following the global turn in historical studies by delving into the Jewish role in transcontinental and transoceanic commerce. Diner’s premise—which echoes the work of Kuznets and the remarkable 2006 comparative study by Cormac Ó Gráda, Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History—is that Jews were motivated to migrate from the Old World of the Romanov, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires not so much because of anti-Semitism as because of better economic opportunities. (As the late Arthur Hertzberg once put it to a class of predominantly Jewish students I attended at Columbia University, "Your ancestors didn’t come here in search of religious freedom—those were the Pilgrims. Yours came here to make a buck.") And for a remarkable number of those Jewish migrants, the first step on the ladder of opportunity was peddling, whether they journeyed to the United States, Canada, South Africa, the Caribbean, South America, or even to economically marginal regions of the British Isles like Wales or Ireland. Given that almost a third of world Jewry migrated from the early 19th century through the 1920s—the period Diner focuses on—the world history of peddling is of outsize importance. Though this book is not the first to touch on the topic—Diner herself devoted attention to it in her 1992 A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880—the subject deserves further treatment. It is, however, particularly difficult to research. In Eastern and Central Europe, peddling had often been a lifelong occupation for poor Jewish men; in the New World, it was a trade most of them plied only for a few years, before moving on to other occupations. Typically, they sold goods in rural areas, supplied by Jewish storekeepers in towns and cities, so they were essentially self-employed. They thus left no conventional business records, and there are no archives of peddlerdom. Diner has thus had to construct her story from a wide range of local histories, memoirs published and unpublished, newspaper articles, and miscellaneous sources on several continents. Conceptualizing and organizing that material poses no less a challenge. Diner’s key contention is that the experience of Jewish peddlers was much the same in various locations. She therefore presents an archetype of the peddling experience, discussing individual similarities and salient differences in various regions and countries interspersed with illustrative anecdotes. The challenge of organizing diverse material is not quite overcome, and almost every key contention is made repeatedly. But that is a small price to pay for a book that fills so large a hole in the history of the Jewish encounter with modern capitalism. Diner shows us that, often brought to the new world by relatives or neighbors from home, the young men would be offered loans and credit that allowed them to begin their sales circuit. Shared ethnicity provided the glue of commercial trust. In rural areas, peddling brought Jews into the domestic space of largely gentile and female customers. For not only did the sales pitch take place in the household, but the peddlers—on the road for most of the week—also often slept in the homes of their clients. For the farmers, farm workers, or laborers in mines and forests who typically bought their wares, it was often the first exposure to Jews, and to the consumer products of the international capitalist economy. For the Jewish immigrants, it meant immersion in the language, tastes, and mores of both the majority population and of minority customers, like African-Americans or indigenous peoples. Successfully grasping opportunity meant becoming a sort of anthropologist, which hastened the process of assimilation. With a few notable exceptions (Quebec), Diner tells us, in many areas Jewish peddlers met with little antipathy toward Jews among their customers. Her book explores the typical occupational routes beyond peddling as well. Rather than returning home with an empty sack or wagon, the peddlers often collected cast-off bones and scrap metal, which led to careers in the "junk" business of salvage. Many went on to become storekeepers themselves, and in parts of the Southern and Midwestern United States, retailing would be dominated by former peddlers and their descendants. Others advanced to real-estate development, banking, manufacturing, and the growth and export of agricultural commodities. Diner is neither afraid to endorse generalizations nor haunted by the demons of essentialism. Jews were well positioned by their historical experience to act as commercial middlemen; they were eager to be self-employed; and they had an acute sense of opportunity, she writes. But comparing their rate of upward mobility and civic acceptance in the United States with that in other countries, their experience in America was indeed exceptional. Jerry Z. Muller is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America and the author of Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton University Press, 2010). _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
