Much has been written about the history of Jews as a very specific kind of economic man. The well-known story about Jewish merchants, moneylenders and middlemen is a familiar part of the discourse on Jewish economy. Another longue durée perspective is on the Jew as the “Other,” mainly manifested in the discourse on anti-Semitism, old and new. These approaches have seldom been totally separated. But they have not always been analytically well combined either. Jonathan Karp's excellent and well-written book shows that research on Jewish economy cannot really be done without dealing their political emancipation. How much was expected and accepted of Jewish presence by the surrounding society and indeed by the Jews themselves? The book examines what economic and political discourses on Jewish commerce tell us about the changing mentalities of the times. The focus is on the intellectual history of economic discourse on Jews and debates over emancipation. Karp writes in the introduction that the book is primarily an intellectual rather than an economic history. The main source materials are published writings, pamphlets, and books by contemporary philosophers, preachers, lawyers, theologians and historians, and political economists, by both Jews and non-Jews. Karp's criteria of selection are in his own words, “both stringent and subjective” (p. 6). The texts he has analyzed are in French, Hebrew, German, and Yiddish. Texts in Spanish and Portuguese, Polish, and Russian are not included, which creates an emphasis on Western Jews.

Karp starts, wisely enough, with the period after the Protestant Reformation, roughly from the Peace of Westphalia to the Revolutions of 1848, the two centuries covering profound changes from an agrarian feudal economy to the beginnings of industrial capitalism in Western Europe. This in turn is reflected in the political theories of the times in general and of Jewish economy in particular. The period was decisive for Jewish emancipation and the intellectual and spiritual modernization of Jewish life in the West.

The expulsion of Jews from Spain in the Middle Ages and Jewish migrations to North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, Poland, and the New World created broader economic networks and new settlements also in Western Europe. Jewish commerce became well-known in broader social circles. The increased Jewish presence triggered new debates on the economic and political integration of Jews in Christian society.

A central argument in the book is that Jewish commerce was defined as a specific function in Western thought, as separated from normative economic life in general. The specifically Jewish commerce was then intrinsically connected to the stigmatization of the Jews. Karp poses the question if this kind of economic stigmatization of Jews was totally prejudiced. His answer is that it was and was not. Conspicuously, many Jews were occupied in specific economic activities concerning money lending, as middlemen, stockbrokers, in minting, tax farming, and especially as merchants. This specialization made Jews explicitly visible and thus controversial. Not only Jewish commerce but all commerce combined with credit was met with suspicion and ambivalence, at least up to the Enlightenment and even beyond. Since Jewish commerce was seen as an extremely specialized part of the whole, the prejudices struck harder on the already stigmatized group.

Karp presents a wide and comprehensive range of political debates, a small selection of which can be presented here. A central apologist of Jewish commerce was the Venetian rabbi Simone Luzzatto, who argued in a publication from 1638 on the unique utility of local Jewish merchants keeping control of foreign trade. Since political emancipation and land ownership was not the goal of rich Venetian Jews, they would not pose a threat to those in political power. Luzzato's view was that specialized Jewish commerce was an asset, not an obstacle to the Venetian economy.

On the question of Jewish naturalization, British writer John Toland was, in his pamphlet from 1714, convinced that Jews should be allowed to work in many economic fields beyond commerce. Jews were, in Toland's mind, inclined to be good British subjects because of Jewish civil and religious heritage. But to both Luzzatto and Toland, the Jew's ineligibility for owning land was central. In the 1750s Jews could own land in England. The debate on the Jewish Naturalization Bill of 1753 was more about whether they were legally entitled to do so or not. Those against the bill declared that it constituted a decisive threat to England's Christian character.

In 1781 the Prussian Christian Wilhelm Dohm presented a new paradigm on the civic improvement of the Jews. His book had far-reaching influence in Jewish political economy up to the 1820s. He was for full civic emancipation and rejected ethnic division of labor and insisted upon Jews leaving their antiquated commercial roles.

The most positive writers, especially in the aftermath of the French Revolution, looked upon both Jewish religion and commerce as echoes of Middle Age superstition and the l'ancien regime economy. Jewish emancipation was desirable since Jews with full citizenship could free themselves of their ancient religious ties and emancipate themselves of their limited commercial economic role. On the other hand, other writers of the same Enlightenment-era were convinced that Jewish emancipation was totally undesirable, exactly for the same initial reasons. Emancipation was connected to the l'ancien regime with land ownership of the nobility as a prerequisite to political power. If the Jews were to be emancipated, they would, just as the nobility, get free access to buy land, which in turn would give them too much political power.

Karp presents a more problematized view of the German-Jewish movement Wissenschaft des Judentums than Jewish Studies scholars before him. He challenges the idea that the Wissenschaft movement in its early days only dwelt on the history of Jewish scholarly accomplishments, literary and cultural matters, and the suffering of Jews. He does not totally agree that only with the emergence of Jewish socialism and Zionism were Jewish historians willing to deal with the backwardness of Jewish economy. Instead, Karp views the Wissenschaft as closely connected to Jewish Enlightement (Haskalah), which had the reformation of Jewish economic life as one of its the most important tasks. Karp demonstrates convincingly that both the early and later practitioners within the Wissenschaft presented extensive writings on how the Jewish Handelsstand could only be reformed through emancipation. The movement became an important gateway between Enlightenment and the later Marxist approaches to the question of Jewish economics.

Finally, Karp analyzes, among others, the text of the young Karl Marx, Zur Judenfrage, published in 1844, and shows how also Marx's writing should be studied not only in its contemporary context but also in awareness of the historical beginnings of the debates on the Jewish Question. Marx made a distinction between Jews (the real Jew) and Judaism (the religious smoke screen). In Karp's view, Marx is not crystal clear on either of these concepts since society should free itself from both the “real” Jew (the moneylender, merchant, peddler, and huckster) and Judaism. In Marx's interpretation, the social relations of the real Jew seemed to create a special kind of faith. It becomes unclear whether Marx was seeking the real Jew in his religion or the secret of his religion in the real Jew.

In summary, Karp's book is a deep and wide presentation of economic thought on Jewish commerce with profound analyses and learned reading. The presentation of numerous thinkers and debates of two hundred years gives occasionally the impression of a “catalogue aria” (Leporello in Mozart's opera, Don Giovanni). This is amplified by the fact that Karp does not follow any hypothesis or theoretical ramification for the whole book. A broader comparative summary as an ending chapter could possibly have given a more comprehensive picture of the development of the ever-present ambiguity of both non-Jewish and Jewish thinkers on Jewish commerce and emancipation through the centuries. But this does in no way diminish the advantages of this scholarly achievement.