Rebecca Kobrin and Adam Teller, editors of Purchasing Power: The Economics of Modern Jewish History, argue that their volume is part of an advance guard of a renewed interest in writing on Jewish economic history, reversing previous generations of Jewish historians who had largely relegated the topic “to the sidelines” (p. 1). The lack of attention to this subject, they argue, is in part due to its malodorous associations. For many centuries, the first principle of anti-Semitism has been the assumption of a malevolent connection between Jews and money and between Jewish money and secretly wielded Jewish power. If there is another historical subject on which more malicious nonsense has been written than that of Jews and money, it does not immediately come to mind. The delicate subject of Jewish business success and acumen has led many Jewish historians to treat it gingerly.

There are other reasons, the editors argue, that historians of the Jews have tended to focus elsewhere, on topics with less fraught historiographies. Recent work in social, labor, women's, and cultural history generally neglects business and economic history. Moreover, a tradition of training Jewish historians places more emphasis on the explication of texts than on the analysis of bookkeeping ledgers. Kobrin and Teller assure readers that the times are changing. Capitalism is a hot topic, one that no longer has to be apologized for. The anti-Semitic miasma that has long pervaded the question of the existence or nonexistence of a Jewish business “exceptionalism” has been dispersed. And for a topic that has attracted more than its share of tendentious essentializing, historians no longer have to write about “the Jew” as an ideal type; they can now study Jews in their particular historical settings and circumstances. The last taboo has been broken as well: historians can write, without apologies, about the relation between Jewish wealth and Jewish power, as reflected in the subtle double entendre in this volume's title.

The editors open the book with a useful overview of writing on modern Jewish economic history from the early nineteenth century to the present, in Europe and the United States, defining “modern” as dating from the sixteenth century on. If I would offer a cavil, I would somewhat challenge their claim that Salo W. Baron underplayed economic history in his monumental Social and Religious History of the Jews (18 vols., 1952–1983). And I would have liked to see more recognition of recent work on Jewish business history, such as Niall Ferguson's study of The House of Rothschild (2 vols., 1998–1999).

In many collections of essays, a gap exists between a volume's aspiration and its somewhat uneven realization. In Purchasing Power, the division is less noticeable than in many of its peers. I wish I had the space to describe every essay. The first section of the collection, “Networks and Niches: The Creation of Jewish Economic Power,” places Jewish power in several distinctive milieus. Bernard Dov Cooperman writes of Jewish moneylending in sixteenth-century Rome. Carsten L. Wilke tells a fascinating story of the domination of the seventeenth-century Spanish tobacco monopoly by Portuguese crypto-Jews living in the French Pyrenees, a dangerous business that could involve an unwanted summons to the Inquisition. Glenn Dynner discusses nineteenth-century restrictions on Jewish merchants on certain key commercial streets in Poland, shaped in part out of a perception that Jewish entrepreneurial prowess led to discrimination against businesses. This, in turn, helped fuel the widespread Polish perception of a superior Jewish talent for business that “profoundly shaped those realities, which, in turn, fed back into the perceptions” (p. 109). For this baby boomer, the chapter in this section that struck closest to home was Jonathan Karp's on American and British rock-and-roll entrepreneurs; Karp takes the story beyond the somewhat familiar story of American Jewish independent record producers in the postwar decades to include their British peers, among them Brian Epstein, manager of the Beatles, and Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Rolling Stones.

If anything, the chapters in the second half of the collection—“Philanthropy, Money, and the Deployment of Power in Jewish Economic History”—are more pointed, dealing even more explicitly with questions of relations between Jewish wealth and power. Abigail Green writes of the development of what she provocatively calls the “Jewish International” in Europe by the middle of the nineteenth century, propelled by the stature of businessmen and philanthropists such as Sir Moses Montefiore and Adolphe Crémieux. Jonathan Dekel-Chen explores international Jewish power and mobilization in a much later era, in the struggle to support Soviet Jews. Derek Penslar discusses how Israel financed its war of independence through the largess of the diaspora, making a fascinating comparison with similar national movements in Ireland, Vietnam, and Algeria. He notes the delicate balance between colonialism and anticolonialism in the Zionist movement pointing out how “the British Empire nurtured the Jewish National Home, yet it was empire's collapse that made possible the state of Israel's birth” (p. 191). Although it is outside the scope of this volume, I would have liked to see Penslar's intriguing insights into international financial support for Israel from the diaspora brought down to the recent present.

Undoubtedly the most surprising contribution to the volume is its concluding chapter, Adam Sutcliffe's partial rehabilitation of the Nazi-tainted Werner Sombart. Sutcliffe's chapter offers a qualified defense of Sombart and his classic work on Jewish economic history, The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911). There is not much to do about Sombart's Nazi associations, but Sutcliffe argues that despite recent evaluations of Sombart as “a pseudo-scholarly hoax,” Sombart's work was highly regarded when it first appeared in 1911, including by most Jewish reviewers (p. 241). Sutcliffe endeavors to show what is living and dead in Sombart's work, precariously balanced as it is between anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism. What Sutcliffe finds particularly attractive about Sombart is his ambition, in contrast with a “field that is particularly averse to ‘grand theory’” (p. 255). Sombart, for Sutcliffe, is a reminder that “sweeping generalizations about Jews, commerce, and history” deserve a place in the agendas of contemporary Jewish historians (p. 255). This admonition is useful for a field that, going forward, must balance detailed attention to specific historical situations with the need to interpret and understand the broad scope of Jewish history.