Zachary Karabell on ‘Capitalism and the Jews’

Truthdig - It’s hard to imagine a more provocative title than “Capitalism and the Jews.” In fact, as I was reading the book, it was striking how many people glanced at the title and gave an ever-so slight but discernible double take. But Jerry Z. Muller’s recent book is neither a polemic nor a setup for a bad lounge joke but is instead a compelling, sober essay about an elephant that has been sitting in the middle of Western history for the past two centuries at least: Jews have been inextricably woven into the history and evolution of capitalism.

There’s no question that Jews have excelled in free-market societies over the past two centuries. Their places of prominence in the Western world reads like a conspiracy manual composed by zealous anti-Semites: In German on the eve of World War I, Jews composed upward of 40 percent of the corporate elite. In Hungary in the 1920s, Jews accounted for 54 percent of the owners of commercial establishments and 85 percent of bank directors. Jews for the entire 20th century were massively overrepresented proportional to their numbers in academia, medicine and finance and as lawyers, architects and engineers. In the 1980s, according to Forbes’ annual survey of the richest Americans, Jews made up a quarter of the list even though they accounted for only 3 percent of the population. They constituted one-fifth of the faculty of elite universities, and of the 38 Nobel winners for economics between 1970 and 2008, 22 were Jews. Read more.