Jews, money and image

The scholars approached their topic with considerable nervousness, and that was before the Wall Street meltdown, before Bernard L. Madoff.

Would a series of lectures at a premier business school on the history of Jews making money feed negative stereotypes?

In the end, the Wharton School and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies decided to go ahead and tackle a topic that has gotten short shrift from academics until recently.

The goal, said the center's director, David Ruderman, is to understand Jewish economic history "more profoundly, which is what a university does."

The center and Wharton, which both are part of the University of Pennsylvania, are sponsoring three lectures at Wharton's Huntsman Hall titled "Jews in Business: Between Myth and Reality." The first is Jan. 20.

The presentations grew from a yearlong postdoctoral study program at the Katz Center, which has its own series of speeches on the topic in the community. Each year, 20 fellows from around the world come to the center to study a particular issue. This year, it is Jews, commerce and culture.

"We don't want to be intimidated by the perceptions of Jewish economic life," said Jonathan Karp, a fellow at the Katz Center who teaches Jewish history at Binghamton University and will be the first speaker for the Wharton lectures.

Michael Gibbons, a deputy dean who approved Wharton's role in the lectures, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Karp and other visiting scholars at the center said many Jews had indeed done well in modern business and finance. They trace the financial success of Jews in the Western world to a cultural emphasis on education coupled with centuries of persecution that forced Jews to disperse around the world - creating the foundation for global trade networks - and discrimination that shut Jews out of the most prestigious jobs. That honed a talent for spotting opportunity on the fringes of the economic world. Jews were among the first, for example, to see the mass-audience potential in movies and recorded music by black artists, Karp said.

The downside of economic success throughout much of Jewish history was that it fueled resentment and harsh treatment from competing groups, the scholars said.

"If you wanted to criticize Jewish society, you would use their . . . economic success as a stick to beat them with," said Adam Teller, a University of Haifa historian who with Karp and Derek Penslar, of the University of Toronto, proposed devoting this year at the Katz Center to economic history.

Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University who is not involved with the lecture series, said the history of Jews in business was indeed understudied. Historians in general have been less interested in economic than in social history for much of the last century, he said, but Jewish historians have had the extra concern that "their writing would be used against them."

Historians at the center said they had seen little evidence that the current economic crisis or Madoff's audacious alleged fraud have led to an upswing in anti-Semitism. That is a sign that Americans can handle this subject, they said.

"It is a measure of Jews' growing security in America that we feel the topic isn't off-limits," Sarna agreed.

The belief that Jews are good with money cuts both ways, the historians said. There's the dark side of Shakespeare's Shylock and Dickens' Fagin, which bolstered the negative stereotype that Jews were greedy and unsavory. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which have been discredited as a forgery, took anti-Semitism to the extreme, contending that Jews conspired to use their wealth to control the world. On the plus side, Jews have been seen as a group whose business acumen could bring communities prosperity.

Whether Jews are disproportionately successful was a matter of contention among the fellows, but they pointed out that there were plenty of examples of Jewish business failures. And there are Jews on all sides of the Wall Street meltdown, from Madoff and his recently alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme to people who are policing financial abuse and trying to rebuild the economy.

The historians said they had found nothing inherent in Judaism that would lead to financial success or a predisposition to entrepreneurship. In fact, commerce and religion have largely been kept separate in Jewish cultural life, they said.

The one exception is that the Jewish emphasis on education gave Jews an early advantage: literacy and familiarity with numbers.

Jews gravitated toward finance and trade centuries ago, when more highly valued roles in agrarian societies - land owner and warrior - were denied to them. Early Christians were banned from loaning money at interest to fellow Christians, but they needed loans and Jews took on that role.

Over time, the historians said, Jews were seen as trusted middlemen and people who could manage the wealth of powerful landowners. Their lack of a country or land of their own made them less threatening to nobles.

"They empowered themselves with their economic activity," Teller said.

Jews' outsider status also freed them from the more rigid roles of noble, burgher and peasant, which were assigned to European countries' primary populations. They became the "utility infielders" and the business "B-team of premodern society," Karp said. Those roles came with flexibility that helped Jews exploit business opportunities better than some other groups.

Penslar said Jews in the 1500s could never have guessed it, but the competitive, restrictive nature of their lives would leave future generations better positioned for modern capitalism. "The Jews were historically urban and mobile people," he said. They were also entrepreneurial and accustomed to finding opportunity where others had missed it.

"The Jews were excluded for most of the history of Europe from accepted fields of economic activity," Teller said. "They were always looking for different niches."

For more information about the Wharton lectures, contact the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at 215-238-1290, Ext. 406.