General History
Subject: Jews and Jewishness in the English Economic Discourse of the 17th and 18th Centuries
Supervisor: Prof. Dror Wahrman
Abstract: My research illuminates the interface of two processes that English society underwent when entering modernity: the move from a traditional economy to a capitalistic market, and a renewed acquaintance with a Jewish population. It is common to point out the financial and consumer revolution - a process beginning at the end of the seventeenth century, reaching its peak in the eighteenth - as central axes in the process of British modernism. However, the chronological overlap of these happenings to the renewal of a Jewish community in England raises historical questions that did not meet their answers in scholarship. I wish to examine what changes did the image of a Jew undergo when his or her historic image as financially greedy person had become the desired financial norm. In what contexts was this image preserved as a contrast to a financial norm (and how was it done), and in what contexts was the image overturned to a positive and productive element of the modern financial structure? An examination of the financial element of the Jewish image can retell the narrative of financial mentality in a more sophisticated way and illuminate new aspects of the detachment and the continuity of the financial sphere from English clergy at the time.
Rotenstreich Stipend 2013/14