An Economy of Strangers: Jews and Finance in England, 1650-1830 Avinoam Yuval-Naeh

An Economy of Strangers: Jews and Finance in England, 1650-1830 – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 9781512825060,9781512825053,1512825050,1512825069

Product details:

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1512825050
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1512825053
• Author: Avinoam Yuval-Naeh 

One of the most persistent, powerful, and dangerous notions in the history of the Jews in the diaspora is the prodigious talent attributed to them in all things economic. From the medieval Jewish usurer through the early-modern port-Jew and court-Jew to the grand financier of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and contemporary investors, Jews loom large in the economic imagination. For capitalists and Marxists, libertarians and radical reformers, Jews are intertwined with the economy. This association has become so natural that we often overlook the history behind the making and remaking of the complex cluster of perceptions about Jews and economy, which emerged within different historical contexts to meet a variety of personal and societal anxieties and needs.

In An Economy of Strangers, Avinoam Yuval-Naeh historicizes this association by focusing on one specific time and place―the financial revolution that England underwent from the late seventeenth century that coincided with the reestablishment of the Jewish population there for the first time in almost four hundred years. European Christian societies had to that point shunned finance and constructed a normative system to avoid it, relying on the figure of the Jew as a foil. But as the economy modernized in the seventeenth century, finance became the hinge of national power. Finance’s rise in England provoked intense national debates. Could financial economy, based on lending money on interest, be accommodated within Christian state and society when it had previously been understood as a Jewish practice?

Table contents:

Part I. Usury
Chapter 1. Jewish Usury, Jewish Historiography, and the Readmission Polemic of the 1650s
Chapter 2. Usury and the Re-narration of the Ancient Israelite Society
Chapter 3. English Ethnography and the Economy of the Jews
Part II. Finance
Chapter 4. Jews and the Financial Revolution
Chapter 5. The 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill and the Polemic over Public Credit
Chapter 6. Jews, Finance, and Gender on the Stage and Beyond
Chapter 7. Finance and the Eschaton
Part III. Reform
Chapter 8. Economic Crime and Criminal Economy
Chapter 9. Jews and English Civil Society: Between Cumberland’s The Jew and the Campaign for Emancipation
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

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