The Politics of Jewish Commerce

“Magisterial…” -The Leo Baeck Institute Newsletter

“Rarely have scholars undertaken, as Jonathan Karp does in this new book, to position the ongoing debates on Jewish emancipation within larger debates over trade, commerce, and political economy within European intellectual history. And no scholar to date has done so in such a wide-ranging and thorough manner as Karp, looking at so many different national contexts and at such a broad field of early-modern history. This is…a major book that should be required reading for scholars and graduate students in Jewish history, in early-modern history more generally, and in the history of Western economic thought.” --The International History Review

“The Politics of Jewish Commerce is an important and stimulating contribution to at least three areas of study—Jewish history, modern economic thought, and the Enlightenment. Its value lies in the originality of its perspectives, which flow from the author’s excellent decision to adopt an intellectual-historical approach to European economic thought in the period 1650 to 1850 insofar as it relates to the political debate about the place of Jews in modern society.” --Journal of Interdisciplinary History

“This original and thoroughly researched book carefully analyzes debates surrounding the place and role of ‘the Jews’ in the economy of early modern Western Europe. The end result is a convincing, fresh and careful analysis of three related but potentially explosive topics that are rarely dealt with appropriately in academia and beyond: Jews, money and modernity. This is a convincing, learned and path-breaking analysis of several different, yet related, fields that add significantly to the study of early modern Europe, the birth of modern economic and political thought, and the place and role of “the Jews” in all three of these discourses.” --Religious Studies Review