Jewish Business Dynasties or a Jewish aristocracy? Conceptualising the Jewish elite c.1850-1950

• In Event: Jews with Money: transatlantic perspectives on class, family, power and vulnerability

Abstract

Work on Jewish elites in this period has operated within a nation-state framework, elaborating paradigms that emphasise national distinctiveness: “the cousinhood”, “juifs de la république”, “Our Crowd” etc, although recently historians have emphasised also the transnational dimensions of families associated, for example, with the Parisian haute banque.

Rather than situating families like the Rothschilds, the Philippsons, the Sassoons and the Gunzbergs within nationally constructed bourgeoisies, this paper argues they are better conceptualised first as Jewish Business Dynasties, and second as a group which, during the period in question, deserves to be understood as the ‘Jewish aristocracy’ in view of their landownership, cosmopolitanism, social aspirations, endogamy and position within intra-Jewish class hierarchies.One advantage of this approach is that it serves to de-particularise Jewish history by deploying conceptual categories that are already widely used by “general” historians.

Drawing on examples taken from early modern and modern Jewish history, the paper considers (1) the relationship between these categories and earlier social types such as the central European “court jew” and the Moroccan “tujjar sultan” (2) the changing relationship between social and political structures in the era of the “dual revolution” (3) what distinguished Jewish business dynasties in this period from their Christian equivalents in Europe in an era of aristocratic decline – including their ultimate fate during the Holocaust.

Essentially, the paper argues that the great Jewish business dynasties served a particular function in European capitalism at a particular moment in time, becausetheir anomalous status as Jewish aristocrats allowed them to act as brokers and intermediaries between very different financial and political contexts. This function ceased became less meaningful with the political upheavals of the early 20th century. As revolution and the collapse of many European empires rendered this new Jewish aristocracy expendable, it transpired that – like the Court Jews of old - their power had always been contingent.

The paper was originally conceived and written with Jaclyn Granick. It emerges from the AHRC-funded project “Jewish country houses – objects, networks, people”.

Author

• Abigail Green, Brasenose College