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

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

In 1933, Michael Gold published ‘Jews without Money’, a gritty autobiographical set in the slums of the Lower East Side. The title signalled Gold’s intention to confound antisemitic stereotypes and get away from novels about Jews in high society. Yet from the perspective of the twenty-first century, more social historians have gravitated towards writing about the kind of communities described by Gold, impoverished immigrants from Eastern Europe, eking out a living in the big city, than the more complex category of ‘Jews with Money’. This panel arises from the desire to find new ways to talk about rich Jews, their politics, their philanthropy and their business activities, a group whose strong transnational connections have been hitherto downplayed and whose place in existing historiographies of class is often anomalous. Drawing on examples from British, European and American experience, the panel seeks to draw out how Jewish elites situated themselves both in relation to the nation-state and capitalist development but also to the wider Jewish world. For despite differences in the pathways to integration on either side of the Atlantic, this group was united by its possession of unprecedented wealth, position and prestige, a source of their power but also of vulnerability.

A recurrent theme in these papers is the centrality of the Jewish family as a unit linked to marital strategies, business partnerships and the transmission of values. Attending to changing family structures can shed light on the extent of social mobility among Jews in late nineteenth-century Holland, the rural activism of Jewish landowners in Victorian Britain, the dynamics within international Jewish politics, and the ethos cultivated within New York family banks- as well as the antisemitism they aroused. By foregrounding the idea of dynasties, each of the papers considers the success of efforts by these elites to maintain their wealth, their social position and their Jewishness over several generations, offering a portrait of ‘Jews with money’ over the longue durée.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish History in Europe, Asia, Israel, and Other Communities

Chair

• Lisa Leff, American University

Individual Presentations

• Jewish Business Dynasties or a Jewish aristocracy? Conceptualising the Jewish elite c.1850-1950 - Abigail Green, Brasenose College

• Opportunity, Agency, and Choices of “Assimilation”: The Jewish Dutch Elite c.1870-1940 - Sietske van der Veen, University of Amsterdam

• The Rural Activism of the Anglo-Jewish Elites c.1850-1950: Stories of Place and Privilege - Tom Stammers, Reader in Art and Cultural History, Courtauld Institute of London

• What Makes a ‘Jewish’ Bank Jewish in America: Antisemitism and the Jewish Family Dynasties who made American Finance - Rebecca Kobrin, Columbia University

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 11