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Article Excerpt
WE SHOULD be surprised to discover Jews embraced by the word "pariah." A term plucked from the caste systems of the Asian subcontinent, its application to a Western and Near Eastern minority might seem to imply that all oppressed are oppressed in the same way. In what sense are the Jews of Christendom like the eponymous low-caste hereditary drumbeaters of southern India? So far as I know, none of the many writers who have called the Jew "pariah" have taken this question seriously, and neither will I. Since its first applications to Jews (in the 1820s?), the word has always served as a metaphor meant to trigger comparisons more polemical than analytic. (1) Nevertheless, the heat of these polemics has provided energy for the pursuit of many questions surrounding the role of the Jew within Christian societies. Here it will nourish a particularly torturous interrogation. To what extent are the analytic concepts by which the modern social sciences approach the study of "included outcasts" (concepts such as "pariah") themselves recapitulations of early Christian thinking about the Jews? To what extent, in other words, is the sociological a secularized form of the theological?
Although Hannah Arendt made the "Jew as pariah" fashionable (1978; 1997 [1957]), it was Max Weber who made him scientifically respectable. Thanks in part to Nietzsche's influence, Jews played an important role in Weber's historical sociology. They "stimulated Weber's concept formation in the sociology of religion, resulting in such concepts as ethical prophecy, salvation religiosity and rational ethical religiosity, as well as resentment, the religiosity of retribution, the situation of a pariah people, pariah intellectualism, and pariah religiosity" (Schluchter, 1989: 164). Weber's serious engagement with the history of Judaism began in early versions of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (published in 1904-5). (2) That work sought to explain the emergence of capitalism not in terms of a victory of avarice or materialism over Christian asceticism and spirituality, but as a Hegelian synthesis of seeming opposites. Luther and Calvin had attained what no religion had heretofore achieved: a union of a spiritualized and transcendent religiosity with a disenchanted and rationalist ethics. The result, according to Weber, was a Protestant (and specifically Puritan) "worldly asceticism," a faith capable of reading the divine in the material, possessing a soteriology of prosperity, a "capitalist spirit."
Through familiarity that famous phrase has lost its paradox, but this was not the case in 1905. To a society trained by Marxist and reactionary alike to associate capitalism with the "Jewish" world of matter and not the Christian world of spirit, Weber's thesis (or rather, synthesis) was an invitation to polemic. (3) That invitation was most famously accepted by Werner Sombart in his Die Juden und das Wirtschaflsleben (1911; translated as The Jews and Modern Capitalism, 1951). His argument was straightforward. The history of capitalism was driven by the migrations of the Jewish people, and had nothing to do with Christian theology. Whenever in the world's history economies flourished and profit grew, there could be found the Jew. "Israel passes over Europe like the sun: at its coming new life bursts forth; at its going all falls into decay" (1951: 13). Capitalism developed, not from Christian synthesis, but through the progressive colonization of the world by the Jew.
Sombart trotted through the history of Europe and its colonies in search of evidence for his thesis, but it was the United States that served him as chief witness. Weber had invoked Benjamin Franklin's ethics of profit to argue that the purest example of the power of the Protestant synthesis could be seen among the Puritan settlers of North America. For Sombart, American capitalism was instead the product of heavy initial settlement by Jews and crypto-Jews (by which he meant Marranos, Huguenots, Puritans ...). "America in all its borders is a land of Jews." "[T] he United States (perhaps more than any other land) are filled to the brim with the Jewish Spirit." "In the face of this fact, is there not some justification for the opinion that the United States owe their very existence to the Jews? ... For what we call Americanism is nothing else, if we may say so, than the Jewish spirit distilled" (30, 38, 44).
Stripped of its historical garb, the argument seems to us an embarrassingly conventional polemic. Association with a negative stereotype of Judaism indicts Americanism, capitalism, and Protestantism. The antiquity of the strategy will become apparent in the following pages, but here it is enough to stress its insistence on an extreme antagonism between "Jewish" materialism and "Christian" spirituality. The Jewish "attitude of Mammon was as opposed to [the Christian] as pole to pole" (121). Despite the sharpness of the polarity, Sombart imagined "Jewish" materialism as highly mobile and highly infectious. Wherever it emerges among Christians, that capitalism should be understood as a form of Judaizing. "All that Weber ascribes to Puritanism might ... with equal justice be ascribed to Judaism, and probably in greater degree; nay, it might well be suggested that that which is called Puritanism is in reality Judaism" (192). Or, as he put it less tentatively later in the book, in a lapidary sentence set off as a paragraph of its own: "Puritanism is Judaism" (249; emphasis in original). (4)
For all its conventionality (or indeed because of it), Weber took the charge of capitalism's and Protestantism's "Jewishness" seriously, and his elaboration of a Jewish history and sociology should be seen as a response to it. In Ancient Judaism (1917-1919, trans. 1952) and The Sociology of Religion (1922, trans. 1964) he grappled again and again with the role of Jews and the Old Testament in the genealogy of capitalism, incorporating his results into the much-revised final version of The Protestant Ethic (1920-21, trans. 1930). Throughout these works Weber deployed a number of solutions to the problem. One was to delimit the impact of Judaism on Christianity through historical periodization. Thus Weber emphasized that it was the ancient Israelite religious ethic of worldly action "free of magic and all forms of irrational quest for salvation" (1952: 4) that mattered for the future of ascetic Protestantism, and that this ethic had been transmitted, not through contact with rabbinic Jews, but through Christian textual engagement with the Old Testament. Further, points of seeming commonality between rabbinic Judaism and Protestantism, such as "formal legality as a sign of conduct pleasing to God" masked fundamental differences. Observance of the law was not the same as inner conviction; Talmudic legalism differed from Protestant morality (1985 [1930]: 165-6, 270-1). (5)
In short, according to Weber nothing of importance to the development of capitalism came from the long history of rabbinic Judaism lived among Christian nations. Christian economic history required only the Old Testament, and even that vital text was stripped of its Jewish chains before it mounted the stage of world history:
The world-historical importance of Jewish religious development rests above all in the creation of the Old Testament, for one of the most significant intellectual achievements of the Pauline mission was that it preserved and transferred this sacred book of the Jews to Christianity. ... Yet in so doing it eliminated all those aspects of the ethic enjoined by the Old Testament which ritually characterize the special position of Jewry as a pariah people (1952: 4).
The similarities between Weber's "historical" argument and the Christian theology of supercession will become more obvious as we proceed, but they were probably not lost on Weber himself. Thus in his lectures of 1919-1920, entitled "Universal Social and Economic History," Weber stressed as key moments in the economic history of the West "the miracle of Pentecost, the fraternization in the Christian Spirit," and "the day of Antioch (Galatians 2.11) where Paul (in contrast to Peter) fostered a cultic community with the uncircumcised" (Weber, 1961 [1927]: 238, 264).
Weber adopted the sociological concept of the "Jew as pariah" under the sign of this same polemic in order to quarantine the "spirit of capitalism" from those who would infect it with Jewish influence. The model was asserted in the opening paragraph of Ancient Judaism: "The problem of ancient Jewry ... can best be understood in comparison with the problem of the Indian caste order. Sociologically speaking the Jews were a pariah people [ein Pariavolk], which means, as we know from India, that they were a guest people who were ritually separated, formally or de facto, from their surroundings" (1952: 3). In The Sociology of Religion, Weber expanded the definition. "In our usage, 'pariah people' denotes a distinctive hereditary social group lacking autonomous political organization and characterized by prohibitions against commensality and intermarriage originally founded upon magical, tabooistic, and ritual injunctions" (1964: 108). (6) The self-imposed marginality of a "pariah people" meant that, as a recent defender of Weber's argument has put it, diaspora Judaism had "a high capacity for innovation" but "a low capacity for diffusion" (Schluchter, 1989: 199). Therefore, even if the Jewish ethic had been truly capitalist (recall that for Weber it was not), it could not have been a source for the economic and cultural transformation of Christendom. It was in order to establish this point that Weber insisted, first, that the "Jews segregated of their own free will, and not under the pressure of external rejection," and second, that this self-creation of a pariah religiosity had occurred early, at the very origins of the Israelite peoples. (7) The pariah status of the Jews served as a cordon sanitaire, keeping Christian rationalism and materialism free of Jewish influence. Adjusting the metaphor, the exceptional status of the Jews was the tie that allowed Weber to bind together worldliness and spirituality into a specifically Christian synthesis. (8)
The analogy of Jew and pariah has been criticized as often as it has been embraced. Weber himself was aware that in asserting it he was ignoring important attributes of the Indian system not present in the European case (caste for example). He was less conscious of the violence he was doing to the particularities of Israelite and Jewish history, religion, and culture, though a number of scholars have since pointed that violence out (e.g., Baron, 1937; Taubes, 1966; Momigliano, 1980). Within sociology the debate was transformed by the publication of Homo Hierarchicus, Louis Dumont's study of the caste system in India. Dumont claimed that Weber's emphasis on the particularism of pariah peoples (Jews and Gypsies, among others) had introduced tension into his broader models of social formation (1980 [1961], appendix A: 249-50). He specifically criticized the tendency to treat the pariah as radically separate from the privileged, and his own exposition of the caste system began with a concept of "fundamental opposition" derived from a structuralist reading of Hegel. "Hegel saw the principle of the system in abstract difference ... [which] culminates in the universal." "The whole is founded on the necessary and hierarchical coexistence of the two opposites." (Dumont, 1980: 42-45; emphasis in original). He therefore suggested a different relationship between Brahman and Untouchable, and implied a different etiology for pariah status than Weber's:
It is clear that the impurity of the Untouchable is conceptually inseparable from the purity of the Brahman. They must have been established together, or in any case have mutually reinforced...
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