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How has the ability of Jews to amass and wield power, within both Jewish and non-Jewish society, influenced and been influenced by their economic activity?Purchasing Poweranswers this question by examining the nexus between money and power in modern Jewish history. It does so, in its first section, by presenting a series of case studies of the ways in which the economic choices made by Jewish businessmen could bring them wealth and influence. The second section focuses on transnational Jewish philanthropic and economic networks. The discussions there reveal how the wielding of power by Jewish organizations on the world stage could shape not only Jewish society but also the international arena. In this way, the contributors to this volume reposition economics as central to our understanding of the Jewish experience from early modern Rome to contemporary America. Its importance for the creation of the State of Israel is also examined. As the editors write: \"The study of culture and identity has proved valuable and enlightening (and, in some senses, also comfortable) in understanding the complexities of Jewish history. Perhaps we should now return to the issues of the material bases for Jewish life, and the ways in which Jews have exploited them in their search for wealth and power. Our understanding of the Jewish past will be immeasurably enriched in the effort.\" Contributors:Cornelia Aust, Bernard Cooperman, Veerle Vanden Daelen, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Glenn Dynner, Abigail Green, Jonathan Karp, Rebecca Kobrin, Adam D. Mendelsohn, Derek Penslar, Adam Sutcliffe, Adam Teller, Carsten L. Wilke

This paper revisits the question of the connection between the wars in Eastern Europe (beginning with gezeirot tah. ve-tat in 1648) and the rise of Sabbateanism. It argues that the key issue is the ways in which the Ashkenazi Jews of Jerusalem dealt with the collapse of Polish-Lithuanian Jewish funding for the Land of Israel in the wake of the wars. Following 1648, an extended transregional philanthropic network began to support the relief efforts for Polish Jewry, diverting resources from the Land of Israel. Initially, this caused great suffering in Jerusalem, including a famine in which many, particularly women, died. In response, great pressure was put on the philanthropic network supporting Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel: the Ashkenazi women of Jerusalem tried to establish their own independent fundraising mechanism, while the men employed a Polish Jew, Nathan Shapira, to collect for them. A major kabbalist, Shapira found common ground with millenarian Protestants in north-western Europe, who saw in the suffering of the Jews in both Eastern Europe and the Holy Land a sign of the Messiah’s imminent return. When they sent money to Jerusalem, the local community—including Nathan of Gaza, then a student—was forced to consider its attitude towards them and their ideology. Nathan had grown up in the post-1648 expanded world of philanthropy and, after the appearance of Shabbetai Zvi, used many transregional fundraising strategies with great success to help spread the new messianic movement.

One of the most significant phenomena in the course of modern Jewish history is undoubtedly the astonishing success of the hasidic movement in winning and retaining large numbers of followers. What is even more remarkable is that this process took a relatively short time to come to fruition: It is widely agreed that at the death of the Ba‘al Shem Tov (who is often still regarded as the founder of the movement) in 1760, his circle numbered no more than a few dozen initiates, but by the 1820s, the movement had become dominant in the Jewish society of large swathes of eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine and Galicia.1 Many different explanations for this success have been proposed: Hasidism's attraction has been variously perceived as a result of its being a movement of religious revival and reform, a movement of social protest and class struggle, a movement popularizing elite Jewish mystical thought, and a movement of social reconstruction.2 In terms of social structure, all scholars agree that Hasidism's main innovation—and a major factor in its success—was the creation of the figure of the zaddik: a charismatic spiritual leader who acts as an intermediary between the individual hasid and God and provides answers to all problems, whether they are spiritual or earthly.3 However, relatively little attention has been paid to the social organization of the early hasidic movement as a whole, which allowed Jews from all over eastern Europe to find their place and nurture their new identity as hasidim.4 My goal here is to examine the development of Hasidism as a social movement from the perspective of the structures that it created to solidify the bond between the zaddik and the hasid. In particular, I shall focus on the ways in which the new movement overcame the geographic barriers separating Jews in different parts of eastern Europe.

In a paper entitled, “Newer Emphases in Jewish History,” published in 1963, Salo Baron wrote: “All my life I have been struggling against the hitherto dominant “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” … because I have felt that an overemphasis on Jewish sufferings distorted the total picture of the Jewish historic evolution….” Indeed, if one was to choose a single idea that encapsulated the legacy of Baron, perhaps the pre-eminent Jewish historian of the twentieth century, it would probably be this: Jewish history is not to be seen simply as a series of persecutions, which determined its nature and its course, but rather as a process of ongoing engagement between the Jews and their surroundings.

IN 1994, YO’EL RABA, a Polish-born Israeli scholar, wrote a comprehensive survey of the historiography surrounding the Jews’ fate during the Khmelnytsky uprising, which he called Between Remembrance and Denial.¹ Though written in the State of Israel at the end of the twentieth century, this work of monumental scholarship was firmly in a Jewish historiographical tradition whose roots go back at least to the Middle Ages, because it focused very narrowly on issues of Jewish martyrology.² Raba’s goal was to see how the fate of the Jews massacred in the uprising was reflected in historical depictions of the events from

In this article, I examine the critiques of the rabbinate expressed by four major groups within eighteenth-century Polish Jewish society: the communal leadership, the maskilim, the rabbinic elite, and adherents to the nascent Hasidic movement. All were agreed that contemporary rabbis were venal, ignorant, and dependent on the Polish nobility for their posts. In proposing solutions to this problem, the communal leadership and the maskilim favored a severe reduction in rabbinic power and even the abolition of the post, whereas the rabbinic elite and Hasidic leaders proposed a renewal of spiritual leadership through the creation of a new learned elite. However, whereas the rabbinic elite favored a withdrawn ascetic group of scholars, Hasidic leaders favored scholars who were deeply involved in social affairs. Noting that the basic outlines of this critique had been made nearly two centuries previously, I suggest that the problems it identified did not constitute a crisis brought on by external factors but, rather, a structural development that arose in response to the Jews' place in the early modern polity. Thus, the idea that modernization took place as the result of a crisis overtaking a static \"traditional society\" should be replaced with a model of incremental change.

In this article, I examine the critiques of the rabbinate expressed by four major groups within eighteenth-century Polish Jewish society: the communal leadership, the maskilim, the rabbinic elite, and adherents to the nascent Hasidic movement. All were agreed that contemporary rabbis were venal, ignorant, and dependent on the Polish nobility for their posts. In proposing solutions to this problem, the communal leadership and the maskilim favored a severe reduction in rabbinic power and even the abolition of the post, whereas the rabbinic elite and Hasidic leaders proposed a renewal of spiritual leadership through the creation of a new learned elite. However, whereas the rabbinic elite favored a withdrawn ascetic group of scholars, Hasidic leaders favored scholars who were deeply involved in social affairs. Noting that the basic outlines of this critique had been made nearly two centuries previously, I suggest that the problems it identified did not constitute a crisis brought on by external factors but, rather, a structural development that arose in response to the Jews' place in the early modern polity. Thus, the idea that modernization took place as the result of a crisis overtaking a static \"“traditional society\"” should be replaced with a model of incremental change.

It is perhaps no coincidence in our current age of global capitalism, when many comment upon the power of the economy and economic institutions to shape the world, that we are considering anew the larger role of the economy in Jewish history as well as the place of Jews in economic history.¹ In recent de cades, the social, and then the cultural, turn in historical research pushed questions concerning Jews’ economic activity to the sidelines. This does not mean, however, that economic issues themselves were in any sense marginal in the Jewish historical experience. They most certainly were not. Nor