Jewish History © The Author(s), under exclusive licence

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-021-09427-x to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

Jews, Economic Metaphors, and the Healthy Body Politic: The

Jewish Role in Christian Economic Narratives and the Birth of
Modern Economics

GIACOMO TODESCHINI
University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy
E-mail: todeschinigiacomo@gmail.com

Accepted: 9 July 2020

Abstract The linguistic structure of the Western Christian discourse about economics as re-
sembling and symbolizing the entire logic of earthly government and order was closely con-
nected to the shaping of the Christian discourse about Jews and Judaism as a religious and legal
system as seen in the framework of the Christian “economy” of Salvation. Seeing the Chris-
tian representation of Jews and Judaism from this viewpoint, it becomes evident that a close
historical relationship has existed between the history of Western anti-Judaism and the shap-
ing of the Western Christian way of analyzing and representing public and private economic
organization. Otherwise stated, there is a close relationship between European anti-Judaism
and Western economics.

Keywords Jewish economic activity · Christian economics · Economic lexica · Anti-Judaism

An Historiographical Introduction

In the 1950s, the famous Austrian and American economist and economic
historian Joseph Schumpeter introduced a new way of representing the his-
tory of economic theories. In what might be called the history of Western
economic rationality, he combined the evolutionary perspective with a rep-
resentation of economic discourses as historical realities. Schumpeter was
convinced that ancient Greek philosophers and late medieval Christian ju-
rists and theologians (the Scholastics) had produced a true economic science
and discovered certain economic principles. He considered these ancient and
late medieval economic doctrines as the prefiguration, or the primitive root,
of modern and contemporary economic theories. He audaciously concluded
that “a considerable part of the economics of the later nineteenth century
might have been developed from those bases more quickly and with less
trouble than it actually cost to develop it, and that some of that subsequent
work was therefore in the nature of a time- and labor-consuming detour.”1

1 Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, ed. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (New
York, 1954; repr. 2006), 93.