Find an online text version here.
After finally reading it for myself (!), I think the critics (namely, it seems, everyone else) are going too easy on themselves.
- Could Sombart be a Jew-hater? Yes.
- Could he, personally, be the worst sort of academic rent-seeker and hack? OK.
- Could his work have severe methodological issues? Does he assert things like “Puritanism is Judaism”? Absolutely.
- Is Weber more interesting? Arguably.
- And so on.
But I also think many sections have the ring of truth to them (new types of contracts and insurance, trust, demographic patterns. And it just “sounds like” Jews, excuse the intuitionism!). He reminds me of my old theory of Martin Luther’s “On the Jews and Their Lies” (he must have spoken to real, knowledgeable Jews while writing it, then omitted their final rejoinders). If he’s wrong, he’s wrong in deep and interesting ways.
It’s not just Marx’s hatred (Jews=Capitalism) + footnotes (“What in reality is the idea of making profit, what is economic rationalism, but the application to economic activities of the rules by which the Jewish religion shaped Jewish life? Before capitalism could develop the natural man had to be changed out of all recognition, and a rationalistically minded mechanism introduced in his stead. There had to be a transvaluation of all economic values. And what was the result? The homo capitalisticus, who is closely related to the homo Judceus, both belonging to the same species, homines rationalistic! artificiales. And so the rationalization of Jewish life by the Jewish religion, if it did not actually produce the Jewish capacity for capitalism, certainly increased and heightened it”)!
To paraphrase Nietzsche (rumored): “The first scholars of a field prove nothing against it”.
If history matters (no opinion there), if Jewish history matters, if economic history matters — if, in other words, Jewish economic history is worthy of study (I think Wikipedia does a good job here), then pointing to this initially popular, groundbreaking book (tinged with bias, containing lazy data, based on poor economic theory), and gleefully mocking it doesn’t let you off the hook.
I dislike Dr. Meir Tamari’s economics, but he at least tries to understand the facts, and his footnotes are usable.
Walter Block is a good short read on Jews and capitalism, too.