Twentieth-Century Jewish Emigres and Medieval European Economic History

This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish emigres to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The emigres form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan and Robert Lopez) identified as Jews, but worked as European historians. The last (Karl Polanyi) was Jewish only by origin, identified as a Christian socialist, and worked first as an economic journalist, then in worker's education and late in life as a professor of economics. All five dealt with the origin of European capitalism, but in different veins: Kisch celebrated and Oelsner contested a hegemonic academic discourse that linked the birth of capitalism to Jews. Postan and Lopez contested the flip-side of this discourse, the presumption that medieval Europe was pre-capitalist par excellence. In doing so, they helped construct the current paradigm of a high medieval commercial revolution. Polanyi contested historical narratives that described the Free Market as the natural growth of economic life. This essay explores the grounding of these paradigms in the shared crucible of war and exile as Jewish emigres. This shared context helps illuminate the significance of their intellectual contributions by uncovering the webs of meaning in which their work was suspended.