True Left

Abraham writes that Weber came to these views in conscious opposition to Werner Sombart’s contemporaneous book, The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1913), where he had argued that Jews were the major promoters of a modern nation-less capitalism. Kalberg appears to be in agreement with Abraham in writing that Weber “saw the capitalism of the Jews as a form of the speculative capitalism that had existed universally” (2002: xxiii). Nevertheless, it seems to me that Weber did detect in Judaism a rationalistic disposition as well as a “this-worldly” attitude to the world that had strong affinities with Protestantism. As Love reminds us, Weber wrote in the Protestant Ethic that Puritanism inherited the “perfectly unemotional wisdom of the Hebrews” which had seen “the rational suppression of the mystical…side of religion.” Weber also observed that Old Testament morality, despite its traditional basis in ethics, “was able to give a powerful impetus to that spirit of self-righteous and sober legality which was so characteristic of the worldly asceticism of….Protestantism” (in Love 2000b: 200).13 He included Judaism – together with the theoretical rationality of Catholic theology and the Protestant rediscovery of the original Judaic ethic – in his grand theory of Western rationalization. It was ultimately Protestantism that promoted the modern spirit of capitalism, but this should not lead us to conclude that Weber did not also attribute a very important (early) role to Judaism.