Weber and Sombart
Two of Dilthey's contemporaries who were significantly influenced by his philosophy of culture and who have been influential in
perpetuating Dilthey's theory of Judaism among contemporary students of German cultural studies were Max Weber and Werner Sombart. Both Weber and Sombart held to the view characteristic of European scholarship that, as Weber puts it in the famous first paragraph of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , "in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which … lie in a line of development having universal significance and value."[55]
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 1992), 13.
The proof of this, for Weber as for Dilthey, was the intellectual culture of modern Europe.[56]Weber, like Dilthey, believed that his judgment that European Christian culture was the only civilization of universal significance and value was not a value judgment but a statement of fact. As he assures the reader in the introduction to The Protestant Ethic: "The question of the relative value of the cultures which are compared here will not receive a single word." Ibid., 30.
In his Sociology of Religion Weber in effect attempts to demonstrate empirically (that is, historically and comparatively) the validity of popular Christian caricatures of the Jewish religion. For example, he maintains that the ancient Hebrews were the first group in history to dedicate themselves to the worship of a deity whose primary qualities were negative ones like wrathfulness and jealousy. In doing so, the Hebrews set themselves apart from every other culture in the world. This concept of deity and the separatist mentality that accompanied it became the model in turn for the Jews' relationships with both other human beings and the world of nature."In no other religion in the world," Weber maintains, "do we find a universal deity possessing the unparalleled desire for vengeance manifested by Yahweh."[57]
Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 112.
According to Weber, the Jewish religion is "a religion of retribution" through and through, not only in the distant past but also in contemporary society.In the mind of the pious Jew the moralism of the law was inevitably combined with the aforementioned hope for revenge, which suffused practically all the exilic and postexilic sacred scriptures. Moreover, through two and a half millenniums this hope appeared in virtually every divine service of the Jewish people, characterized by a firm grip upon two indestructible claims—religiously sanctified segregation from the other peoples of the world, and divine promises relating to this world. … When one compares Judaism with other salvation religions, one finds that in Judaism the doctrine of religious resentment has an idiosyncratic quality and plays a unique role not found among the disprivileged classes of any other religion.[58]
Ibid., 113.
This form of religious observance spawned a distinctive kind of intellectual organization among those who practiced it, leading to the development among the Hebrews of a mode of cognition characterized by distance and objectivity—"instrumental rationality."
Prior to the emergence of instrumental rationality among the ancient Hebrews, according to Weber's narrative, human cognitive and affective experiences were of a participatory nature, so that people had a profound sense of unity with the natural world. The emergence of nonparticipating
consciousness in the form of the ancient Hebrew religion was the beginning of what Weber termed die Entzauberung der Welt , the "disenchantment of the world." Morris Berman offers a vivid description, based on Weber's theory, of what he thinks life was like prior to this process of disenchantment:
The view of nature which predominated in the West down to the eve of the Scientific Revolution was that of an enchanted world. Rocks, trees, rivers, and clouds were all seen as wondrous, alive, and human beings felt at home in this environment. The cosmos, in short, was a place of belonging . A member of this cosmos was not an alienated observer of it but a direct participant in its drama. … This type of consciousness [may be termed] "participating consciousness" [and] involves merger, or identification, with one's surroundings.[59]
Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 16; Berman derives his views from Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965).
The dissolution of this blissful state of unity with Mother Nature began during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when a "rationalization process" gained momentum in Europe, producing "that state of mind in which one knows phenomena precisely in the act of distancing oneself from them," which instigated, in turn, the disenchantment of nature.[60]
Berman, Reenchantment of the World, 39.
In Berman's account this mentality was distinctively "Jewish" because it was the ancient Hebrews who introduced humanity to the idea that "participating consciousness" was sinful. The Hebrew Bible, according to him, is "the story of the triumph of monotheism over Astarte, Baal, the golden calf, and the nature gods of neighboring 'pagan' peoples."Here we see the first glimmerings of what I have called nonparticipating consciousness: knowledge is acquired by recognizing the distance between ourselves and nature. Ecstatic merger with nature is judged not merely as ignorance, but as idolatry. … The rejection of participating consciousness … was the crux of the covenant between the Jews and Yahweh. It was precisely this contract that made the Jews "chosen" and gave them their unique historical mission.[61]
Ibid., 70-71, 73; Barfield, Saving the Appearances, chapter 16.
The mentality of the ancient Hebrews, Weber maintains further, was also characterized by "ethical indifference." The origins of this trait, he suggests, are to be found in interpretations of Hebrew law which allowed Jews to engage in unethical business dealings with non-Jews while at the same time perceiving themselves to be strictly observant, a practice Weber thought to be illustrated by the Jews' maintenance of a double standard in their dealings with Jews and non-Jews. Thus, Weber explains, "the acquisitive drive" among Jews was "directed primarily to trade with strangers," because strangers, like all non-Jews, were considered "enemies." Thus business dealings with them did not have to conform to the ethical
requirements that applied to relations with other Jews; this dehumanizing tendency within Judaism, in Weber's opinion, conditioned the economic behavior of most Jews in his day.
Werner Sombart, a friend and colleague of Weber's, also made a significant contribution to German social theory at the turn of the century, constructing a synthesis of Marx's socioeconomic critique of society and Weber's sociology of religion. Like Marx, he finds the "Jewish spirit" at the heart of the modernization process, and like Weber, he asserts a correspondence between the fundamental tenets of the Jewish religion and this Jewish spirit. Sombart, though not as well known as Weber among contemporary scholars, was "far more representative of the intellectuals of his generation than was Weber" and his books enjoyed great popularity in Germany during the first decades of the present century.[62]
Arthur Mitzman, "Personal Conflict and Ideological Options in Sombart and Weber," in Max Weber and His Contemporaries, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 99. Sombart's first major work, Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung im 19. Jahrhundert (Socialism and the Social Movement in the Nineteenth Century), went through ten editions between 1896 and 1929 and was translated into twenty-four languages,
He went on to become an active supporter of National Socialism during the Hitler era.Of most interest in the present context is Sombart's The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911), a critique and reformulation of the ideas in Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . In this text Sombart maintains, contra Weber, that at the heart of the capitalist spirit is not Puritanism, but Judaism. In fact, Sombart asserts, "Puritanism is Judaism."[63]
Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, trans. M. Epstein (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951), 236.
Whereas Weber himself had insisted unequivocally that "Jews were relatively or altogether absent from the new and distinctive forms of modern capitalism" and that "neither that which is new in the modern economic system nor that which is distinctive of the modern economic temper is specifically Jewish in origin," Sombart holds that both rationalism and capitalism are distinctively Jewish impulses.[64]Weber, Sociology of Religion, 248-250.
Sombart anticipates the views of many contemporary social theorists when he maintains that Jews began to play a disproportionate role in European economic and political affairs in the fifteenth century, after being expelled from Spain and Portugal. Says Sombart of the Jewish migration to Europe and the Americas: "Scarcely were the doors of the New World opened to Europeans, than crowds of Jews came swarming in." Beginning in the fifteenth century, "European Jewry was like an ant-heap into which a stick had been thrust."[65]
Ibid.; 31-32.
Sombart maintains that Jews had played a particularly prominent role in American society, explaining that "the first European to set foot on American soil was a Jew" and that Columbus himself might have been Jewish—" the oldest portraits show him to have had a Jewish face."[66]Ibid.
Not only this but, Sombart adds, "the first traders in the New World were Jewish" and the "first industrial establishments in America were those of Jews." Sombart goes on to claim that North America"owes its existence" to Jewish merchants and in fact "what we call Americanism is nothing else, if we may say so, than the Jewish spirit distilled."[67]
Ibid., 37, 44. Cf. Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), 49.
Ironically, one of Sombart's primary sources for these claims concerning Jewish influence in America was the Jewish Encyclopedia , the first volume of which appeared during the time that he was writing The Jews and Modern Capitalism . The Encyclopedia was a project of the American Reform community, conceived in response to the anti-Semitism that had become rampant in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. The editors of the Jewish Encyclopedia sought to demonstrate the positive—if not indispensable—role that Jews had played in world history in order to counter accusations, typical of European anti-Semites, of Jewish parasitism and cultural inferiority. Thus, as Shuly Rubin Schwartz puts it, "the Jewish Encyclopedia unabashedly sings the praises of Jews and Judaism in America."[68]
Shuly Rubin Schwartz, The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America: The Publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1991), 119.
Queen Isabella, according to the Encyclopedia , was "under the influence" of Jewish associates when she decided to finance the voyage of Columbus; Jews were "instrumental in securing the funds for the first and second voyages"; Jews invented the navigational instruments employed by Columbus on his journey; a Jew was "the first European to tread the soil of America," "the first to discover the use of tobacco," and "the first to receive a detailed statement of the voyage and discoveries of Columbus."Sombart's implementation of this material demonstrates the dangers inherent in the logic of reversal. Sombart concludes on the basis of these exaggerated claims that "Jewish money called into existence all the grand undertakings of the seventeenth century and financed them" and that it was Jewish migration into Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that produced the rationalization of the modern world described by Weber. The Jewish presence in Europe and America was thus determinative for both the external form of modern capitalism and "its inward spirit." This "Jewish spirit" was a product of the Jewish religion, which was "mechanically and artfully wrought, destined to destroy and conquer Nature's realm and to reign itself in her stead." The "characteristic trait of Judaism as of Capitalism," Sombart concludes, is rationalism, which is the enemy of "that creative power which draws its artistic inspiration from the passion world of the senses."[69]
Sombart, Jews and Modern Capitalism, 206-207. Sombart's understanding of "the Jewish spirit" as "contrary to nature" also led him to attribute to Judaism a singularly negative attitude toward the body, sexuality, and women. "All earlier religions saw something divine in the expression of sex," according to Sombart. "None of them condemned what is sensuous, or looked upon women as a source of sin," as Judaism did. Notably, Sombart's understanding of Judaism in this respect was another point of contention between him and Weber. Sombart insisted that Puritan asceticism in particular was "Jewish" in origins: "The dominating ideas of Puritanism," Sombart maintains, "were more perfectly developed in Judaism ... [and at] a much earlier date." By contrast, Weber had contended that the main difference between Judaism and Puritanism lay "in the relative ... absence of systematic asceticism" in the former tradition. According to Weber, Christian asceticism "did not derive from Judaism, but emerged primarily in the heathen Christian communities of the Pauline mission." Compared to Christianity, in Weber's view, Judaism was "not in the least ascetic, but rather highly naturalistic." See Sombart, Jews and Modern Capitalism, 231, 248; Weber, Sociology of Religion, 246.