The same overarching ideas and assumptions that produced questions about Jewish health and disease also produced debates over Jewish social and economic patterns. Did a connection exist between race and crime? Were Jews predisposed to certain types of criminal behavior? As with health and disease, statistics seemed to indicate a difference between the sorts of crimes Jews committed (or at least were charged with) and those committed by non-Jews. Jews, it seems, were more likely to commit white-collar crimes—crimes such as embezzlement and fraud that involved “intelligence”—than “physical” or violent crimes such as rape and murder. What accounted for this difference—biology, or history and environment?
Similarly, what explained Jewish occupational patterns? Jews in Christian Europe, it was widely acknowledged, had by the late Middle Ages been confined to certain professions having to do with money lending and minor forms of commerce. Was this due to fairly clear historical reasons, in particular state and church laws that banned Jews from owning land and forced them into narrower ways of making a living? Or was there something more? Were Jews racially predisposed to certain livelihoods? More specifically, did Jews posses a biological or racial affnity for capitalism?
The theme of Jews and money, or Jews and commerce, had of course been a component of anti-Jewish imagery for centuries. One need only think of Shylock from The Merchant of Venice, or Fagin from Oliver Twist. The social and racial sciences made this issue a matter of empirical research and debate. The question of Jews and capitalism moved from the academic to the public realm in 1911, when the well-known German national economist Werner Sombart published Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (published in English in 1913 as The Jews and Modern Capitalism). Much of the book was taken up with a history of the Jewish engagement with capitalism from a historical and social standpoint. Toward the end of the book, however, Sombart addressed “the race problem.” After a prolonged discussion of anthropological issues, he invoked Arthur Ruppin, justifying a racial approach to the Jews on the ground that a Jewish authority (Ruppin) had already clearly demonstrated that the Jews were indeed a race. Given that, one also ought to grant that such a thing as a distinct Jewish spirit or genius (Geist) exists. Sombart argued that capitalism was and is an expression of this particular Jewish spirit. As such, Jewishness embodied a spirit that was opposite and hostile to the German or Teutonic spirit. As Sombart put it, the Jews were a “desert people” now living among a “forest people.” Sombart’s book received a great deal of attention within Jewish circles; it was received positively by some and attacked by others. In any case, the book gave vivid expression to the notion of a connection between race and economy.