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The Discourse of Usury: Relations Between Christians and Jews in the German Countryside, 1880–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Helmut Walser Smith
Helmut Walser Smith
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
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Extract

Most historians are aware that the charge of usury belongs to the standard arsenal of both traditional anti-Judaism and modern forms of anti-Semitism (if indeed one accepts the validity of this distinction). More recently, historians and scholars of literature have considered the way in which usury was a powerful simile—the usurer as Jew—and as such central to the cultural history of learned and popular forms of anti-Semitic prejudice. In the essay that follows, I do not intend to further document the history of this prejudice in the realm of print culture. Rather, I will explore the way in which its central assumption (namely that Jews and Christians possessed radically different and religiously specific conceptions of work and trade) configured, entered into, and also obfuscated rural relations between Christians and Jews.

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Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , September 1999 , pp. 255 - 276
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1999

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References

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26. Brettener Wochenblatt, 11 January 1892, G LA 357/10035.

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88. Der Wucher auf dem Lande, 55.

89. Ibid., 91–92.

90. Bäuerliche Zustände, 2: 20.Google Scholar

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