Sombart’s prejudice did not let him see that it was actually the political patterns of the host countries, their readiness to allow the Jews their freedoms, that created the optimal conditions for dynamic investment and commerce. Not the Jews, but the conditions that welcomed the Jews led to the rise of capitalism. But it is also true that Jews were active agents in economic expansion, and in the spread of ideas.

The linguistic history of the Jews best exemplifies their unique political patterns. Jews remained attached to Hebrew by their indelible ties to the Bible, the national and religious text that is perpetually reread and reinterpreted. Due to well-entrenched norms demanding universal literacy among Jews, Hebrew was known not just by the priests, as became true of Latin, but by everyone who ever sat in heder or studied in yeshiva. Jews used Hebrew as a lingua franca for trading functions in the Muslim Middle Ages, when Christians and Muslims did not know one another’s tongues; during the high point of Jewish self-rule in Poland, when Jews conducted their own communal affairs through the Council of the Four Lands; and during the Italian Risorgimento, when it served Jewish messengers as a secret code. At the same time, Jews accommodated so thoroughly to local conditions that, depending on the degree of socioeconomic and political integration, they either mastered the languages of the surrounding populations or developed their own vernacular languages. Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-German were all the products of such interaction, each developing according to different historical conditions, with the last evolving into Yiddish, a truly amazing national creation that by 1939 was used by more than ten million Jews. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Yiddish had become such a powerful vehicle of Jewish self-expression that a movement formed to declare it the national language of the Jewish people, with the political intention of separating modern secular national existence from the Jewish religious past. Needless to say, this political impulse failed, and it failed because of the very same patterns of adaptation that had brought Yiddish into being in the first place. The millions of Yiddish speakers who immigrated to the Americas adopted the languages of their host countries, English, Spanish and Portuguese, in place of Yiddish.²⁰ Yiddish had been for them a vehicle of adaptation, meant to secure their religious way of life on foreign soil. Though it may have resembled other European vernaculars in the culture it generated, it did not have the same political function as a native language on national soil.

Some people may resist the notion of a Jewish strategy of adaptation because they are accustomed to emphasizing the reluctance, the enforced and improvised quality of exile. But though Jews may not have planned the stages of the exile, their behavior was no less strategic on that account. Eli Lederhendler points out that Jewish political behavior in the medieval European diaspora exhibited a clear pattern of regularity:

Structurally, the configuration of Jewish politics was defined by the dependence of the Jews on gentile sources of power. Tactically, political activity focused on the drive to achieve, enhance, or use to best advantage a direct relationship with those in power. Ideologically, Jews viewed pragmatic efforts to maintain the security and the stability of their communities as consistent with, and therefore legitimized by, their belief that their own efforts mirrored a divine plan for their people.²¹ 

Jews honed their politics of adaptation to suit their conditions of exile, and, on the whole, they prospered wherever they were allowed to function in relative freedom. The Jewish sojourn in Spain was called the Golden Age for its civic and cultural accomplishments. According to a popular Polish adage, Poland was heaven for the nobility, hell for the peasantry, and paradise for the Jews.

But here we come to the other side of Jewish political strategy, which in non-democratic society depends by definition on the policies of local rulers. Adaptation or accommodation implies interaction between the Jews and those who govern. What we have tentatively called adaptation was really a politics of complementarity, whereby the Jews attempted to win protection by supplying local needs. Although the particulars of Jewish accommodation varied from place to place, Jewish activities always depended on the right to conduct them. Thus, the more the Jews sought to benefit from the protection accorded them by the rulers, the greater the rulers’ power over them.

The political arrangements between the Jews and local rulers differed widely from place to place, but common to all was the protective custody on which the internal autonomy was based. The Gaon, head of the yeshiva, was the highest religious, communal and juridical authority among Jews in Arab lands at the end of the tenth century, but the real power behind the Gaon under classical Islam lay, as Shlomo Goitein puts it, “with the guns, the government with the military and police behind it.”²² In Catholic Spain and Portugal the powers of Jewish self-rule were confirmed—or withheld—by King and Queen. The Polish Jews of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were protected by the shlachta, by the nobility; after the partitions of Poland, the Jews of Russia were the wards of the Tsar; later, under Communism, of Lenin and Stalin. Even Jewish smugglers depended on being able to bribe the guards or police. It was the combination of apparent Jewish strength and essential dependency that characterized Jewish politics in the diaspora. The impression of Jewish autonomy, bolstered ideologically by the national covenant with Almighty God and sustained in everyday life through vigorous economic, social and cultural activity, was wholly at variance with the community’s dependency on the controlling powers of the rulers. This discrepancy between discernible individual success and collective exposure made the Jews a perennially attractive political target, because they were unable by definition to defend themselves from those on whose protection they relied.

The historian Gerson Cohen once gave a dazzling summary of the Zionist diagnosis of Jewish history. Starting with the obvious, namely, that “the safety of the Jews will always depend upon a society in which their interests are guaranteed and maintained,” he demonstrated that any breakdown of the machinery that maintains social discipline will expose the Jews to mass upheaval and resentment. Cohen wanted to emphasize that attacks on the Jews were launched not only by the reactionary ruling classes, but through an eruption of the populace that the rulers and clergy might be powerless to check. He opened his analysis with the Jewish community of Elephantine in Upper Egypt, which was destroyed in 411 B.C.E.:

The Jews had been brought to Elephantine by the Persian government in order to secure the southern border of Egypt, but when there was no longer any need for their services and when, therefore, it no longer paid to defend them, they were abandoned. Similarly, the riots against the Jews in Alexandria in 37 C.E. occurred as a result of the Roman decision to abandon the best friends they had in Alexandria…. [The] Romans operated on the simple principles that politics is the art of the possible, and that the first thing the politician must do is to weigh where the present advantage lies.²³

Cohen cited additional examples from the Crusades of 1096, the Spanish riots of 1391 and the Ukrainian pogroms of 1648-1649 to show how the Jews were sacrificed by their erstwhile protectors to the violence of the mobs. The Jews had visible power and goods to tempt their assailants, but no means of protecting that power and goods once their political shield was withdrawn. Without protection from above, violence against the Jews was always profitable, and always without consequence. Jews had improvised political tactics to maintain their autonomous way of life, but their tacit strategy had inadvertently turned them into a no-fail political target.

The Jew’s ultimate dependency on higher powers was interpreted very differently by Jews and non-Jews, with consequences that ultimately proved disastrous for the Jews.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the realm of Jewish and Christian theology. As Eli Lederhendler points out in the passage quoted above, Jews understood their political efforts as mirroring a divine plan for their people. Their covenantal agreement with God encouraged Jews to situate themselves politically not only in relation to the powers that be, but in relation to the Supreme Power. Jewish politics were predicated on the assurance that God would someday honor the covenantal treaty and restore his people to Zion; the historical purpose of Jewish civilization was to hasten the coming of the messianic age, which would be heralded by a reversal in Jewish political fortunes. Jews interpreted their postponed political sovereignty in the light of God’s will, and in doing so they made God the guarantor of their power. The liturgy ascribes incredible authority to God the Eternal of Hosts, the Almighty, Ruler of the Universe, King of Kings. It holds that since Jews are the living proof of God’s dominion, their ultimate sovereignty was assured by the ultimate Guardian: “The Eternal reigns, the Eternal has reigned, the Eternal shall reign forever and ever. The Eternal shall grant his people strength, the Eternal shall bless his people with peace.” Because their primary covenantal obligation was to fulfill God’s commandments, Jews cast themselves as the human heroes of a divine struggle for redemption that depended on their ability to satisfy the perfect Judge.