Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity

This book investigates the intersection between consumption, identity and Jewish history in Europe.

Gideon Reuveni (Author)

9781107648500, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 August 2021

279 pages, 32 b/w illus.
22.6 x 15.1 x 1.6 cm, 0.42 kg

'In this pioneering book Gideon Reuveni rereads the history of Jewish life in Weimar Germany from the fresh perspective of consumerism, with an eye toward how daily habits of getting, spending, eating and furnishing were inseparable from larger questions of belonging, integration and exclusion amid the tumultuous conditions of interwar Germany.' Paul Betts, St Anthony's College, Oxford

Antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as capitalists have hindered research into the economic dimension of the Jewish past. The figure of the Jew as trader and financier dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the economy has been central to Jewish life and the Jewish image in the world; Jews not only made money but spent money. This book is the first to investigate the intersection between consumption, identity, and Jewish history in Europe. It aims to examine the role and place of consumption within Jewish society and the ways consumerism generated and reinforced Jewish notions of belonging from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the new millennium. It shows how the advances of modernization and secularization in the modern period increased the importance of consumption in Jewish life, making it a significant factor in the process of redefining Jewish identity.

Part I. Narratives of Belonging: 1. Producers, consumers, Jews and antisemitism in German historiography
2. Ethnic marketing and consumer ambivalence in Weimar Germany
3. The Jewish question and the changing regimes of consumption
4. What makes a Jew happy? Longings, belongings and the spirit of modern consumerism
Part II. The Politics of Jewish Consumption: 5. Emancipation through consumption
6. Boycott, economic rationality and Jewish consumers in interwar Germany
7. Advertising national belonging
8. The consumption of Jewish politics
Part III. Homo Judaicus Consumerus: 9. The cost of being Jewish
10. Place and space of Jewish consumption
11. The world of Jewish goods
12. Spending power and its discontents
13. Beyond consumerism: the bridge, the door and the cultural economy approach to Jewish history.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Jewish studies [JFSR1], European history [HBJD]