I’m a proponent of world systems theory as developed by Immanuel Wallerstein (Wallerstein, Amin, Arrighi, Frank et al). This theory is based on the analysis of longue durée commercial/industrial/financial “secular cycles” by Fernand Braudel who posited interlinked Venetian/Genoese (1250-1627), Dutch (1500-1733), British (1733-1896), and American (1850-present) cycles in the rise of the modern world capitalist economy. The so-called first Industrial Revolution (1750-1914) can be positioned firmly within the context of these cycles as a period of dynamic, sustained economic growth that Walt Rostow characterized as the “take-off” stage of world capitalism. Rostow’s analysis of the Industrial Revolution’s origins, in turn, reads remarkably similar to economic developments associated with the ebullient High Middle Ages (HMA; 1000-1300) when “urban life reemerged, long-distance commerce revived, business and manufacturing innovated, manorial agriculture matured, and population burgeoned, doubling or tripling” according to David Routt. So why didn’t European protocapitalism “take off” in a prequel economic explosion during the HMA?
One reason, of course, was the Great Famine (1315-17) and the magna pestilencia of the Black Death (1347-53) which together wiped out between one quarter and three quarters of Europe’s population. But I would argue that the worsening relationship between Christian Europe and the Jewish diaspora dating from the collapse of the western Roman Empire (300-476) through the Late Middle Ages (LMA; 1300-1500) was also a factor.
The Early Middle Ages (EMA; 500-1000) is sometimes called the Dark Ages. The EMA witnessed Europe slowly, painfully emerge after the collapse of the western Roman Empire and various Germanic barbarian invasions due to a consolidation of the Catholic Church with Charlemagne’s conquests that formed the Holy Roman Empire (HRE). Neither holy, Roman, nor an empire (per Voltaire), the feudal HRE did try to reconcile Christianity and Judaism through various papal/imperial sicut Judaeis policies of religious toleration in western and central Europe. This resulted in installing the ethnic Jewish diaspora in its midst as a “middleman minority” to serve as an engine for protocapitalist development. The economic success of this “middleman minority” strategy in turn fostered resentment and reaction among Christian Europeans. The HRE’s costly Crusades (1095-1270) to recapture the “Holy Land” (the Levant) from Islam resulted in 50,000 Jews being slaughtered in the First Crusade’s (1095-99) Rhineland and Danube massacres and the siege of Jerusalem. The First Crusade is often considered a turning point in European Christian/Jewish relations.
Thus began an inchoate effort starting in the HMA to fully Christianize Europe’s feudal economy and its protocapitalist component by liquidating the Jewish “middleman minority.” This diffuse movement was associated often with growing if embroyonic national identities and sometimes with efforts at state formation. Jewish occupations were severely restricted, Jewish livelihood was marginalized, and the Jews themselves were massacred, then had their property confiscated through exorbitant taxation before being expelled from various feudal territories in western and central Europe. (Crimea, 1016, 1350; Silesia, 1159, 1494; England/Wales, 1290; France, 1306, 1322, 1394; Germany, 1348; Hungary, 1349, 1367; Austria, 1421; Cologne, 1426; Provence, 1430; Lithuania, 1445, 1495; Bavaria, 1450; Spain/Sardinia/Sicily, 1492; Portugal, 1497.) Marxists might notice the parallels of this with a process called primitive accumulation which preceded the formation of nation-states and national capitalist economies in Europe.
Ever worsening antisemitism became the order of the day. Jews were ghettoized, forced to wear special humiliating clothing, and forbidden contact with Christians. By the beginning of the LMA, the German and Russian cities of the Hanseatic League (1250-1650) were judenrein even as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth gave refuge to Jews through the Statute of Kalisz. “That German commerce does not need the Jews is proven by the Fuggers, the Welsers, and the Hanseatic League, none of which succumbed to Jewish influence” wrote Konstantin von Gebsattel. Fernand Braudel noted: “There was no truly international economy before the Hanseatic League,” and also wrote that: “Genoa and Venice, in a parallel way, held the Mediterranean space necessary for their grandeur by force, or through the medium of merchant colonies.” He argued that “the world victory of the Atlantic” economy accounted for “the mortal blow to the Mediterranean space which surrounded Italy,” not the erratic persecution, restriction and expulsion of Jews in the Italian territories that marked “the displacement of chains and networks of Jewish merchants. But is it not rather that the success of Amsterdam attracted the Jews to settle there?”
Along with bankrupting Holy Crusades, a decimating Great Famine and the Black Death pandemic, other factors contributed to European protocapitalism not experiencing an industrial-style take-off by the end of the HMA/beginning of the LMA. These other factors included the Mongol invasion and the Hundred Year’s War. Oh yes, and feudalism itself was a major contributor, with its woefully immature state formation even in the LMA. Both the Baltic Hanseatic League and the Venetian/Genoese Mediterranean powerhouse were comprised of politically weak federations of rival city-states. But the often violent expropriation of minority Jewish capital by majority Christian capital certainly figured into the equation.
Raul Hilberg, in his three volume opus The Destruction of the European Jews, argued that the expropriation of the Jews was a necessary, connected precursor to their destruction. Yet he also wrote: “But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus – mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.” The same can be said about the history of the Jews in Europe throughout the Middle Ages up until the Nazi Holocaust, albeit as an even more dispersed process.
Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg both identified the primitive accumulation needed for the development of European capitalism with the expropriation of the peasantry starting at the end of the LMA. Let’s consider the expropriation of the Jews during the HMA a kind of primeval accumulation, one that actually hindered the transformation of European protocapitalism into capitalism proper. Whereas primitive accumulation relied on nothing more complicated than the direct expropriation of peasant lands through practices like the English enclosure movements, primeval accumulation required the wide ranging yet scattershot expropriation of highly networked Jewish diasporic capital that was commercial, industrial and financial. This Christianization of Jewish diasporic capital—along with Crusades, famine, pestilence, war and feudal insufficiencies—disrupted the continental economy, destroyed the wealth of the HMA and hindered capitalism’s take-off for several centuries.
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