As the story of Bernie Madoff ‘s massive fraud began to circulate following his December 11 arrest, many Jews experienced a profound sense of unease – and not just in their pocketbooks. Even prior to the Madoff debacle, September’s tales of financial market breakdown seemed packed with references to Jewish brokers and bankers whose complex machinations were implicated in if not held responsible for the mayhem. It did not matter that many of the victims were themselves Jews, or that the companies with historically Jewish names, such as the bankrupted Lehmann Brothers, lacked any current Jewish connection. Jews knew that anti-Semites would overlook such details and seek to exploit the crisis.  As commentator Bradley Burston put it in a December 21 column for the Israeli newspaper Ha-Aretz, “for the true Anti-Semite Christmas came early this year.”

The reaction of many Jews – and the overreaction of some – is not difficult to understand. The image of Jews as financial crooks has been part of the anti-Semitic arsenal for centuries. It is a venerable and variegated one with countless incarnations: the Jewish usurer of the Christian middle ages, the ghetto sharper of early modern Italy; the suspicious peddler wandering the back country roads of eighteenth-century Germany; the pawnbroker fencing stolen goods in Victorian London; the fin de siècle banking dynasty reaping windfall profits through political manipulation; and of course the fraudulent speculator pocketing his gains as markets crash around him. These are some of the stock anti-Semitic representations associated with Jews and money, and their poisonous potency is incontrovertible.

Yet the ubiquity of such associations demands that they be elucidated, not just refuted. How did these associations first emerge and why have they long resonated with the general public (at least until the aftermath of the Holocaust)? Are they rank fabrications or do they possess some grain of historical truth, distorted but not entirely concocted by anti-Semites. Even broaching these questions makes many Jews nervous. A recent article by Staci Burling in the Sunday business section of the Philadelphia Inquirer underscores the point. Drawing attention to an upcoming series of lectures sponsored by the Wharton Business School on the topic of Jews and commerce (I am delivering the first of these) sparked a firestorm of criticism from donors and alumni who feared that such publicity would only serve to legitimize stereotypes at a moment of severe economic hardship. And judging from the ugly anti-Jewish comments posted by online readers of Burling’s article, one can certainly see their point.

Jews’ squeamishness about investigating their economic history is nothing new. When academic Jewish scholars began doggedly researching Jewish history in the mid nineteenth century, they consistently downplayed the economic dimension.  It was only in the first decades of the twentieth century that a field of Jewish economic history came into being, first, in reaction to the sensational 1912 book by the German sociologist Werner Sombart, The Jews in Modern Capitalism, and second, inspired by the penetration of Marxism and other socialist creeds into the worldviews of Jewish historians in Eastern Europe.  These leftist scholars sought to shift the historical emphasis from the lofty doctrines of rabbis and philosophers to the “everyday life” of Jewish laborers. As one of the leaders of the effort, Ignacy Schipper, put it, “we know about the Sabbath Jew and his extra Sabbath soul. But it is time we got to know the history of the weekday Jew and his weekday thoughts, ... the history of Jewish working life.”

Schipper could make this pronouncement because a significant Jewish working class existed in Poland and Russia, in contrast to central and western Europe. Yet Marxism proved ill-suited to the task of elucidating Jewish economic life. Even in the East, the Jewish population remained essentially skewed toward commercial and middleman occupations. The socialist Jewish historians who wished to lay bear the story of the Jewish “common man” constantly ran up against the ambiguous character of the Jewish population, which straddled the economic ladder between middle and bottom, commercial and proletarian.

In fact, despite their unique qualities, East European Jews resembled their Western co-religionists in important ways. In the middle of the nineteenth century both groups continued to speak Yiddish or had only recently abandoned it as the mother tongue; both possessed experience as sojourners in the countryside who provided commercial and financial services to rural non-Jewish populations; and both were now striving to reconstitute their livelihoods in a world undergoing revolutionary changes in industry and transportation. In meeting this challenge, the more Westernized Jews could even offer their poor cousins a boost, although they often did so while holding their own noses.

These are the factors that best explain the modern Jewish “success” story. Jews were better equipped than most to adapt to capitalism because they had inherited a body of commercial experience derived from centuries of serving as commercial and financial specialists in European life. Jews’ very existence in Christendom as a tolerated religious minority, however at times miserable and precarious, had been unique. The Jews of the late Roman imperial diaspora were agriculturalists, artisans, mercenaries, but not prominently merchants. Yet in a process still little understood by historians, small groups of Italian and Mediterranean Jews migrated to northern Europe during the early middle ages, where they were granted privileges in return for performing commercial services. Very likely it was the seventh- and eighth-century Islamic conquests of much of the Mediterranean world that established the precondition for Jews to serve as intermediaries and long-distance traders, eventually affording them skills as money changers and access to liquid capital with which to provide banking services. These skills were transportable, so that when local conditions became inhospitable, Jews could move on. As the German economic historian Wilhelm Roscher observed in a seminal 1875 article, the persecution of Jews often coincided with growing competition from Christian merchants. But as Roscher explained Jews could always relocate to still underdeveloped regions and new frontiers to begin the process anew.

The seventeenth-century Italian rabbi, Simone Luzzatto, once observed that Jews had been educated in the school of harsh necessity to seek out and exploit new economic niches. With the onset of modernity, this habituation to scraping and scrambling enabled Jews eventually to stake out a prominent position within an economic order now defined by market relations. By the late nineteenth century Jews had come to constitute a kind of “impoverished bourgeoisie,” devastated by discrimination yet possessing the “cultural capital” to rapidly climb back up the ladder as capitalism advanced. The phenomenon was more cultural than economic. The Jews’ essentially middle class orientation ensured that business would be only one among several important avenues to their rise (others included professions, such as teaching, union officialdom, accountancy, and at the higher levels, law and medicine). This Jewish “overrepresentation” (disproportionate participation in certain occupations relative to their percentage in the population) ensures that they will be prominent as not just Madoffs but also as Brandeises and Franfurters.

It is no wonder that the legacy of commerce makes many Jews nervous. And yet that legacy is as much a tale of heroism and survival as of villainy and scandal. Even in difficult times like our own, it is an inheritance that Jews should proudly embrace.