The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies
The Department of History
and The Robert H. Smith School of Business
University of Maryland

are pleased to invite you to a lecture by

Jerry Muller

Capitalism and the Jews

Thursday, November 18, 2010
12:30 PM - 1:45 PM
1520 Van Munching Hall
Brown bag lunch

In a lecture based on his recent book, Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Mullerexamines the ways in which thinking about capitalism and thinking about the Jews have gone hand in hand in European thought, and why anticapitalism and antisemitism have frequently been linked. Muller explains  why Jews have tended to be disproportionately successful in capitalist societies, while also among the fiercest anticapitalists and Communists, and how the ancient idea that money was unproductive led from the stigmatization of usury and the Jews to the stigmatization of finance and, ultimately, in Marxism, the stigmatization of capitalism itself. Finally, Muller  traces how the traditional status of the Jews as a diasporic merchant minority both encouraged their economic success and made them particularly vulnerable to the ethnic nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Jerry Z. Muller is professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. His previous books include The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (Knopf) and Adam Smith in His Time and Ours (Princeton). His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications.