Made in the Pauper’s Image: Theology and Economy in Modern Jewish Literature

Abstract

The article examines the relations between economic thought and Jewishtheological discourse in modern Jewish literature in Yiddish and Hebrew from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s. Treating capitalism and Jewish theology as two parallel orders of representation, the article claims that the abstract reasoning characteristic of the capitalist economy provided modern Jewish literature bold complex concepts with which to articulate the relations between the earthly and the heavenly and between history and its messianic end.