This chapter focuses on three giants of modern social thought: Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Werner Sombart. In their efforts to define what constituted modern capitalism and how it came into being, each proposed a different role for Jews. Although only Sombart transformed Jews into key actors in the genesis of Western capitalism, all three thinkers appealed to Jews to define how modern capitalism differed from earlier forms of commercialization. As part of this quest, Sombart proposed yet another version of the legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange, which figured front and center in his Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (The Jews and Economic Life), a text that most economic historians justly dismiss but that has exerted an enormous, troubling, and—as of late—contradictory influence on the field of Jewish history.
