Acta Papensia 2021. - A Pápai Református Gyűjtemények Közleményei 21. évfolyam (Pápa, 2021)
2021 / 1-2 szám
-e Műhely =Acta Papensia xxi (2021) 1-2. szám Summary BENCE ÜVEGES Wealth and Denomination in Pápa in the 19th century An attempt to examine the theory of Pariah Capitalism in an empiric way The study is an amplified and corrected version of the author’s dissertation which deals with the theory of pariah capitalism drawn up by Karl Marx, Max Weber, Werner Sombart and others. He uses specialist literature, sources from the local press and archive to see how the phenomenon worked locally. The essence of the thesis is that before modernization the Christian society in majority eliminated the Jews and sentenced them to pariah fate and forced them to deal with trade and financial affairs. The jews by using their accumulated capital and knowledge made huge profits during modernization. It was believed that the type of the usurious Jew embodied the dual moral in modern times. This theory found response in Hungary as well. Historian Péter Hanák said the Jews played a special role in the modernization taking place in Hungary. While at the beginning of the 19th century the Jews dealt with procurement of crops and corn trade, in the second part of the century they invested their floating capital in industrial business. Péter Hanák thought that a continuity of family affairs and attitude can be detected in the succession of generations. His conception was not verified by recent studies, and was disputed in many ways. The author of this study looked at the role of the appr. 3000-3500 Jews living in the small town of Pápa in the Transdanubian region in modernization from the theory of pariah capitalism point of view. He wondered what kind of mobility road the 23 families belonging to the economically well-to-do took, what business strategy they followed and how much the Jewish families were characterized by dual morality. (That is, was it true or not that they acted as ruthless usurers towards their Christian tenants living in the same building.) The author pointed out that the Jews who mainly did trade work (mostly corn trade) following the emancipation successfully integrated into the local society in economic, political and cultural fields. They preserved their role in trade, and after 1872 more and more of them began to invest in industry. On the tax statement paid to the state, Jewish craftsmen, traders and an industrialist took the leading role. There was no continuity: the successful Jewish businessmen at the end of the century were not the descendants of the successful ones of the beginning of the century. An analysis of the debt legal proceedings between 1837 and 1848 showed that no proceeding paper issued this time mentioned any usurer of Jewish origin. In this period when the Jews mostly lived at the margin of the society, they fell more in line than those Christians who took the dominant positions in society. In consequence, the assumptions of the theory of pariah capitalism cannot empirically be verified in Pápa.-= 82 -
