“Floating Jews” - The luftmentsh as an economic character Nicolas Vallois* and Sarah Imhoffb aCRIISEA, Université Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France, [email protected] (corresponding author) bReligious Studies and Borns Jewish Studies Program, Indiana University, Bloomington, United States, [email protected] 1 “Floating Jews” - The luftmentsh as an economic character Abstract. The Yiddish word “luftmentsh”, literally “air-person”, refers to petty traders, peddlers, beggars and paupers. The word appeared for the first time in Yiddish literature in the 1860's and began to be used by economists and statisticians in the 1880's-1890's. The case of the luftmentsh is particularly interesting because of the interplay of religion, gender, antisemitism, and economics. This article focuses on the term luftmentsh in economic and statistical discourse in the first part of the 20th century as a case study of the fundamental intertwining of economics and literature. We characterize the luftmentsh as an “economic character”, i.e. as an economic-statistical category associated with a complex imaginary borrowed from Yiddish literature. We show that this economic character popularized an influential yet ambivalent image of Jewish masculinity at work, as well as offering a way to reconsider antisemitism in the history of economic thought. Keywords: Jewish history, literature, economic character, antisemitism. JEL Codes: B10, B41, Z12. 2 Introduction “Luftmentsh” (plural luftmentshn) is a compound word in Yiddish: “luft”, meaning “air”, and “mentsh”, meaning “man”, “person”, or “human being”.1 Literally an “air-person” or “air- man”, the word has been used to refer to Jewish petty traders, peddlers, beggars, and paupers in 19th-20th century Eastern Europe. These luftmentshn were said to “live in the air” in the sense of “floating”, of having no definite occupation, profession or business. “Floating in the air” also evoked wandering and traveling, notably in the case of peddlers who travelled from place to place. More importantly, the “air” metaphor implied poverty: luftmentshn lived from the air in the sense that they had almost no means of subsistence. The word luftmentsh appeared originally in the Yiddish literature of the second part of the 19th century. Desanka Schwara identifies its first use in an 1865 novel by Sholem Yankel Abramovitsh, entitled “The Magic Ring” (Schwara, 2003, 93). At the time, much of Jewish life in Eastern Europe was marked by poverty. The historian Salo Baron estimated indeed that in late 19th-century Russia, about 40% of the Jewish population were luftmentshn, i.e. people without education, capital or specific profession (quoted in Schwara, 2003, 91). But the expression luftmentsh was not merely a descriptive term for the dire economic straits of the Jewish population; it also involved the attribution of aesthetic and poetic value to poverty and meaningless economic activity. Some artists, such as Marc Chagall, used the theme of “floating Jews” to romanticize the lives and bodies of poor Jewish men.2 As Schwara notes, the luftmensh is “the romanticized, transfigured designation for people who have become resigned to poverty” (Schwara, 2003, 217). 1 The Yiddish luftmentsh is a transliteration in Latin characters of the original word written in Hebrew characters. In this article, we use the YIVO system of transliteration and its recent complement proposed by Isaac Bleaman (Bleaman, 2019). We followed the guidelines of the Library of Congress for Hebrew transliterations and omitted diacritical marks. 2 On the theme of “floating Jews” in Marc Chagall's paintings, see Berg, 2008, 54-57; Goldberg, 2003; Harshav, 2006. 3 Jewish authors also used the luftmentsh from a self-critical or ironic perspective. Most novelists writing about luftmentshn were indeed satirists, and the characters they created were first and foremost conceived to be comic. This is notably the case of Menahem-Mendl, hero of the eponymous novel by Sholem Aleichem. Menahem-Mendl is arguably the most famous representation of the luftmentsh, even though his professional profile differs from the previous examples. Unlike small-town peddlers and beggars, Menahem-Mendl is a “speculator”, who decided to leave his shtetl of Kasrilevke to make a fortune in big cities. He dabbles unsuccessfully in various precarious businesses (exchange on the financial market, real estate, commerce of wood, sugar, oil, writing) before ending up as a failed matchmaker and immigrating to the US. Menahem-Mendl is a naive character, who is mocked and criticized by his more “grounded” wife Sheyne-Shendl, who stayed in their shtetl and despised the air- activities of her husband (Sholem Aleichem, 1911). Irony did not imply contempt, however. These descriptions of luftmentshn can frequently be understood as the authors’ reflections about their own fragility and powerlessness (Berg, 2008, 205). Sholem Aleichem, for instance, lost his fortune in financial speculations, and spent his life wandering across towns and continents, like the Menahem-Mendl character he created. Chagall also painted himself and his wife floating in the air in Over The Town, and considered himself to have been “born between sky and earth”.3 Things changed in the 1880's-1890's when the term luftmentsh began to be used in political and economic discourse. The expression was used by authors who were no longer exclusively writers but also political activists, reformers, economists and social scientists. In his book “Luftmenschen – History of a metaphor”, Nicolas Berg argues that this evolution changed the meanings from self-ironizing literary characters to a social discourse that criticized Jews as unproductive. Berg argues that the emergence of the negative luftmentsh entailed the 3 Quoted in Goldberg, 2003, 120. 4 disappearance of the self-ironical attitudes and positive cultural appreciations regarding Jewish poverty (Berg, 2008, 85-152). This article focuses on the term luftmentsh in economic and statistical discourse in the first part of the 20th century. The main thesis of this paper is that the figure of the luftmentsh offers a complex and ambivalent image of the Jewish worker both in economics and literature. This claim challenges Berg's arguments concerning the loss of ironical and positive content in the rhetoric of economic “productivity”. We show that his narrative is too simple, and overstates the transition from literature to economics. On the one hand, the accusation of economic unproductivity was also present in Yiddish literature. On the other hand, even though the luftmentsh was on the whole a pejorative denomination in economic discourse, it entailed positive attributes too. Our new narrative also carefully attends to gender, which, we show, plays a central role in the image of the luftmentsh and participates in its complexity and ambivalence. This paper contributes to the research on the interplay between economics and literature, and relates to previous analysis about the ways in which economists and novelists have reflected upon the problem of poverty in the 19th century (Lallement, 2010). Our focus, however, is more specifically on an “economic character”, i.e. on a literary figure having relationship to economic life (Goux, 2016, 65). Creating economic “types” or “characters” can be considered as an approach common to both economics and literature (Goux, 2016, 74). Existing research about economic thought and literature has paid attention to these literary figures, particularly to Robinson Crusoe (e.g., Watts, 1951; Pignol, 2018), as well as Don Quixote and Don Juan (Perdices de Blas and Reeder, 2013) or Eugénie Grandet (Pignol, 2016b). The luftmentsh, as embodied in the literary characters of Menahem-Mendl or Benjamin the Third, has been frequently read and understood by Jewish critics as a “Jewish Don Quixote” (e.g., Litvakov, 5 1924; Opatoshu, 1936). The case of the luftmentsh is particularly interesting because of the interplay of religion, gender, antisemitism, and economics. Jews, Jewishness and Judaism have played a central yet understudied role in the relationship of economics and literature. Speculation, the stock-exchange and the rise and fall of ambitious social climbers have been powerful and recurring themes in economic novels, especially in the nineteenth century (Akdere and Baron, 2017, 2). From Shylock to Fagin and Frédéric de Nucingen, there is a very long literary tradition of Jewish characters, acting as bankers, usurers or speculators, and frequently involving anti-Jewish stereotypes about greediness, social ambition or power. Yet, as Bruna Ingrao argues, the Jewish identity of these figures has not been yet thoroughly investigated (Ingrao, 2017, 36). When these issues are studied, it is usually through the angle of antisemitism—and more specifically, on the antisemitism of the author, and not of their creations. For instance, in a footnote within his article on Balzac, Thierry Suchère discusses whether the antisemitism of the 19th century stock exchange novel is specific to the era, or reflects the personal views of the novelists (Suchère, 2018, 12). What remains undiscussed, however, is the way in which representations about the Jews—whether antisemitic or not, personal or not—are intertwined with economic reflections. This article intends to show that shared discourse about Jews is an important conveyor of economic representations and is thus a particularly useful -yet understudied- domain to analyse the intersection of economics and literature. The