Religion, Business and Prejudice in American Banking

The session seeks to bring together researchers whose scholarship looks at the economic and business activities of Jewish immigrants and other immigrants in the United States. It seeks to ponder the category of ‘a Jewish bank’ as it considers whether Jewish businesses operated differently from other family businesses in the ever-evolving world of American finance. This panel provides three case studies that will query in different ways the basic categories of analysis used when scholars write about ‘Jewish banks’ and what that says about the state of the field of business history. Why does the study of economy and the business world assume that all Jews run banks in the same way? What could the integration of anti-Semitism and race as categories of analysis raise for future directions not only for the field of business history, but for the field of economic history writ large?