Jewish Studies scholars have long assumed that the movement Wissenschaft des Judentums (“the academic study of Judaism”) was exclusively preoccupied with intellectual history and had little if any interest in economics or sociology. Wissenschaft has typically been viewed as a Geistes- und Leidensgeschichte, a history of scholarly accomplishment and physical suffering. In keeping with the apologetic orientation of its early practitioners, so this view goes, they avoided discussion of the controversial aspects of Jewish material life, such as usury or Jews' fiscal alliances with the nobility and the crown, except occasionally to note that these unfortunate practices had been forced on the Jews by a backward, hate-filled society. In his outstanding recent study of economics and Jewish identity in modern times, Derek Penslar restates this view with little modification. Wissenschaft pioneers such as Isaac Marcus Jost “placed economics in the service of apologics,” whereas “economic themes were muted” in the work of the great nineteenth-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz. High culture and lachrymosity marked the perimeters of German-Jewish historiography, whereas Jewish economic life remained peripheral at best. Only when a Wissenschaft movement emerged in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, or following the 1911 publication of Werner Sombart's The Jews and Modern Capitalism, did the field of Jewish economic history really take off.

This characterization of Wissenschaft has had significant repercussions, given the movement's important contribution to the development of modern Jewish consciousness.