The Drop of a Feather

Plumes - By Sarah Stein (Yale University Press, 244 pages, $30)

Talk about crazes: The tulip mania of 1634, when speculation in tulip bulbs from Holland reached such heights that one collector paid 1,000 pounds of cheese, four oxen, eight pigs, 12 sheep, a bed and a suit of clothes for a single Viceroy bulb. The tulip market collapsed barely three years later; hundreds of investors were ruined, and thousands of bulbs lay rotting in warehouses.

Must've been, or seemed, quite a bulb, that Viceroy.

It is the tulip craze that is most often cited in discussions of speculative bubbles, like the frenzy for Internet stocks a decade ago and the more recent madness in the mortgage and credit markets. But the rage for ostrich feathers a century ago is instructive, too. When ostrich feathers flounced into vogue among the fashionable set in Paris, London and New York,

traders assumed that the popularity of plumes would stay permanently aloft, as if floating on an endless zephyr.

I can just hear it: it's different this time.

Of course there were a few cautious voices. One South African ostrich farmer warned members of the feather industry that they were dealing "with an uncertain, arbitrary, whimsical love of luxury . . . at our own risk. We cannot expect it to be durable." Such spoilsports were booed off the stage. Another dealer more typically crowed that a fine ostrich feather was "an investment for life" and that the plume "has been in fashion for centuries past, and will probably be for centuries to come. It holds its place like the diamond." At the height of the boom, Ms. Stein notes, the price per pound of plumes almost equaled that of diamonds.

That's optimistic: for centuries to come.

In South Africa, where the Barbary ostrich (prized for its extra-fluffy plumage) was domesticated and raised on ranches, and in London, where the feathers were brokered, and on New York's Lower East Side, where the feathers were applied to garments, most of the men and women in the feather business were Jewish.

Fascinating. Any parallel to the garment industry? I wonder. Certainly a parallel to other times were reactions when World War 1 spelled the end of the ostrich feather craze: with the collapse, anti-Semitism flared: "Once valued for their extra-regional contacts," Ms. Stein writes, "Jews were now disparaged for their cosmopolitanism and recast as ruthless speculators inclined to prey on economically vulnerable farmers."

However, Ms Stein does venture to say some things which might prove provocative in some quarters.

Ms. Stein, who specializes in Sephardic studies in the history department of UCLA, is quick not to attribute the rise and collapse of the feather market to Jewish cunning or sharp practice. She does, however, point to what she calls a "symbiotic relationship between ethnicity and particular commercial networks." She recognizes that this is a provocative note to strike and defends it by saying: "It has been the goal of this book to eschew the indignity that popular and scholarly sources have directly or indirectly associated with Jews' involvement in modern global commerce. This ambition has been shaped not in the interest of taboo-breaking," she writes, but because "modern Jews" undertook "commercial practices" for "clear historical reasons."

Take nerve to venture outside widely-accepted strictures and break new theoretical ground.

Ms. Stein, who specializes in Sephardic studies in the history department of UCLA, is quick not to attribute the rise and collapse of the feather market to Jewish cunning or sharp practice. She does, however, point to what she calls a "symbiotic relationship between ethnicity and particular commercial networks." She recognizes that this is a provocative note to strike and defends it by saying: "It has been the goal of this book to eschew the indignity that popular and scholarly sources have directly or indirectly associated with Jews' involvement in modern global commerce. This ambition has been shaped not in the interest of taboo-breaking," she writes, but because "modern Jews" undertook "commercial practices" for "clear historical reasons."

Clear historical reasons?

For centuries, when European Jews were ghettoized and subjected to special "Jew taxes," and not allowed to own real estate, Jews were forced into businesses dealing with products that could be easily transported from place to place – coins, precious stones, commercial paper, works of art. It was easy to roll an oil painting into a suitcase when it was time to flee. And what could be lighter than a bagful of feathers when that ominous knock from the tax collector – or someone much worse – came at the late-night door?

Lighter, but not as easy to carry as a few little stones - valuable gems - inside one's pocket or purse.

It might be simpler to say that Jews took to ostrich feathers not because of the "symbiotic relationship between ethnicity and particular commercial networks" but because of generations of hard luck.

Simpler, yes, but as accurate? Perhaps simplistic.

Not that every financial bubble-burst is the same. When the feather market collapsed, a magazine joked that the newly devalued ostrich might make a nice change for Thanksgiving dinner, adding: "Heaven help him who gets the neck."