Diamonds and Rags: One Hasidic Gem Broker’s Quest for Precarity

The wholesale trade and manufacturing of diamonds, which once supported the vast majority of Antwerp’s Jewish male workforce, has steadily relocated to less-regulated zones in the “midstream pipeline” of the diamond supply chain. This lecture draws upon extended ethnographic fieldwork that Sam Shuman conducted with diamond traders, brokers, manufacturers, and artisans from 2017 to 2019 across the global diamond supply chain.

Shuman will focus on the story of Lazer, a Hasidic rough diamond broker in Antwerp, Belgium, who, like many people in today’s economy, faces disintermediation—being cut out as a middleman or intermediary in an industry or global supply chain. In the wake of this uncertainty, Lazer articulates an economic theology in which God intentionally places Jews in a constant state of dependence. According to Lazer’s economic theology, God intentionally disperses provisions that never last; followers must, in turn, constantly beg God for more provisions. God does not desire supplicants to ever accumulate wealth. Accumulation of wealth is neither a sign of God’s election nor an assurance of future success. Here, Shuman offers an intimate ethnographic portrait of how ancient rabbinic texts are being reimagined in the 21st century. Shuman explores how economic theology operates within the commercial world of the diamond industry and within contemporary Hasidic cosmologies of wealth, dependence, risk, and security.

Sam Shuman is currently the Rabin-Shvidler Postdoctoral Fellow at Fordham and Columbia. Shuman is an anthropologist of race, religion, and political economy who researches global Jewish mobility, trade, and empire. Their dissertation, “Cutting Out the Middleman: The Diamond Industry & the Politics of Displacement in a European Port City,” explores cooperation and competition between and across diasporic trading groups to hold control over the wholesale diamond trade as the state reasserts its control. In so doing, it reveals not only the struggle over power between trading diasporas but also between state and diaspora. Shuman is certified as a polished diamond grader and has conducted more than 18 months of fieldwork among wholesale diamond traders, brokers, and manufacturers in Antwerp, Ramat Gan, Mumbai, and Surat. Their research has been funded by Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. They received their Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology, with a graduate certificate in Judaic studies, from the University of Michigan in 2021. Their work has appeared in Religions, Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, The Jewish Quarterly (UK), and is forthcoming in Feminist Studies in Religion.