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This chapter provides three microstudies on real-life examples of merchant networks in operation. The first microstudy is the Cairo-based Jewish merchants' network, whose records from the tenth through twelfth centuries were preserved in the Geniza and represents, in its India segments, a simple and thin network. Next is the Armenian network centered in New Julfa from the seventeenth through eighteenth centuries that represents the epitome of the merchant network in its most sophisticated, elaborated, and expanded form. Finally, the Sephardic Jewish network based in Livorno in the eighteenth century that exemplifies the marginalization of the network in the shadow of the corporation. The three microstudies provide a taste of some episodes in the rise and decline of merchant networks.

This chapter discusses the merchant colonies who invited Jewish merchants into their cities on exceptionally propitious terms, constituting the west European region of emancipation. Raison d'état and shifting trade patterns induced governments in such cities as Ancona, Livorno, and Venice to grant Jews extensive privileges of residence and trade, worship, and communal autonomy. In Bordeaux, Jews originally gained privileges as New Christians; over time they emerged as Jews and received confirmation of those privileges. In Livorno and Bordeaux, those privileges entailed virtual parity with Christian merchants. Meanwhile, Hamburg's Senate first attracted a Jewish merchant colony by extending privileges but later, by imposing heavy taxes, drove it away. In Amsterdam and London, which had ceased granting charters to foreign merchant colonies, Jews found themselves in the novel and ambiguous situation of functioning without a charter. They therefore gained rights on an ad hoc basis, becoming members of an emerging civil society. The Jews of Bordeaux, Amsterdam, and London were to make virtually seamless transitions from corporate or civic parity to equal citizenship.

Jewish merchants were, with Radziwiłł encouragement, the dominant force in local markets. They were particularly important in allowing the estate administration to take advantage of new opportunities in the eighteenth century, which its established systems were unable to do. Trade served the estate economy in three ways: distribution, supply, and revenue generation. The arendarze boosted grain sales in the new economic conditions and Jewish merchants enabled the family to penetrate the new export market in flax and hemp. Jews were extremely important in supplying estate society. This mercantile activity also generated huge revenues in the form of indirect taxation. The importance of Jews in revenue generation is seen in the family’s expanding river trade to Königsberg starting in the 1720s. The freight payments Jewish merchants made to ship their goods on family rafts made this newly flourishing trade viable for the Radziwiłłs, giving them easy access to the international market.

This chapter examines the role of Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic slave trade. It discusses the three phases of the African slave trade, each succeeding phase numerically larger than its predecessor. In the century and a half of the first phase (1500–1640), nearly 800,000 Africans embarked on the “Middle Passage.” During the course of the second phase (1640–1700), 817,000 left Africa. In the final phase, between 1700 and British abolition in 1807, 6,686,000 were exported. This means that four out of every five Africans transported to the New World between 1500 and 1807 were boarded in the final phase. This chapter also considers how the slave trade opened up transoceanic niches of entrée and refuge that gave New Christians an initial advantage in human capital over other merchants. It also suggests that Jewish merchants were marginal collective actors in most places and during most periods of the Atlantic system: its political and legal foundations; its capital formation; its maritime organization; and its distribution of coerced migrants from Europe and Africa.

This chapter studies the role of Italian Jewry in ransoming Polish Jewish captives. In truth, the most important use for the pidyon shevuyim money as far as Italian Jewry was concerned had nothing to do with Polish Jews and their problems. Instead, ransom money was used primarily to redeem Jewish maritime merchants and travelers who were preyed on by pirates, particularly the Knights of St. John on Malta. This desire to prioritize the needs of the captives on Malta did not mean, however, that Venice totally ignored all other causes. Moreover, the Italian communities in general, though they seem to have understood the benefits of having Venice manage the ransoming on Malta, were not willing entirely to give up their autonomy in how they used their philanthropic funds. This was good news for Polish Jews because it improved their chances of receiving financial support from Italian Jewry. Their requests for that can be divided into two main groups. The first were made by individuals, asking for help with their personal issues. The second were requests for larger groups, most often communities in Poland–Lithuania that were struggling with the costs of recovering from the war or communities outside eastern Europe that were dealing with an influx of Polish Jewish refugees.

This chapter examines Jewish merchants and craftsmen in late medieval Italy. Jewish carters and pack-saddle makers hired out their goods and conveyances for a daily or weekly rate. These carters from the city of Spoleto would often come upon Jewish cloth and saffron merchants from the Umbrian Apennines and the Marches. In Perugia, from 1383, Jews were enrolled in the guild of the cotton-waste and rag sellers, and had close relations with the wool guild, which they partly financed. Moreover, in the villages and larger Umbrian trading centres, Jewish cloth merchants had workrooms and shops where they received their town and country clientèle. Other merchants, too, travelled the roads of Umbria. These were the corn merchants, some of which were Jews. The chapter then considers the Italian leather trade, looking at the rise in the export of hides and leather by Jewish merchants from 1570 until the end of the century.

This chapter explores the Sephardic trading networks that developed from the mid-sixteenth century onward. As the refugees of 1492 set about reestablishing local political associations, they also began to form broader interregional links with one another. Those who were integrated into these networks were bound together by shared circumstances as much as by a common religious ideology or cultural background. Indeed, the commitment of early modern Jewish and Converso merchants to an international Sephardic community was grounded in a common heritage, but also dependent upon mutual economic benefit. Moreover, the shared trauma of exile and the many obstacles faced by the refugees helped bring Sephardic merchants together. However, it never fully obliterated the competition and tensions among leading families and factions as they encountered a host of new political and economic opportunities.

This chapter focuses on the Assarrafs and the ways in which they engaged Muslim notaries public and shariʻa courts to sustain their quotidian business dealings. It shows that Jewish merchants like Shalom and Yaʻakov Assarraf used local Islamic legal institutions frequently because of their extensive commercial relations with Muslims. The absence of a formal banking system and the increasingly short supplies of cash, especially in rural areas, meant that Jewish merchants sold most of their wares on credit. In order to ensure that extending credit would be profitable, Jewish merchants relied on shariʻa courts to document and enforce the debts they accumulated. Islamic legal institutions were thus central to how Jewish merchants did business.

This chapter examines the perception of the eighteenth century that nurtures the seeds of change for the Ottoman Empire and applies to the Syrian Jewish community. It recounts the arrival of Italian Jewish merchants in eighteenth-century Aleppo that fostered significant changes in the socio-economic fabric of the long-standing Jewish community. It also discusses the roots of the uninterrupted Syrian Jewish settlement as the diaspora closest to Erets Yisra'el that lie in antiquity. The chapter cites the extended exposure of Aleppo's Jews to new European Jewish settlers in the city as the most significant force for change in the Syrian Jewish community in the eighteenth century. It describes how European Jews altered the communal and economic structure of Aleppine Jewry and ultimately affected other Syrian Jewish centres.

This chapter addresses the knowledge of foreign language among eighteenth-century Jews. Polish Jews were not isolated in the eighteenth century or in previous centuries. They inhabited an international society of business, medicine, politics, and scholarship. Jews published their works in Hebrew and circulated them across the European continent. Jews also took a major part in international business networks, which carried Jewish merchants to other lands with their Jewish servants and labourers. Within Poland, Jewish occupations demanded extensive contact with the non-Jewish world, as did the political requirements of maintaining a Jewish communal identity. As such, the chapter suggests that there were many individual cases of Jews who had learned the language of their neighbours. It then assesses the degree to which Polish Jews knew Polish and European languages such as German, French, and Latin, as well as east European languages such as Russian and Hungarian.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the emergence of Jewish communities in the regions of central and northern Italy. The growth of these new communities, which archival documentation shows to have been surprisingly rapid and widespread, had its origin in the northward migration from Rome of Jewish merchants engaged in the money trade. This book explores the everyday life of the Jews of Umbria, which can act as a template for the reconstruction of the world-view of much of Italian Jewry in the late Middle Ages. Though many aspects of Christian society encroached on the Jewish way of life at this period, they rarely amounted to a brutal intrusion and were more usually felt as a constant and insidious influence, born of the unequal power-struggle between the opposing societies. The attempt to fit in brought with it not only a dawning awareness of the gulf that separated the Jews from their Christian counterparts but also a heightened sense of the divisions within the Jewish community itself. A true picture of Jewish community life in medieval Italy must therefore take account of the many pressures and contradictions acting from within and without.

This chapter analyzes the Jewish minority in Syria in 1840, when the Damascus affair took place and ended when economic disaster overtook Damascus Jewry. It outlines profound changes in Ottoman imperial rule and society in Syria from 1840, when Ottoman rule was reinstated. It also discusses shifts in Jewish society against the broad background of the political, social, and economic changes that took place in Syria. The chapter distinguishes the difference between the Jewish communities of Damascus and Aleppo with regard to social structure, economic endeavour, communal leadership and organization, and education. It reviews Jewish merchants in both Damascus and Aleppo in 1840 that engaged in international trade via the camel caravans that travelled between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea.

This chapter examines the state of Southern economy after the Civil War, with particular emphasis on a niche that attracted many Jews to the region: country storekeeping. One of the most serious mercantile losses suffered by the South in the post–Civil War years was the disappearance of the factorage system, creating a vacuum that stifled the region's agricultural economy. The factor was replaced by the wholesale merchants in cities such as Louisville, St. Louis, Baltimore, Charleston, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Mobile. This chapter considers the role of the Jewish country storekeeper in the emergence of sophisticated systems of capitalization and distribution in the bankrupt South and how Jewish merchants served as a link between rural markets and the national economy.

This chapter explores the significance of the Gujarati ports by situating these in the broader background of the maritime commerce in the Indian Ocean (particularly the western sector) during 900–1500 CE phase in the light of epigraphic and textual sources and the letters of Jewish traders. In the background of the western sea-board of the subcontinent, the primacy of Stambhatirtha/Khambayat as a port (velakula) is explained by highlighting its impressive hinterland and foreland. How feeder ports like Somanatha (Sumnat), Ghogha, Sanjan and Diu contributed to the pre-eminence of Cambay is discussed. To what extent the agrarian prosperity in Gujarat was conducive to the maritime trade in this region is a point of enquiry. The chapter argues that the Gujarati ports became the focal point not only for the exchange of commodities, but also for cultural transactions.