The Chosen Few
The Chosen Few

Author: Maristella Botticini

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0691144877

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Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein show that, contrary to previous explanations, this transformation was driven not by anti-Jewish persecution and legal restrictions, but rather by changes within Judaism itself after 70 CE--most importantly, the rise of a new norm that required every Jewish male to read and study the Torah and to send his sons to school. Over the next six centuries, those Jews who found the norms of Judaism too costly to obey converted to other religions, making world Jewry shrink. Later, when urbanization and commercial expansion in the newly established Muslim Caliphates increased the demand for occupations in which literacy was an advantage, the Jews found themselves literate in a world of almost universal illiteracy. From then forward, almost all Jews entered crafts and trade, and many of them began moving in search of business opportunities, creating a worldwide Diaspora in the process.

The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion
The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion

Author: Rachel M. McCleary

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-01-27

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 0199781281

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This is a one-of-kind volume bringing together leading scholars in the economics of religion for the first time. The treatment of topics is interdisciplinary, comparative, as well as global in nature. Scholars apply the economics of religion approach to contemporary issues such as immigrants in the United States and ask historical questions such as why did Judaism as a religion promote investment in education? The economics of religion applies economic concepts (for example, supply and demand) and models of the market to the study of religion. Advocates of the economics of religion approach look at ways in which the religion market influences individual choices as well as institutional development. For example, economists would argue that when a large denomination declines, the religion is not supplying the right kind of religious good that appeals to the faithful. Like firms, religions compete and supply goods. The economics of religion approach using rational choice theory, assumes that all human beings, regardless of their cultural context, their socio-economic situation, act rationally to further his/her ends. The wide-ranging topics show the depth and breadth of the approach to the study of religion.

The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000
The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000

Author: Todd M. Endelman

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2002-03-01

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0520935667

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In Todd Endelman's spare and elegant narrative, the history of British Jewry in the modern period is characterized by a curious mixture of prominence and inconspicuousness. British Jews have been central to the unfolding of key political events of the modern period, especially the establishment of the State of Israel, but inconspicuous in shaping the character and outlook of modern Jewry. Their story, less dramatic perhaps than that of other Jewish communities, is no less deserving of this comprehensive and finely balanced analytical account. Even though Jews were never completely absent from Britain after the expulsion of 1290, it was not until the mid- seventeenth century that a permanent community took root. Endelman devotes chapters to the resettlement; to the integration and acculturation that took place, more intensively than in other European states, during the eighteenth century; to the remarkable economic transformation of Anglo-Jewry between 1800 and 1870; to the tide of immigration from Eastern Europe between 1870 and 1914 and the emergence of unprecedented hostility to Jews; to the effects of World War I and the turbulent events up to and including the Holocaust; and to the contradictory currents propelling Jewish life in Britain from 1948 to the end of the twentieth century. We discover not only the many ways in which the Anglo-Jewish experience was unique but also what it had in common with those of other Western Jewish communities.

The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 2, The Hellenistic Age
The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 2, The Hellenistic Age

Author: William David Davies

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 766

ISBN-13: 9780521219297

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Vol. 4 covers the late Roman period to the rise of Islam. Focuses especially on the growth and development of rabbinic Judaism and of the major classical rabbinic sources such as the Mishnah, Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud and various Midrashic collections.

The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000
The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000

Author: Todd M. Endelman

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2002-03

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9780520227200

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A history of the Jewish community in Britain, including resettlement, integration, acculturation, economic transformation and immigration.

The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800
The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800

Author: Paolo Bernardini

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 600

ISBN-13: 9781571814302

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Jews and Judaism played a significant role in the history of the expansion of Europe to the west as well as in the history of the economic, social, and religious development of the New World. They played an important role in the discovery, colonization, and eventually exploitation of the resources of the New World. Alone among the European peoples who came to the Americas in the colonial period, Jews were dispersed throughout the hemisphere; indeed, they were the only cohesive European ethnic or religious group that lived under both Catholic and Protestant regimes, which makes their study particularly fruitful from a comparative perspective. As distinguished from other religious or ethnic minorities, the Jewish struggle was not only against an overpowering and fierce nature but also against the political regimes that ruled over the various colonies of the Americas and often looked unfavorably upon the establishment and tleration of Jewish communities in their own territory. Jews managed to survive and occasionally to flourish against all odds, and their history in the Americas is one of the more fascinating chapters in the early modern history of European expansion.

Modern British Jewry
Modern British Jewry

Author: Geoffrey Alderman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 9780198207597

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An authoritative and comprehensive history of the Jews of Britain over the last century and a half, this book examines the social structure and economic base of Jewish communities in Victorian England and traces the struggle for emancipation.

The Promise and Peril of Credit
The Promise and Peril of Credit

Author: Francesca Trivellato

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 0691217386

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How an antisemitic legend gave voice to widespread fears surrounding the expansion of private credit in Western capitalism The Promise and Peril of Credit takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West’s centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credit markets. By the close of the Middle Ages, new and sophisticated credit instruments made it easier for European merchants to move funds across the globe. Bills of exchange were by far the most arcane of these financial innovations. Intangible and written in a cryptic language, they fueled world trade but also lured naive investors into risky businesses. Francesca Trivellato recounts how the invention of these abstruse credit contracts was falsely attributed to Jews, and how this story gave voice to deep-seated fears about the unseen perils of the new paper economy. She locates the legend’s earliest version in a seventeenth-century handbook on maritime law and traces its legacy all the way to the work of the founders of modern social theory—from Marx to Weber and Sombart. Deftly weaving together economic, legal, social, cultural, and intellectual history, Trivellato vividly describes how Christian writers drew on the story to define and redefine what constituted the proper boundaries of credit in a modern world increasingly dominated by finance.

England's Jewish Solution
England's Jewish Solution

Author: Robin R. Mundill

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780521520263

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A detailed study of Jewish settlement and of seven different Jewish communities in England 1262-90.