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The Economic History of European Jews: Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages . By Toch Michael . Leiden and Boston : Brill . 2013. Pp. x, 373. [euro]146.00, cloth.
Reviews of Books
Medieval to Modern Europe
Nothing comparable to Michael Toch's first volume of a planned trilogy devoted to the economic history of medieval European Jews exists to date. The culmination of the author's long and distinguished career, it traces Jewish demographic and economic trends across Europe and the Mediterranean from the fifth to the eleventh (and occasionally the twelfth) centuries at the same time as it takes on venerable historiographical traditions that have overstated Jewish economic prowess. At once a synthetic and interpretative study, the book advances several bold (though not new, for those familiar with Toch's work) theses on the ground that scholarship on Jewish economic history, since the nineteenth century, has "served and still serve[s] to articulate ambiguities towards Jewish existence in Europe" (p. 178). Early medieval Jews neither monopolized nor specialized in long-distance trade, let alone in exchanges between Europe and the Muslim world. Equally inflated are claims about the Jewish involvement in the slave trade. Regional variations are significant, but for the most part, Jews were active in local and regional commerce. "Crafts and entrepreneurial activities, especially in the agricultural market economy, are almost entirely missing from the Ashkenazic experience" (p. 250). Other Jewish groups, however, are well-represented in several urban crafts and, to a lesser extent, in capital-intensive enterprises such as mills, salt production, and the harvesting and marketing of a crimson dyestuff known as kermes....