Hasia Diner: Jewish Peddler Networks

The Jewish trading networks are the PURPOSELY forgotten method by which Jews built their unprecedented wealth in America. Money, goods, and credit came into the plantation South and cotton, tobacco, sugar, and all slave-produced products came out and into international markets.

This book acknowledges the remarkable story of the Jewish men who put packs on their backs and traveled forth, plantation to plantation, house to house, farm to farm, mining camp to mining camp, to trade their goods. “Persistent and resourceful, these peddlers propelled a mass migration of Jewish families out of central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to destinations as far-flung as the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America.”

Hasia R. Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way Hardcover (2015)