okay so um we've already discussed how the jews are not especially so attracted to
farming right not such a great uh profession for jews but one of the areas where jews
chose to excel and have a very very long history is in commerce we've also looked in previous
classes at the radonites who are probably the most famous of the jewish travelers and
international commercial agents of the 9th century described by muslim historiography
this particular map which kind of like gives you i think a little bit of an exaggerated picture
but it airs a little bit on the side of of expansion but the blue roots are the ones that
are associated with the radonites uh and the the pink ones are the ones that connect to it but it
gives you a sense of how the these radonites who are probably based in southern france on
the rhone river nevertheless had an amazing trade network that extended over all of the known world
at that time the risks and benefits of commerce well the the risks are pretty obvious right you
you're traveling you're going to dangerous places people don't necessarily know you there you've got
to get your goods over land or oversea all kinds of things can go wrong but the benefits are huge
the the profit margin can be massive especially if you pick up some lightweight goods like you know
silks or spices very popular in the west and you bring them over there you know the markup can be
massive and you can really bring in a lot of of cash there is a huge amount of profit to be had
for a relatively smaller amount of effort some risk we as we saw earlier for example
the maimonides family was impoverished when the elder brother of moses maimonides
was at sea with his uh his worldly goods and the the ship sank uh causing maimonides to have to
take a position as a physician which he turned out to do very well at and also as an unpaid rabbi but
these commercial sellers had a tremendous amount of possibility for profit if they did it well
and also it's a collective effort where you know it's not so much that you personally have
to schlep across the mediterranean to get the goods and bring them back you just have to know
the right people who make much smaller journeys on your behalf especially as you become a much more
established transmitter the dangers of travel and transport are are huge but as the economy
begins to develop and these trade networks we can actually see how they expand over time
they're seen to be profitable by everyone involved and so they are generally very protected
especially in the islamic areas where you have you know everything is under
muslim rule rather than a patchwork of different rules of of warring regions and the jews have
a leg up in this the jews of course were not the only international travelers and the jews were
not at all the only international commercial agents but they did have a decided advantage
which made them disproportionately important to international trade this diaspora advantage
includes a few things first of all the jews have a common language so when they are traveling to
far-flung regions you can have a jew from england communicating with a jew from central asia because
they've got a common language in hebrew that's an incredibly important thing now they might not be
deeply fluent in hebrew but they certainly know enough to engage in the basic communication of
negotiation for price and goods and so on secondly also extremely important they have a unified legal
system and maybe even more important than the system the norms expectations how commerce is done
you know if you can imagine even today walking if you've ever gone for example to the uh to the
arab shook long before it was as dangerous it is as it is now but if you went into the arab shook
and you didn't know the kind of culture of negotiation of how you're not supposed to
pay the first price they mentioned and and you're only supposed to negotiate in good faith if you
really will buy it all kinds of things like that you might not necessarily know those rules well
because the jews are all steeped in the same talmudic tradition with the same laws and the same
avenues of appeal if they feel that they're not being treated appropriately in a financial
endeavor then you know you have a whole system whole structure that allows it to take place if
you can imagine a christian traveling deep in muslim territory let's say in in what would be
contemporary iraq you know he would feel extremely out of place especially after the crusades oh my
gosh be extremely unwelcome he would not have the built-in support system there that would be
able to take him in and be able to provide food and lodgings for him at a reasonable price and
protection from being robbed and so on to allow him to do business the jews had these
things because of the diaspora itself ironically the diaspora which was a punishment inflicted
upon the jews if you want from a theological perspective or if you want just from a political
historical perspective the jews were forced into this scattered exile across all of the known lands
of the earth uh it actually was able to work to their benefit when they established these
far-flung international connections uh i can tell you just uh from my personal experience there was
you know i grew up in i'm going to show you a picture later i grew up in a far
flung uh very remote part of northern canada and every year there was a charity collector
for the base yaakov of montreal right a girls school in montreal who would hitchhike
all the way up from toronto we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of miles uh we're literally
the the the only thing beyond the streets that i lived on was the arctic circle in the north pole
and he would hitchhike all the way up there for the handful of jews that lived within a 50 mile
radius and when he got up there uh he would uh my parents would kick me out of my bedroom and
he would get my bedroom i would sleep in the sofa in the living room and that's just the way it was
because that was jewish connection so the same thing is pertaining in medieval europe where
jews are able to travel with much more reliance on you know hospitality extended to guests and so on
and this was a massive advantage for them this is i'm guessing why the jews developed this
unusual habit of playing jewish geography with one another i don't know if non-jews do this but when
jews meet each other especially in a setting where you know they don't expect to meet other jews like
that almost always the first things they start doing is they start playing a game where they ask
okay where are you from oh you're from manitoba i know some jews in manitoba do you know the
right and they they start to immediately try to develop a web of connection that
you know makes them feel plugged into the uh the worldwide tribe of jews so this this jewish
geography game i wouldn't be surprised if it had its cultural roots deep in the medieval commercial
enterprise where jews traveling would you know try to develop a richer network of connections
now what did they sell this is a little bit more controversial as you can see from this particular
image which depicts a negotiation between a jewish slave trader and a uh king over the price of the
slaves that are held in manacles there from the 5th through the 7th century the most popular items
that jews were selling were luxury items from the east like perfumes glassware still very expensive
silks and the spices we already talked about the silkroot the spice root from the east and these
things will be brought towards the west hillary and jews were especially associated with that
trade now uh the uh the wise way to conduct trade of course is to have your ships full
both ways so if you're traveling out the east you have goods from the west to sell to the east
and then you can bring things back from the west you never have your your ships empty as
they leave port fifth to seventh century seventh century is significant because
that's the beginning of the muslim expansion right um the the fourth decade of the seventh century
is when islam really starts taking off and by the middle of the 8th century it's got
all of north africa spain and so on and quite a bit of the eastern mediterranean as well
so after the islamic expansion the jews take a much larger role in the expanded trade
across that major cultural political barrier between uh christian europe and uh islamic north
africa and the mediterranean eastern mediterranean so they're bringing from the west to the east
a lot of things that are produced in europe like uh swords actually there's a lot of superior steel
or iron coming out of uh of eastern europe uh furs right very big thing that's not easily available
further to the east so they're they're bringing the luxury goods we described earlier to the west
and they're bringing a lot of these raw goods as well to the east and here's where the more
controversial element comes in in the year 854 a church council banned the trade in christian
slaves and this is something that we've seen all the way back from the sin of of elvira in the 4th
century and so on that christianity may have a problem with slavery in general but it really
has a problem with jews owning slaves so there's a lot of bans frequently in medieval history that
emphasize the the fact that that jews are not allowed to own slaves and jews are certainly
not allowed to trade in slaves so when there is a ban on trade in christian slaves not only by jews
but by non-jews as well so now the jews become much more important in slave trade because the
slaves are are largely traded in iberian markets under muslim rule that is like the south part
of the spanish portuguese peninsula in places like granada and so on so the actual proportion of the
jews involved in the slave trade is very small right only a small number of jews were
engaged in international commerce and only a small section of the overall commerce was in slaves but
jews were disproportionate to christians involved in this trade and they were definitely dwarfed by
the the you know the huge amount of slave trade in general by christians and by muslims but on
a per capita basis it's reasonable to assume that just like jews are overrepresented in commerce in
other goods they're over represented in goods like slaves as well now this noxious pattern does not
hold true in the same way for the transatlantic slave trade which was a much larger and in many
ways far more exploitative trade when african slaves were sold to the the americas in particular
certainly there were jewish slave traders but they were again a minority among slavers as a whole
and we should bear in mind that this was in the context of the morality and the accepted
commercial practices of that day as offensive as it may seem to us in the 21st century uh
it was not considered especially offensive in the 8th 9th 10th century with the one exception
that christians um you know would not allow the trade of other christians uh when
eastern europe which was the the main source of slaves at this time in fact there are some
theoreticians that say that the word slav is related to the word escalab or slave
it's also possible in modern slavic languages it refers to a very different kind of word like glory
like you say slava bohu you know glory be to god but be that as it may as eastern europe
is increasingly christianized towards the uh the the later part of the middle ages
then of course that becomes a an area that is off limits to slave traders as well
and much of it will shift even further towards africa where there are still larger proportions
of non-christians available for sale in europe adding to this besides the slave trade there
was a significant expansion of uh trade routes in northern europe the population in general
in northern france and germany has been expanding since around the year 1000 there
are a lot of theories as to why this happened it is a noted phenomenon it appears that the
the uh the agricultural output increased significantly over this time so it might actually
have a climactic reason for it it could be that there was uh you know just a general
warming of the northern part of europe at this point or something to make it much more arable
but at any rate uh as the the north opens up more trade routes through northern europe open up and
jewish populations there increase and it's kind of like a cycle of the uh the general expansion
of trade means the expansion of jewish migration to europe and the increase in the population
as there is more income and so on but that's essentially what is happening throughout this
period in terms of trade but once the slave trade becomes much more difficult to maintain
particularly in northern europe and as there are increasing levels of anti-semitic restriction
on jewish trade which we're going to talk about a little bit more next week in particular so jewish
trade begins to largely decrease from the huge international scale and become much smaller
and become much more focused on retail and on local sales and uh i reflect on this personally
as well i already told you one personal story about the charity collector that went well all the
way up from montreal to my hometown but in many ways this is really my own family story here's
my father allah may rest in peace standing in front of the family store in 1957 way up in
northern remote ontario uh his father is the alex in the alex abrams son my father is the son there
you know he ended up migrating from northern russia and he came to canada thinking he was going
to become a farmer he was terrible at farming like we see the pattern talked about last uh video
and uh he ended up going into dry good sales and connecting with lots of middlemen what they called
jobbers down in toronto so he was able to connect with a largely jewish environment of commerce
bringing large mainly work clothes and things like that up to this dry goods store that was the
economic mainstay of the abramson family for almost a century so it's really in in
my own person i feel the connection with this particular period in jewish history as well
okay so that's a discussion of the goods involved in jewish commerce now we get to perhaps the most
difficult aspect of it which is specifically the involvement of jews in money lending