In recent years, one of the most striking trends in American Jewish historiography has been the turn to economic history, as scholars have increasingly utilized economic lenses to explore some of the fundamental questions of the American Jewish experience: how did Jews impact and how were they impacted by their American milieu? To this trend we now add Adam Mendelsohn's The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire, and Hasia Diner's Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way. These excellent new monographs push American Jewish economic historiography in fresh new directions, using transnational frameworks to demonstrate how Jewish niche economies shaped Jews and the communities in which they lived.

Adam Mendelsohn's The Rag Race tells the story of Jews who came to the United States between 1820 and 1924 and asks “what was the alchemy that transmuted them from economically abased immigrants to among America's most successful citizens?” (1). A prime reason, Mendelsohn argues, was that they “were aided appreciably by their association with a particular corner of the American economy that they turned into a home of their own”—the clothing trade (2).

Harkening back to the central question of Jewish economic history, The Rag Race uses a comparative, transnational framework to argue that structural factors in America were more responsible for Jewish economic success than cultural propensity. Mendelsohn compares the rag and garment trade in America to that of England, noting wisely that if “gelt was in their genes,” (1) and “if ethnic culture functioned independently of other factors,” we would expect to see English Jews “advancing at roughly the same rate as, if not faster than, those in America, in the garment industry and in their overall economic standing” (3). However, pointing to structural factors, Mendelsohn claims that “historical divergences within the same industry on different sides of the Atlantic … contributed to very real differences in the social and economic outcomes for Jews in the United States and England in the twentieth century” (4).

Beginning in England, Mendelsohn argues that by 1850 London's Petticoat Lane seemed to offer better prospects for Jews in the used clothing trade than New York's Chatham Street. England's lead was due in part to “modern retailing and manufacturing of cheap ready-made clothing” (16), and England's Jews embraced opportunities throughout the British Empire (135). However, “the early lead established by Jews in London and Manchester turned out to be chimerical, a case of the tortoise and the hare” (135). The different trajectories of England and America, Mendelsohn argues, were attributable to structural forces. “Whereas in London the persistence of poverty in the Jewish community ensured that there was no shortage of those who were willing to carry the collector's sack,” he maintains most antebellum American immigrants “preferred a readily available, alternative source of employment,” (56–57) including peddling, clerking, and country shopkeeping. Mendelsohn concludes that “these contrasting routes into the clothing trade had long-term consequences,” (57) and that peddling and shopkeeping in the American South and West enabled Jews “to establish the initial foothold that enabled them to later conquer the clothing trade in New York” (56). Conversely, “the secondhand and slops businesses in England ultimately channeled far fewer Jews into the ranks of wholesalers than peddling and clerking did in America” (135).

Also strengthening the American Jewish garment industry was the Civil War's military economy, as Jews were “propelled by a wartime tailwind to the forefront of the clothing trade” (182). The wake of the Civil War saw a “dramatic broadening of Jewish participation in the production of ready-made clothing,” while “wartime subcontracting enabled Jews with limited financial means but ample social capital to enter the lower ranks of manufacturing” (182). These opportunities were not available to Jews in England in the same way.

Thus, Mendelsohn demonstrates, “but for the confluence of structural forces in the American market, the fortunate positioning of Jewish immigrants on the edges and then at the center of the unfolding industry, and considerable individual effort aided by ethnic cooperation, the outcome would have been subtly or substantially different” (228). Indeed, The Rag Race helps us to answer some of the biggest questions about the American Jewish experience. “Although Jews may have been responsible for making parts of the modern clothing industry, without question the clothing industry—at least to some extent—made the Jews in America” (228).

Meanwhile, Hasia Diner's Roads Taken tells a story about peddlers, “ordinary people who in their ordinariness made history” (ix). Countering the idea that Jews left their old-world homelands solely because of persecution, Diner argues that they also left for economic opportunity, and that “peddling shaped the great migration, opening the pages to a crucial new chapter in modern Jewish history” (200).

Diner's work is transnational in nature, focusing largely on America, but also on a host of other New World locations such as South Africa, Argentina, New Zealand, and Australia. While Jews scattered throughout the New World, Diner notes that upwards of 80 percent went to America, and thus “the United States, more than any other place, matters in this history of peddling and the history of Jewish migration in the modern period” (xi). There, Jewish rights and opportunities “could not be matched anyplace in the new world” (xi). Thus, she maintains, “the experience of Jewish immigrant peddlers in America provides ringing endorsement of American exceptionalism, a concept much discredited by American historians, but one that reclaims its validity when we investigate the experiences of the Jews” (xi).

Alongside its emphasis on America, Roads Taken draws into sharp relief the universality of peddling across the globe, as Diner maintains that “new-world Jewish peddlers had more in common with one another than they differed based on where they came from” (x). This approach follows her earlier work in which she argues for a century of Jewish migration rather than the standard German-Russian periodization.  “The notion that ‘German’ and ‘eastern European’ Jews underwent essentially different experiences falls by the wayside in the face of their shared peddler histories,” (x) she argues here.

Nevertheless, Diner maintains that peddlers were an important part of “an economic web which the Jews could call their own,” as “Jewish shopkeepers relied on Jewish peddlers,” who were in turn relied on by Jewish wholesalers, manufacturers, and warehouse owners; “credit and money flowed along this circuit” (6). Correcting an oft-repeated idea, Diner believes that while many have assumed that Jews turned “to other Jews for credit because banks and other lending institutions harbored negative views of Jews,” instead, “while bank presidents in fact might have not liked Jews, the Jewish peddlers had no interest in going to non-Jewish credit sources. They preferred to turn only to other Jews” (x).

While Diner argues that peddling shaped the great migration, she also maintains that it fostered “the integration of the Jews into the lands to which they went and in which they sold and then settled” (xiii). She demonstrates how “the peddler's act of crossing the threshold of some strangers’ home, talking to her in her language, and striking up a positive personal relationship built bridges, rendering Jews as real human beings and not odd foreigners,” (203–204) and “over time the peddlers ceased to be alien” (86). Peddling also brought Jews closer to other ethnic groups, as Jews “sold to everyone and anyone. White, black, or tawny, it made no difference: customers were customers, business was business. The color of the customer's skin mattered not at all to the peddler who exchanged goods for cash” (43). Often this included selling “to women and men of subordinated or subjugated status,” (86) including African Americans and Native Americans in the United States, Maori in New Zealand, Aborigine in Australia, and indigenous Africans in South Africa (86). As a result, Jewish peddlers “performed on a weekly basis a kind of subversion of regnant social norms” (86).

In addition to shaping migration and integration, Diner maintains that peddling also ushered in “a new iteration of Jewish life” (xiii). “While on the road,” she maintains, Jewish peddlers “had difficulty observing Jewish practice, dietary laws in particular” (193). While in some instances Jews “loosened the bonds of personal religious behavior,” they did not all turn completely away from Judaism; rather, their new realities “forced the Jews to redefine Judaism” (207). Diner also argues that “men's peddling enabled Jewish women to take up communal roles they had not had before, and … men's absence on a weekly basis allowed women to play key roles in shaping the modern Jewish experience” (xii).

The legacy of peddling was profound, although “Jewish peddlers had no desire to stay on the road,” (153) Diner notes, and for the “vast majority, in fact, life on the road proved to be a short sentence, a brief stint before settling down” (153). She notes that “new-world Jewish enterprises grew out of peddler antecedents,” and while some former peddlers made it big—case in point are names such as Guggenheim, Lehman, Seligman—“even small, humble businesses founded by erstwhile peddlers constituted mobility” (157).

But not only did peddling change Jews, “the integration of Jews, men who had once peddled, and of their daughters and sons, transformed the societies where this process took place” (206). Diner believes that “Jews altered social, political, and cultural realities of their new-world places,” (206) and as a result, she “asks scholars of the many places to which Jews went through the aegis of peddling, to think about Jewish history as crucial to the histories” of those locations (x). Jewish peddlers “participated in a process which broke down class barriers in the places where they sold, and they spread the gospel of consumption as a matter of individual choice and personal enhancement” (xi). In other words, “the story of the peddlers does not stand outside the story of those countries and its people. Rather, the immigrant Jewish peddlers’ story forms an integral element of these histories” (xi).

Hasia Diner and Adam Mendelsohn have both persuasively demonstrated how niche economies helped Jews thrive in the New World. Yet there is still work to do in this emerging subfield; for example, we must better understand what set Jews apart from other ethnic groups in America. Here, Mendelsohn and Diner have offered valuable direction. Diner notes that Arabs, primarily Syrian and mostly Christian, also “built up an intricate, highly articulated ethnic economy,” that was also “based on internal group credit and trust born of familial and communal intimacy” (10). Mendelsohn, too, notes that “other ethnic groups have succeeded in America, but none quite like the Jews” (1). He maintains that “what seems to have set Jews apart from other immigrant groups” was “the rapidity with which the typical worker sought to strike out on his or her own” (209). But what would deeper analyses of other ethnic groups show us? How do Jewish ethnic economies differ from others? Comprehensive answers lie well beyond the scope of The Rag Race and Roads Taken—two works that significantly enhance our understanding of how economic niches shaped American Jews and the communities in which they lived.