They are ubiquitous in the opening chapters of almost every history of Jewish community in the Americas and in the opening chapters of every history of old-line synagogues: peddlers, Jewish men who spent their time carrying their peddler's pack, or if they were lucky, traveling with a horse and a cart, going on their appointed rounds, befriending their mainly female customers, selling their wares, collecting their payments for items purchased on credit, making whatever sleeping arrangements they could on the road during the week, returning home for Shabbat, and often serving as pillars of their fledgling communities.

But the problem with Jewish peddlers is that they strut their stuff in the early chapters of Jewish histories and then leave the stage. The phenomenon of Jewish peddling has never before been studied in a comprehensive fashion. Hasia Diner, a distinguished scholar of American Jewish history, fills this considerable lacuna in Jewish and Jewish business history with her characteristic comprehensiveness and aplomb in Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way. (Although her book concentrates on the United States, as the subtitle indicates it takes all of the Americas as its subject, with occasional glances at peddling in Europe, Africa, and Australia.) For Diner, the peddler, always on the move, is the emblem of the most restless era in Jewish history, from the late eighteenth century through the 1920s, when, as she estimates, as much as one-third of the Jewish world emigrated from the lands of their birth, with much of this migration crossing the Atlantic. She refrains from hazarding a guess on the numbers or percentages of Jewish peddlers, because of the difficulty of making the calculation (due to their peripatetic nature, their reluctance to register as peddlers, and the temporary nature of the employment), but suffice it to say they were plentiful.

Peddlers were an advance force of industrial and commercial capitalism during the century of its great expansion, making available to populations in rural peripheries all sorts of goods that, in the absence of stores, would not otherwise be available and, through the extension of credit, helping to usher in the realities of a market economy. As such, Diner argues, peddlers were harbingers of social and economic change and cultural innovation. And as a profession that required little in the way of an initial capital investment, peddling was an easy way for relatively penurious men to make their way in a new country and new world. It was a niche occupation—Jewish storekeepers, wholesalers, and former peddlers made new recruits, and everyone profited from the extension of the geographic ambit of the market. Jewish peddling in the United States, at its peak in the second half of the nineteenth century, coincided with the wave of Jewish immigration from Germany and other central European areas, and Diner, as the author of the best history of this period of American Jewish history, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820–1880 (1992), is well placed to tell this story. (Although Eastern European Jews also peddled, their tendency to cluster in large cities such as New York made peddling a less identifiably Jewish occupation thereafter.)

Diner uses peddling as a way to explore many of the larger issues of Jewish history. For many customers, the first—and often the only—Jew of their acquaintance was the peddler. And for many peddlers, their occupation plunged them into a gentile world, without other Jews or kosher food. Diner provides numerous examples of how these interreligious encounters paved the way for greater understanding—and the occasional marriage. (The basic art of peddling is knowing how to cultivate and keep customers.) She has some fascinating things to say on how peddlers could upend existing social hierarchies, providing alternative ways for women to spend money (and sometimes—if they had something the peddler, that inveterate collector of “junk,” wanted to purchase—to earn money.) Racial minorities and those otherwise economically disadvantaged, such as miners, found peddlers to be a useful way around the hold of local elites over their lives.

Diner discusses the various problems peddlers encountered: the harshness of life on the road, thievery and robbers, merchants trying to make things difficult for them through license fees and other restrictions. And there was anti-Semitism. She discusses an effort by Catholic priests in Limerick, Ireland, in the early twentieth century to boycott Jewish peddlers. The effort attracted international attention, and as Diner shows, this sort of prejudice was most common in Catholic countries—though the United States had its anti-peddler moments as well; most notoriously, Ulysses S. Grant's General Order No. 11, issued in December 1862, expelled “the Jews, as a class” from the Department of the Tennessee, in response to their mercantile activities (p. 126). (The order was rapidly countermanded by President Lincoln.) If these incidents were rare, they spoke to the suspicions and latent prejudices surrounding Jewish peddlers in the United States and elsewhere. The organized Jewish establishment was often not that much more favorably inclined to peddling, seeing it as a disreputable occupation, and thus various schemes were attempted from the 1880s onward to get the peddlers off the road and into agricultural colonies and other settlements.

Peddlers usually did not need this sort of pressure to abandon their sacks. Most peddlers saw their work as temporary—as a first job in a new country—and the list of famous names that had Jewish peddling in their family ancestry is a long and starry one, from Bernard Berenson to Barry Goldwater; peddlers featured in the background of such illustrious business families as the Guggenheims, Lehmans, and Seligmans, the Strauses of Macy's department stores, and the (Levi) Strausses of riveted denim fame, to name but a few. Ex-peddlers became presidents of their local synagogues, went into politics, and established businesses. Many of the Jewish dry goods and clothing manufacturers had peddling in their backgrounds, having made an easy transition from one archetypically Jewish occupation to another.

This short review cannot do justice to the density and intercontinental scope of Diner's research, the subtlety of her arguments, and the chockablock profusion of sprightly anecdotes she uses to recapture the many dimensions of the largely forgotten Jewish profession of peddling. If I may relate a personal story, after finishing Diner's book, I checked a history I had written some years ago about the first Jewish congregation (founded in 1848) in Rochester, New York, to see what it had to say about peddlers. As in almost all Jewish histories of the period, they were a dominant presence. Several peddlers were among the founders of the congregation, including its first hazzan, the leader of religious services. And the preponderance of peddlers in the synagogue is not surprising in a city where, at the time, one-quarter of the identifiable Jews in the city directory listed their profession as peddlers. But like most historians of American Jews, I left the peddlers isolated in the prelude of the story, unconnected to the broader themes of the book. Now, with the appearance of Diner's wonderful book, historians will know what to do with Jewish peddlers: to place them in their rightful place, at the center of Jewish history.