Jewish economic history is finally enjoying a comeback. A century ago, in the era of the Max Weber and Werner Sombart, the role of religion and ethnicity in economic life was a focal point of historical and sociological interest, with Jews widely regarded as playing a key role in the rise of capitalism. The prominence of that association in Nazi antisemitism led in the postwar decades to a virtual taboo descending over the topic of Jews and money, with scholars often more comfortable debunking stereotypical notions of Jewish moneylenders and merchants than in exploring the realities of Jewish economic activity. A number of recent edited volumes and monographs over the past decade or so have at last signaled a return to those questions. Building on the work of Jonathan Karp (The Politics of Jewish Commerce, 2008) and Adam Teller (Money, Power and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania, 2016), Cornelia Aust's fine monographic study of Jewish mercantile networks in northern Europe in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries further deepens our understanding of the transnational, cultural, and commercial aspects of Jewish entrepreneurial activity in this period.

The eighteenth century has generally been regarded as a period of decline in Jewish economic fortunes and significance. Aust provides a corrective to this view, which was most influentially put forward by Jonathan Israel in his European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750 (1985). Focusing attention on east-central Europe, rather than on the west of the continent, she demonstrates that leading Jewish merchants continued to play an important role across this century, and particularly in its later decades. The book's primary focus is the approximately seventy-year period from the Seven Years’ War to just after the Congress of Vienna. Transitioning over the course of this period from military provisioning into banking and the leaseholding of state monopolies, these adaptable merchant families prepared the ground for the nineteenth-century emergence of a Jewish economic elite in Warsaw and in Poland more generally.

Drawing on a wide range of archival material in order to explore in detail the economic activities and business networks of a sequence of Jewish merchant clusters, Aust's study shifts from west to east as it also moves forward in time. The first chapter focuses on Amsterdam, which over much of the eighteenth century remained a leading center of Jewish involvement in European commerce. Her second case study is much more surprising: Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, which she offers as an illuminating example of Jewish mercantile activity in a medium-sized urban center. She then looks more broadly at the Polish-Prussian borderlands, showing how a new group of entrepreneurial Jewish merchants flourished as army suppliers in this region in the later eighteenth century. The final two chapters, on Warsaw and its satellite settlement of Praga on the opposite bank of the Vistula, move forward into the early nineteenth century, vividly reconstructing the economic activity and also the cultural and religious lives of key figures in this increasingly important economic hub.

Combining rigorous and extensive archival scholarship with an eye for a good story, Aust's book provides a lucid, illuminating and engaging account of how the most nimble Jewish merchants adapted and prospered over the course of the long eighteenth century. While not in any sense falling into unwarranted generalizations, her text is also free of any hint of the awkwardness that has often blighted historiographical discussion of Jewish money-making in central and eastern Europe. While providing a careful and detailed analysis of how the families she aptly presents as representative members of a “Jewish economic elite” rose to this status, her study is nonetheless by no means only of interest to economic historians. Aust also discusses, particularly with respect to Warsaw, how economic activity intersected with changing and at times conflictual differences in religious orientation, such as between Hasidic and non-Hasidic individuals and communities. She is also attentive to gender, with female entrepreneurs featuring significantly in her narrative. This sure-footed book valuably builds upon and binds together recent work in the field of Jewish economic history. It also brings an original trans-regional perspective to this field, and provides a rich tapestry of new statistical evidence and vivid case studies that significantly enriches our understanding of the role of Jewish merchants amid the major economic and political transitions of this period.