Nothing comparable to Michael Toch's first volume of a planned trilogy devoted to the economic history of medieval European Jews exists to date. The culmination of the author's long and distinguished career, it traces Jewish demographic and economic trends across Europe and the Mediterranean from the fifth to the eleventh (and occasionally the twelfth) centuries at the same time as it takes on venerable historiographical traditions that have overstated Jewish economic prowess. At once a synthetic and interpretative study, the book advances several bold (though not new, for those familiar with Toch's work) theses on the ground that scholarship on Jewish economic history, since the nineteenth century, has “served and still serve[s] to articulate ambiguities towards Jewish existence in Europe” (p. 178). Early medieval Jews neither monopolized nor specialized in long-distance trade, let alone in exchanges between Europe and the Muslim world. Equally inflated are claims about the Jewish involvement in the slave trade. Regional variations are significant, but for the most part, Jews were active in local and regional commerce. “Crafts and entrepreneurial activities, especially in the agricultural market economy, are almost entirely missing from the Ashkenazic experience” (p. 250). Other Jewish groups, however, are well-represented in several urban crafts and, to a lesser extent, in capital-intensive enterprises such as mills, salt production, and the harvesting and marketing of a crimson dyestuff known as kermes. Many also owned real estate and land plots, especially in the hinterland of Spanish and Southern French towns, although they rarely cultivated the land themselves. Finally, Toch rejects the tendency to project onto earlier periods the preponderance of Jewish moneylending that began in the twelfth century—a tendency that has distorted both the scholarly and popular perceptions of Jewish economic roles. Early medieval Jews were indeed involved in credit operations, often lending to Christians against land as collateral, but did so to finance their investments rather than as an end of its own. The overall goal of the volume is thus to bury any lingering belief in Jewish economic exceptionalism.

Part I (“Stocktaking: Regional Populations and Livelihoods”) proceeds systematically to document the demography and economic pursuits of Jews in different areas: the Byzantine Empire, Italy, France, Germany, the Iberian Peninsula, and Eastern Europe. Part II (“Economic Functions and Significance”) exposes, by way of reasoning and philology, the biases of landmark works by giants in the field, whether gentile (Wilhelm Roscher, Charles Verlinden) or Jewish (Robert Lopez, Eliyahu Ashtor), in order to advance an alternative picture of Jewish involvement in credit and landholding. Chapter 8 (“Historical Conclusions”) wraps up the book gesturing toward an important, if still underdeveloped direction: the treatment of Jewish economic history as part of the general economic history of the period. Readers of this JOURNAL might wish that the demographic data had been condensed in tables or graphs but will be captivated by the suggestion that the “environment, ecology, and pandemics” (p. 242) shaped early medieval Jewish demography and economy. The book ends with eight maps of Jewish settlements and four accompanying appendices of sources, which are part and parcel of the goal to establish a factual basis of analysis.

Every page reminds us of Toch's relentless commitment to identify “real-life Jews, as opposed to virtual ones” (p. 1), by which he means the figments of the imagination of both anti-Semitic scholarship and Jewish apologetics. In the name of “the old concept of source criticism—Quellenkritik” (p. 2), Toch scrutinizes every scholarly statement and every piece of evidence—whether epigraphic, archeological, documentary, or literary, whether in Latin, vernacular, and Hebrew—with impressive learning and rigor. To the extent that the two souls of the book—empiricism and historiographical exposé—are mapped onto the division between Parts I and II, however, the marriage between the two parts is only partially successful. The uninitiated reader will find that the empirical reconstruction in Part I is animated by a polemical drive that only becomes fully clear in Part II, while the latter expands on empirical reconstructions already outlined in Part I.

Economic historians who in recent years have been introduced to the study of premodern Jewish economic history by scholars like Avner Greif, Maristella Botticini, and Zvi Eckstein will encounter here a different mode of historical writing as well as altogether different Jewish societies. Toch repeatedly pits European Jews against the Jewish merchants documented in the Cairo Geniza, although the latter, too, have now been shown to have had close links to the rural economy (See Jessica Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and Their Business World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Having lent to Botticini and Eckstein (The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012) most of the evidence for their argument that discrimination played virtually no role in the Jews' hyper-specialization in urban and skilled trades during the Middle Ages, it is not surprising that Toch agrees with them in this respect (p. 253). He is nonetheless less endorsing of Botticini and Eckstein's key argument that culture, defined as compulsory male literacy, was the driving force behind the Jewish over-representation in urban and skilled trades. In fact, he cites an authoritative scholar of Jewish law (Haim Soloveitchik, “The Jewish Attitude in the High and Late Middle Ages (1000–1500).” In Credito e usura fra teologia, diritto e amministrazione: Linguaggi a confront (sec. XII–XVI), edited by Diego Quaglioni, Giacomo Todeschini, and Gian Maria Varanini, 115–27. Rome: École française de Rome, 2005), who refutes the notion that medieval Jews had any “cultural predisposition towards commerce” (p. 255).

Toch is more forthcoming in his criticism of Simon Kuznets' well-known theory of Jews as the quintessential middleman minority, whose internal cohesion and minority status allegedly account for the economic niches that they occupied. Rather than comparing Jews to the majority of the population, which in the early Middle Ages was largely “nonurban, nonliterate, [and] not engaged in craft production and services” (p. 254), Toch argues that Jews should be regarded as a subset of the non-Jewish urban society and that they did not differ much from it. This is a provocative insight, but one whose elaboration would require Toch to write a different book. Meanwhile, there is much to be admired in this one.