Between the 1780s and 1920s, more than three million Jews left their homes in Central and Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and North Africa for the New World. The preponderance of scholarship focuses on the United States, where most Jewish immigrants landed, and on urban settings in particular, where they found employment in factories and inhabited ethnic enclaves. Historians have begun to turn their attention to other features of nineteenth-century Jewish immigration, including small-town Jewish communities. In Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way, Hasia R. Diner looks at the Jewish immigrants who dotted the hinterlands—Jewish peddlers. Tens of thousands of Jewish men plied remote regions not only in the United States but elsewhere in the Americas, Britain, Ireland, the antipodes, east Africa, and southern Africa. Peddlers’ lives were markedly different from those of immigrant industrial workers. Lone strangers in unfamiliar environments, they hauled their wares into the hinterlands, encountering non-Jewish customers through whom they learned local languages and cultures. Diner argues that peddling highlights a crucial immigrant experience, and it also sheds lights on the overlapping phenomena of Jewish immigration and commerce and on cross-cultural exchange.

Roads Taken explores a range of dynamics that characterized and shaped the peddler experience, including their motivations for migration and the obstacles and opportunities they faced; life on the peddling circuit; interactions with customers; the difficulties peddlers faced as Jews, purveyors of goods, and vulnerable individuals carrying cash and items of value. Diner also discusses their lives and initiatives once they abandoned peddling, which was generally a temporary occupation, and settled down. It is well known that adverse conditions drove emigration, including persecution, population growth in a period of shrinking economic opportunities, and European nationalism that heightened Jews’ outsider status. To Diner, however, the promise of economic opportunity was more significant. Indeed, accounts of opportunities and others’ successes in far-off places enticed immigrants, as did the encouragement of family and friends who had already settled into their new lives overseas. Peddling provided an opportunity to an untold number of young Jewish men who arrived on foreign shores. In fact, despite the hardships that were part of the peddling life, it offered advantages that factory employment lacked, namely a modicum of autonomy and, more importantly, a path to business ownership.

Peddlers needed advice, credit, and goods to sell, and Diner emphasizes that kinship and communal networks answered these needs. Every man who took to the road had a connection to a shopkeeper or merchant, often a relative who had followed the same path. “Old-timers,” men who usually started out as peddlers themselves and had since opened a store in a small town or city, provided the goods that peddlers sold. This arrangement did not merely benefit newcomers. Shopkeepers profited from the arrangement too; it enabled them to expand their own commercial enterprises, especially if they supplied several peddlers. These merchants and their families provided some comfort and company on the weekend, when peddlers returned to the small towns and cities to settle accounts with suppliers and to restock. Peddlers could socialize and observe the Jewish Sabbath with coreligionists—those who lived in the towns and cities to which peddlers returned—and other peddlers who had spent the week on different circuits. Over decades, Jewish communities became established and grew as peddlers who used hinterland towns as their weekend bases settled down and opened retail stores.

These weekend communal retreats notwithstanding, peddlers spent most of their time on the road carrying goods to remote houses, farmsteads, and mining compounds where they encountered people quite unlike themselves with whom they negotiated mutually beneficial exchanges. These interactions facilitated trust, partly because the dynamic required both parties to approach each other with solicitousness. As Diner shows, “each had an equal stake in the transaction” (85). While peddlers needed to earn a living, the goods they sold transformed the lives of their customers—predominantly non-Jewish women who desired the material goods that peddlers sold. Many of their customers were poor and could not have afforded the “the accouterments of bourgeois life” (99) without the other services that peddlers provided: they offered installment plans and paid much-needed cash in exchange for goods that hard times sometimes forced customers to relinquish. Both parties also benefited when peddlers paid customers for junk, animal pelts, and herbs, among others things, and sold them to the their suppliers in towns who had uses for these castoffs and goods.

Alongside the commercial exchange, and of equal importance, was the interpersonal and cultural exchange that took place when peddlers entered the homes of their rural customers. Peddlers constantly faced the problem of finding food and overnight shelter, and many customers invited them to share meals and stay overnight, deepening what were sometimes long-term convivial relationships. These interactions advanced newcomers’ language skills and understanding of local cultures. In some cases, peddlers sold to customers of subordinated status, including African Americans, Native Americans, and indigenous people. Engaging in commercial transactions required peddlers to approach these customers with the same respect paid to all customers. These Jewish immigrants, then, crossed boundaries that few others did.

For most young Jewish men, peddling was temporary. But it was critical. It facilitated immigration by providing newcomers in foreign lands with a livelihood, and it connected them to a wide network of coreligionists as they established themselves in their new homes. Diner argues that peddling was an experience shared by Jewish immigrants globally, but most of her examples relate to the United States, both because it was the destination for the vast majority of Jewish immigrants from the Old World and because it was particularly noteworthy in that it bestowed on Jews political and economic rights. While Diner provides plenty of examples from a variety of contexts, the book only touches on local particularities that shaped newly developing Jewish communities. She nevertheless contributes to a recent scholarly effort to explore the diasporic dimensions of Jewish history and opens the door for comparative studies of diverse contexts.