The Chosen Few Quotes

“Table 8.1 indicates that two-thirds of the households living in nine Tuscan towns and hundreds of nearby villages were involved in credit transactions (as lenders, borrowers, or both)—an indication that credit was a vital part of the medieval economy. Most households actively participated in credit market transactions. People borrowed for various purposes (to buy seeds and working tools, to provide their daughters with dowries at the time of the marriage, to buy food while awaiting the next harvest). One-third of the loans to peasant households were advanced by fellow peasant households subject to correlated shocks (table 8.2”
― Maristella Botticini, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492

“The German Jews migrating to central and eastern Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were already specialized in moneylending. At the same time, the backwardness of central and eastern Europe brought them more opportunities to engage in a wider spectrum of urban high-skill occupations, including crafts and trade.”
― Maristella Botticini, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492

“and economic activities in German lands.44 When moneylending became the main occupation of German Jews, their history became punctuated by repeated episodes of temporary expulsions from one location followed by their return and subsequent expulsions and readmission.”
― Maristella Botticini, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492

“The next expulsion occurred in 1322, when Philip V died. His successor, Charles IV, expelled the Jews and replaced them with the Lombards as licensed moneylenders until they were also expelled in 1330.41 In 1360, the Jews were invited to resettle in France. At the time, during the Hundred Years’ War, King John II of France was held prisoner in England. As ransom, he had to pay three million gold crowns. To help put together this enormous sum of money, Charles the Dauphin decided to recall the Jews and grant them a new charter for twenty years. On admission, each head of family had to”
― Maristella Botticini, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492

“Jews specialized in moneylending almost from the beginning of their settlement in England after 1066. The next center of Jewish moneylending was northern France and the Rhineland; in the rest of Germany and central Europe, the specialization of Jews into moneylending was much more gradual. In central and northern Italy, the specialization of Jews into moneylending occurred much later, during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In southern Italy, as in the Iberian Peninsula, the Jews never specialized in moneylending; until their expulsions in the late fifteenth century, they engaged in a wide spectrum of occupations, including crafts, shopkeeping, trade, and medicine, as well as moneylending.”
― Maristella Botticini, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492

“Another option was to force citizens to lend money—that is, to impose “forced loans.”
― Maristella Botticini, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492

“For many Jews during Talmudic times, conversion to Christianity prob- ably did not appear as a major change: Christianity looked like a slightly di erent version of the Jewish religion, with the same core belief in one God and the Torah but with fewer demanding requirements. For many Jewish households that earned their living from farming—and especially the poorer ones that struggled to support their families and, as illiterate, were made to feel like outcasts (ammei ha-aretz) by the local rabbis and lit- erate Jews—Christianity probably seemed a welcome change: it enabled them to believe in the same God without having to obey several costly norms, including the one that required fathers to educate their sons.”
― Maristella Botticini, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492