L'activité économique des juifs anglais

Abstract

The jewish economic activity in England. The character of Jewish economic activity in eighteenth-century England was misrepresented in the polemics that accompanied the incorporation of the Jews into English society. Both friends and foes exaggerated the role of the Anglo-Jewish financial and mercantile elite and ignored almost completely the bulk of the Jewish community, who were engaged in a variety of low-status street trades. Most Anglo-Jewish economic activity was non-innovative and unrevolutionary, and had little bearing on the emergence of England as the first industrial nation. Most English Jews followed trades similar to those of Jews in Western and Central Europe, from whence most English Jews, or their immediate ancestors, had emigrated.