Heavy Jewish manufacturing participation correlated with the backwardness of the host economy

Evidence

For various reasons, Jewish participation in manufacturing indexed the backwardness of a western or central European capitalist economy and, relatedly, its relative lack of involvement in empire building. Jewish manufacturers were extremely important in Hungary, less so in Germany, and marginal in England and France. On the raw materials side, the owners of plantations were rarely Jewish. Mine owners, too, were seldom Jewish, with the exception perhaps of the South African gold and diamond industry, where Lithuanian Jews, who had traditionally dominated the once prosperous diamond industry in their country of origin, found some application. By and large, however, if Jewish groups benefited from imperialism it was less from producing goods that needed to be exported or mining raw materials to be imported, than from associated opportunities in finance and trade. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 131

Categorization

• XREF: This correlation between Jewish manufacturing prominence and a country’s economic backwardness has parallels in other minority-economic-history patterns (e.g., Chinese merchant networks in Southeast Asia).
• DEFINE: Gives a concrete pegging of where Jewish capital sat in the imperial hierarchy: trade and finance, not production or extraction.