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108 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 extended family kept one in touch with the past. Relatives offered instruction, comfort, and protection. In their first generation, through an entangled web of work, family, and neighborhood, American Jews could feel a part of something larger than themselves both in the Jewish past and possibly in its future. If there is a Jewish literature, then, it reflects as much about the process of assimilation as it does about the staggering events of building a Jewish state. Whatever the aspirations for normalcy, the Jewish historical experience has been "so odd, so paradoxical and multilayered, that the literature continues to bear traces of its peculiar cultural origins" (p. 22). Thus the most current of novels and poems can recall and conjure up earlier worlds and traditional values even as they address problems and developments engaged only in modern society. Donna Robinson Divine Department of Government Smith College Lender to the Lords, Giver to the Poor, by Gerry Black. London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 1992. 389 pp. $30.00. The figure of the Jewish moneylender has been a familiar one through the ages, and to find himself in "the hands of the Jews" was the stock fate of the young ne'er-do-well in many a Victorian novel. Typically, however, modern Jewish historians have tended to ignore the careers of Jewish moneylenders, preferring instead to concentrate on Jews who more nearly fit the paradigm of the "modernizing Jew." When they have examined moneylenders it is more likely that they do so either as an example of a past that was disappearing or as a first step toward some more "respectable " business like banking. We have numerous studies ofthe Rothschilds, for example, but know virtually nothing of the often anonymous men who lurk in the background of those Victorian novels ready to ensnare the careless scions of the nobility. For that reason, Gerry Black's Lender to the Lords, Giver to the Poor, a study of the life and career of Samuel Lewis, the greatest of the late Victorian moneylenders, should be of great value. Unfortunately, though he treats a subject of the utmost significance and importance, Black's book is a great disappointment. By any measure, Lewis' life was a remarkable one. Born in 1838 into a poor Birmingham family, his estate was valued at over two-and-a-half Book Reviews 109 million pounds at his death in 1901. Though he lived in Grosvenor Square and rubbed elbows with the highest in the land, he never pretended to be anything other than what he was, a moneylender who never advertised but who numbered among his clients the richest men and women in the country. One of Lewis' contemporaries observed that the difference between a banker and a moneylender is that a banker lends other people's money, a moneylender lends his own. In the latter years of his life, Lewis probably had about one and a quarter million pounds out at loan at any given time and had an annual income of about £200,000, an enormous sum by the standards of the day. During his lifetime, lewis, though he never sought after wide publicity, was a well-known figure, not only among his wealthy clients and prospective clients. His name was brought to a wider public through gossipy memoirs and popular journalism, and he was demonized by the anti-usury crusaders, a small group of activists who, based on Black's account, seem to share much with other Victorian moral reformers such as the temperance and anti-gambling activists. Indeed, it is through the rhetoric of the anti-usury movement that we see the emergence of fascinating linkages between attitudes toward aristocracy, moral purity, free trade, and capital markets. The reformers managed to convince Parliament to pass the Moneylending Act of 1899, which allowed courts to void borrowing agreements if they found that the rate of interest was excessive. Had Lewis not been a Jew, therefore, there would still have been ample reason to examine his life. The fact that he was a Jew, and one who participated in the life of the Jewish community through charity and synagogue membership...

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