Though entitled ‘Jews in Economic Life’, this volume is not a systematic and structurally cohesive history of the economic activities of Jews (like the Economic History of the Jews by S. W. Baron, A. Kahan et. al. or M. Arkin's Aspects of Jewish Economic History) but a collection of individual studies that cannot be viewed as a whole, its common subject matter notwithstanding. It comprises papers presented at the seventh annual conference of the Historical Society of Israel, which took place in Jerusalem in 1982 thanks to the Zalman Shazar Center, and presents a variety of studies relating to different historical periods and geographic areas, loosely connected, divergent in methodology and uneven in the manner of exposition. Moreover, certain lacunae in the table of contents initially envisaged could not be avoided because all conference participants did not submit their papers for publication.

Many of the twenty-five essays deal with Jewish occupations and Jewish entrepreneurs, or entrepreneurship, in the traditional descriptive way, based on primary or secondary documentation for inductive conclusions, emphasizing the measure of the ‘Jewish contribution’, with little or no reference to relevant or underlying socio-economic and political factors. The redeeming merit of this category of studies is that most are devoted to specific topics and/ or less well-known, marginal and ‘extraneous’ geographic areas. One contribution, of essential value, deals with the economic activities of Jews in the Caribbean in colonial times, which played such a vital role in the link between Sephardic refugees-marranos and the colonization of the New World (a subject discussed extensively by Peter Wiernik in his History of the Jews in America published in 1912). The other papers in this category include such questions as Herod's sources of revenue to fund his enormous building projects, agricultural variations in different areas of the Golan in the Talmudic period, cosmetics as the main commodity of the Jewish itinerant peddler in Roman Palestine, Jewish guilds in Turkey, and other specific economic functions of Jews in such places as Izmir, the Ottoman Empire in general, Sherifian Morocco and Moldavia. This widening of the geographic horizon as it relates to different periods provides new perspectives for a wider understanding.