"As late as the 6th century the Eastern Roman empire (i.e., the Byzantine empire) was issuing decrees against conversion to Judaism, implying that conversion to Judaism was still occurring." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_conversion#Co...)

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"As it is infantile to see the economic position of Judaism as the result of the “predispositions of the Jews,” just so it is puerile to consider it as the fruit of persecutions and of legal bans against exercising other professions than commerce or usury"

“In numerous writings on the economic life of the Jews in the Middle Ages, it is stated that they were excluded, from the very beginning, from artisanry; from traffic in goods, and that they were prohibited from possessing land property

_That_ _is_ _only_ _a_ _fable_.

In fact, in the twelfth century and in the thirteenth century, living in practically all of the great cities of Western Germany, they dwelt among the Christians and enjoyed the same civil rights as the latter .... At Cologne, during an entire period, the Jews even possessed the right to compel a Christian, who -had a claim to make against a Jew to appear before Jewish judges in order to have the matter adjudged according to Hebraic law .... It is just as false to assert that the Jews could not be admitted into the artisan guilds. True, several guilds did not admit what were termed ‘Jewish children’ as apprentices but this was not the case for all the guilds. The existence of Jewish goldsmiths and silversmiths, even in the period when the guild rules become far more severe, is sufficient proof of this. There were certainly few Jewish blacksmiths, masons, and carpenters among the artisans of the Middle Ages, but Jewish parents who gave their children into apprenticeship in these trades were very rare. Even the guilds which excluded the Jews did not do so out of religious animosity or racial hated but because the trades of usury and peddling were reputedly ‘dishonest’ .... The guilds excluded the children of Jewish businesspeople engaged in usury or peddling, in the same way that they did not accept the sons of simple laborers, carters and boatsmen, barbers, and weavers of linen into their ranks.”

"In 1462 the doctor Han Winter was driven from the city of Nordlingen because he practiced usury through the intermediary of a Jew.Thirty years later, in the same city; a bourgeois named Kinkel was placed in the pillory and driven from the city for having practiced the “Jewish profession.” The synod of Bamberg, in 1491, threatened to drive every Christian practicing usury; either by himself or through the intermediary of Jews, out of the Christian community. In 1487, in Silesia, it was decreed that every Christian practicing usury would be placed in the hands of the royal tribunal and punished in exemplary fashion."

"In 1189, there were anti-Jewish _excesses_ in a number of English cities: at London, Lincoln, etc."

"A year later occurred the _tragedy_ of York. The indebted knights of the Yorkshire Jews, goaded on by a certain Malebys, attacked the Jews and the Scaccarium Judaeorum. The notes found in the Scaccarium were solemnly burned and the Jews who took refuge in the chateau Were besieged. The affair ended by a mass suicide of the besieged Jews."

"It is easy to understand the hatred that the man of the people must have felt for the Jew in whom he saw the direct cause of his ruin, without perceiving the emperor, the prince, or the rich bourgeois, who became richer thanks to the Jewish usurer."

"But it is certainly not by chance that at the same time that the Jewish question was being extinguished in the West, it rebounded with redoubled violence in Eastern Europe. In the period when the Jews in Western Europe were being massacred and burned, a large number of Jews had sought refuge in the countries where capitalism had still not penetrated. At the beginning of the nineteenth century; the immense majority of Jews inhabited the east of Europe, principally the former territory of the monarchist republic of Poland. _In_ _this_ _paradise_ of a carefree Shlachta (petty nobility), the Jewish commercial class had found a large field of activity For long centuries, the Jew was a merchant, usurer, publican, steward to the noble, an agent for everything. The small Jewish cities, submerged in a sea of peasant villages, often themselves adjoining the chateaux of the Polish feudal lords, represented exchange economy within a purely feudal society."

"It is easy to understand the hatred that the man of the people must have felt for the Jew in whom he saw the direct cause of his ruin, without perceiving the emperor, the prince, or the rich bourgeois, who became richer thanks to the Jewish usurer."

: 1 : of, relating to, or characteristic of the townsman or of the social middle class
2 : marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/bourgeois

"http://wernercohn.com/Trotsky.html#5"

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