Again, the point was echoed powerfully and paradoxically by the heretic Jew, St Paul, in the dramatic opening to his First Epistle to the Corinthians… - Paul Johnson

Jews by mid-century were already turning from banks to wire-services. Paul Julius Reuter (1816-99), whose name was originally Israel Beer Josaphat, left his uncle’s bank in Göttingen to set up the world’s greatest news-agency in 1848.

Chaucer saw French and Italian poetry not so much as models to imitate but as verbal shop windows from which he could steal words that as yet had no English equivalents. He thus added over 1,000 words to our language — that is, these words cannot be found in earlier writers.21 They included these: jubilee, administration, secret, voluptuousness, novelty, digestion, persuasion, erect, moisture, galaxy, philosophical, policy, tranquillity. These are mostly polysyllabic, weighty words, used by scholars and professional men.

Jewish financial and trading activities in the eighteenth century became so widely diffused that economic historians have sometimes been tempted to regard them as the primary force in creating the modern capitalist system.