A two-part path of money, and an author who retired from KOTRA in 2010

This book, this reading says, is the second part of a two-part work that follows the path of money the Jews walked. Part 1 is said to run from Sumer — through the Exodus recorded at length in Scripture, Phoenicia and Israel, ancient Greece, Babylon, and the Hellenistic age — to Jews who finally reached Rome, and to how they built a country and a people, what culture they spread, and what they took in.

Part 2, in this telling, takes up Jews settled in Rome, the influence of Jesus on them, the Roman war that led at last to two thousand years of wandering, dispersal to Europe and the Middle East, and how they lived through the Middle Ages. The author, Hong Ik-hee, joined the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) after university, served in Bogotá, São Paulo, Madrid, New York, Panama, Mexico, and Milan, and on retiring in 2010 began to write what he had seen and felt in the world’s trading posts.

Overseas postings, this reading says, led him through the Jews he met to ask where the strength of people who always seemed to stand at the world’s center came from, and to conclude that the economic history of the world is the history of the Jews. He wrote the book from that economic-historical angle. The student writer adds that knowing the author had actually worked in trade, in several countries, makes it easier to see how much he wanted to study the subject, and how far he wondered why Jews had stood at the world’s center. The 2010 retirement stays in that year.

Spain’s 1492 expulsion, and a vertical trade in Antwerp

The contents of part 2, they write, begin with Jews settled in Spain, forced to convert to Christianity, massacred at the hands of a Spanish archbishop, persecuted under the Toledo edict, subjected to witch-hunts, and finally driven out by the expulsion order of 1492. The student writer records having known that Jews had wandered the world, and having known of the German Holocaust of the Second World War, but not of these earlier humiliations and of the blood shed as a community was hardened. Those events stay in the book’s historical frame.

A later anecdote, as retold in this reading, ends with Spain, after driving the Jews out, weakening its finances through a policy of expansion by conquest and then declining. The book’s stage then moves to Antwerp in the Netherlands. There, first, transit trade is said to have brought large profits. In Antwerp’s then-lively diamond business, a monopoly in diamonds is named. Sugar, cocoa, tobacco, coffee, and tea coming from India and Africa — luxury goods — are said to have been monopolized as well, and to have brought large income. The student writer, thinking of mines still fought over and nicknamed “blood diamonds,” finds it hard to imagine how high the value, and how sharp the competition, must have been then.

In any case, they write, the monopoly was completed in a single vertical form — production, trade, processing, and distribution — and from that time until recently this is called a specialty that allowed a market to be held. Money was also made through trade and finance: in plain terms, a “trade in money.” Credit was extended on a merchant’s standing, and from granting goods on account this reading moves to the introduction of the bill of exchange, which could play the role of money without a direct trade in gold or silver. As funds moved more smoothly, Antwerp’s commerce and seaborne trade are said to have grown explosively, and people naturally gathered there.

The 1608 exchange, the 1609 Bank of Amsterdam, and later pages in the book

When Antwerp was taken by Spain, this reading says, Jews moved to Amsterdam and to England. Those who entered England are said to have led British maritime trade and to have headed the East India Company and the Levant Company — Eastern trades that, in the student writer’s words, exploited Indians and seized their goods. In Amsterdam this reading names pepper trade, the Dutch East India Company, a stock exchange opened in 1608 in a modern sense, and the Bank of Amsterdam, founded in 1609, as forces that developed the city’s economy; merchants and artists flowed into a wealthy town. They could do this, the book is said to argue, because they took more favorable terms than other countries’ trading ships: lower transit dues, long narrow decks to keep ships light, sails placed efficiently, fewer weapons, and crews cut to about a third of other ships, staking their lives, in this telling, to hold the maritime trade. The student writer’s own thought, on reading that strategy and courage, is simply: so this is how money is made.

The exchange of 1608 and the bank of 1609 are said to have an important place in economic history. With the exchange, trade in securities became livelier, and the occupation of the securities dealer was born; Jews, this reading says, were active in that market as dealers. The Bank of Amsterdam is said to have made a standard currency in order to unify monetary units that were then unstandardized and used in a jumble, and to have introduced a system of “bank money”: merchants with accounts deposited gold and silver, and could trade with others on the strength of the recorded amounts. Trading on recorded metal meant the physical gold and silver were not needed, which made trade with other merchants easier and became an occasion for bills of exchange to spread. The student writer likens it to today’s system of deposits and withdrawals, and says world finance became more advanced as a result.

Seeing Jewish activity in the Netherlands, Ashkenazi Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe are said to have moved to Amsterdam, and to have lived there as a poor and ordinary class. Sephardi Jews who had lived in the Arab world, by contrast, are said, through skill and a wide knowledge of culture, to have been regarded as an upper, wealthy class even within Amsterdam’s Jewish society. The student writer finds it bitter that even among the same people, status and wealth were unequally divided by place of origin and by work, and also thinks it may have been unavoidable. Later, when perceptions of Jews were still negative, their standing is said to have risen through the part they played in the Thirty Years’ War. After that, this reading says, the history moves quickly: large profits from exchange-rate trades in Asian gold and silver, and, in the eighteenth century, huge gains from importing East Asian porcelain, especially Japanese porcelain, which Europe then admired. The same pages, however, set that beside a time of rampant imperialism, fierce competition to make other countries into colonies, and the cruel abuse and exploitation of people enslaved there. Those years and claims stay as the book and the student writer give them, not as a 2026 official social total. The same Korean essay, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A book report on Hong Ik-hee’s Jewish Stories, part 2, following the path of money; the author’s KOTRA postings and 2010 retirement, as the text records them.
2. The opening of part 2 in Spain, the expulsion order of 1492, and Antwerp’s transit trade, diamond and luxury-goods monopolies, vertical system, and bills of exchange.
3. The move to Amsterdam and England, the stock exchange of 1608, the Bank of Amsterdam in 1609 and its “bank money,” Ashkenazi and Sephardi differences, the Thirty Years’ War, and later eighteenth-century pages, with years left in the book’s historical frame.

Last updated: 14 November 2026