a few quotes from The Fiddler's Children - for future use.

At the turn of the twentieth century, 60 percent of Europe's Jews (5.2 million out of 8.7 million) lived in the Russian Empire. Subject to a comprehensive range of legal disabilities and discrimination ... Russia's Jews were dominant in banking; they financed much of the country's railroad construction, its gold mining, oil production, river transportation, and commercial fishing; they were prominent in its timber and sugar industries; and for a long time they controlled most of its grain trade.

- here i just deleted a few sentences in between. The result is impressive, huh?

The Jews owed their economic success to strangeness, specialized training, and the kind of intragroup trust that assured the relative reliability of business partners, loan clients, and subcontractors. And like all Mercurians, they tended to think of themselves as a chosen tribe consisting of chosen clans—and to act accordingly.

- for this Kevin MacDonald was declared an antisemite. He has a chapter explaining economic success of ethnic Chinese in Thailand exactly this same way ...

Slezkine is at his most controversial in assigning "Jewish" attributes to an ethnic group, which he calls "Jews" just by virtue of their birth:

"Jews," for the purposes of this story, are the members of traditional Jewish communities (Jews by birth, faith, name, language, occupation, self-description, and formal ascription) and their children and grandchildren (whatever their faith, name, language, occupation, self-description, or formal ascription).

- This is an enormously inclusive group. By these criteria, I am certainly a Jew (although I have never been to a religious service in a synagogue and do not think of myself as a Jew

- well, the Government of Israel does. And one other Government used to ...  ¶ 3:56 PM