This intriguing book is a model of transnational Jewish economic history. Assorted histories—imperial, Jewish, economic, and labor—converge in Coenen Snyder's fascinating account of how diamonds became a niche dominated by Jews in the world of luxury goods. This comprehensive but comprehensible study takes the reader from the minefields of Africa to the exchange floors of London to the 'Jewish factories' of Amsterdam to the retail storefronts of New York
City as it brings to life the enterprising people who made diamonds a ubiquitous luxury by the twenty-first century.
Saskia Coenen Snyder is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of Building a Public Judaism: Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe, which was a finalist for the Grawemeyer Award in Religion.