I just listened to this Church lecture from mises.org today: [What is Morally Right About Economic Freedom](http://What is Morally Right About Economic Freedom) by Rabbi Daniel Lapin. In there he basically asks the question “Why have Jews been successful in business?” and answers it in light of Jewish tradition.
I thought it was fantastic. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says (although I agree with the vast majority), and I think a lot can be added to the concept of Judaism and Capitalism from Talmud and Chassidic thought, but I think the lecture is much better than Dr. Gordon’s lecture, both in content and presentation.
Of all the Church lectures, I enjoyed the one on Islam by Mustafa Akyol the most. Here was clearly someone who knew what he was talking about in terms of using the religion’s sources and looking at them through the light of libertarianism. The lecture I linked to above is close second.
I don’t really think there is much difference between the situation of Jews in Western Europe and in Eastern, except in Eastern Europe, the conditions in the 17th-19th centuries were similar to the conditions of Jews in medieval Western Europe. Jews were very involved in economic transactions where they were allowed to do so. Also, in medieval Europe, Jews also formed communes (ghettos), which were oftentimes self-governing. But this difference was proportional to Russian Empire lagging a few centuries in economic and social development behind Western Europe.
This. I’d say regions that were ‘in-between’ West and East, such as Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, were a good example of a halfway point between a gentile autarchy (szlachta) and serfdom contrasted with the large number of healthy cities and towns, which while not as booming as the west still fairly equaled them in overall size and wealth, providing plenty of outlets for trade and Jewish communities were unarguably among those to influence it.