Columbia News highlighted Rebecca Kobrin (Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History) and her new book, Credit to the Nation: Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Bankers and the Shaping of American Finance, 1873–1930. In the profile, Kobrin uncovers the story of the 20th-century immigrant bankers who provided services to communities excluded by mainstream institutions, transforming New York City and the U.S. financial industry along the way. She also reflects on the archival research behind the book, the Lower East Side building that inspired the project, and the book’s continued relevance in contemporary debates about immigration, inequality, and access to credit.

The book traces the novel practices of bankers who not only enabled the flourishing of American Jewry, but also revolutionized the U.S. financial industry. Drawing on previously unexamined archival materials in Russian, Yiddish, German, and English, Kobrin tells a story that is also crucial to the history of New York, as immigrant bankers’ financing of real estate transformed wide swathes of the city. Lenders drove a boom in the prices of tenement buildings, but heavy speculation eventually precipitated the downfall of immigrant banking. Kobrin notes in particular the case of the Bank of United States—a private lender catering primarily to Jewish businessmen—which the Federal Reserve refused to bail out from bankruptcy in 1930.

 

Immigrants’ grasping for credit, and the rise and fall of immigrant banks, gave way to a contemporary banking industry that, ironically, refuses credit to today’s immigrants. Kobrin emphasizes that now, as before, the denial of credit pushes entrepreneurial Americans into unregulated money-lending and the trap of endless debt.