>>510892144 (OP)1. 586 BCE – The Babylonian Exile
After the destruction of the First Temple, Jewish elites were deported to Babylon. There they compiled, edited, and canonized the Hebrew Bible—texts that would later anchor the moral and legal codes of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. By turning a military catastrophe into a portable civilization, Jews created a template for diaspora survival that every minority culture has since copied.
2. 70–200 CE – Rabbinic Codification under Rome
Following the Second Temple’s fall, the rabbis at Yavneh (and later in the Galilee) transformed Temple-centered religion into a text-centered, law-driven faith. The Mishnah (≈ 200 CE) and the Talmuds (≈ 500–600 CE) built an autonomous legal system that could operate inside—and eventually override—foreign jurisdictions. This legal portability is the ancestor of every trans-national regulatory regime today.
3. 900–1100 – The Radhanite Merchants
Jewish multilingual traders (the Radhanites) monopolized the silk, spice, and slave routes between Europe, North Africa, and China. Their letters of credit and double-entry bookkeeping prefigured modern banking and the global supply chain.
4. 1492 – Expulsion from Spain & Entry into Amsterdam
When Spain expelled its Jews, Sephardic families took their capital, nautical charts, and sugar-refining know-how to Amsterdam, Livorno, and later London. Their capital financed the Dutch and English East India Companies—corporations that became the first truly globe-spanning multinationals.
5. 1654 – First Jewish Settlement in New Amsterdam
Twenty-three Sephardic refugees founded Shearith Israel in Manhattan. Over the next three centuries their descendants (Lopez, Seixas, Guggenheim, Lehman, Goldman, Sachs, Warburg, Schiff, Loeb) built the banks, railroads, and commodity exchanges that turned the United States into the world’s financial hegemon.