Interesting, and the author tried to say jews were an "integrated Jewish population" where they went into Central and then Eastern Europe, but they were not integrated. They lived in their own neighborhoods and spoke yiddish, not intermingling with the host countries' people except transactionally to be the merchant. They were also insulting of the host countries' people who worked the farms saying 'ours is the city and yours is the dirt' Also interesting is that the author puts them as some kind of southern European origin.