Western Europe moved to large cities to participate in the unbinding of Prometheus (as David Landes, conveniently for our purposes, called the rise of capitalism). They did it in their own way—partly because other avenues remained closed but also because their own way was very effective, as well as well rehearsed (Prometheus had been a trickster and manipulator similar to Hermes before becoming a martyred culture hero). Wherever they went, they had a higher proportion of self-employment than non-Jews, a greater concentration in trade and commerce, and a clear preference for economically independent family firms. Most Jewish wage laborers (a substantial minority in Poland) worked in small Jewish-owned shops, and most great Jewish banking houses, including the Rothschilds, Bleichröders, Todescos, Sterns, Oppenheims, and Seligmans, were family partnerships, with brothers and male cousins—often married to cousins—stationed in different parts of Europe (in-laws and outmarrying females were often excluded from direct involvement in business). In the early nineteenth century, thirty of the fifty-two private banks in Berlin were owned by Jewish families; a hundred years later many of these banks became shareholding companies with Jewish managers, some of them directly related to the original owners as well as to each other. The greatest German joint stock banks, including the Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank, were founded with the participation of Jewish financiers, as were the Rothschilds’ Creditanstalt in Austria and the Pereires’ Crédit Mobilier in France. (Of the remaining private —i.e., non–joint stock—banks in Weimar Germany, almost half were owned by Jewish families). 13 In fin de siècle Vienna, 40 percent of the directors of public banks were Jews or of Jewish descent, and all banks but one were administered by Jews (some of them members of old banking clans) under the protection of duly titled and landed Paradegoyim . Between 1873 and 1910, at the height of political liberalism, the Jewish share of the Vienna stock exchange council ( Börsenrath ) remained steady at about 70 percent, and in 1921 Budapest, 87.8 percent of the members of the stock exchange and 91 percent of the currency brokers association were Jews, many of them ennobled (and thus, in a sense, Paradegoyim themselves). In industry, there were some spectacularly successful Jewish magnates (such as the Rathenaus in electrical engineering, the Friedländer-Fulds in coal, the Monds in chemical industries, and the Ballins in shipbuilding), some areas with high proportions of Jewish industrial ownership (such as Hungary), and some strongly “Jewish” industries (such as textiles, food, and publishing), but the principal contribution of Jews to industrial development appears to have consisted in the financing and managerial control by banks. In