contractors and tax farmers in Orsha, Mogilev province. Several Jewish financiers from Warsaw and Lodz formed the first Russian joint-stock banks; Evzel and Horace Gintsburg founded the St. Petersburg Discount and Loan Bank, the Kiev Commercial Bank, and the Odessa Discount Bank; Iakov Solomonovich Poliakov launched the Don Land Bank, the Petersburg-Azov Bank, and the influential Azov Don Commercial Bank; and his brother Lazar was the main shareholder of the Moscow International Merchant Bank, the South Russia Industrial Bank, the Orel Commercial Bank, and the Moscow and Yaroslavl-Kostroma Land Banks. The father and son Soloveichiks’ Siberian Commercial Bank was one of Russia’s most important and innovative financial institutions. Other prominent Russian financiers included the Rafalovichs, the Vavelbergs, and the Fridlands. In 1915–16, when the imperial capital was still formally closed to all but specially licensed Jews, at least 7 of the 17 members of the St. Petersburg Stock Exchange Council and 28 of the 70 joint-stock bank managers were Jews or Jewish converts to Christianity. When the merchant of the first guild Grigorii (Gersha Zelik) Davidovich Lesin arrived in St. Petersburg from Zhitomir in October 1907 to open a banking house, it took a special secret police investigation by two different agencies to persuade the municipal authorities, who had never heard of him, to issue the licence. By 1914, Lesin’s bank had become one of the most important in Russia. 20 Nor was finance the only sphere of Jewish business expertise. According to the premier economic historian of Russian Jewry (and first cousin to Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin), Arcadius Kahan, “There was hardly an area of entrepreneurial activity from which Jewish entrepreneurs were successfully excluded. Apart from the manufacturing industries in the Pale of Settlement, one could have encountered them at the oil wells of Baku, in the gold mines of Siberia, on the fisheries of the Volga or Amur, in the shipping lines on the Dnepr, in the forests of Briansk, on railroad construction sites anywhere in European or Asiatic Russia, on cotton plantations in Central Asia, and so forth.” 21 The earliest, safest, most profitable, and ultimately the most productive investment was directed toward railroad construction. Benefiting from the example and direct financial backing of the Rothschilds, Pereires, Bleichröders, and Gomperzes (as well as the budgetary munificence of the imperial government, especially the War Ministry), some Russian-based Jewish bankers built large fortunes while connecting disparate Russian markets to each other and to the outside world. Consortia of Jewish financiers and contractors built the Warsaw-Vienna, Moscow-Smolensk, Kiev-Brest, and Moscow-Brest lines (among many others), while the “railroad king” Samuil Poliakov founded,