" Jews specialized in moneylending almost from the beginning of their settlement in England after 1066. The next center of Jewish moneylending was northern France and the Rhineland; in the rest of Germany and central Europe, the specialization of Jews into moneylending was much more gradual. In central and northern Italy, the specialization of Jews into moneylending occurred much later, during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In southern Italy, as in the Iberian Peninsula, the Jews never specialized in moneylending; until their expulsions in the late fifteenth century, they engaged in a wide spectrum of occupations, including crafts, shopkeeping, trade, and medicine, as well as moneylending. "

― , The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492