ABSTRACT
Urban poverty was always a serious social problem, and there is every indication that it became steadily more acute in the course of the early modern era. Social marginalization was a profoundly determinative experience for many groups and individuals in the early modern city. Impecunious Jewish pedlars occasionally had close links to the vagrants or criminals of the urban underworld whose own marginal status meant they had little to lose from intimate contact with the Jews. The extremes of Jewish poverty and Jewish wealth were usually little evident to the outside world: the poor were looked after by Jewish communal institutions, while the rich had few opportunities to flaunt their wealth in the manner of Christian patricians. By the start of the sixteenth century, every sizeable European city had a hodgepodge of hospitals, leper-houses, pilgrim hospices and other philanthropic institutions, supported largely by rents or other forms of income bequeathed by the faithful in their wills.
