In 1914, my grandfather, Henoch Tepper, was struggling. Having arrived from Latvia in 1901, he was thirty years old and married with three children. He scraped by working at a grocery store in St. Louis. A successful Jewish garment merchant spotted a lantzman and immediately recognized an opportunity to do a mitzvah…and make a buck.

“There’s a town in rural Tennessee that doesn’t have a clothing store,” the man told my grandfather. “If you go up there, I’ll front you the merchandise, and you can open a store. You’ll pay me when you can…” Thus did my grandfather pack his family onto a train and head a few hundred miles up the tracks to a depot where a wooden crate of dresses was waiting for him. He then opened the first of what became a chain of 16 “Jew stores” across the rural South.

In addition to explaining why my relatives spoke Yiddish with southern accents (“Y’all want to kibbitz on Shabbos?”), this story offers a great example of how Jews have long been in the business of startups. Startups, often involving this same kind of lending and promissory arrangements, are a staple of Gemara. You borrowed my ox to plow your field. Where is it? You lost it? Oy vei…

Flash forward to modern-day Israel,........

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