Peddling, long an economic niche for European Jews became in the late eighteenth century a powerful engine which drove their migration around the globe. Young Jewish men, responding to both the decline of the traditional economies of their home communities and the opening up of a number of 'new worlds' took up their familiar occupation in broad range of places. They left eastern and central Europe for North America, the British Isles and Ireland, South Africa, and Antipodes by means of peddling. In these places they provided finished goods - pots and pans, needles, thread, buttons, fabric, eyeglasses, bedding, pictures and picture frames among the stock items they carried - to rural populations not served by retail markets. In each of those places these Jewish immigrant peddlers confronted new political situations which reflected the racial, religious, and ethnic divides which accompanied the colonial process. This paper indicates the degree to which peddling as the engine which facilitated migration functioned as a nearly universal modern Jewish phenomenon, despite the general silence of historians as they have written about that era.