“They had no unique economic function: They were Europeans.”

August 19, 2023 6:59 AM

The rumour about the Jews is an essay by Prof. Francesca Trivellato about how Jews expelled from France in 1394 were falsely credited with inventing the bill of exchange. She was interviewed at length on this subject by Nachi Weinstein for the Seforim Chatter podcast. The historiography of Jews and finance was the subject of Prof. Julie Mell’s The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender, which she summarizes in a brief radio interview with the Carolina Journal. For a more in-depth interview, you can listen to Scott Ferguson interview her for the Money on the Left podcast (incl. transcript) or read the three critiques in a forum on the book hosted by the Marginalia Review, and Prof. Mell’s response.
posted by Kattullus (21 comments total)

I liked this observation in the New Republic article

To invest such great sums and to have the privilege to make such returns on them, even skirting canon law, was a practice deemed too lucrative and important to accord to non-Christians. This was a Christian privilege. Hence, medieval and Renaissance banking in Europe was tightly intertwined with Christianity. ...

To get around the law, Italian bankers renamed the interest paid to their depositors discrezioni, or discretions, not made contractually, but as gifts, and thus not usury.

It gets at something I've always wondered about the just-so story of "Jews were moneylenders because they didn't follow usury laws". How did a small oppressed group get a monopoly on such a financial superpower? Well, they didn't.
posted by Nelson at 8:01 AM on August 19, 2023 [27 favorites]

Interesting and important work.

Just yesterday I was listening to a Qanon Anonymous episode on the Rothschilds (promoting a book about the family by an unrelated journalist) and despite good intentions the uncritical acceptance of the moneylending and "moneychanging" narrative leads to uncomfortable and anachronistic oversimplifications of the influence and power of 'court jews' during a relatively brief period of history (ignoring the existence of other finance and trading networks, and the number of Jews occupying such positions as versus those living as a precarious underclass in ghettos and shtetls), and from there a reductive view of antisemitism as a predictable response to material and political conditions.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:05 AM on August 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

Qanon Anonymous

Well there's an "instant nope-out" podcast title.
posted by pwnguin at 8:44 AM on August 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

Do you also think Al Anon is a drinking club? See also True Anon.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:52 AM on August 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

It's funny how often QAA's podcast title has let them walk into Q adjacent events and have attendees open up to them, thinking they're fellow travelers.
posted by Reyturner at 8:54 AM on August 19, 2023 [15 favorites]

This is close to / builds on recent economical historiography regarding the figure of Judas Iscariot, and other pre-modern tropes/topics by prof G. Todeschini of Trieste (who has not, I believe, published in English).
posted by progosk at 9:34 AM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think this essay by Giorgio Agamben is also adjacent
posted by chavenet at 9:48 AM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

QAnon Anonymous

QAnon Anonymous (QAA) is an investigative journalism podcast that analyzes and debunks conspiracy theories. It is co-hosted by Travis View (pen name of Logan Strain[3]), Julian Feeld,[4] and Jake Rockatansky,[1] alongside British correspondent Annie Kelly[2] and Canadian correspondent Liv Agar.[2]

sounds pretty cool to me
posted by philip-random at 10:21 AM on August 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is a really thought-provoking revision, and I hope that she will come out with the argument in a more popular book available to the general public because this would make a great read. (I suspect the expensive two-volume set would be way over my head!) The idea of Medieval European Jew as Usurer is so baked into our idea of financial history that it's hard to think about an alternative telling, where, as Mell puts it in the response to her critics, "royal surveillance over Jewish lending is what has created the archives that fuel the myth." She's making a very careful argument--not that Jewish lending never existed (which some of her critics take as her point), but that its apparent centrality, importance, and alienness is an effect of that surveillance regime. What an amazing idea.
posted by mittens at 10:45 AM on August 19, 2023 [15 favorites]

Do you also think Al Anon is a drinking club?

Admittedly, in 2023 I now associate "Anonymous" with 4chan and hacker collectives, versus alcoholism. In retrospect, those were already covered in the Anon part of QAnon. I'd still rather not peer into that abyss, even if this was in fact a guided tour.

"royal surveillance over Jewish lending is what has created the archives that fuel the myth."

Immediately I thought of the conditional probability models that anthropologist Richard McElreath apparently teaches to student researchers. Applying the idea to prehistoric civilization like in that example feels almost farcical, but you'd think recorded history would allow us more ability to reason, not just about the datam but about the process that generated the data and when and why it's missing. Does sound a bit Azimovian as I write it down though.
posted by pwnguin at 12:18 PM on August 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

i mean yeah. it was the knights templar!
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 12:26 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

(Mell’s answers explicitly confirm a suspicion I had: that some of her critics do not seem to have read Todeschini.)
posted by progosk at 12:37 PM on August 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

its apparent centrality, importance, and alienness is an effect of that surveillance regime

this is one of the ideas Harkaway plays with in _The Gone-Away World_, a book I love
posted by clew at 1:14 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Merchant of Venice was published in 1596.

It would be interesting to know how often it was produced in Britain and America relative to other Shakespeare plays between WW1 and WW2, and how often since.
posted by jamjam at 1:15 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

This was really thought provoking though it feels like stepping into the middle of a debate I'm not even aware of. I'm certainly aware of the apparent myths about Catholicism outlawing interest-bearing finance and the relation to "Jewish finance."

It seems to me like one modern parallel might be the centrality of Jews or rather anti-semitism in US McCarthyism/Red Scare. I feel like it has some of the same qualities - while yes there were Jewish radicals advocating for communism & socialism in the US, the fear was of Communists hidden among us which was sometimes equated with Jews hiding among us and corrupting our American values.
posted by muddgirl at 1:24 PM on August 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't remember the details, but _Shylock_ by John Gross is a history of the play.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 1:40 PM on August 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

So Ivanhoe was misleading?
posted by ActingTheGoat at 1:51 PM on August 19, 2023

Yes, the Gross book has a whole chapter on post-1945 performances! (And I love the book dearly and everyone should read it.)
posted by mittens at 1:52 PM on August 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is interesting. One of my best (Jewish) friends wrote his undergrad thesis at Princeton in thn 60s on the spread of culture along the Caminos of Europe, and the role of Jews in creating universal financial practices along the route. Goethe, and the birth of Europe, and all that. This will give me fodder for our next conversation. Thanks.
posted by grimjeer at 9:40 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

An awful lot of medieval nonsense about Jews and usury is still repeated uncritically. Jews had a monopoly on moneylending because usury was forbidden in Christianity? Y’know murder and adultery were also forbidden to Christians? Did Jews get a monopoly on those? One of the prescribed punishments for usury was excommunication? For Jews? Dick Whittington (yes, him) presided over a massive series of usury trials in England when Jews had long been completely excluded from the country.

Just knock that shit off, guys.
posted by Phanx at 2:12 PM on August 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

As it happens, I'm reading The Merchant of Prato right now and, while it's dated and a book aimed at a lay audience anyway, in the whole section on the subject's thriving trade in bills of exchange there's scarcely a mention of the Jews. Just a bunch of Italians ripping each other off.
posted by praemunire at 7:46 AM on August 21, 2023 [5 favorites]