Did the Jews invent the instruments of capitalism in 17th-century Bordeaux? This myth, initially intended to reflect the dangers of financial operations, was soon taken as historical fact.
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The idea that Jews embody the world of money is an old cliché, which has long fed suspicions of a global conspiracy to generalize capitalism in the service of the interests of a caste. However old they may be, both ideas are not without origin. In The Promise and Peril of Credit (translated in French under the title Juifs et capitalisme), Francesca Trivellato, professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, USA, sets out to retrace their history. In so doing, her book overturns the boundaries of knowledge in three areas, for which she proposes innovative avenues of research.
The origins of the stereotype: the legend of bills of exchange
The book first renews our understanding of the factors behind the construction of the anti-Jewish stereotype over the long term, by situating them within the cultural, political, religious and economic frameworks of the different eras considered. It highlights changes and continuities, in particular hostility to religious diversity, as a metaphor and mechanism that expresses, in reality, distrust of real and effective social and economic integration. It traces the deep lines, drawing on concrete situations in which the short-circuiting of the stereotype operates. In this sense, Francesca Trivellato does not limit herself to describing the origins of a degrading or discriminating topos: she follows its evolution by relating it to the contexts in which Jews have acted and interacted, thus determining the adoption of the topos, its adaptations or, on the contrary, its silencing.
At the heart of the analysis is the reconstruction of the formulation and success of a false but enduring narrative, the basis of the “legend”. The Jews of the Middle Ages are said to have invented marine insurance and the bill of exchange (although the book is mainly devoted to the second subject). This fanciful tale has enjoyed narrative success for centuries, right up to the present day, even if it has changed in form, implications and fallout. The author illustrates the path of diffusion of the astonishingly vast melting pot of false beliefs linked to it. The journey winds its way mainly through Europe, between loose papers and books, on the one hand, and urban centers, markets and ports marked by the Jewish presence, on the other. Bordeaux is the ideal starting point for this itinerary. Around this center, Trivellato's trail branches out, until it comes across the first known formulation of the legend (we don't know if it's the first, but it's reasonable to believe that it's the first written attestation), attributable to the lawyer Étienne Cleirac (1583- 1657), who was born and practiced all his life in the Atlantic city.
In reality, bills of exchange are a credit instrument which, after a long incubation period, spread throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages and reached maturity in the 16th century. Initially designed to transfer money from one town to another without the need for cash, it has since become the instrument of a fully-fledged form of financial speculation. Although it's impossible to say where, when and by whom it was invented, Italian Christian merchants - and certainly not Jews - played an important role. As the author points out, “no medieval author would have claimed that marine insurance and bills of exchange were Jewish inventions, for it was known at the time that these instruments were the prerogative of the great Christian merchant-bankers, who constituted the ruling class of the Italian communes and Northern Europe” .
The merchants of Bordeaux
So why did the legend of a Jewish invention (most likely) emerge in the city of Gironde? Two factors account for this. The first is that Bordeaux is a religiously turbulent city, and since the mid-sixteenth century has been home to a core of “new Christians” who fled the Iberian Inquisition, and whom the French crown authorized to practice Judaism freely from 1723 onwards. Up until this date, although religion remained confined to the home, it already had a wide range of external manifestations. Even in Venice and Livorno, where Jews of Iberian origin, all baptized at birth, were invited to settle towards the last decade of the 16th century, they were only able to do so on condition that they openly declared their adherence to Judaism, and consequently lived under precise restrictions. In Bordeaux (and Bayonne), on the other hand, Portuguese merchants were officially Christian and therefore not excluded, while the practice of Judaism was allowed to oscillate between private conscience and public identity.
The second factor that made Bordeaux a fertile breeding ground for the legend was that during these same years, the professional status of merchants and those engaged in commercial activities, particularly over long distances, also underwent major innovations. The nobility, encouraged by the crown, became particularly involved in merchant activities, leading to a gradual shift in the social ranks engaged in these activities. This long upheaval is said to have gradually transformed French mercantile society from a society of order to a contractual society, which underwent its first codification with the reforms sought by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, in particular with the approval of the 1673 land trade ordinance.
As Francesca Trivellato shows, what emerges from Cleirac's pages is a narrative construction that blends history and fiction, real subjects and unreal references, to create an edifying tale, aimed at warning of the risks resulting from the spread of credit instruments that were difficult to understand and use, linked to the expansion of market spaces on an increasingly international scale. This story had to be comprehensible to a public dominated by a spirit of anxiety, deriving from the religious and social context of the time. In other words, through the naming of behaviors deemed reprehensible, the public (merchants and legal practitioners in particular, but also the rest of society) is warned of the danger represented by the imprudent use of the new financial instruments, although their usefulness is also recognized when used sensibly.
From edifying image to origin story
It is against this backdrop of the gradual disintegration of traditional social ties and the curtailment of market activities, which guaranteed a form of security to the privileged classes, that the legend finds its full flowering. In the midst of these uncertainties concerning the new (the international credit market, long-distance trade, the gradual erosion of the privileges and professional distinctions of the orders), presenting the public with the negative example of Jews plotting in obscurity makes sense, as a warning. Naming the Jews as the inventors of the most abstruse contemporary credit instrument serves as a warning: just as there are people, the Jews, who operate beyond the visible and intelligible by virtue of their social and religious discredit (which in so doing they deserve all the more), so those who engage in the market must be warned of the possibility of stumbling across operators who carry out unclear actions, who deceive, who cause harm to (Christian) society. As Giacomo Todeschini has shown, the overlap between the circle of business and politics, on the one hand, and the circle of religious identity, on the other, in certain key periods of this history, between the Middle Ages and modern times, is almost perfect.
Over the following centuries, the transformation of the image of Jewish merchants from an edifying to a performative and practical function, as formulated in the 19th century by Wilhelm Roscher, undergoes distinct temporalities, which the author reconstructs with sagacity and expertise, and which the reader follows like a police investigation. In the 19th century, finally, in the presence of more efficient means of doing business, even on an international scale (joint-stock companies, stock exchanges, mixed and investment banks), the legend ceased to be a “useful compass to indicate the morality of credit, as it had been under the Ancien Régime”. It is now “part of the great narratives on the birth of capitalism” , i.e., the reflections of Karl Marx, Max Weber or Werner Sombart . Under their pen, and following in their footsteps, historical studies quickly lost interest in the implications of edifying tales, such as the legend attributing the invention of the bill of exchange to the Jews. Focusing more on market mechanisms, economic history turned away from social frameworks and actors.
Liberalism and the market economy
Beyond its historical investigation, Jews and Capitalism offers a fruitful critique of preconceptions often taken for granted in public debate. The idea of a link between liberal thought and the modern market, favoured by institutionalist economists, is strongly undermined by Francesca Trivellato's analysis. More specifically, an examination of the actual social frameworks of economic history calls into question the scheme that accounts for the market - understood here as the expansion and intensification of transactions - through the liquidation of the religiously-based discriminatory apparatus (towards the Jews). All the terms of this syllogism appear either blurred or resolutely incorrect. In this instance, it was certainly not liberal thinkers who were the first to declare the presumed and never proven graces of exchange as a means of ironing out disagreements. The Venetian rabbi Simone Luzzatto was already asserting this at the beginning of the 17th century, and in following this path, he claimed a role for Jewish merchants capable of weaving a bond of concord with the Ottoman world - a vain attempt, to say the least, as historian Benjamin Ravid has shown, judging by the wars the Serenissima frequently waged with the Sublime Porte...
Francesca Trivellato also questions the role traditionally assigned to trade (and its tools) in the debate and in the concrete ways in which Jewish emancipation was achieved in France and other European countries. Unlike under the Ancien Régime, the role of Jews as merchants is virtually absent from later Jewish claims, where it takes on a different nuance. The positive version of the legend, notably accredited by Montesquieu, which sees the Jews as the protagonists in the affirmation of a new season in the exercise of merchant activities, did not meet with success among the Jews themselves; and indeed, the Girondin philosopher certainly did not go so far as to assert the true social equality of the players or the erasure of the rights of the orders. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that a Jewish author took up the legend relating the invention of the bill of exchange to the Jews; from which a line of studies on the contributions of the Jews to Western civilization took shape, notably on the initiative of Isaac Disraeli, father of the future British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
This new approach is the result of the turbulent period that characterized the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This era of revolutions organized a historic transition that led to the emancipation of Jews from a discriminatory legal regime. But emancipation was achieved by means other than recognizing the merits of Jews in economic activities. At the same time, this turning point gave rise to unprecedented fears. The new condition of formal equality, of sharing fundamental rights with the rest of the citizenry (which did not yet include slaves and women), gave rise to new concerns that spread throughout Europe, where nations were asserting themselves. At a time when states are tending to define themselves through identity politics, how can we recognize the faithful citizen, belonging to the national state? Jewish membership and its recognition is once again in question.
A decompartmentalized, multi-scale history
The Promise and Peril of Credit succeeds in profoundly renewing our knowledge of this past, thanks to bold methodological choices that deserve attention. First of all, Francesca Trivellato takes the path of micro-history (which consists in tracing the diffusion of a narrative form based on a work, an author or a context) to tackle macro-historical problems (the mutations of the anti-Jewish stereotype relating to economic and financial activities, the evolution of the legal status of Jews in pre- and proto-industrial Europe) based on textual research concentrated on a few words. The exploitation of powerful digital databases now makes it possible to trace the singular facts and ideas of a past that has become foreign to us. The most unexpected fruit of Francesca Trivellato's work is the uncovering, behind an obscure Bordeaux lawyer, of a torrent of references, debates, refutations and reconfigurations involving anonymous provincial intellectuals as well as the great European thinkers.
If the micro-historical approach is not new in itself, it is new here in its field of application: economic history, which has gradually lost interest in the pre-industrial era and found itself paralyzed by an excessive polarization, keeping at bay the history of economic and political thought, the history of credit instruments, the history of the Jews... Against this tendency, Francesca Trivellato manages to hold together these different aspects of the problem and thus approach it in its globality and complexity. In other words, this economic history is renewed by its decompartmentalization, which makes it also a political, diplomatic, cultural and material history. Here again, the approach resonates with a trend in contemporary historiography (reflected, for example, in the work of Jonathan Karp and Guillaume Calafat). It is all the more aptly applied to the theme of anti-Jewish stereotypes, as they themselves have long been fuelled by the encounter between the dynamics of economics and social change and the development of linguistic and symbolic tools aimed at constructing a negative image of Jews.
To extend the reading of this book, rich in questions and avenues of investigation, the influence of the Protestant Reformation could be explored in greater depth. Alongside the reasons so well explored by Francesca Trivellato, the Reformation shapes the context that makes possible a reflection like Cléirac's. Without remaining enslaved to the presumed link between Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism that Weber suggested, we can see that the Reformation contributed to shaking the edifice previously built on the legitimacy of credit. Bills of exchange had been known and widespread since the 14th and 15th centuries, and the very invention of purgatory, for example, contributed to the acclimatization and gradual legitimization of the financial activities carried out by merchant-bankers in Christendom. To what extent did the storm that shook the Christian world between the reform attempts of the 15th century and the Protestant affirmation of the 16th century influence the renegotiation of the terms of the relationship between credit, merchants and society in the decades that followed? And to what extent did this context reinforce the interest in making the Jewish merchant the anti-model of legitimate transactions? In a sense, The Promise and Peril of Credit poses as many questions as it answers, which is the hallmark of a great book.