Francesca Trivellato
THE PROMISE AND THE PERIL OF CREDIT: WHAT A FORGOTTEN LEGEND ABOUT JEWS AND FINANCE TELLS US ABOUT THE MAKING OF EUROPEAN COMMERCIAL SOCIETY
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-069-117-859-2
Reviewed by Jane S. Gerber1
The image of the Jew as an omnipotent and nefarious figure has dogged Western thought since antiquity. While frequently vague in nature, this image was generally linked to specific stereotypes that played upon irrational fears of the masses to energize one of the most persistent historical phenomena, that of antisemitism. Theologians and historians have described the varieties of antisemitism in detail. Yet, the importance of economic factors in the evolution of modern antisemitism has tended to be largely ignored in those analyses. Francesca Trivellato’s new book, The Promise and Peril of Credit, provides a brilliant corrective to this gap in the historiography of antisemitism while also contextualizing the Western Sephardic diaspora within her discussion, and linking it to the emergence of the modern economic order.
In her reading of a once very popular compendium of maritime laws,Us et Coustumes de la Mer, written in 1647 by the French lawyer Etienne Cleirac (1583-1657), Trivellato stumbled upon the startling statement, presented as fact, that the Jews of medieval France invented bills of exchange and maritime insurance in order to hide their ill-gotten gains at the time of their expulsion from France in the fourteenth century. This contention leads her on an intellectual journey in order to unravel the origins and evolution of the myth. In the course of her ingenious sleuthing she interweaves the meteoric rise of the Portuguese Jewish diaspora and its role in the emergence of the new Western economic order of capitalism. Her examination of Cleirac’s calumny deftly links the anomalies of Bordeaux’s crypto-Jewish merchants to the evolution of “modern” doctrines of secular antisemitism and the economic transformation of Western Europe constituting an intellectual tour de force. When read alongside her previous award-winning volume on Sephardic commercial relations in early modern Livorno, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period2 (2012), Trivellato’s scholarship offers new perspectives on the Portuguese Jewish diaspora.
Cleriac’s book was extremely popular in its day. It appeared in twenty-nine French printings, several other European languages, and was regarded for centuries as the classic exposition of maritime history and conduct. Using a wide range of sources, Trivellato traces how accusations of Jewish economic malfeasance were grounded in both traditional Christian notions of “Jewish usury” (Introduction) and widespread uneasiness about the changing economic order of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She methodically uncovers the various layers of Cleriac’s legend, including a sixty-seven page appendix listing the references to the legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange with an excursus on its afterlife in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
When the myth first began to circulate in the seventeenth century, French society still harbored a disdain for manual professions as well as for trade. By the time of the French Revolution, the thesis of the Jewish invention of the bill of exchange had been widely disseminated by Montesquieu and other thinkers. At that time, the medieval legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange began to appear in texts unrelated to commerce. By the eighteenth century, the legend was incorporated into the great encyclopedic works of the age and combined (then) contemporary Jewish commercial activity with traditional notions of Jewish treachery (117). Although Cleriac devotes only seven pages to the alleged economic evils of the Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux, since his maritime treatise passed from hand to hand and was soon heralded as a classic text, the wide dissemination of the myth tended to reinforce earlier accusations of the disproportionate and insidious role played by the Jews in commerce.
Iberian refugees or the “Portuguese merchants” or the Nação, as they were called, were invited in 1550 to settle in the French border region of Bordeaux as Christians with full property rights. Their religious ambiguity (as Jews forcibly converted to Christianity) and ill-defined political status provided a natural scapegoat. Their economic dynamism conspicuously exceeded their small numbers. Although never exceeding two percent of the local population they were prominently engaged in the cross-border trade with Spain and in wider Atlantic commerce; they also constituted a formidable presence in continental commerce via Amsterdam and Mediterranean commerce via Livorno. The “Portuguese merchants” were New Christians who defied easy definition since they were embedded in religiously diverse commercial networks. Their new modes of commercial exchange posed a threat to the traditional ways of life. Correctly perceived as economic powerhouses in Bordeaux, the New Christian Sephardim provoked local fears that Jews and Christians were indistinguishable (84).
Bills of exchange were slips of paper containing a few coded words that were intended to be conveyed over long distances by merchants in lieu of currency. The pieces of paper could be manipulated and counterfeited, were quite abstract and, consequently, feared or suspected in the context of the breakdown of traditional hierarchies, the expansion of commerce beyond the local level, and the beginnings of the consolidation of the nation-state in France. Both the bills and their “foreign” bearers (Huguenots and Armenians as well as Sephardic Jews) evoked strong negative feelings. Although the commercial bill of exchange was probably invented by medieval Italian merchants (from Lombardy), legends surrounding its Jewish origins fed upon traditional beliefs that the Jews were everywhere and nowhere, bent upon undermining Christian traditions and mores. This imagery was fueled by the upheavals of the Spanish expulsion, the Portuguese mass conversions, and the suspected crypto-Judaism characterizing the widely dispersed Portuguese diaspora.
Trivellato contends that the representation of the Jews’ economic roles as both insidious and mysterious is symptomatic of larger fears generated by an unfamiliar and evolving market economy in Western Europe. Profit derived from commerce was perceived as both “base and sordid” (89) as people longed for a bygone era in which you could distinguish easily between Jews and Christians. In a city like Bordeaux where New Christians, Catholics, and Protestants signed each other’s bills of exchange and underwrote each other’s insurance policies, the rise of new moneyed elites posed an especially palpable threat to the old order. At the same time, Cleriac conjured up a medieval world in which Jews duped kings, nobles, and commoners through their wits; he also lamented his times in which bills of exchange, like Jews, moved across borders operating in a secret and coded language. The old verities and social structures were vanishing, much to the consternation of the established classes.
Trivellato brilliantly traces the origins of Cleriac’s myth of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange with the skills of a seasoned detective. Her inclusion of several detailed appendices includes one containing a useful translation of the original text by Cleriac that seethes with animosity towards the Jews (Appendix 2), as well as another detailed one containing a list of printed books appearing between 1647-1800 that mention the legend (Appendix 5). Trivellato demonstrates convincingly how economic history can inform and deepen our understanding of the Western Sephardic diaspora and how obscure antisemitic legends crept into the European lexicon as the Jews of Portugal penetrated and, in some cases, transformed the commercial scene of Europe in early modern times.
1 Jane Gerber is Professor Emerita of History at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.