Überlegungen zum Stellenwert des jüdischen Kleinkredits im Reichsgebiet bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts

This paper explores the institutional determinants of persecution by studying the intensity of the Black Death pogroms in the Holy Roman Empire. Political fragmentation exacerbated competition for the rents generated by Jewish moneylending. This competition made Jewish communities vulnerable during periods of crisis. We test this hypothesis using data on the intensity of pogroms. In line with our model, we find that communities governed by Archbishoprics, Bishoprics, and Imperial Free Cities experienced more intense and violent persecutions than did those governed by the emperor or by secular princes. We discuss the implications that this has for the enforcement of the rule of law in weak states.

‘Roman Empire and German kingdom: from Charlemagne to the Ottonians’ describes the period of time after the decline of the Roman Empire and the establishment of the Germanic tribes of the Franks on its north-western periphery through to the reign of Henry of Bavaria, whose death in 1024 ended the Ottonian dynasty. Charlemagne’s reign and the Carolingians are described, followed by the eastern kingdom of the Franks, which under the rule of the sons of Louis the German (r. 843–76) developed a distinct sense of identity. The Saxon-German kingdom; the kingdom of Italy; Otto I’s imperial rule in Germany; and the new aspirations of Otto II and Otto III are also outlined.

Grameen: Banking for the Poor. From Grameen Bank Bhavan, Mirpur-1, Dhaka-1216, Bangladesh. Web site, available at: http://www.grameen-info.org. Accessed August 25, 2007.

Focusing especially on Jewish moneylending, the article explores economic relations between Jews and Christians in Northern Castile at the turn of the fourteenth century. During interfaith economic transactions, Jews and Christians followed the procedures established by customary law, and engaged in negotiations to resolve conflicts and generate inter-communal consensus. As more and more Christians defaulted on their loans, however, such negotiations often collapsed due to a combination of internal and external pressures. In Belorado and Miranda de Ebro, royal assistance with debt collections elicited strong protests from town officials, who accused Jewish moneylenders of violating local privileges and impoverishing Christian debtors. Tensions developed between Jewish and Christian residents of these towns when the traditional mechanisms of conflict resolution were upended, and the enforcement of loan repayment was taken away from local control.

Foreword. Acknowledgments. Introduction to the 2008 Edition. Introduction to the First Edition. Chapter 1. Muhammad Yunus -From Vanderbilt To Chittagong. Chapter 2. The Birth Of The Grameen Bank. Chapter 3. Zianpur Bazaar. Chapter 4. Las Papillons. Chapter 5. Amena Begum's Dream. Chapter 6. Omiyale Dupart. Chapter 7. The Haldar Para. Chapter 8. The Maxwell Street Market. Chapter 9. Krishna Das Bala. Chapter 10. The Hip Hop Shop. Chapter 11. Dry Money in a Monsoon. Chapter 12. The Black on Black Love Festival. Chapter 13. The Sixteen Decisions. Chapter 14. a We're Here For Youa . Epilogue. Appendix A. Notes. About the Author. Index.

Jewish women played a central symbolic and practical role in helping their persecuted communities maintain coherence and identity, but their non-normative leadership roles are rarely recognized. This article examines their little-known but essential contributions to the burgeoning economic life of Northern French cities from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. Although they usually made only small loans, they often collaborated with male Jewish money-lenders in short-lived, varying partnerships in order to make substantial loans to nobles, for marriages or financial emergencies. In some localities, they controlled as much as one-third of the loan business. They had few female Christian counterparts. Not generally more emancipated than Christian women, they nevertheless found in money-lending opportunities to assert autonomy not otherwise granted them by society.

The geographic location between the Adriatic Sea, the Alps, the Pannonian Plain and the Balkan Peninsula has made the territory of present-day Slovenia an important transitional area from prehistory onwards. This especially concerns a route between the Apennine Peninsula, and central and eastern or south-eastern Europe. This strategically important borderland has been at the crossroads of cultures, peoples, nations and languages. It witnessed incursions of the Goths, Huns and Langobards to Italy, collisions of Frankish, Avar and Byzantine interests, the settling of the Slavs and Hungarian raids to Italy. The German Kingdom, later Holy Roman Empire, established a defence system of border provinces at its south-eastern corner where feudal families, dynasts and kingdoms such as Přemysl Otakar II, the Habsburgs and the Counts of Cilli fought for territory, influence and access to the northern Adriatic area controlled by the Venetians. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the area was continuously attacked by the Ottomans. The article outlines some of these events and presents a selection of the extant pieces of arms and armour, of equestrian and horse gear that are kept in Slovenian museums, as well as some archaeological sites important for the problem.

Microfinance, a provision of small loans (mostly without collateral) to poor people and accepting tiny savings deposits, has existed in different forms for a long period of time across the world. Modern microfinance was born in Bangladesh in the 1970s, when Professor Muhammad Yunus, an economics professor at University of Chittagong, Bangladesh, and the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate in 2006, began an experimental research project providing credit to the rural poor by establishing Grameen Bank. Today, Grameen Bank is replicated in five continents and microfinance has shaken up the world of international development. Many banks or banking institutions are now specializing comprehensively on microfinance. In 2005, the UN designated the year as the “International Year of Micro-credit.” The critical device that has brought the success in microfinance is group-lending: this has achieved very high rate of repayment rates, thus, has made the lending sustainable. It also transfers the responsibility from bank staffs to borrowers, making lenders feel free from taking high risks. The most common group-lending model in India is “SHG (self-help group)-bank linkages” and it is primarily providing small loans from banks to groups of SHGs. Micro-saving is also its important target. Beside borrowing and saving, SHGs in India play additional roles in spheres of local politics, social harmony, social justice and its contribution to community. While the SHG model and bank-linkage program continue to be popular, many commercial and cooperative banks are now entering into the microfinance market, and there is an India-wide trend towards the formal registration of MFIs (Mocrofinance institution) as For-profit Non-bank Finance Companies (NBFCs). It also diversifies its activities into the micro-insurances and remittances. The growth of India's microfinance over the past 16 years is remarkable - and it has been accelerated for the last three years, being improved both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Germanic kings wielded less power than the Roman emperors because the concept of res publica existing in the ancient Roman Empire was supplanted in the Germanic kingdoms by a patrimonial conception of royalty. This meant that the old hierarchical relationship which recognized the emperor as the supreme public authority was replaced, in the case of the Germanic kingdoms, by interpersonal, private accords between the king and his most important subjects: the magnates. These were the heads of clans to whom they often had to entrust territorial government, as kings lacked an administrative apparatus of the type afforded by the extensive imperial bureaucracy of the Dominate. Sovereigns sought to control territorial government by establishing lifelong feudal pacts with their nobles through which, in exchange for land vassals pledged to loyally serve their lords, administrating territories in their names and providing them with military defense. When the benefits of the feudal relationship became hereditary kings lost control over their vassals and political power ended up being viewed and handled as a private asset and affair. However, public authority did not completely disappear, as the Church became a bulwark against its disintegration and helped kings to recover their authority in the final centuries of the Medieval Age. Moreover, feudalism would have a lasting influence on European constitutional history because its contractual nature transformed the conception of power; thereafter sovereigns could not govern their realms without reaching a consensus with their subjects (pactism).

Over 5,000 entriesThe first comprehensive, multi-disciplinary reference work covering every aspect of history, culture, religion, and life in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East (including the Persian Empire and Central Asia) between c. AD 250 to 750, the era now generally known as Late Antiquity. This period saw the re-establishment of the Roman Empire, its conversion to Christianity and its replacement in the West by Germanic kingdoms, the continuing Roman Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Persian Sassanian Empire, and the rise of Islam.Consisting of more than 1.5 million words, drawing on the latest scholarship, and written by more than 400 contributors, it bridges a significant period of history between those covered by the acclaimed Oxford Classical Dictionary and The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, and aims to establish itself as the essential reference companion to this period.

Small Loans, Big Dreams: How the Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus and Microfinance are Changing the World, edited by Alex Counts

Over 30 years ago, Muhammad Yunus founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh with just $27 and the idea that desperately poor, working rural women were credit-worthy (Yunus 1997). Yunus found that women almost universally used the credit to expand their fledgling businesses, and they would pay back the loans with proceeds from these businesses. Yunus thus developed the idea that even with no collateral, these women should be granted small loans at competitive interest rates with frequent payback cycles. This concept, that small loans (usually less than $100) should be granted to the previously “unbankable,” came to be called microcredit (Unitus 2007). Early on, practitioners such as Yunus realized that microcredit borrowers have payback rates as high as 95 percent (Felder-Kuzu 2005). These payback rates allow the lending institutions to survive, expand, and provide loans to additional borrowers. Concurrent to the work of Yunus in Bangladesh in the early 1970s, other social innovators developed similar practices in other countries (consider ACCION and its early work in Brazil or the subsequent work of John Hatch and the growth of village banking [ACCION 2007; FINCA International 2007]). Thus. the microcredit movement was born.KeywordsBusiness ModelMicrofinance InstitutionSmall LoanPopulation Service InternationalEdward Elgar PublishingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

- Micro-credit, a Bengali invention of Professor Muhammad Yunus, is an innovative practice of credit, based on very small loans, given to people traditionally ignored by the banking system. These loans allow people to open small businesses or to support their current activities. Micro-credit is a tool that develops the potentials of marginal people and encourages autonomy. It represents a parallel welfare policy that holds back human passivity, supports self-recovery, and reprocesses the social dimension of relationship, the internal/external dialectic between individual and group. Micro-credit involves the "poorest of the poor", the people traditionally excluded from the banking system, because considered "not includable", or simply "not trustworthy" enough. This paper describes micro-credit practices, adopted by the mental health service of Carpi (a small town in northern Italy). The basic aim of this service is to counter the idea that people with psychiatric disorders, as the poor, are not worthy of trust, nor of receiving financial loans. Micro-credit enhances autonomy, initiative and shared responsibility. It is a basic tool of active citizenship. It represents an alternative model of welfare and of coconstructed care: a collaborative model built with different stakeholders. It is an important tool to keep in check public costs by promoting self-esteem and quality of life, by bringing people to become more autonomous and less dependent on services.Parole Chiave: microcredito, fiducia, gruppo, gruppoanalisi, riabilitazione, beni relazionali, salute mentale.Key Words: micro-credit, trust, group, group analysis, rehabilitation, relational goods, mental health.

This article deals with two registers of outstanding loans contracted with Jewish moneylenders in the town of Mons and its surroundings (county of Hainaut). They were drawn up in the course of the persecutions at the time of the Black Death, during the summer of 1349. It is claimed that the registers, at least in part, constitute translations from the Hebrew account books kept by the moneylenders themselves. Where they give details, they allow insights into the Jews’ accounting practices, offering rare additions to what we know from the few extant Hebrew account books of the later medieval period. This concerns, inter alia , the practice of calculating interest. Given the short-term nature of the loan contracts, compound interest could accrue.

The article discusses the most consequential episodes of genocidal violence against the Jews in medieval Western Europe: the slaughter of Jews in the Rhineland during the First Crusade (1096), the massacres in England (1189-90), the Rintfleisch and Armleder massacres in Germany (1298, 1336-38), the Shepherds’ Crusade violence in France and northern Iberia (1320-21), attacks on Jews during the Black Death epidemic (1348-1351), and the anti-Jewish urban riots in Castile and Aragon (1391-92). While the massacres did not aim to eradicate Jews from the Western Christendom, by the end of the medieval period the violence expanded in scope, affecting entire regions and even kingdoms. Christians from all walks of life – not just lower-class people – participated in the assaults. They had a variety of motivations: while some wanted to take revenge on the supposed killers of Christ, others resented Jews’ association with royal power, or felt victimized by Jewish moneylenders. The dissemination of conspiracy theories about Jews committing ritual murder, desecrating the Eucharistic host, or causing the plague also led to violence. Jews were accused of plotting to destroy Christianity, inflict physical harm on Christians, and undermine their livelihood. In this sense, medieval and modern anti-Jewish violence have far more in common than many scholars are willing to admit.