Historiography on the Jewish community in Florence has traditionally focused on the period following its official admission to the city in 1437. This essay, by contrast, seeks to investigate the reasons why the Florentine government had previously refrained from allowing Jews to settle permanently within the city. While medieval Western Europe was pervaded by a pervasive cultural substratum of anti—Judaism—an essential premise for any discussion of the subject—this study argues that, in the Florentine case, economic considerations played a more decisive role. The absence of a Jewish community, and particularly of Jewish moneylenders, prior to the consolidation of Medicean rule, will be examined in relation to the fiscal model developed by Florence in the early fifteenth century. Within this framework, the years of the War of Lucca (1429–1433) will emerge as especially significant, as they marked a moment of unprecedented fiscal pressure that shaped the Republic’s economic policies and social dynamics.

Abstract Jewish men and women appeared before various courts in medieval Austria. Many of the trials dealt with disputes arising from their activities as moneylenders and pawnbrokers. Jews defended their claims before municipal and manorial courts, especially for forfeited pledges, and sued their debtors for their rights, or found themselves as defendants accused, for example, of defaulting on levy or rent payments. The Christian courts made no distinction in their treatment of Jewish and Christian parties. As direct subjects of the ruler, however, Jewish moneylenders were also able to appeal to the ducal court. In addition to providing insights into the everyday practice of moneylending and pawnbroking and the problems associated with it, the court documents also reveal the knowledge that Jews had of the complex structures of medieval court systems.

Abstract The Viennese Jew David Steuss can safely be considered the richest and most successful Jewish moneylender in late medieval Austria. Sources on him consist mainly of business documents, most of which are debt instruments or related charters resulting from credit transactions. This article analyzes the information that can be gleaned from this kind of documentation with regard to David Steuss’ background and family connections, his social and business networks in Austria and abroad, his relationship with the territorial rulers, his general standing in Jewish and Christian circles, and his descendants’ handling of his legacy. Thus, the documentation of his exceptional career demonstrates the potential of sources on Jewish moneylending as a basis for research beyond the scope of purely economic history.

Abstract The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to economist Muhammad Yunus in 2006 in recognition of his work on microcredit theory and its implementation has also given further impetus to historical research on small loans. While Jewish small loans in the fifteenth-century Holy Roman Empire, which are comparatively well documented, have already been the subject of some research, there is still a lack of relevant studies for the period before the Black Death pogroms. This is primarily because small-scale loans were rarely recorded in writing, and much of the relevant documentation has been destroyed. However, an evaluation of the few surviving written records suggests that small loans and microloans already dominated lending by Jewish moneylenders in the German Kingdom in the thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth centuries.

Abstract 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.

Abstract Generations of excellent scholarship concerning the social and economic lives of Jewish communities in late medieval Provence have relied upon notarial contracts to illustrate and analyze financial, seasonal, and demographic aspects of Jewish moneylending. Historians have paid less attention to how Jews influenced the practices of Christian notaries themselves. This article examines the practices of notaries favored by Jewish moneylenders. By focusing on nearly ten thousand contracts recorded in sixty registers composed by late fourteenth-century notaries in Apt, a market town and episcopal see in central Provence, this article argues that notaries created sophisticated information management devices to meet the distinctive needs of Jewish moneylenders. Jews were not simply passive users of notaries, but rather they were actors in the evolution of late medieval notarial practice and legal technologies.

ABSTRACT In criticism, the motif of theft in The Merchant of Venice has simply been regarded as an ironic counterpoint to the characters’ invocation of Christian values. In contrast, this article argues that Shylock’s account of Jacob’s ewes – a narrative of primordial appropriation and displacement – introduces a sense of unease at the imputation of theft that at first seems to characterise the Jewish moneylender but then gradually afflicts characters across the religious divide, creating complex networks of remorseful thieves in Venice and Belmont. The play’s obsessive concern with shiny outer surfaces – rich fleece and gilded caskets – inscribes both allegorical interpretation and the acquisition of wealth within a sacred economy of theft, the theological resonance of which has not been fully recognised. Like St Augustine and John Donne, Shakespeare reads biblical thievery as a generalised sign of man and woman’s abject sinfulness. In the process, the play’s dialectical understanding of thrift and theft, transfer and supplanting, deceptive covering and hidden truth acquires a profound, deeply conflicted, soteriological meaning. Written at a time of growing hermeneutical instability, the comedy problematises attempts to demarcate in-groups of the elect by showing that to possess the blessing is to develop a peculiar consciousness of misappropriation.

Only F. M. Dostoevsky’s brief message speaks about the completion of his play “Jew Yankel” in January 1844. The article formulates three hypotheses/assumptions about the content of the drama. The first correlates the writer’s idea with the literary tradition of portraying a Jewish moneylender, laid down by Shakespeare (“The Merchant of Venice”), Walter Scott (“Ivanhoe”), Pushkin (“The Miserly Knight”) and Gogol (“Taras Bulba”). The humanizing effect of V. Scott’s novel is emphasized. The second version associates Dostoevsky’s Yankel exclusively with the homonymous character from Gogol’s story, first published in 1835. It is proposed to take into account the author’s revision of the story for the 1842 edition, in which Yankel, in the process of building up the epic potential of the work, is endowed with a powerful vital resource and rises to the role of the antagonist of the title character. The third hypothesis refers to the trial of the Jews in the town of Velizh, who were accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child and acquitted many years later. Yankel Aronson died under investigation, which was conducted by inhumane methods. Evidence is provided to confirm that Russian society became aware of these events. The painful end of the Jewish youth could serve as a source of drama, structured with a focus on the writings that made a strong impression on Dostoevsky at that time: “The last day of a man sentenced to death” by V. Hugo and the melodrama “Ugolino” by N. Polevoy. All three versions confirm that pity was not only one of young writer’s motives, but also the ontological basis of his creative universe. The scientific significance of each of the proposed hypotheses also lies in the fact that their deployment allows to expand the understanding of the potential sources of the writer’s work, to reveal an unknown or little-known historical and cultural context of his early, least studied period.

This study presents an original manuscript of the European Genizah containing the earliest account book of a Jewish moneylender in Italy. This document, which dates back to the early fifteenth century, sheds new light on the economic history of the Jews, credit issues in north Italy, Jewish–Christian economic relations and material culture through references to pawned objects, as well as the history of accounting practices. Its paper leaves were dismembered and reused to bind a different book of Italian origin. As with thousands of other fragments found in bindings across Europe, the recycling of codices paradoxically assured their survival. The sheets of the ledger were discovered, detached and conserved when the manuscript was restored at the end of the nineteenth century.

In 1502 Vittore Carpaccio delivered the Calling of Saint Matthew to the Venetian Scuola Dalmata dei Santi Giorgio e Trifone, a confraternity founded in 1451 by the Dalmatian community resid­ing in Venice. The painting’s recent restoration sponsored by Save Venice offers an opportunity to re-examine the work and recon­sider its iconography. Building upon new visual and documentary evidence, this article argues that Carpaccio painted the tax collector Matthew not as a Jewish moneylender, as previously assumed, but as a Venetian moneychanger within his workplace, a banco de tapeto that once faced Campo San Giacomo at Rialto. An examination of Matthew’s gesture reveals that Carpaccio depicted the moment that preceded, rather than followed, the Evangelist’s decision to aban­don his profession and follow Christ. This change to the traditional iconography, I suggest, should be regarded as a visual exemplum of Christian charity, the virtue central to the Scuola Dalmata’s devo­tional practices.

Since its earliest performances, The Merchant of Venice garnered attention for its depiction of Shylock, the greedy Jewish moneylender who takes the protagonist of the play to court, demanding a pound of flesh. Over the centuries, depictions of this character have varied as much as the critical and popular reception to him. In the hands of each actor who newly embodies the character, Shylock can take the shape of a grotesque antisemitic caricature or a sympathetic anti-hero speaking truth to power. While Shylock began as a comic villain whose defeat allows the comedic resolution, almost all modern directors, actors, and audiences are forced to reckon with the cruel antisemitism voiced by the play’s protagonists. In tracing the performance history of this character from the turn of the 17th century, to the Third Reich, to his most recent incarnations, this research resists reducing Shylock to any single interpretation. Instead, this essay argues that Shylock serves as a reflection of the place and time in which he is performed, both an indicator of cultural attitudes and a potential instigator of cultural action towards oppression, justice, and representation of those deemed outsiders.

Bidding Prayers:The Economic Vocabulary of Late Medieval European Christianity and the Experience of the Liturgy on the Eve of the Reformations1 Tyler Lange Mutuum date, nihil inde sperantes. Luc. 6:35 O sacramentum pietatis! o signum unitatis! o vinculum caritatis! Qui vult vivere, habet ubi vivat, habet unde vivat. Accedat, credat, incorporetur, ut vivificetur. Augustine, Tractatus in Johannem, 26.13 (ad Jo. 6:50-52) Culpae quantitas non mensuratur ex nocumento quod quis facit, sed ex voluntate qua quis facit, contra caritatem agens. Et ideo, quamvis poena excommunicationis excedat nocumentum, non tamen excedit quantitatem culpae. Thomas Aquinas and Rainaldo da Piperno, Supplementum ad Summam theologiae, Q.21, a.3 Je deffens pareillement que nulle personne de quelque estat quil soit ne viengne a la table nostre seigneur Jesu crist ayant aulcune rancune ou haygne contre son prochain: ou se sentent estre en quelque aultre peche mortel secret ou notoyre Car en telle sorte prendre le corps de Jesu crist est recepvoir sa dampnation. Priest's Manual, Saint-Eustache, Paris BNF Latin 1216, 1530s) [End Page 19] Introduction 'Economy of salvation', 'treasury of merit', 'marketplace for merit', 'price of salvation', 'business of salvation', 'office of souls', 'management of poverty', 'accounting for the afterlife', 'moral economy or economies', 'passports to paradise', 'quantifiable religiosity'…2: theologians and historians since at [End Page 20] least Tertullianhave used 'economic' language to speak of God, salvation, and religious life. Recent contributions are no exception, whether the specific subjects are: Franciscan theologians as experts in valuation and shapers of the late medieval economic vocabulary, managing the finances of Franciscan convents; the operation of the Apostolic Penitentiary, confession and scandal, testamentary bequests funding masses, devotional indulgences, and popular piety; or governmental regulation of bread prices. Yet what do recent historians mean by using such language? For the most part, these accounts abandon former narratives of economic history in which lending, which existed in a separate, economic realm divorced from religious life, was Christianized at some point in the Middle Ages, hobbling it with the prohibition of usury from which the economy had to be liberated, most successfully in the Protestant territories of northern Europe. They do not, for the most part, revive old, anti-Catholic narratives of a commercialized, corrupt medieval Church. Instead, they, and in particular the studies of Giacomo Todeschini, Jacques Chiffoleau, and Chiffoleau's students on the 'economic vocabulary' and management practices of the Franciscan friars, offer a vision of economic life fully embedded in religious life. In fact, they show that there was no separate economic life to be disembedded from religious life because a religious language of economic ethics shaped economic life through the sermons and management practices of the friars. Franciscans became experts at valuation and valorized the circulation of economic goods, rather than hoarding or thesaurization, because the Franciscans had to manage daily life without legal property rights in accordance with St. Francis's [End Page 21] ideal of poverty, and because their subsistence—and salvation—depended on proper estimation of the necessities of life. The intellectual and practical consequences of Franciscan poverty clarify the context of the excommunications for debt that I examined in Excommunication for Debt in Late Medieval France, and affirm the possible implications of the practice's apparent decline from the late fifteenth century. In short, it appears that excommunication for debt manifests popular adoption of the Mendicants' encouragement of economic circulation through caritative lending: excommunication for debt treated debt not as a crime per se, but as a crime when payment was delayed or deferred against the creditor's will. Our mistake is to imagine the creditor as an oppressor: because he or she had likely extended an interest-free sales credit, the defaulting debtor was potentially behaving in an immoral manner by breaking a promise and by impeding the circulation of goods, within this economic ethics. (The situation was different for usurious loans from Christian or Jewish moneylenders.) While Franciscans were most obviously arbiters of proper economic behavior as preachers and confessors, users of late medieval church courts were also arbiters of proper economic behavior each time they sought ecclesiastical sanction against a usurer or, more commonly, a defaulting debtor. Because the practice...

Abstract This study uses an extensive body of archival evidence from Latin-Christian sources to explore economic and social interactions between Provençal Jews and Christians. Evidence discussed in section one indicates that the city’s Jewish and Christian communities interacted to a significant degree, and not just in the domain of moneylending. Data derived from a network analysis suggests that Jews were prominent in providing brokerage services. In the second section, analysis of a small sample of Jewish estate inventories indicates that the material profiles of Jewish and Christian families were very similar. In the third section, an analysis of a register of debt collection shows that Jews were involved in credit relations at a rate that was proportional to their population. Jewish moneylenders filled an economic niche by providing Christians with the liquidity to pay off structural debts generated by the political economy of rents and taxes.

Abstract This article examines on document acknowledging debt to Maruna, a Jewish woman, to John of Kent that was deposited in a chest in Canterbury in 1264. Using this document, the article examines what can be learned about the archae system in thirteenth-century England from the perspective of the documents which were produced there. A series of chests (Lat. pl. archae) were established across England following the introduction of the Articles of the Jewry (1194), which regulated the production, use, and storage of the records generated by Jewish moneylending activities in medieval England. Additionally, the Articles of the Jewry required that more general business transactions, such as the sale and purchase of property, also be recorded at the archae. This paper considers not only the legal and administrative structures which governed the production of such records but also how these systems manifested themselves within the documents which produced at the archae. Finally, it will consider the role that ritual and gender had to play in such transactions and the documents which recorded them.

ABSTRACT The Merchant of Venice explores usury and the violation of hospitality’s codes in a world where hospitality is no longer a charitable act. Rather, money is the primary motivation and relationships revolve around commercial transactions not social bonds. Robert Wilson’s Elizabethan morality play The Three Ladies of London provides an important antecedent to Shakespeare’s play in its depictions of Usury, Hospitality, and the usurer-Jew Gerontus. The flesh bond and the wealthy Lady of Belmont appear in one of the probable sources for Shakespeare's play: Giovanni Fiorentino’s medieval Italian novella Il Pecorone. In The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare seems to have developed from Il Pecorone the idea that insincere hospitality can have serious consequences. Shakespeare also appears to consolidate distinct concepts from Wilson’s Three Ladies by reshaping the figure of Usury (the sin of medieval morality) and Gerontus (the reasonable Jewish moneylender), into Shylock, a complex figure who elicits both sympathy and revulsion. Where Hospitality is murdered by Usury in Wilson’s play, Shakespeare presents Shylock’s isolation in terms of alterity, dehumanisation, and social exclusion in a world where loyalty and moral obligations have been replaced by the demands of the market.

This study addresses the controversial “arcas-de-arena” episode in the Cantar de Mio Cid. The usurious transaction between Mio Cid and the Jewish moneylenders Rachel and Vidas has led critics to interpret this scene in sundry ways. In this article, I provide overlooked textual evidence to argue that neither Mio Cid nor Martín Antolínez intends to honor the promise of repaying the moneylenders. Instead, they perceive the transaction as a deception from which they obtain a profit (“ganancia”). Mio Cid and Martín Antolínez feel entitled to cheat the Jews due to ever-increasing anti-Jewish sentiments prevalent during the time of the Cantar’s composition.

Shakespeare is well known to have set two of his plays in and around Venice: The Merchant of Venice (1596) and The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (1603). The first is often remembered for its famous speech about “the quality of mercy,” delivered by the female lead Portia in the disguise of a legal scholar from the university town of Padua. The speech helps to spare the life of her new husband’s friend and financial backer against the claims of the Jewish moneylender Shylock. The play has raised questions for Shakespearean scholars about the choice of Venice as an open city where merchants of all nations and faiths would meet on the Rialto while the city’s Senate, composed of leading merchants, worked hard to keep it open to all and especially profitable for its merchants. Those who would like to learn more about the city’s development as a center of trade can learn much from Richard Mackenney’s new book.

Abstract Studies concerning the Monti di Pietà have quite a long tradition; in the past decades, however, this institution has been studied from new perspectives. After arguing in favor of the Marches (central Italy) as a privileged view angle on the phenomenon, the paper touches upon some complex relationships existing between political authorities and Observant Franciscan preachers, who campaigned in favor of the Monti on explicit invitation of local authorities. The question of the actual functioning of the Monti is also connected with the mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion; the role of Jewish moneylenders, who were the major targets of Observant preaching in favor of the Monti, is also a key issue for the understanding of the institution.

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.

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the parallels between the character of Vladek in Art Spiegelman’s Maus and certain stage incarnations of Shylock from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Spiegelman’s Maus, I contend, invokes Shakespeare’s famous Jewish moneylender to challenge dominant American Holocaust memory. Invoking the theatrical tradition of representing Shylock as a credibly complex character, Maus specifically generates a counter-discourse to the paradigmatic representation of the Holocaust survivor as the flat character of hero-saint.