Prof. Trivellato & the medieval origins of invisible Jewish cocks.

 Prof. Francesca Trivellato, writes in Aeon magazine-

The question of what links medieval to modern antisemitism is one of the most controversial topics in modern history.

Why should this be? Certain medieval institutions continued to exist in modern times. They continued to propagate anti-semitic ideas as did some new institutions which had not previously existed.

Defenders of institutions which had a role in this dirty business may say that the thing is 'controversial' but what else do you expect them to say? No doubt, they would also say that evidence of widespread sexual abuse, or large scale financial fraud, regarding such institutions, are 'controversial'.

Among the most thought-provoking arguments about the matter is a lecture that the renowned Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi delivered in 1982: ‘Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian and the German Model’. Yerushalmi’s argument is not entirely convincing, but rests on a compelling analogy. For him, baptism was to medieval Europe what legal equality is to modern liberal societies.

This is utterly foolish. A baptized Christian could be Excommunicated. There was no 'legal equality' whatsoever. 'Benefits of Clergy' were reserved for those with a certain level of education. Similarly, the rights of an Aristocrat were quite different from those of a serf.

In theory, baptism and citizenship eliminated all discrimination against Jews. In reality, they gave rise to new fears that, even as their distinctiveness disappeared, Jews would remain fundamentally different.

But there were even greater fears about 'heretics' of various types. Being a Cathar was probably more dangerous than being a Jew.

This imagined difference, no longer marked as apostasy to Christianity or disloyalty to the state, suffuses what Theodor Adorno in 1951 called ‘the rumour about Jews’: a conspiratorial mentality that sees Jewish people as invisible and yet ubiquitous, as capable of pulling the strings of power from behind the scenes.

This is silly. The plain fact is that a high proportion of Communist nutjobs were actually Jewish. It was also true that a German Jewish Wall Street Investment Bank had lent Japan the money which enabled it to thrash Tzarist Russia in 1905, thus setting the wheels in motion for the Bolshevik Revolution. At any rate, Henry Ford came to believe this conspiracy theory during his absurd 'peace mission' to Europe. He funded its dissemination and many 'respectable' people were convinced that it was a case of 'no smoke without fire'.

Yerushalmi used the analogy between baptism and citizenship to contest the opposition between a medieval, religious anti-Judaism and a modern, secular and racialised antisemitism.

But the analogy is fatuous. A slave can be baptized and remain a slave. A citizen can't be deprived of life, liberty or property save by due process of Law.

But there are more and different lessons to be drawn from his insight.

Rubbish! No 'insight' can be gleaned from a stupid lie.

One of these lessons concerns the penchant of learned and popular authors, from the Middle Ages to the 21st century, for linking capitalism to Jews.

Hilarious! The fact that many successful Capitalists were Jewish had nothing to do with this!

This durable and protean connection has nothing to do with any historical role played by Jews in the development of European capitalism.

So, if no Jews had been Capitalists they would still have been castigated as Capitalists. Why stop there? Why not say, even if Israel did not exist, Anti-Zionists would target Jews as somehow being responsible for the suffering of the Palestinians? Furthermore, suppose Seinfeld and Larry David and every other Jewish hero of comedy had never made anyone laugh, people like me would still marvel at the ethical quality of 'Jewish humor'.

If Jews being successful Capitalists did not cause them to be associated with it, what did?

It has everything to do with the social transformation and uncertainty that accompanied the advent of capitalism, especially finance capitalism.

But India and China and Africa experienced that same 'social transformation and uncertainty'. In India and China, there were successful Jewish Capitalists- like the Sassoons. But there was no anti-semitism- save that of the Persian or, later, the anti-Zionist sort.

More than 500 years before the industrial revolution, finance capitalism, represented by paper instruments, enabled new kinds of commerce over long distances and generated new wealth.

But Caliph Uthman had this type of wealth 1400 years ago. But it had existed even at the time of the Buddha.

But this wealth was increasingly disconnected from the production and exchange of material goods.

Nonsense! These pieces of paper corresponded to a claim on material goods or assets.

It overturned traditional economic models and threatened the established social order.

How did the Indian 'hoondi'- or Bill of Exchange- 'threaten the established social order'? Why was there no anti-Jain sentiment in India despite the fact that this small minority probably controlled half the mercantile wealth of Upper India? Jains have always been seen as upholding the social order.

Indeed, the end of 'feudalism' proper and its replacement by the mal jasmani system which evolved into the zamindari system, was associated with an increase in 'traditionalism' and a freezing up of the social geography.

The more capitalism became intangible, the more the rumour about Jews spread.

This is nonsense. 'All that is solid' was 'melting into air' for Karl Marx at precisely the time when the British Establishment was at its most philo-semitic. Disraeli and Rothschild were heroes for securing the Suez Canal for Queen & Country by some sort of financial trick or swindle. A Rothschild heiress ensured her charming but stupid husband succeeded Gladstone as Prime Minister.

Finance capitalism dates back to the commercial revolution of the Middle Ages (1100-1348) and matured during the economic expansion of the 16th century, when Europe began to exert its domination over the rest of the world.

But Indian merchants lent the Brits the money they needed to take India over. The 'compradors' had had financial capitalism for thousands of years- when Brits were still dying themselves with woad.

What does the baptism of Jews have to do with finance capitalism?

Nothing at all. In some parts of Europe, it is true, baptism may have been necessary to hold high office in the State. But 'finance capitalism' is about a 'high trust' in-group. Small, persecuted, minorities can excel at it. Look at the Quakers. Barclays Bank is still one of the biggest high street banks.  Wikipedia says 'According to a 2011 paper by Vitali et al., Barclays was the most powerful transnational corporation in terms of ownership and thus corporate control over global financial stability and market competition'

To answer this question, we must begin by noting that, according to Christian theology, baptism – the rite of passage necessary to enter the Christian covenant – is a sacrament dispensed individually that renders all those who receive it equal to each other and in the eyes of God.

Till the Church decides to excommunicate you. Popes have put entire countries under this ban. The thing has been meaningless since the Reformation.

It is a radically levelling act.

It is mere mummery. Women got baptized. Did they find themselves accorded equal treatment? Of course they did! That is why the Pope is a woman.

The specific beliefs and practices adopted by various Christian denominations are less important than the core idea articulated by Paul, in 1 Corinthians 12:13: ‘For we were all baptised by one Spirit so as to form one body – whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free – and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.’

Paul went on to encourage women to lead church services. What's that? He said 'I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet." ? Well, maybe true equality means not being equal at all.

Paul’s precept, there is no difference between someone who is born into, baptised and raised in a Christian family, and someone who converts or descends from a family of converts. In practice, Christians have not always observed the spirit of Paul’s assertion. Medieval Iberia, Yerushalmi noted, was the site of the first major crisis in the Christian theology of baptism. After a wave of deadly attacks in 1391-92, thousands of Jews, hoping to escape further violence, asked to be baptised. In 1492, the Spanish crown gave those who had continued to live as Jews only two choices: convert or leave. In the wake of these mass conversions, as Yerushalmi put it: ‘The traditional mistrust of the Jew as outsider … gave way to an even more alarming fear of the Converso as insider.’

But there was also a fear of various different types of heretic as well as a fear of former Muslim converts.

The fear that ‘Conversos’ were crypto-Jews passing as Christians inspired secular and ecclesiastical law. Around 1450, new municipal statutes in Spain, the so-called statutes of the purity of blood, forbade anyone who had been baptised recently (or whose ancestors were found to have been Jewish) from holding public offices and entering religious orders on the assumption that they were still Jewish at heart. A new, all-powerful inquisition, created in 1478, prosecuted these recent converts – not just baptised Jews (Conversos) but, after 1502, former Muslims (Moriscos) as well. Inquisitors launched large-scale genealogical enquiries aimed to determine who was a scion of ‘new Christian’ lineages.

So the thing wasn't about Judaism. It was about having flourished under Muslim rule and perhaps hankering for its return.

Yerushalmi regards the 15th-century statutes of the purity of blood and the activities of the Spanish inquisition as the roots of modern racism and a prelude to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis.

Is this a reasonable view? Spain's influence declined spectacularly over the course of the Seventeenth Century. In the Eighteenth Century, the Bourbons did sponsor a limited 'Enlightenment' and prejudice against 'Marranos' declined. But Spain was a backwater. It had little influence, save that of a retrograde type in parts of Italy, in Europe.

Scholars continue to debate whether these 15th-century anti-Jewish sentiments and legislation qualify as modern racism. The issue is important, but so is a different, related and equally prolonged historical problem: the parallels that medieval and modern European authors frequently drew between the threat posed by baptised Jews and the fears engendered by the growth of the financial economy. A negative portrait of both Jews and capitalism nourished most of these parallels.

Yet, they equally applied to former Muslims and persisted in the absence of Capitalism.

To appreciate how this analogy between baptised Jews and finance capitalism could take hold of people’s imaginations, we need to see the connection between three apparently independent historical phenomena.

Which aren't phenomena at all. They are stupid lies.

First, medieval Iberia was not the only time and place where people grew apprehensive about Jews’ supposed invisibility.

Nobody ever got apprehensive about the invisibility of Jews. Witches, maybe. Warlocks- okay. The reason I don't shower more regularly is because lascivious Iyengar maidens may use a magic ointment to make themselves invisible. They may seek to feast their eyes on my naked form.

In the old days, everybody knew everything about their neighbors. That's why the Marrano had to spend a lot of time sitting outside his house eating pork sausages.

When, in the 16th and 17th centuries, Conversos fled Iberian persecution and settled in pockets of western Europe, they adopted the habits of the local mercantile elites and mingled with them in the course of doing business. In these locales too, including Venice, Livorno, Hamburg, Amsterdam and especially Bordeaux, both educated scholars and regular folks often associated Jews and Conversos with the excesses of finance.

Why? Because persecuted minorities bound together by a spiritual practice which demands high literacy and numeracy and scrupulosity in observing sacred law, develop 'high trust' internal networks. In other words, they create Credit. That's what Capitalism is about. As for 'excesses of finance'- what does that mean? Usury? The solution is more competition.

Second, an Anglo-Protestant and anti-Catholic reading of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) helped to popularise the notion that the medieval Church condemned all forms of profit.

But nobody read that crackpot's book. It was his wife who popularized it after he died- perhaps out of remorse for not letting him consummate the marriage. It was the Roman Church which popularized the idea that it had condemned profit rather than looting everybody and raping all the little boys it could safely get its hands on.

In fact, the Roman Church always recognised the value of industriousness and touted the benefits of international trade. Clergymen were engaged in a much subtler, if often acrobatic and ultimately doomed, enterprise: namely, to trace the line between honourable and disreputable merchants, between rightful and usurious credit practices.

So, what the author is saying is that some stupid guy made a bad analogy. We can get insight into that bad analogy because of another cretin's stupid lie. What's next? Will this lady start babbling about David Icke and shape changing Lizard People from the Planet X?

Third, after c1200, when pursuing this elusive goal, ecclesiastical and lay writers often castigated Christian merchants whose credit practices were dubious but difficult to pinpoint by calling them ‘Jewish’. The Jewish usurer became a capacious allegory, the symbol of the economic malpractice not only by Jews but also by Christians that proved particularly difficult to pin down and punish.

Who gave a shit about these 'ecclesiastical lay writers'? People killed Jews so as to rob them. This may have been inconvenient for the King, but at some point he found it worthwhile to expel the Jews rather than repay money they had lent him. This is a story about a 'Stationary Bandit' who fattens up the Jew or Venetian or Florentine or Templar so as to roast him up for a fine banquet.

As a result, whenever finance reshaped social and political relations among the Christian majority, when commerce eroded existing legal hierarchies, and the modalities of conducting trade and credit grew more complex and more opaque, anti-Jewish sentiments spiked.

Very true! The mark of the anti-semite, then as now, has always been high erudition in matters of 'ecclesiastic' law and a mastery of the more abstruse elements of Econophysics & its FinTech applications.

I recall attending a pogrom in the Germany of my birth. I said 'kill dem kikes coz they use the blood of my Christian playmates to moisten their matzo dough'. I was laughed at. Very patiently, the torch wielding, pitchfork carrying, peasants explained to me that the only reason to kill kikes is because of the modalities of conducting trade and securing credit under conditions of increased Kolmogorov complexity. 

Such was the case during the period from the 12th century until the Black Death (1348), which historians call the medieval commercial revolution.

They are speaking of Italy where Jews suffered little over any prolonged period. True a particular Pope- like Innocent III- might persecute them but his successor would see sense- or at least the color of money.

The Jews became a stand-in for the negative, destructive features of nascent finance capitalism. 

But Jews, who had been direct subjects of the King for 200 years, were expelled en masse from England in 1290. Finance Capitalism wasn't 'nascent' then. It was non-existent. Serfdom was a casualty of the Black Death.  1381, the year of the Peasant's Rebellion, is the salient date in this connection.

There have been a number of expulsions of Jews for economic motives over the centuries. Indeed, in 1862, General Grant expelled Jews from the parts of Kentucky and Tennessee which he controlled because he believed they were involved in the black market for cotton. But expulsions of perceived 'ethnic monopolists' occur in underdeveloped countries ruled by stupid Generals- like Idi Amin. It is not Religion which is important but a lack of understanding of Economics.

The medieval commercial revolution saw the simultaneous rise of both international trade and antisemitism.

But both preexisted this supposed 'revolution'.

After centuries of stagnation and the dominance of agriculture, the urban economy began to flourish, especially in northern-central Italy and Flanders.

There was an anti-semitic outrage in Brussels in 1370. Two priests had used a Jewish middleman to get round the usury laws. The allegation was made that a rich Jew had tried to desecrate the Eucharist or something of that sort. So the mob went crazy. This has nothing to do with 'nascent capitalism'. It is some crazy shit about how eating a wafer means you are actually eating God.

Merchant-bankers ascended to rule Venice, Florence, Bruges and other city-states. They formed partnerships to trade textiles and spices from as far as Alexandria and the Black Sea. To facilitate these commercial advances, they devised new credit instruments, including marine insurance and bills of exchange.

Negotiable instruments and marine insurance and so forth have always existed. No doubt a particular group- e.g. the Lombards- might be associated with a particular form but, in commerce as in literature, there is nothing new under the sun.

During the medieval commercial revolution, the Papacy emanated several decrees to limit all social interactions between Jews and Christians. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council issued a notorious order requiring Jewish men to wear a distinctive sign (usually a hat of a specific shape or colour) and codified the crime of Jewish usury. Around the same time, Christian artists slowly began to depict Jews not only as carrying recognisable headgears or beards, but as people with peculiar and repulsive physiognomic traits. The new rules demarcating Jewish space and new stereotypical representations of Jews emerged in the same period when a booming urban economy undermined time-honoured feudal hierarchies.

Yet, these hierarchies returned when urban centers ceased to flourish. Christians, for religious reasons, may have wanted to picture Jews as repulsive and artists did whatever they were paid to do.

This was a turning point in the history of Europe: as wealth became more movable than ever before and upended long-standing social relationships, the forces responsible for these changes were not necessarily self-evident.

Here is the problem. History can't be said to have turning points if it fails to turn for centuries. The ancien regime in France did not end till 1789. Other European countries waited longer. The Church, speaking generally, resisted this. Reactionaries banded together out of self-interest. Anti-Semitism was 'populist'- it was the 'Socialism of Fools'- but, more importantly, it represented orthodoxy in Religion.

The world appeared more unstable because it was.

Where? Only in places without 'natural frontiers'. Germany was a battleground. England wasn't. Russia wasn't. France only became so briefly by its own folly. Spain might tear itself apart for internecine reasons. Italy was held back by its Popes and the Emperors who protected those Popes.

England has been pretty stable since the Glorious Revolution. It has seen enormous socio-political changes. These have not correlated to anti-semitism- with the exception of the 'British Brothers League' which opposed Jewish immigration in the East End and pressured the Government into legislative action in 1905 -  save by reason of excessive stupidity and incompetence on the part of individual politicians. Oswald Moseley could have been a Lib-Lab PM. Instead he went crazy and started strutting around in a black shirt. Then he began to whine about how the East End Jews would keep invading his meetings and beating his thugs. Moseley didn't get that beefy Fascists who get beaten up by Jewish tailors can't hope to take power. Just recently, we have had Jeremy Corbyn screwing up a heaven sent opportunity to displace a shambolic Tory administration by, entirely gratuitously, giving a platform to crazy anti-Zionist nutters.

But, in these cases, anti-Semitism was just the symptom of a more fundamental type of moral imbecility and political cretinism.

Indeed, this is the only thing one can say about stupid ideologies which are based on hatred. If they succeed the State fails. Democracy under the Rule of Law is about making sure stupid shitheads fail, not take the rest of us down with them.

In this turmoil, people turned to the figure of the Jews as a stand-in for the negative, destructive features of nascent finance capitalism.

But they did so where there was no nascent finance capitalism whatsoever. The thing would come many centuries later.

During the 16th century, the growth of the paper economy continued and the fear of Jewish invisibility deepened. Even as Europe’s colonisation of the Americas and commercial expansion in the Indian Ocean relied on great violence, the new paper economy aided the expansion and growth in trade, in Europe and around the world.

The author is being silly. Anyone can have a big paper economy. I personally can issue Bills of Exchange to the amount of ten gazillion dollars in return for a half pint of beer. Where trade grows, its paper trail grows. Sure, there can be a bubble in traded derivatives. But 'Tulip booms' can occur even in subsistence economies. If you rent my land- which I previously used to grow wheat- to grow tulips promising to pay me with a larger sack of wheat and a lot of other people do the same thing, then there could be a famine. Doing stupid stuff at the macro level means 'austerity' no matter what type of economy you have. Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' failed. Don't do stupid shit. It's bad for the economy. That's the arrow of causation here.

Merchants and bankers established credit or settled debts by the stroke of a pen.

So what? They could have matched tally sticks just as easily. Why focus on the stroke of the pen, or the very sinister fact that people are shaking hands? What's important is whether the transaction they made was smart or stupid.

Consider my own plight. My online Banking app tells me I don't got a pot to piss in. Some electrons within an integrated circuit have pronounced the epitaph on my life as an economic agent. Some Super Computer somewhere has rendered me a pauper. All these years I've been working my ass off as a Rabbi at my local Hindu Temple- and this is the reward I get? You talk about anti-semitism but what about Rabbis like me who have been cheated by those damn Iyengars with their fancy degrees in Computer Science? True, my local Hindu temple looks like a pub and the work I have been doing there involves drinking a lot of beer and singing rude songs till they throw me out. But that is what Rabbis do- right? Anyway, it is what Rabbis like me do. How come I don't got no pension fund or savings?

Their accounting and credit techniques became more efficient. But, compared with payments in hard specie, they rendered transactions ever more abstract.

Very true! Erudite Savants like our esteemed author would not write worthless shite if they were paid in gold and silver. The fact that their salary is transferred into their bank account by a Computer is something they can't understand. The thing is too abstract. Have they actually been paid to write something sensible? Or is it rather the case that money has been taken from them as punishment for not writing some worthless nonsense about Finanz Kapital and Neo Liberalism and how Karl Polanyi wasn't an utter cretin who knew shite about Econ and who kept gassing on about how Dahomey was a paradise because of all the slaves it shipped across the Atlantic.

One particular financial instrument, the bill of exchange, epitomised the promise and peril of the swelling paper economy.

In India this was called a 'hoondi'. China has had several different terms for private bills which have been circulating since the Tang dynasty. The thing does not represent any 'promise or peril'. It corresponds to an exchange of physical goods and services which is audited or otherwise verified.

No one, not even the most conservative Catholic theologians, could deny the achievements of bills of exchange.

Rubbish! Theologians could, and did, say stupid shite like 'money is the devil's dung'. Promissory notes were impermissible because it was impious to promise anything save obedience to God. Anyway, the World is going to end next Tuesday. Consider the lilies of the field. Fuck you want to go in to work for?

Thanks to them, merchants no longer placed sacs of coins on board a ship that could sink or fall prey to pirates, or on the back of a horse that could be seized.

Rubbish! Bullion was transferred after transactions were netted out. Pirates and Highway men could make a good living- unless a concerted effort was made to catch and hang them.

Bills of exchange allowed merchants to transfer funds abroad simply by scribbling a few words on a piece of paper.

But, if the country had a current account deficit, bullion had to be physically transferred.

For Catholic theologians, however, bills of exchange raised the spectre of usury. Each bill was a loan that also performed a currency conversion. A merchant would use local currency to purchase a bill of exchange. That bill was then made payable at a future moment in time, in another location, and in a different currency. The interest rate charged by the lender was not recorded but rather subsumed under the currency-exchange conversion. Visa and Mastercard used the same trick until litigation required them to disclose foreign transaction fees on customers’ statements.

This problem still arises in connection with 'Islamic' banking. Why not simply say 'theologians- then as now- are as stupid as shit? They aren't happy till they have fucked up the economy and the polity and national security and everything else under the sun.' The problem here is that most academic economists are theologians in mufti.

In the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, bills of exchange grew more widespread, and more arcane. They could be endorsed and passed on to a new creditor, a procedure that increased their circulation.

Negotiability has always existed. However, for mercantilist reasons, States sought to limit this. Ultimately, this would happen because the real economy contracted or rents got captured directly.

At financial fairs held in Lyon and other cities, the upper crust of commercial society gathered to buy and sell bills of exchange, speculating on currency arbitrage. These financial fairs represent the first instance of financialisation.

According to some stupid Eurocentric historian who doesn't know enough about Roman, or earlier Phoenecian, practices of a similar type.

Understood as a separation between commodity markets and money markets, financialisation confounded even sympathetic observers.

Coz they were ignorant and stupid. They believed in magic- like how going to Mass means you get to eat God's own flesh and drink some of His blood.

I suppose one could say 'financialization' means State's don't interfere in purely financial claims over resources. But there is an obvious limit to the thing. If people kill and eat bailiffs or other enforcement agents, financial claims aren't worth the paper they are written on. All that matters is the cost of enforcement of control rights as a proportion of the benefit they yield. Often 'appropriable control rights' are not financial at all.

Economic abstraction reached its highest form at these fairs: fortunes were made and lost without any goods passing hands.

How silly is this author? Fortunes were made and lost at the gaming table. But unless the winner could take control of your gold and land and house and furniture, nothing had in fact been lost. If goods don't change hands there is no 'economic abstraction'. There is just a silly game.

As during the medieval commercial revolution, in the 16th and 17th centuries financial innovation developed alongside heightened fears about the mixing of Jews and Christians.

Who expressed those fears? Jews? Or was it stupid Theologians or crazy Pontiffs?

In the 1590s, the Republic of Venice and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany offered safe havens to baptised Jews escaping the inquisition in Spain and Portugal. They had to live as Jews in Venice or Livorno but, when they conducted their commercial and banking activities, they enjoyed the same privileges as Christians. In Amsterdam, Iberian Jews achieved an even greater degree of economic equality. In all these port-cities, as in Hamburg and London, they also dressed like the well-to-do Christian bourgeois with whom they traded. Jewish acculturation in Europe had never been so pronounced.

It was more pronounced before the spread of Christianity. Josephus was more 'acculturated' than Spinoza.

In one region, the Southwest of France, conversion, not just acculturation, revived older fears about Jewish invisibility. In 1394, the king of France had expelled all Jews from his lands. In 1550, however, as the descendants of former Jews were seeking to flee Portugal, King Henry II of France invited ‘merchants and other Portuguese known as New Christians’ to come and live in Bordeaux and its surroundings. Everyone understood what his words meant: the Southwest of France became the only place in Europe where crypto-Judaism was tolerated as an open secret. Only in 1723 was the worship of Judaism permitted in the region, and even then, prejudice did not vanish.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, there appears to have been substantial Jewish participation in the 'Radhanite' trade network which ran from France all the way to China and India. In other words, there was continuous flux in these matters till Western Europe gained Oceanic mastery and, following the industrial revolution, Society was transformed by the growth of an urban proletariat and 'enlightened' bourgeois class. This marked the advent of the 'Secular' age which fundamentally changed the nature of anti-Semitism.

Recognised as subjects of the crown, ‘Portuguese merchants’ in the Southwest of France were free to move, conduct any economic activity, and bequeath their assets. Life was not easy for these immigrants. The clergy remained hostile to them. The local population suspected them of being not only religious enemies but also political traitors every time a war broke out between France and Spain – and there were many wars. Baptised former Jews intermarried and socialised with native and foreign traders. Some merchants, wine producers, insurance underwriters and bankers denounced them as unfair competition. But the king, who valued their economic ties to the rest of the diaspora, shielded them from the worst outbreaks of antisemitism, and even their opponents relied on their work.

But, this had been true for a thousand years. It was the repetition of a familiar pattern.

A century after France granted these ‘Portuguese merchants’, or baptised Jews, protection to live and trade in Bordeaux, a 1647 book asserted that medieval Jews invented marine insurance and bills of exchange. This novel idea linking Jews and capitalism was printed in a collection of maritime laws titled Us et coustumes de la mer (‘Usages and Customs of the Sea’). Its author, Étienne Cleirac, was a lawyer with extensive experience adjudicating disputes involving credit obligations, mariners’ wages, freights and shipwrecks. He was also a devout Catholic and loyal monarchist, eager to offer the king and his officials a tool to assert their power in the arena of international trade and diplomacy. Today virtually forgotten, Us et coustumes de la mer was a remarkable success. It made four centuries of maritime law available in vernacular to statesmen, lawyers and writers of all matters economic, just when the subject garnered increasing attention. Cleirac’s text also included extensive annotations, most of them useful and accurate. Yet it was his wildest comment that sealed his fame.
Cleirac wrote that medieval Jews expelled from France had invented marine insurance and bills of exchange in order to salvage their properties. There is no ground whatsoever for this claim. No single individual or group invented marine insurance or bills of exchange, byproducts of the commercial revolution of the Middle Ages and later improvements. However, Cleirac’s story struck a chord because it offered a seemingly persuasive answer to the question of the day: how to demarcate the proper place of private finance?

Cleirac was quite important. His book was translated into English. It represents the Mercantilist Doctrine in vogue in the Seventeenth Century and, as such, was of interest to Land Lords who viewed the noveau riche of the Cities with suspicion. Jefferson had a copy of Clierac's work.

Cleirac refers to Jews harshly, accusing them of ‘execrable crimes’ and calling them ‘malicious men lacking public confidence’ or ‘people without a conscience’ who felt no allegiance to non-Jews. Cleirac, however, uses the Jews as a prop to set up his ultimate target: ‘Lombards’. The Lombards were Christian bankers from northern Italy who had taken up the position of Jewish moneylenders in foreign countries from which Jews had been expelled. In Cleirac’s account, Lombards were ‘imitators’, ‘disciples’, ‘apprentices’ and ‘wretched clerks’ of Jews, from whom they learned how to extort usurious rates from naive Christian debtors. For Cleirac, Lombards were even more dangerous than Jews. Jews, he writes, ‘were hated, despised as impertinent fellows, and continuously ridiculed’. Lombards, in contrast, could pass as reputable Christian merchants.

Since Richlieu had triumphed over Marie de Medici, Cleirac obviously knew which side his bread was buttered on.

The 17th century produced many illustrious enemies of commerce and merchants. Cleirac was not one of them. He was a proponent of credit, in moderation. He was also not interested in Jews as such. Rather, Cleirac found the figure of Jews useful to reprimand the most cunning merchants who used bills of exchange purely for personal gain and to trick gullible borrowers. By portraying these bills as a Jewish creation, he did not deny that good Christian merchants could utilise them for the benefit of Christian society, which depended on trade for its necessities. Nor did he point to a particular economic crime for condemnation. Accusing those who misused bills of exchange of trading ‘like Jews’ was effective in good part because of the inherent imprecision of the accusation.

The French resented the fact that their King's father had been poor and that his Medici wife had brought with her a large fortune which she used for their benefit.

Cleirac led his readers to draw parallels between the facility with which Jews traversed geopolitical borders – and could even, when called ‘Portuguese merchants’, be treated like Christians – and the immaterial quality of bills of exchange, which had no intrinsic value and yet moved wealth across vast distances. Written in coded words on thin slips of paper, these bills were as hard to decipher by those who didn’t handle them professionally as Jewish rituals seemed to Christians. Worse: those coded words could hide something deceitful, in the same way as converted Jews were presumed to be insincere Christians.

So, 'cunning Jew' stands in for 'scheming Italian bitch'.

Rather than fading into insignificance, Cleirac’s misguided analogies gave birth to a veritable legend. A crucial step forward took place in 1675, when Jacques Savary summarised Cleirac’s story in his Le parfait négociant (‘The Perfect International Merchant’), the most widely reprinted, cited, imitated and plagiarised bestseller of the European merchant literature. From then on, until well into the 20th century, renowned authors such as Montesquieu and myriad lesser-known ones repeated the idea that Jews invented bills of exchange, usually to demonise and sometimes to praise capitalism’s tendency to trespass all boundaries.

This is Mercantilism pure and simple- i.e. the ignorant notion that gold must never leave the country. It must flow inward but never outward.

The French background against which the legend of the Jewish invention of European private finance came into being gave it particular poignancy. Not only was the presence of Jewish converts an everyday reality in Bordeaux, but more than 100 years before the French Revolution abolished feudalism in 1789, the sacrosanct barrier separating merchants from aristocrats began to break down.

There was no such barrier. The great merchant Jacques Coeur was ennobled in the middle fifteenth century. Then the King turned on him and plundered his wealth though he was a Christian and his son was an Arch Bishop. After some years in captivity, Coeur was able to flee to Rome where he was well received by the Pope because of his connections in the Levant. But he died soon afterwards. There were several other noble families whose origins were in trade. Equally a number of aristocrats by birth lost that status because they were unable to keep up an 'honorable'  way of life- i.e. they had to work for a living.

Hoping to enhance France’s stature in global commerce, the crown invited noblemen to invest in overseas trade. To do so, it had to introduce small but significant revisions to the anti-commercial laws and ideology that, for centuries, had nurtured the legitimacy of its feudal regime.

Or it could simply ignore those laws.

The baseless attribution of the invention of bills of exchange to medieval Jews appeared at a moment when the demands of private finance eroded the culture of inheritable aristocratic honour at a faster pace than ever before.

But it had no practical effect whatsoever. That is why Economic Historians don't bother with this Cleriac dude.

After 1673, noblemen who signed bills of exchange were brought before a merchant-judge in case of infractions.

Yeah right! Like you'd bring Pablo Escobar before a 'merchant-judge' in case he bounced a check on you! Guys who can have you killed don't appear before judges. Laws don't matter very much where enforcement is difficult.

This rule was a major departure from centuries of noblemen’s superiority over commoners.

But the nobleman could still procure lettres de cachet to have you thrown in the Bastille. Better still, he could get his bravos to slit your throat.

Yerushalmi, one of the great 20th-century historians of Jews and Judaism, was too quick to draw a straight line connecting medieval to modern antisemitism.

There is a straight line- the Roman and, to a lesser extent, the Lutheran Church.

The persecution of Jews (and Muslims) who were coerced into being baptised in medieval Iberia cannot be equated with the pseudo-racist ideology and extermination structures of Nazi Germany.

But they can be equated with the Islamic Caliphate was getting up to.

But Yerushalmi was right to stress that fears of Jewish invisibility long preceded the granting of civil and legal equality to Jewish men in France in 1790-91. What he neglected to take into account is that those fears were not unique to medieval Iberia. Elsewhere too, and particularly in the Southwest of France, the local population resented the presence of converted and assimilated Jews.

As was the case in Germany, Poland, Russia etc.

That resentment became a way of expressing the angsts associated with financialisation and the crisis of social legibility that financialisation brought about.

No. Some people like killing people whom they can also rob. What stops them is the fear of being killed or thrown in jail.

Lots of people nowadays have 'angsts associated' with imaginary bogeymen like 'financialisation and the crisis of social legibility' and the scotomization of the Gramscian Nomenklatura by Trumpian Neo-Liberalism and so on and so forth. Very few of them turn into anti-semitic nutjobs. Why? The Churches are against it. Colleges are against it. The better sort of pubs or football clubs won't tolerate it on their premises. Only Corbynistas or crazy 'antifa' nutjobs still cling to it, albeit in the guise of anti-Zionism.

A great deal has been written about Jewish usury in the Middle Ages and about how, beginning in the 19th century, both the Left and the Right have mobilised violent anti-Jewish imagery to demonise capitalism, especially international finance. Missing from this portrait is the new figure of the Jewish usurer that emerged in the 17th century: one that did not symbolise the outright rejection of commerce and capitalism, but rather filled the void created by the collapse of the legal and cultural norms about what constituted good and bad behaviour in ever more intricate financial markets. The invisible Jew, not the invisible hand, was the prevailing metaphor that European authors used to debate the proper place of finance in politics and society before, and even after, Adam Smith.

Why? Because these cretins were Mercantilists. They thought having lots of gold was what made a country rich. They didn't get that the thing was inflationary and had ruined Spain. Why did Mercantilism survive so long? It permitted the capture of rents by vested interest groups. It was a type of stupidity which protected the wealth of chinless wonders who in turn were willing to throw a few crumbs to Grub Street hacks in return for their writing hateful, ignorant, nonsense.

This raises a question. Why did England suddenly produce anti-semitic nutjobs like Chesterton? Okay, there was the Boer war for which 'Oppenheimers' were blamed by the Left. There was also an influx of Jews fleeing Tzarist pogroms which led to restrictions on their immigration in 1905. Also, through Belloc and other Francophiles, there was the Dreyfus angle. But why were Quaker newspaper owners initially sponsoring Chesterton? Does the answer have to do with the Agricultural Depression of the Eighteen Eighties and the rising demand for 'Imperial Preference'? Chesterton was both anti-Imperialist as well as part of a populist, William Cobett type, Radical tradition which, supposedly, connected with rural England. His attraction to Catholicism made him a comrade to 'Dissenters' against the Mammon of the Established Church though his opposition to the 1906 Education Bill promised by the Liberals must have been difficult to swallow. His anti-Semitism reached a peak at precisely the time when Quakers were most alarmed by the bellicose spirit of the Liberal Cabinet. Later Chesterton was to repay his debt to the Quakers by suggesting that the Catholic Cathedral contained the Quaker meeting house. It was a crumb, but a crumb they appear grateful for perhaps because he blamed the First World War on 'Quaker millionaires' whose pacifism had prevented the Liberals from making it clear to the Kaiser that Britain would fight to safeguard France.

On balance, tendentious 'socio-economic' blather, like the above, explains nothing.

 British anti-Semitism had to do with immigration not Imperial Financialized Capitalism with or without a coating of Quaker chocolate. But this was also true of much French anti-Semitism. Sartre says he was scared of knife wielding teen-aged Jewish pimps when he was young. If Jews were hated it was because they were poor, not because they were rich. Chesterton objected to the sight of young Jews dressed in fancy clothes enjoying themselves at English sea-side resorts. But they were mainly employed in the fashion industry. They were simply advertising their own wares. Anyway, young people should enjoy themselves. Jews started to do very well in the Entertainment industry. Merit took them all the way to the top. If they were entrepreneurial, it was because nothing was handed to them on a plate. Every jibe made against any 'immigrant' group- e.g. Southern Blacks arriving in Northern Cities- was also made about Jews. They were accused of being violent, noisy, vulgar, nihilistic, very funny but in a subversive and mocking manner and as for their jungle music- it was bound to deprave the morals of our womenfolk and lead to demands for cunnilingus.

By contrast, German Jews were sober and deeply boring. But the problem of the 'invisible Jew' remained due to the contango in improperly amortized Maritime Bills of Lading which caused young Aryan maidens collecting mushrooms in the forest to accidentally sit down on occulted Jewish cocks. I mean, if it could happen to my Uncle, it could happen to anybody! Only through a proper understanding of how financialization is leading to social illegibility and invisibility of Jewish cocks upon which all and sundry are accidentally sitting down upon can we begin to untangle the roots of modern anti-semitism in medieval epistemic practices. Meanwhile, be very careful about where you sit. Invisible Jewish cocks are roaming around all over the place.