Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the old anti-Semitic specter of the Jew as a financial international manipulator and money-grubber persists, from Moscow and Budapest to Des Moines, Iowa. Hungary's neo-authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán prospers politically by portraying the financier George Soros and Jews in general as shadowy, “ungenerous” figures who fight “by stealth,” who are not “honorable, but unprincipled; they are not national, but international; they do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs.” In October 2018, Chuck Grassley told Fox News that he believed Soros uses his “billions” to secretly manipulate politics.
As Francesca Trivellato shows in her extraordinary book, The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society, the bigoted cliché of the Jew as a representative of shady international financial deals has a long and error-filled history. For centuries, Jews have been falsely credited with the invention of bills of exchange, which are considered essential to the origins of capitalism, but which also were mistrusted as a form of financial trickery. Trivellato has discovered that this fundamental anti-Semitic story has its roots in a long-forgotten, seventeenth-century French legend about Jews and usury.
Trivellato's discovery is based on her earlier work on how Jews, and indeed, other diasporic groups like Armenians, gained financial prominence and expertise through trading within their international networks from the middle ages into the modern age. But capitalism and finance were not Jewish inventions. They came from medieval Italy with the rise of multi-partner firms, where double-entry bookkeeping emerged around 1299. They also grew out of the credit markets based on bills of exchange (bill comes from “bulla,” in Italian, means letter), which had existed in one form or another since antiquity, but now became essential for international, capitalist trade.
Trivellato's main point here is that European Jews did not get their start in finance through usury or bills of exchange. To invest such great sums and to have the privilege to make such returns on them, even skirting canon law, was a practice deemed too lucrative and important to accord to non-Christians. This was a Christian privilege. Hence, medieval and Renaissance banking in Europe was tightly intertwined with Christianity. The oldest bank in Europe, the Banca di Monte dei Paschi si Siena, founded in 1472, means the “Bank of the Holy Mount.”
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