Francesca Trivellato

Classic Essays on Jews in Early Modern Europe (Routledege, 2023): Designed for both students and seasoned scholars, this volume provides an innovative guide to the study of the Jewish past from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. It makes available seventeen contributions, published between 1904 and 1984, which are veritable landmarks in the scholarship on Jewish history in early modern Europe but have so far remained little accessible. Many are here translated into English for the first time, while all but one are not currently available in English online. The editors’ introduction situates these classic essays in relation to the growing perception that the early modern period in Jewish history possesses its own distinctive features and identity. Accompanied by a rich bibliography, the volume highlights the many changes that the academic study of this vital phase of the Jewish past has undergone during the last hundred and twenty years.

By bringing French history and Jewish history into dialogue, this article intervenes in the vast scholarship on the relationship between commerce and toleration in eighteenth-century French thought. It focuses on the place of Jews in Montesquieu’s ideas about doux commerce and explores the legacy of Montesquieu’s views on the debate on Jewish emancipation in the 1770s and 1780s. It traces the survival and adaptation of the medieval trope of the Jewish usurer in a variety of discourses, ranging from irenic images of commercial cosmopolitanism to representations of Jewish moneylending marshaled by radical advocates of Jewish “regeneration.” The article concludes by showing that in 1790–91 the doctrine of doux commerce did not provide a consistent argument in favor of civic and political equality even though commercial practices and policies in the French Southwest had favored the integration of Jews during the Old Regime.

The organisation of business transactions in the preindustrial period, once a central concern in scholarly debates about the rise of capitalism, currently plays only a marginal role in the literature on long-run economic development. Our survey of the contents of five top-tier business and economic history journals published in the United Kingdom and the United States from 2000 to 2016 finds that only 20 per cent of the articles concern the entire period before 1800 and that, among those articles, most are national or regional in scope, with a disproportionate focus on Europe, and on England in particular. At the same time, our survey suggests that a strong theoretical foundation and rich empirical data exist on the basis of which we can develop a comparative business history of the preindustrial world. We identify four areas of enquiry that are especially conducive to further comparisons within and beyond Europe: the corporation, the family firms, the economic role of women, and the funding of private businesses.

This essay inquires into the continuity and discontinuity between the Middle Ages and the early modern period with regard to the legal and symbolic forms of Jewish belonging to the « republic of merchants », an expression which I interpret as analogous to what today we call impersonal markets. It synthesizes published research and outlines future research projects with the aim of offering new analytical categories and solid empirical studies to unravel the nexus of market exchange and religious toleration. The contribution begins by examining the ideological construction of this nexus in the primary sources and in the history of European economic thought. It then surveys a variety of credit relations that Jews and Christians established across Western Europe. A principal objective of this analysis is to determine whether and what influence antisemitic collective stereotypes had on the credibility of individual Jewish economic actors. This objective requires a wide-ranging approach that includes : the re-examination of classic texts of the European enlightenment and eighteenth-century political economy ; the systematic gathering of data about credit obligations between Jews and Christians that entailed different degrees of risks ; and finally, detailed comparisons across different regions of Europe.