Credito e cittadinanza nella republica dei mercanti visti attraverso la diaspora sefardita nell'Europa moderna

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.