In 1647, Étienne Cleirac, a respected lawyer in the southwestern French port city of Bordeaux, published an annotated compilation of maritime laws. Although now almost entirely forgotten, Cleirac's Les us et coutumes de la mer (Usages and Customs of the Sea) was a bestseller at the time, and it continued to be reprinted for more than a century. Most contemporary readers who consulted the work likely found its collected texts more useful than Cleirac's meandering commentaries. Yet as Francesca Trivellato masterfully demonstrates in her new book, one of Cleirac's claims—namely, that medieval Jews were the inventors of both marine insurance and bills of exchange—proved astonishingly resilient and influential.

In asserting that medieval Jewish refugees had invented these new financial instruments to protect their wealth from royal confiscation, Cleirac crafted a link between medieval discourses surrounding Jewish moneylending and early modern anxieties about the dynamics of commercial expansion. This fictional origin story was soon taken up into a popular seventeenth-century merchants’ manual, and from these two starting points, it swiftly spread across Europe, influencing authors from Montesquieu and Cesare Beccaria in the eighteenth century to Werner Sombart and Albert Hirschman in the twentieth. Over the course of eight penetrating and persuasive chapters (as well as a coda and seven appendices), Trivellato reconstructs the shifting social and economic contexts that underpinned the legend's many iterations across time and space, highlighting the anxieties and influences that led the legend to be elaborated, reworked, challenged, and revived.

This makes for a fascinating intellectual genealogy in its own right, but the book's achievements extend still further. While Cleirac used the legend to depict bad credit as inherently “Jewish,” and Montesquieu used it to anchor his narrative of a modern spirit of commerce triumphing over a backward medieval past, Trivellato wields the legend and its afterlife to advance a wide array of historical claims and methodological arguments. As she rightly points out, the legend's persistence challenges both enduring assumptions about the supposed “pragmatic tolerance” of early modern commercial culture (especially in opposition to a moralizing and exclusionary medieval antecedent), and “long-held narratives about the power …of the market to create more equal societies” (5). Conversely, the fact that the legend has attracted so little attention among modern specialists underscores the need to reinvigorate (and broaden) the study of early modern economic thought alongside early modern economic history, and to integrate Jewish history into both. Also noteworthy are Trivellato's thoughtful reflections on the possibilities and pitfalls of digital source collections for historical research; it is rare for authors to write so candidly about the serendipities that underpin their research, and the institutional frameworks that make them possible. (As Trivellato notes in Appendix 1, the high subscription cost of Gale's Making of the Modern World, the main database on which she relied for her research, puts it beyond the reach of most educational institutions worldwide.)

Trivellato has previously drawn on Cleirac's compilation for insights into early modern legal pluralism and the construction of European sovereignty (see her “Amphibious Power”: The Law of Wreck, Maritime Customs, and Sovereignty in Richelieu's France,” Law and History Review 33 [2015]: 915–44). The book largely sidelines these themes, although the simple fact that the legend concerns the (purported) origins of two legal instruments might suffice to pique the curiosity of this journal's readers; likewise the fact that the legend was widely disseminated through legal compilations and commentaries. From a legal-historical perspective, however, the book's most compelling contribution lies in Trivellato's interpretation of the legend's reception as a litmus test of the contemporary transition from a “society of status … to a society of contract” (130). As legal barriers to commercial activity grew ever weaker, and as impersonal and abstract commercial arrangements grew ever more popular, the legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange became a vehicle for expressing fears of the moral ambiguities embedded within this new marketplace.

The book's long subtitle promises to tell us what this forgotten legend reveals “about the making of European commercial society.” It is a testament to the author's erudition, patient research, and intellectual ecumenism that her book delivers so richly on this promise. If nineteenth-century scholars treated the increasing complexity of bills of exchange “as symptomatic of larger transformations in European history” (218), Trivellato's work convincingly shows that the origin story associated with such bills not only reflected such larger transformations, but helped to shape them as well.