The Promise and Peril of Credit examines the idea that medieval Jews invented the bill of exchange. This claim first appears in Étienne Cleirac's Us et coustumes de mer (1647). When expelled from France during the Middle Ages, Jews had recourse to bills of exchange to move their wealth out of the realm. Italian merchants, who aided them in this venture, learned to use the bill of exchange from these Jewish exiles. Credit began to penetrate the commercial life of Christendom.
Cleirac's account is fictional. Nonetheless, this legend (which also maintained that Jews invented maritime insurance) was widely accepted throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, despite criticism that might have discredited the story but was often ignored. For Trivellato, the legend offers a case study in relating discursive production to an economic context increasingly defined by credit relations, and, by the nineteenth century, defined by debates about the origins of capitalism.
The core of The Promise and Peril of Credit is a close examination of Cleirac's language, relating it to European discursive traditions, French legal culture, and the commercial and social contexts of Bordeaux, where Cleirac was a jurist. Consider this passage from the Us et coustumes de mer: when the Jews were exiled from France, “in order to retrieve their commodities and money, which they had consigned to or hidden in the hands of their friends before leaving, necessity taught these malicious men lacking public trust to use secret letters and bills written with few words and little substance, as bills of exchange still are, addressed to those who had received and concealed their stolen goods and given Jews a hand” (as quoted on p. 36). In glossing this and other passages, Trivellato shows that the bill of exchange was a deeply opaque instrument to those who were not initiated in its use, and that suspicion about its use remained common long after debates on usury receded. The passage also suggests that property rights related to the possession of “public trust,” which was impossible for Jews to obtain; yet somehow these social pariahs had Christian “friends” on whom they could rely.
Trivellato's pathbreaking The Familiarity of Strangers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) is an examination of how informational exchange enabled merchants from different social groups to trade with one another in the absence of a strong legal framework for trade. The Promise and Peril of Credit is about information, too—the asymmetric information that forced the uninitiated to function in a world whose rules were defined by wealthy long-distance merchants. It is about the anxieties that people felt about a commercial world that was not only difficult to understand, but also increasingly inescapable, anonymous, and sometimes unstable.
For scholars of economic thought, The Promise and Peril of Credit demonstrates that philosemitic mercantilism was not the only economic discourse about Jews during the early modern period. The notion that Jews were commercially useful and worth attracting to one's port cities figures prominently in the period's reason-of-state literature. Trivellato shows that this idea existed alongside a counterdiscourse, wherein Jews emblematized the antisocial perils of credit in a world where Christian communal ideals remained alive but under growing threat. She suggests that scholars must broaden the canon of economic writings beyond the division of thought into schools of doctrine. They must examine how concerns originating outside the commanding heights of commerce influenced the representation of economic life among all manner of writers. Trivellato likens the reappearance and recombination of Cleirac's legend to a karstic landscape, a land ridden with caves and underground rivers: “By analogy, we can think of the discursive and material contexts … as soluble rocks and the manifold versions of the legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange as the corrosive streams that plunge underground and reappear from time to time—never in exactly the same guise, sometimes leaving only a minor trace, and other times creating more durable paths” (192).
Trivellato's research has direct implications for Jewish history. She argues throughout the book for continuities between medieval and modern discourse about Jews, suggesting that the periodization of Jewish history may differ from the periodization of European history at large; indeed, her narrative would be more familiar to a medievalist than to a modernist. This emerges with particular clarity in her reexamination of Jewish emancipation during the French Revolution. As the Old Regime collapsed, the fear spread that Jews would be unable to assimilate and unable to fully inhabit the equality of citizenship: “The revolutionary promise of equality carried with it the prospect of a fully realized society of contract, in which credit markets would shed their religious and corporatist biases in favor of anonymous competition. Equality and anonymity in turn carried with them new risks: How could one discern which economic actors were reputable and which duplicitous in an impersonal market? … Once again, Jews’ invisibility intensified fears of contamination, and their perceived ubiquity continued to serve as a metaphor for the perils lurking behind ever more complex financial markets” (160–61).
The distance between the economic anxieties of everyday life and the considerations of a figure like Cleirac is wide. Despite her meticulousness as a scholar, Trivellato is unable to fully bridge this distance. Partly, that is because she relies on a reading of the secondary literature to reconstruct the commercial life of the period, rather than on an original foray into archival sources. Perhaps a detailed look at commercial disputes among relatively marginal actors would have helped strengthen her case. Her goal is also hampered by the indeterminacies inherent in translating social life into cultural output. For instance, Trivellato links the “usefulness” of anti-Jewish stereotypes to the informational asymmetries of the early modern marketplace, but the difficulty with this procedure is that better information does not necessarily update one's prior assumptions, as she herself observes. Trivellato's main ground-level explanation for distrusting bills of exchange and the merchants who used them (especially out-group merchants such as Jews) does not map neatly onto the larger canvas of European antisemitism. In any case, the book is ultimately more about the peril of credit than its promise, and it is more about the intellectual reverberations of credit than about its social effects. Even if this reader were persuaded that Trivellato has identified how anxieties linked to credit reactivated long-standing discourses on Jews, readers with different standards of evidence may well have a different reaction.
The last chapter of the book examines the scholarly afterlife of the legend—afterlife because the new technologies and credit arrangements of the nineteenth century rendered the bill of exchange a historical artifact. The bill of exchange abandoned everyday life and entered scholarly discussions of the origins of capitalism. Trivellato focuses on Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Werner Sombart. She argues that the survival of the legend in the era of positivist inquiry should give us pause in reflecting on the achievements of scholarship. More importantly, her account suggests how the historiography on the rise of the West is worth studying in its own right, as a venue for reflecting on the way historical problems are constituted over time—and how Jews are deployed within, or written out of, such histories. Werner Sombart emerges in Trivellato's pages as a shoddy scholar, at least in his Jews and Economic Life (1911), which accepted Cleirac's legend and placed Jews at the origins of capitalism. Sombart “pillaged and distorted” (207) historical scholarship on Jews in order to defend his thesis about the origins of capitalism. Rather than figuring as a seminal figure of modern social theory, in Trivellato's hands Sombart emerges as the last (and the least) of the heirs of Étienne Cleirac.
