Intertextuality and Context

A core contention of my book is that only by combining intertextual analysis and historical contextualization can we begin to map this mixture of permanence and contingency. Discourses about credit and debt demand to be examined from a plurality of disciplinary angles, not in observance of prevailing academic expectations, but because the valuation of tangible assets, the regulations developed for their circulation, and the regard afforded to borrowers and creditors are inseparable from the dominant cultural systems of value and worth. It is thus important to draw from economic, legal, and cultural history. But this level of generalization tells us very little. This is why I concentrated my attention on two credit instruments— marine insurance and bills of exchange—and elucidated their economic and legal mechanisms before exploring the manifold reactions that they elicited in a wide range of commentators from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century.

The frequency with which these commentators resorted to Jews as allegorical figures is striking, but so is the variety of purposes and outcomes with which they did so. As all the contributors to this forum make clear, this lack of uniformity is at least as revealing as the tenacity with which representations of Jews punctuate the European social imaginary about debt and credit. Which lending practices and institutions evoke associations with Jews and why? To what ends did certain authors summon those associations and when, in the process, did they forge new ones? What stereotypes did they tap into and how did they defy or adapt them?

Visiting Büchel’s Monte di pietà I am struck by the extent to which these questions frame his art project but are intentionally left unanswered. The installation’s scale—the surface it covers and especially the number and diversity of objects it assembles—makes it difficult to describe it in a few words. This is a calculated objective. Monte di pietà literalizes its critique of waste and accumulation by filling every inch of the palazzo’s three floors with a quantity and array of items that defy any concise summary. I will nevertheless try to give an account of the exhibition in order to unveil its intellectual stakes.Footnote ³

Chaos by Design

It does not take long for a visitor with a modicum of background knowledge to realize that a paradox lies at the heart of Büchel’s Monte di pietà. On the one hand, the exhibition must have required an extraordinary amount of research—research conducted on both a global and a local scale, to use historians’ professional jargon. Indeed, for two years, a team of investigators assisted the artist in his choices. In the end, nothing has been left to chance. On the other hand, Büchel has made a deliberate effort to erase the footprints of the research that he conducted and commissioned, leaving only a few clues for the initiated to discern. As a result, most visitors appear to be visibly confused by the seemingly chaotic cumulus of random objects.

Of course, as a conceptual artist, Büchel is not seeking to write a treatise or a political manifesto. Monte di pietà is meant to be first and foremost a visual and sensorial experience, and a disorienting one. Its subject matter is purposefully ill-defined. The pawnshop is only the metaphoric umbrella under which several interconnected themes are brought together, including the commodification of the art market, the crushing power of the media and large corporations to accelerate poverty and indebtedness, the omnipresence of gambling, the unremitting rise of public debt on a global scale, and the role of that debt in financing war.

However, the paradox that I just highlighted is far from innocent. It builds on the problematic assumption that arguments and ideas can emerge out of a jumble of decontextualized allusions. This assumption, as we will see, becomes particularly troubling when the allusions thematize Jews and debt. As an immersive exhibition, Monte di pietà demands that visitors be actively engaged in the creative process. But the studied chaos that informs its conceptualization begs the question of how visitors are expected to make sense of what they observe (or merely glance at). Will the exhibition unsettle or simply confirm the views they held before entering it?

For the duration of the Biennale, Büchel has made alterations to the interior and exterior of Ca’ Corner della Regina with the dual goal of recreating the historic pawnshop once housed in the building and making the palazzo resemble any of the loan shark windows, thrift shops, casinos, and bookmakers to be found in most cities of the world today. In other words, the visual refashioning of the space hosting the installation superimposes a notion of transhistorical and universal immutability onto a situated location with a specific past.

Signs in Italian that mean “on sale” and “everything must go” hang on the façade of the palazzo, overlooking the Grand Canal. Their colors and graphics imitate the lowbrow ones with which we have become so familiar: “We Buy Gold,” “Cash for Cars,” “99 Cents Only Store” (the latter, by the way, is a retail chain). A splendid historic landmark wrapped in cheap advertisements is ready to be liquidated for a pittance.Footnote ⁴ The interior of the palazzo retains its original frescoes and marble decorations but has been stripped of its elegance as much as possible, the infrastructure of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century pawnshop reconstructed on the basis of photographic and archival sources. Squalor is the reigning aesthetic.

Upon entering, one meanders through piles of worn-out clothes and used objects covered in dust—some laid down on metal shelves, some packed in or overflowing from garbage bags, some left abandoned on the floor. I look around to discern visitors’ reactions to this anticlimactic beginning of the exhibition. Some walk through faster than others; many look perplexed. Presumably, the immersive quality of the installation demands that one be overtaken by the loss of power and dignity felt by those forced to resort to a pawnshop. But it seems that the confusion generated by the absence of any of the didactic material that normally introduces visitors to an exhibition prevails over all other feelings. As one proceeds, the sensations become even more contradictory: alienation, revulsion, claustrophobia, irritation, compassion, and, above all, sheer puzzlement at the seemingly incoherent juxtaposition of disparate objects.

Of these thousands of objects, only a few (147 in total) are marked with a number. It is not immediately clear why this is the case. There is the rare piece that ordinarily resides in a museum, Titian’s portrait of Caterina Corner—whose descendants built the eponymous palazzo as it stands today—on loan from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, next to a plastic hanger and a hairdryer. There is a suitcase with small drawers filled with synthetic diamonds (the only art piece made by Büchel himself). There are metal presses used by the Catholic church to stamp communion wafers—a technique reminiscent of stamping minted coins. There is an emergency evacuation kit distributed by Lehman Brothers to its employees. There are hundreds of account books of the Naples Monte di pietà, together with regalia of the local soccer team and a picture of Venice’s mayor, under investigation for corruption. There is a self-service refrigerator filled with energy drinks for staff hired to design addictive video games. There are records of the reparations paid to former slave owners in Haiti and chains used by Italian colonists to tie the feet of Somalian men. There is a piece of cloth with the Prada logo covering the empty shelves of a food bank as well as a glossy magazine featuring Miuccia Prada, next to an ashtray crammed with cigarette butts on the desk of a late-night security guard. There is a poster denouncing the Venice Art Biennale for having escalated tourism to the point of disfiguring the city and an inscription on the back of a picture frame that reads “La Biennale è fascista” (The Biennale is fascist). There is much, much more.

History is at once paramount in and absent from Büchel’s installation. Items hailing from disparate places and times are massed together. There are no labels for the objects on display, nor panels providing explanations at the entrance of the rooms. In place of the usual paper or audio guide, visitors are handed a shabby leaflet in the guise of a catalog for a judicial auction, the kind that is held after a bankruptcy or when a tribunal seizes the goods of a criminal organization. The catalog’s entries are terse and only concern the 147 items that carry a number.

If one pays attention, it is more than evident that each object’s selection and arrangement have been planned meticulously. Lot 24 is a bond issued in 1823 by the self-proclaimed king of the imaginary Principality of Poyais in Central America, a Scot who engineered one of the least known but no less dramatic crashes of modern international finance.Footnote ⁵ The background music on the mezzanine level devoted to gambling is a 1991 reggae song in Venetian dialect, “Pin Floi” (Pink Floyd) by Pitura Freska, a biting satire of the dreadful consequences of mass tourism for the city of Venice. But how is a visitor to know this unless they already know it? The all-too-brief entries in the self-styled auction catalog are dry and anodyne (as is the case for lot 24) and the vast majority of items on display (including Pitura Freska’s lyrics) are not identified. The entries for two statues of Saint Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444)—one dating from 1490 (lot 77), the other from the eighteenth century (lot 50)—do not mention that Bernardino was one of the most fervent of the Franciscan preachers who railed against Jewish moneylenders, nor that Monti di pietà have long been closely related to anti-Jewish attitudes.Footnote ⁶

Clues

Amidst this open-endedness, the name tag “D. Graeber” functions as Carlo Ginzburg’s proverbial clue.Footnote ⁷ Readers of the Annales will have already guessed that it stands for David Graeber, the anthropologist and political activist who, coincidentally, died in Venice in 2020, five months shy of his sixtieth birthday. His 2011 best-seller Debt: The First 5,000 Years (translated into French in 2013) reached near-cult status among the Occupy Wall Street movement, but it also acquired a solid reputation in some academic circles.Footnote ⁸ A worn copy of the book can be spotted in a corner of the second floor—half tribute, half Ariadne’s thread with which to walk through the maze surrounding it. Obviously, it is impossible to tell how many visitors will recognize this clue.

By focusing on debt alone, rather than on debt and credit (which are two sides of the same coin), Graeber lays his cards on the table. For him, debt is a synonym of economic life, if not of life in its entirety. There is no money without debt. And yet debt is more than just money. Indebtedness structures all forms of social relations, and it equals servitude and submission. No emancipation can come via indebtedness. Part moral philosophy, part history, Debt: The First 5,000 Years hammers this point home through anthropological accounts intended to stress the commonalities of all human societies and a survey of recorded history stretching from the Sumerian cuneiform tablets of 3500 BC to the present day. From the dawn of urban civilization, Graeber tells us, debt has created inequality and been a tool of domination. The forced transplantation of twelve million African men and women to labor on European-owned plantations in the Americas (itself a continent expropriated from its indigenous populations) represents a particularly egregious chapter in this history.Footnote ⁹

This is also the exhibition’s message: everything in human relationships involves debt, and debt always implies violence and oppression, whether it is the corset splints gifted by a fiancé to his future wife as a love debt (lot 49), the mountain of used stuff never claimed from the pawnshop, or the license granted to the British South Sea Company in 1713 to sell African slaves to the Spanish colonies in the Americas (lot 104).

A secondary plotline hides in plain sight in Büchel’s installation. (This one, it must be said, is not borrowed from Graeber.) Here the clues are a series of items concerning Jews, Nazi Germany, Palestine, and the State of Israel. It is important to note that none of these objects appear in the auction catalog that functions as an exhibition guide. As a result, they all lack even the barest description and contextualization.

Let me list the items that form this secondary plotline which I noticed scattered among so many others on the mezzanine and second floor (I may have missed some): two posters for the film The Pawnbroker (1964) by Sidney Lumet; a copy of the so-called Balfour Declaration of 1917 (above it “Nakba 1948” is handwritten in marker and below it is a copy of a 1948 letter from the United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Palestine); a glass case containing a menorah with a star of David, together with various civil and military objects dating from different historical periods, all from the region of Palestine; The State of Israel War Map, printed in Tel Aviv and showing the borders drawn on the day of the truce, July 18, 1948; a German-language geographical map of Palestine with the ancient biblical kingdoms flanked by the colored triangles used by the Nazis to identify targeted groups (red for political prisoners, yellow for Jews, pink for homosexuals, etc.); three commemorative medals issued when then-president Donald J. Trump moved the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018; a video game called Conflict with a telling question mark in its subtitle: Middle East Arab/Israeli Wars 1973–?; the complete list of what the Nazis deemed degenerate art; a T-shirt with the Coca-Cola logo written in Hebrew letters; and two shirts of the Palestinian Football Association.

Only when I left the exhibition did I realize that a faded image pasted on the exterior wall of the palazzo was not a piece of street art but belonged to the installation. It is a graphic rendering of an iconic photo of a father mourning his dead child, taken in Gaza by the photojournalist Mahmoud Bassam on October 17, 2023. Again, none of these items are labeled or commented on in any way.

There is, however, an exception to this silence. In a side room on the ground floor, among the rubble of an air raid, several bags of cement are piled on top of each other. The name printed on them, “Nesher,” together with text in Hebrew and Arabic, leaves no doubt: the cement is produced by an Israeli company. The plaque by the room’s entrance reads, “Museum of Debt and War; opening hours: every day all year round.” Significantly, this is far from the only reference to the connection between debt and war in the exhibition—quite the opposite. Upstairs, visitors are greeted by a prominent display of heavy military equipment that has no place in a pawnshop. Evidence that the public debt has long served to underwrite wars of aggression and colonial conquest is everywhere. Lot 140 lays out treasury bonds issued by several nations to finance their respective military campaigns throughout the twentieth century, including one, featuring Walt Disney characters, meant to attract the savings of parents celebrating the arrival of a newborn baby in the United States toward the end of World War II.

In short, while the condemnation of the function played by government debt in destructive warfare is ubiquitous in the exhibition, Israel alone figures in the room expressly devoted to that topic. What is one to make of this asymmetry? If the exhibition’s overall message is that humanity has funneled all its ingenuity into creating an ugly and unfair world, that is frankly too generic an indictment to inspire outrage, let alone new insights. If the exhibition also intends to suggest that Jews and the State of Israel have played a special role in the incessant process of subjugation and self-annihilation produced by private and public indebtedness, then the message is insidious and patently wrong. One might object that Büchel is an artist and not a scholar. That is true. But the research that has gone into his project (and is occasionally on display in it) justifies taking his approach to task. On a table arranged to resemble that of a scholar or museum curator, we find a row of academic books on the history of pawnshops, banking, and their representations in the visual arts. One of these books, by Giacomo Todeschini, debunks the exhibition’s subplot by demonstrating that throughout European history it has been an all-too-common strategy to define the perimeters of a useful and charitable Christian economic sphere in opposition to the supposedly conniving and self-interested economic behavior of Jews.Footnote ¹⁰ This time, too, one can only know this if one has read the book.

The Ambiguity and Danger of Free Associations

By amassing disparate references without offering any guidance, Büchel leaves it up to each visitor’s free associations to incorporate the Jewish-themed items that pepper the exhibition into its overall narrative. One of the problems with free associations is that they are rarely free. In fact, they are based on preexisting assumptions. As I hope to have explained, Büchel infuses his project with a strong pedagogical impulse. His hide-and-seek pedagogy, however, stops short of interrogating the premises undergirding the associations he conjures up in the minds of visitors. These premises, in turn, are not the same for everyone. Some visitors will recoil at any hint of an association between Jews and debt, while others will take it as confirmation of their assumptions. It is possible (or even likely) that a great many will hardly notice or process the traces left by Büchel, which would be a missed opportunity for different reasons.Footnote ¹¹

Exit interviews would need to be conducted with a random sample of visitors to get a better idea of their reactions, but my impression is that, in the end, this cerebral and amply documented installation leaves intact the baggage of presumptions with which one comes to see it, and adds to it only a minimum of disjointed information. If that is the case, then it does not matter that we are speaking of conceptual art rather than scholarship. Neither should succumb to this trap.

Umberto Eco once pointed out that artists and writers often resort to lists as a rhetorical device to grapple with the ineffable.Footnote ¹² Büchel’s Monte di pietà, however, is a reminder that the mere process of enumerating can also be a way of abdicating analysis for no compelling reason. Even if we leave aside the legitimate question whether blue-chip galleries such as Prada’s are appropriate homes for artistic provocations about excess and wealth, there remains the issue of what precisely Büchel wishes to denounce and why his juxtapositions of Jews and debt are so assiduous and yet so nebulous. To condemn capitalism for all the evils of the modern world would be an empty charge in this day and age. To insinuate that Jews hold a particular responsibility for those evils is something that cannot be taken seriously, regardless of the crimes that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza and the West Bank.

A Book in Translation

The word “capitalism” is not mentioned in Büchel’s exhibition but hovers over it, with the same looseness of meaning as “fascism” in the slogan “The Biennale is fascist.” As Chauvard notes, I omitted the word “capitalism” from the original title of my book, which was published in English in 2019. There I explained my preference as follows in a footnote:

This footnote does not appear in the French translation of the book, which takes after the Italian edition and is titled Juifs et capitalisme.Footnote ¹⁴ Several considerations led me to adopt this title in translation. A more accessible title seemed better suited to a context in which private publishing houses play a significant role in disseminating academic work, as is the case in France and especially in Italy. Moreover, it made more sense to foreground the link between Jews and capitalism in France and in Italy, where antisemitism is a pressing issue (which is not to say that antisemitism is the only form of racism in Europe, nor that it does not exist in the United States). I was not afraid that the new title would call to mind Werner Sombart’s pseudo-scientific study, which is now largely forgotten and which I discuss at length with regard to the misguided ideas it puts forth and the political and intellectual milieu in which they took shape.Footnote ¹⁵ What weighed most in my deliberations was the different tenor of scholarly debates about the history of capitalism in Continental Europe and North America.

In North America, after decades of marginalization, interest in all things economic began to make its way back into history departments after the global financial crisis of 2008. This resurgence of interest, however, was and largely remains tied to a desire to identify a relationship between capitalism and slavery in the United States. The definition of capitalism in this recent literature is unapologetically vague: capitalism is more than a synonym of industrialization, though it is closely associated with it. While it has caused a great deal of friction with economists, this lack of clarity does not trouble most historians.Footnote ¹⁶ A capacious if vague definition of capitalism, combined with the remarkable success of new studies of the impact of slavery on the economic development of the United States, has led many historians who are not specialists of North America to seize on the term in order to make their work relevant to a broader audience. This was the tide against which I was swimming when I chose the English title of my book. By contrast, in France, as in Italy, the economic history of medieval and early modern Europe and the history of economic thought are less influenced by this trend. This circumstance freed me from the fear that putting the word capitalism in the book’s title would be taken as an instrumental attempt to masquerade its content.

The subject of my inquiry is one particular feature of what, by the nineteenth century, came to be called capitalism—namely, the growing abstraction of credit relations. By abstraction, I mean both the dematerialization of value that accompanied the diffusion of paper instruments such as marine insurance and bills of exchange and the increasing impersonality that these instruments entailed. This was nonetheless a highly imperfect impersonality given that not every group or individual in society had the same access to the capital and expertise necessary to profit from their use. The intricacies of bills of exchange in particular raised suspicions of oligopoly and malpractice that jurisprudence and tribunals struggled to quell. The legend that began to spread in the mid-seventeenth century according to which medieval Jews had invented marine insurance and bills of exchange had no empirical basis whatsoever. But it gained traction because of its evocative ability to parse the negative and positive effects of the paper economy. The legend portrayed Jews as handling bills of exchange to exploit naive borrowers, while also reserving the possibility that upright Christian merchants could manage the same bills for the good of the collective. This illusion purged impersonality of its unfairness by projecting its negative traits onto Jews alone.

This is not the place to reiterate my evidence and arguments. Suffice to say that long before capitalism became a keyword of modern social thought and political action, impersonality had emerged as a major concern of jurists, philosophers, and administrators. The footprints left by the groundless legend attributing the invention of marine insurance and bills of exchange to Jews has provided me with a roadmap for charting attitudes toward the rise of impersonality in credit relations. To return to the observation from which I started, these attitudes display a remarkable mixture of permanence and contingency.

Title aside, nothing in the content of my book in translation has changed (aside from minor tweaks). My distaste for the casual use of the term capitalism lacks an explicit defense in the French and Italian editions, but I hope that its reasons will be apparent to anyone who ventures to browse through them. It is rewarding to find that the colleagues who kindly participated in this forum share my distaste. By drawing a contrast between this collective intellectual endeavor and Büchel’s Monte di pietà, I hope to have also clarified why the choice to avoid the casual use of that term is far from a pretense of scholarly neutrality or a retreat into what rising populism denigrates as hyper-specialized knowledge. In fact, at least for me, this choice is informed precisely by the awareness that all arguments about credit and debt that traverse the academy and public discourse are politically charged, and all the more so when Jews are invoked. That is why it is dangerous to broach the subject by means of allusions and enumerations alone.

Readings in Context

My book and all the contributions to this forum point in the opposite direction to Büchel’s exhibition. As Kriegel recalls, for example, I stress how the figure of the all-powerful Jewish merchant could usher in new policies of toleration in Old Regime Europe because Jews’ subordination to the Christian majority was taken for granted. By contrast, once Jewish men were granted equal civil and political rights that erased all formal distinctions between them and Christian citizens, the same inflated figure engendered new forms of discrimination. This is why Jewish emancipation owes little to Jews’ economic roles, despite what several specialists maintain.Footnote ¹⁷ In this instance, as in others, the need to combine intertextual analysis and historical contextualization that I raised at the start of this piece comes into full view: a similar range of words and preconceptions assumed new valence as legal and political structures shifted.

In their comments, Brunori and Halpérin wonder what in the historical and intellectual context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France made some jurists (but not others) susceptible to the false claim that medieval Jews had invented marine insurance and bills of exchange, and why their Spanish and Italian counterparts mostly rejected this assertion. The essays by Hautcœur and Kriegel insist on the tenacity of antisemitic prejudice in discussions of money and finance as well as the specific aims with which various authors mobilized such prejudice. The 1840s were not the 1890s. Karl Marx drew on some of the same stereotypes about Jews as Jules Michelet, but he deployed them in the service of entirely different arguments. The laws passed in France to regulate the stock market in the 1890s were rooted in the information that politicians had about its workings but also in their political parties’ opinions on the merits or evils of free market competition and, it turns out, in their opinions on Jews. These opinions were sharply divided, and not only along party lines, as the Dreyfus affair would soon confirm.

That said, it remains to determine what kind of contextualization is best suited to scrutinizing the recurrent and yet varied stereotypes about Jews that surface in so many discourses on credit and debt, even when they do not structure those discourses. Ultimately, this is the central question that the pieces in this forum raise, some more tacitly than others. Hautcœur is the most explicit in calling for a social history of ideas grounded in contextually bounded realities, which is why he seeks to link images of Jews as speculators to specific economic theories and policy recommendations. For his part, Kriegel remains more faithful to the history of ideas and texts, marshaling his extraordinary erudition to unearth echoes, influences, and intellectual trajectories that had so far gone undetected. Brunori and Halpérin appreciate the heuristic potential of the legend on which I focus to go beyond conventional modes of writing the history of legal doctrines. Referencing a forthcoming study by Victor Le Breton-Blon, they endorse my (and his) effort to draw from the history of legal doctrines, commercial practices, and representations to explore how individual merchants and different social groups, including Jews, governed their reputation and creditworthiness.Footnote ¹⁸

In the current historiographical landscape, it seems more fruitful to tease out the differences than underline the similarities between these three approaches. The battles waged by proponents and detractors of the linguistic turn have now subsided, leaving surprisingly few scars.Footnote ¹⁹ The divisive antagonism that, until not long ago, pitted the defenders of socioeconomic perspectives (or at least the most dogmatic among them) against the practitioners of the new cultural history has dissipated. Over the past two decades, themes have largely replaced methods as the object of contention among historians. This state of affairs has its detrimental effects but it also clears the field of controversies that had become sterile. My book seized the opportunity created by this calming of tensions between economic history and cultural history. I used it to explore new ways of integrating historical contextualization and intertextual analysis in order to examine the apprehension created by the growing abstraction of the credit economy. The sympathetic rejoinders and constructive criticisms outlined in this forum provide further stimulus to continue in this pursuit.