“Which is the Merchant Here? And Which the Jew?”: Fiction, Economics, History

Some of you will remember the plot of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice better than others, so forgive me for starting with an all too quick summary. Bassanio is a young gentleman who has squandered his fortune and needs cash to marry his love interest, the ­heiress Portia, who reciprocates his feelings. Bassanio’s dear friend Antonio, an upstanding Venetian merchant, is ready to lend him the money but is short of liquidity and assets to ­mortgage. Antonio decides to borrow the needed sum from the nefarious Jewish moneylender Shylock and famously agrees to offer a pound of his flesh as collateral, putting his life on the line.

In the play’s climactic scene, Shylock demands the pound of flesh before the highest Venetian tribunal because the loan has come due and Antonio has failed to repay it. Portia is moved by Bassanio’s angst at the prospect that his friend might die on his behalf, and tells Bassanio to offer Shylock double the sum due by Antonio as repayment. But the Jewish moneylender persists in demanding Antonio’s flesh. In another of Shakespeare’s twists, Portia storms into the courtroom dressed as a male lawyer in order to try to save Antonio, whose death would break Bassanio’s heart. She is fully informed about the terms of the dispute, but appears to be confused about one detail. As the Doge who presides over the trial invites the two litigants, Antonio and Shylock, to come forward, she asks: “Which is the merchant here and which the Jew?” (4.1.171).[1]

What is Portia hinting at? How could she be unable to tell a Jew from a Christian merchant in sixteenth-century Venice, where such distinctions were enshrined in sumptuary law? For a long time, literary critics overlooked this question, presumably considering it bizarre or simply tangential. Those who took it literally could not make sense of it. Tony Tanner calls Portia’s question “astonishing.” In sixteenth-century Venice, he claims, it would have been easy to distinguish between members of the two groups. Shylock would have been a “marked” man, a Jew wearing the obligatory garment or a distinctive sign.[2]

There are indeed plenty of scenes in the play that support Tanner’s assertion that Jews and Christians could not be easily mistaken and inhabited separate spheres. After Shylock and Bassanio seal their deal — the 3,000-ducat loan for three months secured by Antonio’s flesh — Bassanio invites the Jewish lender to join him and his friends for a celebratory meal. Shylock declines with disdain: “Yes, to smell pork, to eat of the habitation / which your prophet the Nazarite conjured into evil. I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following. But I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you” (1.3.28–32).

Wherever Jews were tolerated as a religious minority in medieval and early modern Europe, they existed as a collective body. Keeping kosher was a given for all of them, not a personal choice. Nor did economic cooperation across religious communities necessarily breed mutual appreciation. When he is introduced to Antonio, Shylock cannot contain his rage: “I hate him because he is a Christian” (1.3.38). “He hates our sacred nation and he rails / even there where merchants most do congregate” (1.3.44–45). Shylock recalls Antonio spitting at him and calling him a “dog,” a theologically charged term that associated Jews with blood libel because they purportedly attacked Christ’s body, the Eucharist, like dogs.[3]

The historical record is filled with evidence supporting a high degree of animosity and separation between the two groups. Jews and Christians traded together but did not dine at the same table, did not intermarry, did not live under the same roof and rarely in the same neighborhood; they worshiped different gods in different sacred spaces, and despised each other’s religious ­traditions. Jews in Venice also had to sport a yellow or red clothing item.

Why, then, did Portia have any difficulty telling Antonio and Shylock apart? For some time now, scholars have illuminated the allegorical meanings Shakespeare attributed to Shylock and Judaism and thus helped us solve the puzzle. They point to Christian theology’s obsessive need to demarcate clearly the difference between Jews and Christians as a key to the entire play.[4] Jews were allowed to reside in parts of Europe under severe constraints as proof of Christianity’s triumph over the “old religion.” Yet their very existence, in spite of perennial efforts to convert them, continued to threaten Christianity’s self-confidence. Christians feared that Jews, whether as a real or imaginary presence, would pollute and subvert their social order. Building on this line of criticism, I suggest that Portia’s question allows us to grapple with some of the paradoxes that accompanied the momentous historical shift from feudalism to capitalism.

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith famously wrote that a complete division of labor among producers, and between producers and consumers, would bring into being a new social world. “Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.”[5] Smith’s iconic image of commercial society is often interpreted as an idealized rendition of the advent of capitalism — and a particularly egalitarian capitalism, given that, for Smith, one of the happy outcomes of this process would be the end of monopolies and merchant corporations, the East India Company in primis, whose harmful influence he decried.

In Smith’s stadial concept of economic development, commerce replaces medieval hierarchies by mixing people of all ranks. Adopting the language of the social sciences, we would say that his commercial society celebrates the dismantling of status distinctions and the beginning of formal contractual equality. Much has been written on this slow, fraught, and consequential transition. I argue, using Shakespeare’s play, that innovations in the legal status of Jewish merchants in early modern Western Europe and the cultural representations that accompanied them shed additional light on this historical transformation and the cultural backlash it engendered.

By the late sixteenth century, waves of forced conversions from Judaism to Christianity and institutional changes in the mercantile world rendered Jewish and Christian merchants more and more similar, legally and sometimes even in appearance. Far from being the springboard of altogether more benign views of Jews in the Christian imagination, the increased invisibility of Jews elicited new images of mighty Jewish traders who moved undetected across political and geographical borders, exerting disproportionate financial influence in pursuit of their egoistical goals. That is, greater inclusion of Jews in European commercial society and Christian fears of Jews’ ability to subvert the putatively egalitarian order of European commercial society went hand in hand.

Image

Shylock is the epitome of the usurious pawnbroker, insensitive to the plight of his clients and intent on extracting more than his due. He lends on collateral. The pound of flesh is obviously hyperbole, but theatergoers would have recognized it as the caricature of a harsh reality: imprisonment for debts. Ubiquitous credit instruments, such as the seal bond used for small sums and the bill of exchange used for international trade, were guaranteed by the borrower’s reputation. Technically, this guarantee meant that borrowers offered their bodies as surety and were willing to be incarcerated if they became insolvent. In France, this arrangement was called contrainte par corps, literally bodily constraint.

Shylock, however, does not work from behind a desk or a window in the ghetto, surrounded by the unclaimed pawns abandoned by needy customers — jewels, but also coats, sheets, and other simple objects left as collateral. Rather, once approached by Bassanio, Shylock walks to the Rialto central market in the heart of the city, where merchants did not only buy and sell but gather news about each other’s fortunes and the fate of small and big ventures. With no credit scores to consult, no 24-hour news cycles, no peer-to-peer messaging systems, few things were as scarce and precious as accurate and timely information.

Antonio is momentarily short of liquidity and lacks anything to mortgage (“all my fortunes are at sea; Neither have I money nor commodity / To raise a present sum” [1.1.176–178]). Rialto is where he sends Bassanio to inquire about his reputation and creditworthiness: “go forth; try what my credit can in Venice do” (1.1.177–178). As an upright and prosperous member of the city’s mercantile elite, Antonio has no reason to doubt his ability to borrow on his own reputation: “I no question make / to have it of my trust or for my sake” (1.1.185). Note that no mention of collateral is made. As Adam Smith puts it, the credit that someone “may get from other people, depends, not upon the nature of his trade, but upon their opinion of his fortune, probity, and prudence.”[6] Evidently Antonio counted on being regarded as a man of such “fortune, probity, and prudence.”

Just how merchants formed these opinions of each other is partly a mystery. Printed newsletters were not of great help: they were better at relating information about the sinking of a rich cargo, a military defeat, or a piracy attack than the integrity and solvency of the myriad actors who populated marketplaces the world over. Word-of-mouth communication in public squares, along the docks, in coffee houses, and then transcribed in private letters remained critical to the conduct of long-distance trade well into the nineteenth century, when the transport revolution and the telegraph allowed information to travel faster than human beings for the first time in history.

Thus, Shylock heads to Rialto to gather intelligence about his prospective borrower. Antonio “is a good man,” he murmurs aloud, that is, he is creditworthy in spite of the fact that “his means are in supposition” (1.3.11, 14–15). Shylock continues to ruminate:

He [Antonio] hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies; I understand moreover upon the Rialto he hath a third at Mexico, a fourth for England, and other ventures he hath squandered abroad. But ships are but boards, sailors but men; there be land rats and water rats, water thieves and land thieves — I mean pirates — and then there is the peril of waters, winds and rocks. The man is notwithstanding sufficient. Three thousand ducats: I think I may take his bond. (1.3.15–22)

This is an elegant rendition of the thought process of a professional underwriter in a major early modern European commercial hub as economic historians have pieced it together from a multitude of dry and fragmentary records. To determine whether to lend to Antonio or not, how much, and at which rate, Shylock weighs in his mind the knowns and the unknowns as he interprets what he hears about Antonio’s reputation in Rialto. Antonio is an experienced overseas merchant with four ships sailing to the most profitable destinations of the time: the Ottoman Empire (Venice’s longtime trading partner), the Indian Ocean (then the world’s source of spices and diamonds), Spanish America (with its silver mines), and England (the exporter of cheap woolen cloth that outcompeted Venetian products in the Levant). But overland and overseas travel is marred by dangers — some man-made (pirates and brigands), others environmental (“the peril of waters, winds, and rocks”).

Finally, Rialto is where Antonio’s friends Salanio and Selerio rush once they hear that one of Antonio’s vessels has sunk in the English Channel. Act III opens with an angst-filled ­question: “What news on the Rialto?” (3.1.1). Did “not one vessel scape the dreadful touch / of ­merchant-marring rocks?” Bassanio asks. “Not one, my lord,” Salerio answers (3.2.270–271). By the end of the play, the news on the Rialto turns out to have been wrong. All of Antonio’s ships return to Venice and his risky businesses earn him the profits he had anticipated.

There are as many accurate as inaccurate details in Shakespeare’s portrayal, beginning with the fact that by the late sixteenth century, any European merchant placing his fortunes onboard vessels plying the oceans would have bought an insurance policy. But as some have remarked, the absence of marine insurance from the plot is “the enabling condition of the play.”[7] With insurance, Antonio would have had enough to repay his debt to Shylock even before finding out that, contrary to what was initially believed, his ships were not lost at sea. Marine insurance would have also frustrated Shylock’s desire to take Antonio’s life rather than accept the larger sum that Bassanio was willing to pay to relieve his friend of the bond.

My point here is not to correct Shakespeare’s account but quite the opposite, to investigate the sources and the power of his creativity. Shylock embodies simultaneously two Jewish social types: the Italian-Ashkenazi pawnbroker and the Sephardic international merchant; one is a creature of medieval antisemitism and social segregation, and the other is a symbol of an ever more tolerant and expanding but also potentially treacherous early modern commercial society. No matter how much the rulers of the Venetian Republic sought to distinguish between the two groups, the Christian imagination conflated them.[8]

In 1516, Venice permitted Jews to reside within the urban precinct and assigned them an enclosed area guarded at each entrance day and night and closed from sundown to dawn (the guards were Christian but paid by the Jewish community). The first residents of the ghetto were Italian-Ashkenazi Jews who were permitted only to sell second-hand goods and run pawnshops for consumer credit. Twenty-five years later, in 1541, the Republic responded positively to a petition by certain “traveling Levantine Jewish merchants” (“hebrei mercadanti levantini viandanti”) who asked for an enlargement of the ghetto so that they, too, could settle there. Venice was eager to entice these traders away from the Ottoman Empire, its main military and commercial foe. While granting this concession, the Senate stated very clearly that Jews hailing from the Ottoman Empire were forbidden from engaging in pawnbroking and second-hand dealings or “any occupation except for the sole mercantile activities.”[9]

There was a deliberate effort on the part of the Republic to create two tiers of Jewish ­residents: the Italian-Ashkenazim would cater to the needs of the poor; Ottoman Jews would boost Venice’s weakening commercial position in the Eastern Mediterranean.

In 1589, then, the Venetian Senate issued a charter addressed to “Levantine and Ponentine Jewish merchants” — Ponentine designated those arriving from Iberia, also known as Sephardim. A particularly daring clause made Venice a desirable destination for the Iberian diaspora. By definition, everyone with Jewish ancestors living in the territories of the Spanish or Portuguese crowns had been baptized following the policies enacted in the 1490s. According to canon law, baptism cannot be rescinded and anyone who received the sacrament and did not live following the Catholic precepts could be tried for apostasy. In defiance of the papacy, the safe-conduct policy issued by Venice to Sephardic Jews in 1589 stipulated that as long as they lived as practicing Jews in the ghetto, they would “not be harassed because of their religion by any [Venetian] magistrates” (“sicuri … di non esser molestati per causa di religione da qual si voglia magistrate”).[10] In other words, they were beyond the reach of the Inquisition.

The 1589 charter awarded Jews additional assurances that had no precedent in Europe. For all intents and purposes, it treated Iberian newcomers as Venetian subjects with regard to their property rights. For example, it specified that in case of wartime, their goods could not be confiscated or “their families disturbed in any other way.”

In short, even as it defined the terms of Jewish segregation and subordination, the 1589 charter lessened the status differentials between Ottoman and Iberian Jews, on the one hand, and Venetian merchants, on the other. Sephardic Jews could enter into contract with anyone of their choosing, trade in the Eastern Mediterranean as if they were Venetian citizens or patricians, and avail themselves of the military and legal protection granted to the merchants of the Republic.

This is one of the ways in which we ought to understand Portia’s question. In a society of status like early modern Venice, where Jews and any other corporate group were assigned a specific collective position in the social hierarchy, Sephardic merchants who engaged in long-­distance trade and finance were legally equated to their Catholic and local peers in the day-to-day conduct of trade. In this respect, they were indistinguishable from Venetian traders like Antonio. At the same time, they were confined to live in the ghetto and, as Jews, they were perennially mistrusted.

Sephardic merchants therefore embodied at once the persistence of status hierarchies and the progressive erosion of status differentials in European commercial society. This dual condition was visible even in the ghetto. The Spanish synagogue was the most imposing and sumptuous among the five in operation. But while they invested in their place of worship as a monument to their superior standing within a corporate logic of group definitions, Ponentine and Levantine Jews also adopted the attire of the elites who resided outside of the ghetto. An Englishman visiting Venice roughly a decade after The Merchant of Venice was published was struck by their propriety and genteel appearances: “I observe some fewe of those Jews especially some of the Levantines to bee such goodly and proper men, that then I said to my selfe our English proverbe: To looke like a Jewe (whereby is meant sometimes a weather beaten warp-faced fellow, sometimes a phrenticke and lunaticke persone, sometimes one discontent) is not true. For indeed I noted some of them to be most elegant and sweet featured persons, which gave me occasion the more to lament their religion.”[11]

A few other cities in Europe followed Venice’s example and courted Iberian refugees. By 1593, Livorno, the principal port-city of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, extended even greater privileges to Sephardic merchants and their families.[12] Jews in Livorno were not only granted freedom of movement and safety of their persons and property, but not obliged to wear a distinctive sign or live in a prescribed section of the city; they were allowed to employ Christian domestic servants and wetnurses and to own real estate, including land in the countryside. Taken together, these provisions — all exceptional for the time — afforded Jewish merchants in Livorno legal parity with local Tuscan merchants. The 1593 decree, however, also included articles condemning anti-Jewish attacks that today we would describe as hate-crime legislation. This is the clearest demonstration that economic necessity did not dispel cultural hostility. Credit obligations between Jews and non-Jews were negotiated against this background.

The city of Amsterdam never issued a formal charter to Jews but encouraged them to settle and trade there, as it did with other foreign, ethnic, and religious communities. Amsterdam was the most tolerant of all early modern European cities and the one where the mercantile world approximated most what social scientists call an open-access order, that is, a society in which “personal relations still matter, but impersonal categories of individuals, often called citizens, interact over wide areas of social behavior with no need to be cognizant of the individual identity of their partners.”[13]

In order to outcompete Antwerp, its Catholic rival in the Southern Low Countries, and to attract traders from near and far, the Amsterdam municipal government made a panoply of institutional resources available to merchants of all stripes. It required guild membership (from which all Jews were excluded) in most artisanal crafts and for marine insurance brokers. But it drew no distinction between local and foreign merchants when it came to charging custom duties or providing legal and financial services.[14]

The Dutch Republic prized Jews’ commercial expertise and gave them full and equal access to public institutions serving international trade, including the Exchange Bank, the stock market, trade auctions, and local tribunals. The most affluent Jewish merchants invested not only in the Dutch East India Company, but in municipal and state bonds, thus acquiring a sort of financial ­citizenship — a privilege denied to Jews in Venice, where public debt had existed since the twelfth century.

The first Jews who arrived in the United Provinces had converted to Catholicism in Spain or Portugal. In Holland, these “New Jews” undertook a process of adapting traditional Judaism to local circumstances. The leaders of this creative project were the upper echelons of Amsterdam’s Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community, who came to embody the notion of bom judesmo, a novel symbiosis of Jewish mores and gentile decorum.[15] Their attempts to discipline interactions between Jews and non-Jews in order to minimize any confrontation displayed a class component, in the sense that they targeted the improper behavior of the poorest members of the community in order to preserve their collective reputation. The need to preserve tranquility (quietação) was symptomatic of the Jewish leaders’ desire to blend in as respectable merchants.[16]

But it was in Bordeaux, of all the cities in Europe, where Portia’s question would have resonated the most. Jews had been expelled definitively from the kingdom of France in 1930٠. A century and a half later, the creation of a royal inquisition in Portugal led many baptized Jews to emigrate. Seizing on the opportunity, in 1550, the king of France invited “merchants and other Portuguese known as New Christians” (“les marchands et autres portugaiz appellez nouveaux chrétiens”) to come and live in the Southwest of the kingdom with their families.[17] Everyone understood what these words meant. The territories around Bordeaux became the only European region other than Iberia where any kind of Judaism was recognized institutionally, with one big difference: in France there was neither a Roman nor a monarchic Inquisition. The 1550 edict included some extraordinary concessions: these immigrants would automatically be granted the status of subjects of the French crown (régnicoles); they were thus exempted from the droit d’aubaine, the much-maligned king’s prerogative to confiscate the property of any foreigner who died in the kingdom without heirs. They were free to move, exercise any economic activity, and bequeath their assets.

In Bordeaux more than anywhere else, Sephardic merchants were legally indistinguishable from French merchants. Precisely for this reason, however, they were suspected of unfair competition, religious infidelity, and political betrayal. This was the dark side of Portia’s question and of the blurring of formal boundaries between Jews and Christians.

The allegorical invisibility of Jews was an ancient trope dating back to the early Church, when converts from Judaism to Christianity maintained certain Jewish practices. Indeed, the very institutions that promoted the forced baptism of Jews in Spain and Portugal centuries later also dreaded its consequences, and the indiscernible convert became an ominous figure of secrecy and deviousness and a veritable obsession, not just of the Inquisition but of Iberian culture at large. The more secure legal status that Sephardic merchants obtained outside of Iberia leveled the playing field for their participation in global trade but also harnessed these theological fears of Jewish invisibility to the economic realm.

Whether or not Shakespeare was aware of the changes in the legal status of Jews introduced in Venice by the 1541 and 1589 charters is beside the point. What matters is that The Merchant of Venice reveals the pervasiveness of the fears that those changes intensified. Half a century later, a new legend began to spread across France and from there to the rest of Europe.[18] It narrated how, in order to save their assets from confiscation, Jews invented marine insurance and bills of exchange when they were chased out of France during the Middle Ages. Christian merchants, who found these new credit instruments terribly useful, were said to have adopted them. Nourished by stereotypes about Jewish cunning and avarice, this implausible and false story served as a warning: by squeezing unreasonable interest from naïve and needy borrowers (by acting as predatory lenders, we would say), Christian merchants behaved like their Jewish counterparts and thus “became Jewish.”

Bills of exchange were the quintessential paper instruments of payment in early modern Europe. Unlike money, their liquidity depended exclusively on the solvency of those who issued and endorsed them. No sovereign entity backed their value. Only the reputation of those who signed any such bill made it redeemeable for cash. A real-life merchant like Antonio in need of liquidity might have indeed turned to a Jewish lender in sixteenth-century Venice, but most likely to a Sephardi trader from whom he could have purchased a bill of exchange against his reputation.

Bills of exchange were thin slips of paper, smaller than modern personal checks. They condensed multiple financial transactions in few and coded words. They allowed merchants to make funds available abroad without the risks involved in the physical transfer of currency. During the sixteenth century, bills of exchange worked not only as remittances but as speculative instruments. Lyon, Besançon, and Genoa hosted so-called financial fairs, seasonal gatherings at which a small club of merchant-bankers bought and sold bills of exchange betting on the fluctuation of exchange rates (what today we call currency arbitrage). Financial fairs stood at the pinnacle of early modern capitalism and represent the first instance of financialization in the history of Europe because they divorced money markets from commodity trade. They were run by the wealthiest and most international merchants, who were capable of handling intricate financial operations that appeared opaque to outsiders.

We have plenty of scattered evidence that Sephardic Jews transacted bills of exchange with non-Jews across Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. Because of the nature of the sources, however, we cannot determine how frequently this happened or how individual merchants, especially those belonging to groups targeted by popular prejudice, managed their reputations. What we know is that the medieval stereotype of the Jewish pawnbroker blended together with new images of Jewish commercial prowess that undermined fair competition.

The legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange was first committed to the printed page in 1647 in Bordeaux, the city where, you will recall, there were no legal distinctions whatsoever between Jews and Christians. It appeared in a commentary on commercial and maritime law that is today virtually unknown but at the time had a significant success. From then on, the legend owed its endurance, which was remarkable, not to vocal conservative theologians and clergymen, of whom there was always an abundance across Catholic and Protestant Europe, but to a rich and diverse literature about commerce, spanning from practical handbooks to Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. The didactic warning conveyed by the legend of the Jewish invention of the most advanced instruments of private credit drew on anxieties generated by the arcane nature of bills of exchange and the limits of legal norms to draw clear lines between beneficial and wicked credit practices. This legal instability gave way to the allegorical conflation of Jews (and baptized Jews in particular) with bills themselves: both could be assumed to serve only the interest of a few and to move surreptitiously across geographical and political boundaries.

Image

In conclusion, when Portia asked “Which is the merchant here and which the Jew?” she did not raise an implausible question. In fact, she pointed to a conundrum that was becoming inescapable and that has since remained at the heart of modern capitalism: the impersonality of the market is at once an indicator of progress and a screen that hides potentially infinite fraud. A transition from collective to individual responsibility and the dismantling of merchant guilds paved the way for the inclusion of Sephardic merchants in the commercial world of Western Europe. Interstate competition further improved their status in cities like Venice, Livorno, Bordeaux, and Amsterdam to the point that Sephardic merchants could blend in legally and sartorially. But in an epoch that made no room for hyphenated identities, a Sephardic merchant was never only a merchant.

Scholars of Adam Smith remind us that the expression “the invisible hand” recurs only three times across his works, with varying meanings, and at least in one instance ironically.[19] The invisible hand as a synonym of unfettered competitive markets is a creation of the Affluent Society of the 1950s and a neoliberal political slogan. When Smith used the expression, invisibility did not signal transparency but rather conjured up the spectrum of dissimulation — the ubiquitous post-Reformation and Baroque anxiety about deceptive appearances.

The impersonality of the market — what Max Weber described as the market’s antithesis “to all the elementary forms of human relationship”[20] — and the abstraction of financial transactions from material value are two hallmarks of modern capitalism. Scores of commentators have debated when the latter came into being, and therefore, when such depersonalization acquired its full form. My aim here has been a different one: not to offer yet another date or causal narrative of the transition to modernity but to recover some aspects of the imbrication of legal and cultural changes that this transition involved.

By following the evolution of the local status of Sephardic merchants in early modern Europe as well as the novel Christian representations of Jews that it set in motion, we can better comprehend the profound ambivalence generated by the abstractions proper to capitalist development and the fears to which they give rise. As I hope to have shown, the real and allegorical invisibility of segments of the early modern Jewish diaspora rendered those fears palpable and legible and thus also explains the otherwise incomprehensible responsibility projected onto Jews for the ills of capitalism.

This text is a slightly modified version of the Harry Camp Memorial Lecture that I delivered at the Stanford Humanities Center on May 24, 2022, and thus retains the tone of an oral presentation. I am grateful to Roland Greene for inviting me to speak at the SHC and to Nicole Hughes for soliciting this contribution.

endnotes

1. All quotations are from William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. M.M. Mahood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). ↩

2. Tony Tanner, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 141. For the use of this quote, see also Julie L. Mell, The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender, 2 vols. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 2: 175–91.

3. Kenneth Stow, Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters: Continuity in the Catholic-Jewish Encounter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). ↩

4. For a particularly illuminating reading, see David Nirenberg, “Shakespeare’s Jewish Questions,” Renaissance Drama 38 (2010): 77–113. For a more recent statement on the matter, see David Scott Kastan, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 88–102. ↩

5. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 1: 37 (Bk. 1, Chap. 4). ↩

6. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1: 122 (Bk. 1, Chap. 10). ↩

7. Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham, “English Law in Shakespeare’s Plays,” in The Law in Shakespeare, ed. Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–19, at 13. ↩

8. While offering a literal rather than allegorical reading of Shakespeare’s play, in 1933 Cecil Roth already stressed the importance of these distinctions within the Venice Jewish ghetto: Roth, “The Background of Shylock,” Review of English Studies 9, no. 34 (1933): 148–56. ↩

9. The original Senate decree of 1541 is transcribed in Benjamin Ravid, “The Religious, Economic and Social Background of the Context of the Establishment of the Ghetto of Venice,” in Gli Ebrei e Venezia, secoli XIV–XVIII, ed. Gaetano Cozzi (Venice: Edizioni di Comunità, 1987), 211–60, at 250–51. A partial English translation appears in David Chambers and Brian Pullan, ed., Venice: A Documentary History, 1450–1630 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 344. See also Ravid, “The Legal Status of the Jewish Merchants of Venice, 1541–1638,” Journal of Economic History 35 (1975): 274–79. ↩

10. Ravid, “The First Charter,” 220 (my translation). ↩

11. Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (London, 1611; repr. Glasgow: J. MacLehose and Sons; New York: Macmillan, 1905), 372. Coryat also extolled the beauty and elegance of Jewish women as rivaling those of English countesses. ↩

12. I offer an expanded discussion of the status of Jews in Livorno in Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). ↩

13. Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2. ↩

14. Oscar Gelderblom, Cities of Commerce: The Institutional Foundations of International Trade in the Low Countries, 1250–1650 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). ↩

15. Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 71. ↩

16. Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), 219. See also Francesca Trivellato, “An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Economic Dimension,” in Paths to Modernity: A Tribute to Yosef Kaplan, ed. Avriel Bar-Levav, Claude B. Stuczynski, and Michael Heyd (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2018), 121–44. ↩

17. Gérard Nahon, ed., Les ‘Nations’ juives portugaises du sud-ouest de la France (1684–1791): Documents (Paris: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Centro Cultural Português, 1981), 21–26. ↩

18. What follows borrows from Francesca Trivellato, The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). ↩

19. Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 116–56. ↩

20. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 3 vols., ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 1:637. ↩