The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender

Volume II

Julie L. Mell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319341866
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa medievale

This book challenges a common historical narrative, which portrays medieval Jews as moneylenders who filled an essential economic role in Europe. Where Volume I traced the development of the narrative in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and refuted it with an in-depth study of English Jewry, Volume II explores the significance of dissolving the Jewish narrative for European history. It extends the study from England to northern France, the Mediterranean, and central Europe and deploys the methodologies of legal, cultural, and religious history alongside economic history. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of key topics, such as the Christian usury campaign, the commercial revolution, and gift economy / profit economy, to demonstrate how the revision of Jewish history leads to new insights in European history.

Part Three
Some Explorations: Ashkenaz and Beyond

© The Author(s) 2018

Julie L. MellThe Myth of the Medieval Jewish MoneylenderPalgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-34186-6_1

Begin Abstract

6. The Discourse of Usury and the Emergence of the Stereotype of the Jewish Usurer in Medieval France

Julie L. Mell¹

(1)

North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA

End Abstract

What injustice do you find in usury greater than the prohibition on eating pork, forbidden animals, and fish without fins and scales? Since you transform everything into an allegory, called figura, why do you not interpret the commandment on usury likewise allegorically and permit even your own people to lend to each other on usury, as you do with the other prohibitions?…

Also you are commanded to protect us and not to force us to receive the commandments (mitzvot) according to your interpretation—Meir ben Simeon of Narbonne (ha-Meili), Milḥemet Mitzvah ¹

A discourse on Jewish usury emerged in the mid-twelfth century, developed “legal teeth” in the thirteenth century, and was used to justify expulsions of Jews from western Europe by the early fourteenth century. Well-known texts mark this development: In a letter of 1146 preaching the Second Crusade, Bernard of Clairvaux wrote that “where there are no Jews, there Christian men Judaize even worse than they in extorting usury—if, indeed, we may call them Christians and not rather baptized Jews.” ² Around 1200, the Parisian theologians Thomas of Chobham and Robert of Courson asserted in their summae that “Jews have nothing except what they have gained through usury.” ³ By 1215, legislation prohibiting Jews from extorting “heavy and immoderate usury from a Christian” was decreed at the Fourth Lateran Council and justified by the claim that “the perfidy of the Jews” in exacting usury was increasing so much that “in a short time they exhaust the wealth of Christians.” ⁴ By 1290, Edward I King of England, justified the expulsion of Jews by claiming that “the Jews did…wickedly conspire and contrive a new species of usury more pernicious than the old…to the abasement of our…people…for which cause We, in requital of their crimes and for the honour of the Crucified, have banished them from our realm as traitors.” ⁵

These texts traditionally have not been read as markers of a new discourse, but as straightforward evidence of a social and economic fact—that European Jews concentrated in moneylending by the later twelfth century and served an important role as moneylenders by the thirteenth century. This chapter offers a new reading of these texts by placing them within the larger context of an anti-usury campaign directed primarily toward Christians and a new anti-Judaism campaign. The central question this chapter examines is why a discourse on Jewish usury arose in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The answer involves a complex range of historical causes: a Church campaign against usury among lay Christians, an intensifying crusading ethos, a new virulent Christian anti-Judaism, and the emergence of increasingly powerful and centralized monarchies, among them a papal monarchy, which were constructing their power through the expansion of legal jurisdiction, in part. But it is the legislation on usury that gives real force to these changes. Hence it is the legislation that will be the focus of my analysis. The usury legislation originates in Church councils, but becomes the blueprint for royal legislation. Alongside canon law and royal legislation, there exists a third legal tradition which is actively regulating usury in thirteenth-century Europe, rabbinic law. The competition between the legal judgments and legal jurisdictions of Church, Crown, and rabbinic authorities stands at the heart of the emergence of a medieval stereotype of Jews as usurers.

In the current historical model, the elaboration of canon law and theological tracts on usury is regarded as a reactionary response to the economic takeoff of the high middle ages: ⁶ the Church’s position is considered to have been inherited from and reflect the “dark ages,” when Europe was an agrarian society. A rigid opposition to usury was codified in Gratian’s Decretum in the mid-twelfth century, where usury was defined as “any gain stemming from a loan, no matter how small.” ⁷ But “even when it was pronounced, some time about the year 1140,” it “was not compatible with reality.” ⁸ The history of the development of canon law and theology on usury is the story of the Church forced to come to terms with the reality of the market.

The need to come to terms with the realities of the market drove Parisian theologians like Robert de Curzon (d. 1219) and his master Peter Cantor (d. 1197) to consider, though not necessarily approve, the possibility of indemnifying a lender for forfeit he was losing (lucrum cessans) and for damages he would suffer (damnum emergens) when lending money. Even Thomas Aquinas, half a century later, was bound to accept such compensations as legitimate, considering that “human laws leave certain sins unpunished because of the imperfection of man.” He was driven to admit the existence of usury. ⁹

In this historical narrative, more and more “loopholes” were defined by canon law. But this narrative overlooks the fact that at the same time the rhetoric against usury reached a new pitch and spread beyond ecclesiastics to secular rulers. When historians pay attention to the references to Jews, they present Jews as caught in the crossfire: “Jews’ involvement in moneylending made them subject to restrictive legislation and to hostile political actions, not to mention social opprobrium and physical violence.” ¹⁰

Three elements in this traditional narrative are problematic and will be challenged in this chapter. First, encoded in the historical paradigm is the presumption of a radical split between “economy” and “religion,” represented by “the needs of the market” on the one hand and the anti-usury law of “the Church” on the other. This interpretation fails to give proper attention to chronology. The same medieval churchmen who railed against usury also created the concept of interesse (interest) and defined legitimate forms of credit and moneylending. At the very same time as the canonists defined 13 exceptions to the usury prohibition, they increased the severity of the penalties on usurers and extended these penalties to ever-wider circles of individuals. Both the campaign against usury and the widening definitions of licit forms of credit are aspects of the same developments in Christian economic thought. What we have then is not the opposition of economy and religion, but the invention of economic concepts within religious thought. ¹¹ By means of these concepts, the boundaries were drawn between permissible and impermissible economic forms. To understand the campaign against usury, we must refrain from translating usury as “interest,” “moneylending,” or “credit,” and we must seek to understand what was encompassed in the illicit and dangerous category of usura.

Second, the attack on Jewish usury is elided in the literature with the campaign against usury among Christians. This may be a consequence of Benjamin Nelson’s work in the 1940s, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood. Nelson read all of Christian intellectual thought on usury as a contest between Jewish tribalism and Christian universalism. ¹² He flattened out the dynamic history of the high medieval usury campaign by adhering to an old-style intellectual history of ideas and projected back to the early Church a consistent usury campaign and a static definition of usury. Consequently, he misconstrued what was primarily an internal Christian fight, presenting it as a contest between Jewish and Christian interpretation. Only in the mid-thirteenth century when the Talmud came under attack would a contest between Jewish and Christian interpretation surface in the polemical literature. Even then, this contest would remain on the sidelines of the Jewish-Christian polemical debate and the Christian anti-usury campaign. The result of Nelson’s influence is an odd split in the historiography. Jewish historians ¹³ write as if the usury campaign is directed entirely at Jews, while scholars of canon law ¹⁴ rarely refer to Jews at all. This chapter will avoid conflating the two by discussing first the conciliar legislation on Christian usury, and only then the conciliar legislation on Jewish usury. This theoretical approach is supported by two facts which will become apparent below: the campaign against Christian usury preceded the campaign against Jewish usury by 70 years, and the canons themselves textually separate the legislation on Jewish usury from that on Christian usury.

Third, the campaign against Jewish usury is treated as a rational, economic response to Jews cornering the market, while the antisemitic fantasies of ritual murder, blood libel, and host desecration are treated as irrational, religious responses to Christian doubt. ¹⁵ Framing the attack on Jewish usury as rational naturalizes it as economic and disguises its religious aspects. The historical literature fails to consider “Jewish usury” as part of a developing anti-Judaic discourse. This is due not only to the presumption that the texts reflect an economic and social reality, but also to the reification of the royal legislation as political history unconnected with ecclesiastical legislation and ecclesiastical issues. The charges of both ritual murder and usury should be understood as intertwined parts of a developing anti-Judaic discourse. Dissolving the binaries irrational/rational and religious/economic will provide a more satisfactory answer to the old question raised by Stobbe on the decline of Jewish status than Roscher’s answer—“the economic function of the Jews.”

Several historians have pointed the way toward a discursive approach to Jewish usury. In the 1940s, Joshua Trachtenberg approached the Jewish usurer as an overblown myth linked to a constellation of stereotypes clustered around the Devil and heresy, even as he tipped his hat to the historical narrative on Jewish concentration...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Some Explorations: Ashkenaz and Beyond
• Backmatter