Francesca Trivellato

Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean in Recent Historical Work

In 1951, Robert Sabatino Lopez published a provocative piece in the American Historical Review entitled “Still Another Renaissance?” The question mark in the title was little more than a rhetorical concession. Lopez had no doubt: “If renaissance be understood in its original meaning of revival, new birth, or, indeed, new conception, no period in European history seems entitled to be called renaissance more than the tenth century.”1 An economic historian who did not shy away from the study of “civilizations,” Lopez was less concerned with the emergence of new intellectual trends than he was with the demographic, economic, social, and political opportunities that opened up for larger strata of the population in much of western Europe, and particularly in the Italian peninsula, at the end of the first millennium of the Christian era. His proposal for a new chronology of the Renaissance had broad implications. In Lopez’s words, “The humble beginnings of the tenth century ushered in the long age of European preponderance in the world.”2

Credit, Honor, and the Early Modern French Legend of the Jewish Invention of Bills of Exchange

The history of Europe between 1500 and 1800 is largely a history of the decline of old feudal hierarchies and the rise of new commercial and legal elites. But it is also a history of the multifarious, deeply ambivalent, and ever-contested views that commerce elicited—as the livelihood of humankind and generator of peace, solidarity, and virtuous restraint, or as the corruptor of old mores and source of insatiable desires (to cite only some of the arguments that were rehearsed most often). The role that Jews played in these debates as well as in the concrete economic transformations that accompanied them can shed important light not only on the internal transformation of Jewish societies but also on prevailing notions of the shifting balance between virtue and commerce, between traditional values concerning social order and the growing opportunities for money to erode those traditional values. To cite Jonathan Karp, “the Jews’ commercial identities served as a barometer of shifting general attitudes toward commerce, money, and credit as a whole.” More precisely, “the notion . . . [of] a specifically Jewish commerce served a vital function in Western thought. It served to abstract various types of activities from the generality of economic life and, through their association with stigmatized Jews, make them vehicles for expressing widely felt anxieties about commerce in a manner that was politically safe and psychically tolerable.”1 Scores of social scientists and historians have written about the consequential ways in which private and public credit shaped social relations, economic development, and political institutions in early modern Europe. According to the standard account, the expansion of the market grew hand in hand with the decline of personal ties, oligopolies, and religious discrimination. But just how impersonal was early modern European commercial society? And how were experienced actors and ordinary people able to defend themselves from the perils of impersonal markets, in which dubious business practices could lurk behind anonymity, especially when reliable credit ratings did not exist and tribunals were not always fair or effective? These questions were ubiq-

Un nouveau combat pour l’histoire au XXIe siècle ?

Résumé Cet article noue un dialogue avec certaines des questions soulevées par David Armitage et Jo Guldi dans «Le retour de la longue durée : une perspective anglo-américaine » et évalue la résonance de leur article chez les lecteurs des Annales. En particulier, il conteste le classement, sous la catégorie de micro-histoire, d’une variété d’études historiques menées sur de courtes périodes de temps. Il interroge également l’argument selon lequel ces études seraient la preuve d’une « crise morale » qui aurait dominé l’historiographie anglophone de la révolution culturelle de 1968 à la crise financière mondiale de 2008. En outre, l’article compare les significations moins conventionnelles que Fernand Braudel a attribuées à l’origine à la longue durée avec les interprétations de D. Armitage et J. Guldi. Enfin, il se demande comment, dans la pratique, les historiens sont censés suivre l’invitation des deux auteurs à aller au-delà de la formation et des connaissances spécialisées pour produire des lectures nouvelles et originales de l’histoire humaine depuis ses origines.

Images and Self-Images of Sephardic Merchants in Early Modern Europe and the Mediterranean

The economic role of Jews in Christian Europe changed profoundly from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Sephardic Jews—the descendents of those who had been expelled from the territories of the crown of Castile and Aragon in 1492, or of those who, after seeking refuge in Portugal, were forced to convert to Catholicism in 1497—formed increasingly stable communities in Venice, Livorno, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and London (after 1656). They were eventually tolerated in Bordeaux and other towns in southwestern France, and slowly set foot in the Dutch and English Caribbean. In the late seventeenth century, they also established small enclaves in Levantine and North African ports. Unlike medieval Jewry or other early modern segments of Jewish society in Europe, Sephardic merchants did not engage in petty credit and retail sale. Instead, many among them were largely involved—each with varying degrees of success—in long-distance trade, international finance, and the processing and manufacturing of colonial goods (especially sugar, tobacco, and diamonds). For most Sephardim, credit operations were closely linked to commerce, but for a few, such as Gabriel de Silva (ca. 1683–1763) in Bordeaux, private banking was their sole occupation.1

Jews and the Early Modern Economy

Trivellato, Francesca, “Jews and the Early Modern Economy,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 7: 1500-1815, eds. Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 139-167.

A New Battle For History in the Twenty-First Century?

Abstract This article engages with some of the questions raised by David Armitage and Jo Guldi’s “The Return of the longue durée: An Anglo-American Perspective” and their resonance among readers of the Annales. In particular, it challenges the authors’ classification of a variety of different historical studies of short periods of time under the rubric of “microhistory.” It also questions their argument that such studies are evidence of a “moral crisis” that supposedly dominated anglophone historiography from the cultural revolution of 1968 to the global financial crisis of 2008. Furthermore, the article contrasts the less conventional meanings that Fernand Braudel originally attributed to the longue durée with the ways that Armitage and Guldi interpret this expression. Finally, it asks how, in practice, historians are supposed to follow the authors’ invitation to move beyond specialized training and knowledge to produce sweeping new and original interpretations of millennia of human history.