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Myth of the Jewish Money Lender with Julie Mell
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Julie Mell: One of the misconceptions is that in the medieval period, and here you're gonna hear it again, kind of a stages theory. This is a narrative I do not agree with: that the earlier medieval period was a church dominated society. It was an agrarian society. The economy was static. In the 12th and 13th century, we see what medievalists would refer to it as a commercial revolution happening, spurred by an agricultural revolution, demographic growth and so on. The church now is put in a position where they can no longer hold the line against usury, but they have to give in to the market. So we have a model where market and religion are in conflict, intention with each other. Religion has to give away to the progress of a market society.
In fact, what's happening is really different. There isn't a prohibition on usury except for clergy until we hit this high medieval commercial revolution. And it's the very same Franciscan/Dominican thinkers who hold up poverty as the ideal Christian life who are thinking out both what is permissible economically and what is not permissible.
They are the ones that really flesh out and create a concept of usury at the very same time that they're creating all kinds of ways to loan and make a profit on that loan that are perfectly legitimate. They actually invent the term interest, and that has no negative moral implications to it. There are actually two things that go hand in hand. Usury really is, and I know that other medievalists that work on this would agree with me, usury is really just a label that marks out someone as undesirable. Usury should not be understood as lending money on profit.
To go back to the first part of your question about social, legal, and cultural features that lead to the development of this conception of Jews as usurers. I told some of the story in terms of the Franciscans and the kind of intellectual thought that's going into economy. It's not a surprise that the outsider, the Jew who's not a believer, not one of the faithful, would be tagged as a usurer.
But there's at the same time, a kind of development of anti-Judaism or some might even call antisemitism in this high medieval period that I think runs together and crosses over with this economic discourse. Jews are seen as an internal enemy during the period of early rampant crusading who is dangerous and two wishes to harm Christian society out of sheer malice. One of the ways in which they could do that potentially is through their economic activity. Having said that, one of the things I try to emphasize to other medievalists is that actually that there's a whole church campaign against usury, and that campaign is actually not focused on Jews. It's focused on Christians, and only later is it applied to Jews.
So even this notion of the Jewish usurer that we can see [as a] stereotype developing in the 12th and 13th century, when you have great intellectuals, whether it's Benard of Clairvaux, who says, "you Christian merchants are Judiazing because of your usury," things like that. Even in that context, the principle campaign against usury is not directed towards the Jews, and so I think actually our perception of Jewish usury is really shaped much more by a modern context of political antisemitism, from the late 19th century on.
Julie Mell is an associate professor of History at North Carolina State University and author of the two volume book, The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender (Palgrave, 2017).
