Anticapitalism and the Emergence of Antisemitism. Stephanie Chasin
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to execute a fake sale at an inflated value and then resell at a lower price, a practice called chevisance (meaning an unlawful agreement or contract). While the legal system was still rudimentary, it was relatively easy for the usurer to avoid detection. As the law became more sophisticated, contracts had to become even more complicated in order to avoid the lender’s possible prosecution for usury.27
As trade increased, new banking methods were developed to fit a changing and more dynamic economy that was spreading further afield. It became standard for business at markets and fairs to be conducted within a chain of credit transactions as buyers bought goods on credit and then sold to a merchant who also needed credit for his purchase. One of the earliest and most revolutionary developments in early pre-industrial capitalism was the bill of exchange. These new promissory notes included the terms of the loan, the repayment schedule, and the hidden interest rate. With these bills, merchants could make cash-free transactions. Credit notes offered the merchant-moneylenders another way to disguise interest payments as they could be easily concealed in the exchange rate, with the lender simply inflating the exchange rate to his benefit. In addition to the bills of exchange, other innovations shaped the rudimentary capitalist world. The emergence of Christian Humanism that used and assimilated Greek and Roman texts that were now rediscovered and translated, contributed to the late medieval changes in commerce and finance. Despite Aristotle’s distaste for usury, it was ←14 | 15→the mid-twelfth century translation of the first three logical texts of his Organon that encouraged the questioning, systematization, and categorization that aided loan transaction by reformulating bookkeeping and finance. Merchants began to specialize in various industries and commodities, markets were organized, weights, measures, and exchange began to be standardized, and transportation was improved both on roads and seas. With these changes, the new money economy flourished, that is, coinage, whether gold, silver, or copper, as money can equally be bits of paper, shells, stones, or, in today’s world, virtual cryptocurrency. Laws were introduced and action taken to protect buyers against unscrupulous traders who sold them short of a product, gave them inferior or fake goods, or deceived the customer in countless other ways, such as engrossing (hoarding). There were always fears that the unscrupulous would manipulate supplies either individually or in collusion with others, to fix prices or hoard goods until the price was driven up by scarcity. It was a concern that never disappeared and resurfaced time and again, particularly during times of dearth or for political gain. On the books, the penalty for such frauds was imprisonment and the confiscation of all the convict’s goods to the Crown, although the law was more stringently imposed when harvests were bad.28
Everyone—kings, queens, nobles, clergymen, tradesmen, and peasants—borrowed money. The papacy may have called usury a sin, Jewish trickery, and detrimental to the common good, but the Church needed money, and lots of it. In the eleventh century, Godfrey of Bouillon pledged an allodial property to Bishop Otbert of Liège in return for a loan of 1,300 silver marks and 3,000 gold marks, while the archbishop of Cologne secured credit from Jewish moneylenders. Thirty years after William’s landing in England, the first crusade was called by Pope Urban II (Odo of Châtillon) to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims who had conquered the Levant in the seventh century. What was supposed to be a mission for God did not always attract people for that cause alone. With wages intermittent, some of the crusaders were more intent on enriching themselves than on pleasing God and looting was rife. The attacks on Jews mainly in towns along the Rhine were violent plunders. To what degree the attack was motivated by religious animosity and how much was due to greed is impossible to say. It seems safe to assume that the two were often mingled to a greater or lesser degree.
All orders of society were expected to support the crusade both morally and financially, but this costly expedition could not be undertaken without recourse to loans. Knights often had to mortgage their estates in order to obtain the money necessary to fight and maintain their families during the time they were away. When the second crusade loomed in 1147, after the fall of Edessa to the Muslim ←15 | 16→armies, there was a pressing need to help people in debt so that they could embark on the crusade. Pope Eugenius III (Bernardo da Pisa) had already issued a bull in 1145 which included the plight of crusaders who were “oppressed by debt.” While crusaders should not be concerned with “precious clothes or elegant appearance or dogs or hawks or other things that are signs of lasciviousness … multicoloured clothes or minivers or gilded or silvered arms …” they should be able to could begin their “holy … journey with a pure heart” and free -from usury on past loans. If a crusader or someone acting on their behalf was bound to a usurious contract by an oath or pledge then he was absolved of that debt by apostolic authority. Peter the Venerable (1092–1156), the abbot of Benedictine abbey of Cluny and the first to translate the Quran into Latin, had another idea about how to raise funds for the campaign. He urged Louis VII of France (r. 1137–1180) to make the Jews contribute to the campaign expenses. Peter despised moneylenders who, he said, preyed on the poor and desperate. For that reason, they were no better than thieves. “Robbers as they are,” he implored, “this is the very occasion to compel them to disgorge!”29
Peter’s hatred for moneylenders may have resulted from his own need for loans. He pawned valuable items from the sacristy at Cluny, to both Jewish and Christian creditors. In 1147, while he derided moneylenders for filling their storage bins and wine cellars and reaping significant riches at the expense of the weak and impoverished, he sought aid from the Jewish moneylenders of Mâcon. When his monastery fell short of funds again, he turned to Henry of Blois, the bishop of Winchester and younger brother of England’s King Stephen, who gave the monastery 2,000 marks to pay their debts and another 7,000 marks six years later. Even the cross donated to Cluny by Henry was stripped of its gold.30
Over the course of the twelfth century, it became standard for the economy of the abbey of Cluny to be run on credit. Monks were supposed to live comfortably in accordance with their status and churches and monasteries were to be richly adorned to honor God. The Cistercian monasteries were also well immersed in the everyday world of moneylending. Bishops and other clerics all over Europe pledged chalices, statues, crosses, rings, robes, bells, books, lamps, and altar panels, among many other items, as collateral in return for much needed funds. In one case, William, the sacristan of a monastery, secretly took out a compound interest loan for forty marks from Benedict, a Jewish moneylender. When the debt came due, Benedict returned to the monastery for the 100 pounds now owed and it was only at that point that the other monks and the abbot learned of the sacristan’s debt. More borrowing was needed to cover the loan amount with the result that, after some years, the debt owing to Benedict was a staggering 1200 pounds.31
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Trading in sacred pawns was commonplace but some Jews feared and despised it. Rumors were spread that once in the custody of the Jews, the pawned Christian objects were used sacrilegiously. Although he traded pawns for money, Peter the Venerable lamented the holy vessels “held captive” by Jewish pawnbrokers, which, he claimed, were used for despicable and unspeakable purposes. And it was not only Christians who deplored the pawning of religious items as security for a loan. Rabbi Jacob Tam, a Jewish community leader in twelfth-century northern France, was also hostile to the practice and forbade the commerce of “Prayer books of the Church.” In Tam’s case, possessing Christian items was an act of idolatry and the trade of “cult” artifacts was a sin punishable by God. Not only did he rage against the pawnbrokers who traded in Christian sacred objects, he also reviled usury as a sin against God and urged moneylenders and pawnbrokers to turn away from such an ungodly trade. Rabbi Eliezer ben Nathan of Mainz looked at the issue with a different perspective. He thought so little of the pledged Christian sacred items that taking a Christian religious item as a pawn was of no importance. To Eliezer, the items so sacred to Christians were not intrinsically holy to Jews, but, rather, goods attached to a “cult.” Taking a cross as a pawn was the same as taking a necklace or a set of cutlery. In his eyes,