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There’s More to Debt Than Meets the Eye

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2025

Francesca Trivellato
Francesca Trivellato*
Affiliation:
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton ft@ias.edu
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Extract

On the first landing of the staircase, there is a door with a name tag: “D. Graeber.” I am inside an eighteenth-century Venetian palazzo, Ca’ Corner della Regina, which since 2011 has been turned into an exhibition space by the Fondazione Prada (the contemporary art foundation of the famous fashion brand). From 1834 to 1969 the palazzo was home to the municipal pawnshop, called Monte di pietà after the lending institutions for the poor established in the fifteenth century by Franciscan friars in various Italian cities, although not in Venice. These Franciscan lenders were partly conceived to counteract Jewish pawnbrokers. Monte di pietà is also currently the title of an immersive installation housed in the same palazzo, designed by the Swiss conceptual artist Christoph Büchel and timed to coincide with the Sixtieth Venice Art Biennale, which runs from April to November 2024.

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Type
Research Article
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Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , First View , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
© Éditions de l’EHESS 2025

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Footnotes

This response was first published as “Toutes les dettes ne se valent pas,” in “Juifs et capitalisme. Forum autour du livre de Francesca Trivellato, Juifs et Capitalisme,” Annales HSS 79, no. 3 (2024): 479–92, doi 10.1017/ahss.2024.66.

References

1. 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).

2. I am grateful to Guillaume Calafat for spearheading the publication of this forum and to Luisa Brunori, Jean-François Chauvard, Jean-Louis Halpérin, Pierre-Cyrille Hautcœur, and Maurice Kriegel for taking time away from their obligations in order to contribute to it. While I am not able to address their many observations in detail here, I look forward to continuing to learn from their work and from our scholarly exchanges. I also wish to thank the editorial staff at the Annales for their assistance and professionalism.

3. Readers may wish to look up images on the web to complement my description: https://www.fondazioneprada.org/project/monte-di-pieta/?lang=en.

4. A fact not mentioned in the exhibition: in 2011, Prada bought Ca’ Corner della Regina from the Venice municipality for forty million euros at a time when the company’s annual revenue was 2.78 billion dollars: https://companiesmarketcap.com/prada/revenue/. This is only one among many instances (some even more egregious) in which Italian public institutions have sold their artistic patrimony to private investors.

5. Recent scholarship has delved into this episode: Damian Clavel, “What’s in a Fraud? The Many Worlds of Gregor MacGregor, 1817–1824,” Enterprise & Society 22, no. 4 (2021): 997–1036; Clavel, Créer un pays, le royaume de Poyais. Gregor MacGregor, emprunts d’État et fraude financière 1820–1824 (Neuchâtel: Livreo-Alphil, 2022).

6. Another Franciscan with the same name, Saint Bernardino of Feltre (1439 –1494), was even more instrumental to the creation of Monti di pietà. In several cities, these consumer lending institutions run by Franciscan friars coexisted with pawnshops operated by Jews, but charged much lower interest rates. As such, they assisted the poor while also contributing to the demonization of Jewish usury.

7. Carlo Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues [1989], trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990).

8. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011). To cite two examples among many, see Lawrin Armstrong, ed. and trans., The Idea of a Moral Economy: Gerard of Siena on Usury, Restitution, and Prescription (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 28–29, and the dialogue between Graeber and Thomas Piketty, “Soak the Rich: An Exchange on Capital, Debt, and the Future,” The Baffler 25 (2014): 148–54.

9. A salutary part of Graeber’s volume is its firm rebuttal of any residual belief in evolutionary histories of money that place its origin in barter. Marc Bloch had already rejected this commonplace: Bloch, Esquisse d’une histoire monétaire de l’Europe (Paris: Armand Colin, 1954), 27–33; Bloch, “Natural Economy or Money Economy: A Pseudo-Dilemma,” in Land and Work in Medieval Europe: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch, trans. J. E. Anderson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 230–43.

10. Giacomo Todeschini, Il ghetto e la banca. Una storia italiana (secoli XIV–XVI) (Rome/ Bari: Laterza, 2016).

11. None of the reviews of the exhibition that I read in the summer of 2024 alluded to its Jewish-related themes. See, for example, Scott Reyburn, “This Enormous Artwork Turns a Palace into a Pawnshop,” New York Times, August 14, 2024. After I had finished writing this text, in September 2024, the European Jewish Association (EJA) described the installation as “extremely dangerous and irresponsible given the record rises of antisemitism as a result of the October 7 massacre and the ongoing war in Gaza.” The association asked the Fondazione Prada to remove the “clear antisemitic tropes on display in this installation”: EJA, “Fondazione Prada Called on to Remove ‘Artful’ Antisemitism on Display in Venice by European Jewish Association,” Brussels, September 13, 2024, https://ejassociation.eu/eja/fondazione-prada-called-on-to-remove-artful-antisemitism-on-display-in-venice-by-european-jewish-association/. According to Gregorio Botta, “Non per soldi ma per denaro,” La Repubblica. Robinson, Sunday, October 13, 2024, p. 41, the foundation did not reply. On the one hand, Büchel and his patrons appear to have failed to differentiate between legitimate political criticism of the State of Israel and pure antisemitism. On the other, certain Jewish voices weaponize antisemitism to stifle criticisms of Israel.

12. Umberto Eco, Vertigine della lista (Milano: Bompiani, 2009). I thank Tommaso Munari for mentioning this reference during our discussion of Büchel’s exhibition.

13. Trivellato, The Promise and Peril of Credit, 295, n. 4.

14. Francesca Trivellato, Juifs et capitalisme. Aux origines d’une légende [2019], trans. Jacques Dalarun (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2023); Trivellato, Ebrei e capitalismo. Storia di una leggenda dimenticata [2019], trans. Filippo Benfante and Francesca Trivellato (Rome/ Bari: Laterza, 2022).

15. Published in 1911, Sombart’s book was titled, literally, “The Jews and Economic Life”: Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1911). But it is better known through the title of its English translation (and slightly modified version): Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism [1911], trans. Mordecai Epstein (London: T. F. Unwin, 1913). The French translation retained the original title: Sombart, Les Juifs et la vie économique [1911], trans. Samuel Jankélévitch (Paris: Payot, 1923). It was republished in France in 2012 by Éditions Saint-Rémi, whose mission is to “preserve Catholic literature.” In Italian, the book was translated much later by a neo-Nazi publisher: Sombart, Gli ebrei e la vita economica [1911], trans. Renato Licandro [Franco Giorgio Freda], 3 vols. (Padua: Edizioni di Ar, 1980). See Trivellato, Juifs et capitalisme, 394–95, n. 6; Trivellato, Ebrei e capitalismo, 337, n. 6.

16. On the unapologetic vagueness of the term capitalism in this literature, see Seth Rockman, “What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?” Journal of the Early Republic 34, no. 3 (2014): 439–66. On the friction generated with economists, see Francesca Trivellato, “Rivoluzione industriale, capitalismo e crescita economica tra storia globale, schiavitù atlantica e quantificazione,” Archivio storico italiano 681, no. 3 (2024): 593–606.

17. David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), especially pp. 17–33.

18. Victor Le Breton-Blon, L’évolution de la lettre de change pendant la seconde modernité. Étude conjointe des pratiques, des réglementations royales et des discours à travers le port de Bordeaux (1673–1789) (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi, forthcoming).

19. Sabina Loriga and Jacques Revel, Une histoire inquiète. Les historiens et le tournant linguistique (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS/Gallimard/Éd. du Seuil, 2022).