...This introductory chapter provides an overview of the legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange. During the period of their use, bills of exchange garnered considerable attention among enthusiasts and critics alike, not only for their ability to move and generate wealth in seemingly...

...This chapter discusses Étienne Cleirac's commentary on the first article of the Guidon de la mer (The Standard of the Sea). In brief, he says that the Jews expelled from France invented marine insurance policies and bills of exchange in order to salvage...

...This chapter looks at the circumstances in which Étienne Cleirac composed his writings. Whether Cleirac coined or merely repeated it, the legend of the Jewish invention of marine insurance and bills of exchange was his attempt at making sense of the changes in the legal, political, and social...

... new legal and cultural standards for private trade and finance. He repeated the fictional account of Jews' invention of bills of exchange while also streamlining and purging the seven relevant pages of Us et coustumes de la mer of their overt anti-Jewish language. After Savary's death...

...This chapter focuses on two moments: the reworking of the meaning of the legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange by Montesquieu in the 1740s and the debates on emancipation that occurred during the last quarter of the century. The discursive and political contexts in which the legend...

... in the genesis of Western capitalism, all three thinkers appealed to Jews to define how modern capitalism differed from earlier forms of commercialization. As part of this quest, Sombart proposed yet another version of the legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange, which figured front and center in his...

...This chapter examines the quotation claiming that Jews invented marine insurance and bills of exchange, which can be read from a compilation of maritime laws assembled with commentary by a provincial French lawyer, Étienne Cleirac, published in Bordeaux under the title Us et coustumes de la...

...This coda argues that from the 1650s to the 1910s, the legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange absorbed and at the same time transformed conceptions of Jewish usury that had emerged in the thirteenth century. Resilient as those conceptions proved to be across time, they also evolved...

...This chapter analyzes the echoes of the legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange beyond France up to 1800 and how they intersected with a variety of discourses about the morality of commercial credit. The legend that pointed to Jews as the creators of European private finance did...