@article{mell_2022, title={The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society}, ISSN={["1477-4534"]}, DOI={10.1093/ehr/ceac029}, abstractNote={The medieval bill of exchange and marine insurance are widely regarded by historians as financial instruments central to the long-distance trade that fuelled the commercial revolution of pre-modern Europe. Marine insurance was rooted in partnership contracts (commenda, societas maris), which, by splitting risk, mitigated loss due to storms, pirates and war. The bill of exchange, by which a merchant promised to repay a loan in another currency and place, combined the promissory note with currency exchange. Some early modern authors attributed the invention of these financial instruments to medieval Jews who, these authors supposed, used them to secrete wealth out of lands from which Jews had been expelled. Intrigued by the legend of Jewish origins, Francesca Trivellato (an Italian historian known for her work on Jews and cross-cultural trade in the early modern period) sets out to find when, where and why this ‘legend’ emerged. The book is the intellectual history of this legend. Trivellato traces the legend of Jewish origins back to the seventeenth-century genre of mercantile law books, in particular to Étienne Cleriac’s widely used Us et coustumes de la mer (1647), Jacques Savary’s ‘commercial manifesto’ Le parfait négociant (1675), and Savary’s sons’ bestselling Dictionnaire universel de commerce (1723–30). In the mid-eighteenth century, Montesquieu incorporated it into his De l’esprit des lois. With Montesquieu, the legend leapt from the backwaters of mercantile law to the mainstream of political theory. And as the reach of the legend expanded, the image of its Jewish inventors underwent significant change. Cleriac’s version of the legend was rooted in rank medieval stereotypes of Jewish usurers, while the Savarys stripped away these negative connotations. But in Montesquieu’s hands, the Jews became economic liberators—the obverse of usurers. The Jewish bill of exchange was not a species of nefarious usury, but a means of liberation from the economic stagnation of medieval Catholic doctrine. With this invention, ‘Jews introduced new dynamism into Europe’s economy and became harbringers of modernity’ (p. 134). However, Montesquieu’s positive vision of Jews as a modernising commercial force was reversed with the French Revolution.}, journal={ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW}, author={Mell, Julie}, year={2022}, month={Feb} }
 @article{mell_2014, title={Capitalism and the Jews}, volume={90}, ISSN={["1475-4932"]}, DOI={10.1111/1475-4932.12161}, number={291}, journal={ECONOMIC RECORD}, author={Mell, Julie}, year={2014}, month={Dec}, pages={559–561} }
 @article{mell_2014, title={Cultural Meanings of Money in Medieval Ashkenaz: On Gift, Profit, and Value in Medieval Judaism and Christianity}, volume={28}, ISSN={["1572-8579"]}, DOI={10.1007/s10835-014-9212-3}, number={2}, journal={JEWISH HISTORY}, author={Mell, Julie L.}, year={2014}, month={Jun}, pages={125–158} }
 @article{mell_2012, title={Twentieth-Century Jewish Emigres and Medieval European Economic History}, volume={3}, ISSN={["2077-1444"]}, DOI={10.3390/rel3030556}, abstractNote={This essay discusses the intellectual contributions of five Jewish émigrés to the study of European economic history. In the midst of the war years, these intellectuals reconceptualized premodern European economic history and established the predominant postwar paradigms. The émigrés form three distinct groups defined by Jewish identity and by professional identity. The first two (Guido Kisch and Toni Oelsner) identified as Jews and worked as Jewish historians. The second two (Michal Postan and Robert Lopez) identified as Jews, but worked as European historians. The last (Karl Polanyi) was Jewish only by origin, identified as a Christian socialist, and worked first as an economic journalist, then in worker's education and late in life as a professor of economics. All five dealt with the origin of European capitalism, but in different veins: Kisch celebrated and Oelsner contested a hegemonic academic discourse that linked the birth of capitalism to Jews. Postan and Lopez contested the flip-side of this discourse, the presumption that medieval Europe was pre-capitalist par excellence. In doing so, they helped construct the current paradigm of a high medieval commercial revolution. Polanyi contested historical narratives that described the Free Market as the natural growth of economic life. This essay explores the grounding of these paradigms in the shared crucible of war and exile as Jewish émigrés. This shared context helps illuminate the significance of their intellectual contributions by uncovering the webs of meaning in which their work was suspended.}, number={3}, journal={RELIGIONS}, author={Mell, Julie}, year={2012}, month={Sep}, pages={556–587} }