*This lecture was postponed due to Covid-19; we will post an update as soon as a rescheduled date is determined.*
The Fourth Alfred Lehmann Memorial Lecture
Week 8, Thursday, 2nd December, 2021 17:00 (UK time)
The following lecture will be given by
Dr Francesca Trivellato (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
‘Jewish Invisibility Before (and After) Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand’
Catherine Lewis Lecture Room
Clarendon Institute Building
Walton Street, Oxford OX1 2HG
Refreshments to follow
ALL ARE WELCOME
Abstract
This talk revisits the links between medieval and modern antisemitism by discussing the fears generated in European Christian societies first by forced baptisms and later, by the granting of citizenship rights to Jews –two phenomena that threatened to dissolve clear and identifiable boundaries between Christians and Jews. It connects these fears to religious and economic changes across three epochs: the Middle Ages, the Counter-Reformation, and the post-Emancipation period. Overall, it shows how the expansion of private financial markets reproduced new and old antisemitic tropes by raising the specter of Jewish “invisibility.”
Francesca Trivellato is the Andrew W. Mellon of Early Modern European History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and the author, most recently, of The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells us about the Making of European Commercial Society(Princeton University Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History.
Please find the poster for this lecture here.