The Making of an Anti-Semitic Myth

Reviewing Professor Francesca Trivellato's The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society for The New Republic, Jacob Soll writes:

“Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the old anti-Semitic specter of the Jew as a financial international manipulator and money-grubber persists, from Moscow and Budapest to Des Moines, Iowa.… As Francesca Trivellato shows in her extraordinary book, the bigoted cliché of the Jew as a representative of shady international financial deals has a long and error-filled history.

…Most surprising of all is that it took this long for a historian to tackle this legend and trace its origins. Trivellato’s excellent book shows the power and the necessity of credible history to fight ever corrosive and dangerous legends alive and thriving in our own technologically advanced yet troubled times.”

Read more at The New Republic.