Usury as Deviance in Medieval Europe

Summary

EUROPEAN JEWS WERE first collectively labelled, then criminalized as “usurers” between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Even when involved in financial loans, Jews were only engaged in the same economic activities as Christian “merchants” who were valued as contributing to the public good. In fact, large numbers of Jews were too poor to have actively traded or loaned. Ironically, this new category of Jewish deviance originated out of a social movement to reform Christian usury. The labelling of Jews as usurers is the end result of a campaign against Christian usurers and Christian usury. In the mid-twelfth century, church councils decreed new legislation against usury aimed at lay Christians—not Jews. But by the sixteenth century, large numbers of Jewish communities had been expelled from western Europe under the charge of usury, and those that remained in the more politically fragmented Holy Roman Empire and Italian peninsula were being expelled from city centres and enclosed in suburban ghettos. Late medieval Christian economic thought resulted in a new dualism: “Christian merchants” versus “Jewish usurers” immortalized in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. The merchant was an upright member of the civic commune and Christian community, whose business increased the wealth of the community by circulating wealth. The money-lender was an enemy of Christ, his church, and the Christian community, whose lending drained the wealth of the commune and hoarded it for private ends.

Sociological theories of deviance offer a useful way to analyse the social construction and criminalization of Jews as usurers. The social status of the individual in a society tends to determine whether their rule-breaking is considered deviant or not; stigmatization both propels, and results from, the labelling. This paradigm fits well late medieval Italy where Jewish merchant-bankers were labelled “faithless usurers” hoarding wealth, because they were Jews, and Italian merchant-bankers were labelled “Christian merchants” increasing the wealth of all, because they were Christian citizens.

However, this was a process of dynamic historical change. The very categories of “usury” and “usurer” shifted over several hundred years. To further complicate matters, the category of “the Jew,” considered religiously deviant since late antiquity, was applied to Christians as a means of marking the category of usurer as deviant.