Part of Recognizing Religion(s): The Cultural Dynamics of Religious Encounters and Interactions in Historical Perspective

Francesca Trivellato discusses the medieval and early modern origins of the stereotype linking Jews to finance capitalism, especially the invention in seventeenth-century France of a false but persistent claim that Jews invented bills of exchange, one of the most powerful but detested financial instruments in the emerging commercial economy. Leor Halevi discusses the links between the rise of Wahhabism in eighteenth-century Arabia and Saudi investment in a new kind of weapon in the region, the matchlock gun, so that the most insular and inward looking of Islamic movements actually depended upon significant connections to world trade.

Speakers
Francesca Trivellato, Institute for Advanced Study
Leor Halevi, Vanderbilt University

Moderated by
Ethan Shagan, UC, Berkeley

In collaboration with the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University, the ERC-project European Qur'an: Islamic Scripture in European Culture and Religion at the University of Copenhagen (EuQu), NYUAD Institute