The Merchant of Venice and the Western Sephardic Diaspora: Fiction & History – Francesca Trivellato
314 Royce Hall 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los AngelesTaking a cue from a passage in Shakespeare’s play, the talk analyzes the tension between the contractual freedom that Western Sephardic merchants enjoyed within the confines of the marketplace and the discrimination to which they remained subjected in their daily lives, even in the most tolerant cities of Western Europe and the Americas, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that this tension has broad implications for how we think about the development of capitalism at large. Francesca Trivellato is the Andrew W. Mellon of Early Modern European History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and...