It was in its Renaissance that western Europe achieved what the Middle Ages had at most dreamed of: a world free of Jews.

Writing in 1533, Rodrigo Manrique, himself the son of an inquisitor general, seems to have understood that the logic his father (and so many others) had championed, rather than freeing Spain from Judaism, had instead convicted vast areas of its thought and culture as Jewish. As he put it in a letter to his exiled friend, the humanist Luis Vives, in

“[To] call someone a Jew amounts to an instigation to work him over until he resembles the image.”

Communication and interpretation have long been associated with lending and obligation, as the etymology of those words themselves makes clear.33 In Shakespeare’s age, a number of prominent theorists understood every communicative act, regardless of whether it involved words, objects, or money, as a promise of meaning to others. Words are, to quote

As far as her enemies were concerned, Spain’s unprecedented evangelical success had created a “Jewish” empire threatening the world with its tyranny.45

“I declare that neither pope nor bishop nor any other person has the right to impose a syllable of law upon a Christian man without his own consent.”

Any number of European princes channeled Jewish economic activity toward lending at interest to Christians, so that they could then expropriate a considerable share of the proceeds from the Jews in the form of loans, taxes, and extraordinary seizures called captiones, “takings.” We can think of this as a novel form of indirect taxation. At a time

After all, Jews and their synagogue had long been the whipping boys of preachers and exegetes: “If hatred of Jews makes the Christian, then we are all plenty Christian,” as both Erasmus and Luther put it at much the same time.

Many of his tracts were written in German rather than in the Latin of the learned. These, combined with his efforts to translate the Bible into a language intelligible across the wide variety of dialects that stretched from the Netherlands to Poland, accelerated the birth of a modern German capable of serving as a language of culture.