Chapter 25. Simon the Jew [October 15, 1347] Cultural Explanations

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	In this chapter Bávlos learns many new things from his travelling companion.
Nieiddash, Bávlos, Simon

In this chapter, Simon and Bávlos debate differing attitudes toward trade. Bávlos enunciates a traditional Sámi approach to the activity: one made the things one needed for life oneself or within one's family, and people traded for goods only when commodities (like metal for knife blades) were not easily produced locally. Trade occurred either with valued trading partners—the verdde institution that Bávlos describes—or with royal tribute takers—the birkalachat. Trade implied a significant interpersonal relation, and was regarded as an out-of-the-ordinary event.

In contrast, Simon describes Hanseatic trading customs. Here, I was being facetious and anachronistic in making Simon use Marxist terminology in describing the exchange value of commodities and how this value changes with the addition of labor. But the basic concepts of capitalist trading relations were already well established in fourteenth-century Hanseatic cities, and Simon's description of how merchants viewed trade is probably accurate for the era. The Hanseatic cities represented an entirely new set of interpersonal relations for people in northern Europe: relations that were centered on the exchange of goods and services instead of on permanent social relations that were simply expressed through the exchange of goods. Hanseatic cities were ruled largely by the merchants themselves and became the crucible of what would eventually emerge as the dominant political structure of Western societies. For Bávlos, this new world of exchange-oriented casual relations is bewildering, particularly when its intricacies are pointed out to him by someone wiser and more experienced.

Simon is a Jew. He laces his German with Yiddish and Hebrew terms: chutzpe (audacity), goniff (thief), chavver (friend, partner), shmo (simpleton), tefillin, and he views the world as someone who knows better than to trust the benevolence of strangers. Jewish people were viewed as dangerous figures in medieval Europe, and their activities were highly regulated and limited by the state. Special clothing and a mandatory hat and badge were required to identify them to all passers by. Outbreaks of violence against Jews were frequent, and the law seldom accorded Jews the same rights as Christians. Trade was one of the only livelihoods open to Jews, and Simon sees in it a glimmer of a future in which people can stand as equals to one another. He speaks of the Hanseatic cities as glorious experiments in part for these reasons.