＂The Confusion of Confusions＂: Between Speculation and Eschatology

Noting that while our contemporary society vitally depends on global capital markets and financial speculation, these practices seem to conspicuously lack an aesthetic, moral or spiritual ground, this paper explores the ”economic theology” of Joseph Penso de la Vega's ”The Confusion of Confusions”. Set in the context of the 17th-century Amsterdam community of conversos and the rise of the stock exchange spawned by the Dutch East India Company, the book compares the passions of the stock exchange to those of religion. De la Vega draws on the contemporary Messianic movement of Sabbateanism and the traditional Jewish Kabala. The anticipation of continued growth in share prices is allegorically associated with the religious movement's expectation that the world would end and Sabbatai Zeti become the Messiah. Furthermore, De la Vega associates the shares with fragments of the cosmos by way of Philo's reading of the Tower of Babel. The significance of de la Vega's ”economic theology” emerges from these sources: the financial speculator is an antinomian figure who, through the seeming chaos and perils of his ongoing speculation, must break the law in order to uphold it and regenerate the society. The end of the paper develops a conception of financial speculation after the death of God.