VEGA, Joseph Penso de la.

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Die Verwirrung der Verwirrungen. First edition in German, the second overall, of Vega's description of the Amsterdam stock exchange. This was the first book to describe any stock exchange and was first published in Spanish in Amsterdam in 1688.De la Vega was a Jew who lived and worked in Amsterdam in the second half of the 17th century. "Although in his earlier years directed by his family toward the career of a rabbi, Joseph actually became a businessman. He managed his business activities, however, in such a way that he had considerable time available for writing; and in his leisure he composed marriage poems, poems in praise of princes, novels, speeches, and treatises of moral and philosophical character" (Kellenbenz, p. x). Stylistically, the Confusion is an extension of his earlier, more literary writings - it is in the form of a dialogue between a shareholder, a philosopher and a merchant, and is full of biblical, historical and mythological allusions - but it is its content which is of most interest to scholars today."The author stressed in the preface to his book that he had three motives in writing the dialogues: first, his own pleasure; again, for those who were not active in the trade, he desired to describe a business which was on the whole the most honest and most useful of all that existed at that time; and, lastly, he wished to describe accurately and fully the tricks that rascals knew how to employ in that business. In this last connection his purpose was in p

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