JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

ar Ilai, who reported this saying, also drew a line of demarcation
between different types of transport workers. He contended
that “most of the donkey drivers are evildoers, most
of the camel drivers are honest, most of the sailors are pious.”
The latter’s reputation may have been owing to the fact that
*shipping had now become an even more important occupation
than in earlier centuries. The Alexandrian Jewish guild
of navicularii had become so important that even the hostile
Roman administration had to extend it important privileges
in 390 C.E. (Codex Theodosianus, 13, 5, 8).
Perhaps the most significant economic change, resulting
from the transfer of the center of gravity to the dispersion,
occurred in the much larger Jewish participation in
commerce. It is a well-known sociological phenomenon that
alien immigrants often turn to mercantile endeavors because
they have no attachment to the foreign soil, shun isolated living
among native majorities, are familiar with two or more
languages and cultures, and hence are able the better to mediate
between distant localities. If, as seems to have been the
case, a large number of former Phoenicians and Carthaginians
had joined the Jewish community via conversion, they
must have brought some of their commercial skills and contacts
into their new communities. Jewish slaves, if employed
in their masters’ businesses, must also have acquired certain
aptitudes which they put to good use upon obtaining freedom.
For all these reasons the number of Jewish traders, ranging
from peddlers to big merchants, must have greatly increased.
Yet their ratio in the Jewish population of the Diaspora need
not have greatly exceeded the general mercantile ratios among
the majority of peoples.
Even banking began to assume a certain role in Jewish
economic life. True, would-be Jewish moneylenders faced the
tremendous obstacles of the traditional Jewish anti-usury laws.
In fact, some rabbis tried, on segregationist grounds, to forbid
their coreligionists to lend money with or without interest
even to gentiles, unless they found absolutely no other means
of earning a living (BM 70b). However, there were always legal
subterfuges which made loans profitable, such as high conventional
fines for missing the repayment date, intervening in
utilization of mortgaged properties, and the like (see, e.g., The
Tebtunis Papyri, 3, 1902, ed. by B.P. Grenfell et al., 315ff., nos.
817–8; E.N. Adler, introd. to his ed. of The Adler Papyri, 1939,
5f.). In Alexandria Jewish banking may have played a certain
role even in nurturing the anti-Jewish animus of the population.
This is, at least, the interpretation given by some scholars
to an Alexandrian merchant’s warning to a friend “to beware
of the Jews” recorded in a single papyrus dated 41 C.E. (Aegyptische
Urkunden aus… Berlin, Griechische Urkunden, 2, no.
1079). But this explanation has been cogently disputed. There
is no question, however, that Philo’s relatives, Alexander and
Demetrius, holding the high position of alabarchs (the meaning
of this term is still controversial), could enter banking on
a large scale. For example, Alexander extended to Agrippa I
the substantial loan of 200,000 sesterces (about $30,000), the
bulk of which he paid out to the Jewish king from his Italian
economic history
branch office in Putoli-Dikaerchia (Jos., Ant., 18:160). But
these were exceptions confirming the rule that the majority of
Jews were still very poor and eking out a living by hard work
in various occupations.
On the other hand, in the talmudic age Jewish slavery
played even less of a role than before. Jewish masters, rigidly
circumscribed by law, did not enjoy employing coreligionists
as slaves. A popular adage had it that “he who buys a Hebrew
slave acquires a master unto himself ” (Kid. 20a). Certainly, as
aids in production, even gentile slaves could not compete with
the readily available free laborers. The Roman colonate with
half-free sharecroppers tilling the soil for the landlords only
developed toward the end of antiquity. Characteristically, the
new Christian empire after Constantine I, which totally outlawed
Jewish ownership of Christian slaves and encouraged
pagan slaves to obtain freedom by conversion to Christianity,
was prepared to tolerate the employment of Christian coloni
by Jewish farmers (Gregory I, Epistolae, 4:21, 9:38). Even Jewish
slave trading (see *Slavery and the *Slave Trade), which
was to play a certain role in the early Middle Ages still, was
quite insignificant.
In all these activities Jews depended even more than
before on the general economic transformations which took
place during the first centuries of the Christian era. The Roman
Empire’s semicapitalistic economy of the first two centuries
increasingly gave way to a semifeudal system. The Sassanian
Empire never reached the stage of relative economic freedom
of the early Roman Empire. Jews, as well as their intellectual
leaders, had to make constant adjustments to both economic
systems through the adaptation of traditional laws by way of
interpretation. As a consequence of this pliability, rabbinic
legislation was to prove quite useful to the Jewish communities
in their medieval pioneering. One result of the growing
state controls in both empires was a certain regimentation in
occupations and price structures, which also induced the Jews
to organize their own zoning tariffs in transportation, supervision
of weights and measures, and even setting maximum
prices. Even the unfriendly Theodosius I decreed in 396 that
“no one outside the Jewish faith should fix prices for Jews” – a
principle upheld by his successors (Codex Theodosianus, 16, 8,
10). On the other hand, because of the ensuing commercial
restrictions, customs barriers, and innumerable official fees,
the exchanges between the provinces of the Roman Empire
were now severely hampered. This reduction in imperial and
international commerce greatly stimulated the local and regional
autarky and helped to create in many parts of the empire
highly diversified occupational structures, providing for
most of the needs of the local populations. These developments
account also for the greater diversity of occupations
among Jews from the third century onward.
Economically perhaps even more important was the
sharp decline in the class struggle within the Jewish community.
Confronted with indiscriminate hostility on the part of
many neighbors, Jews, whether rich or poor, employers or employees,
had to close ranks. Since the hostile state legislation
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6 103