JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

economic history
of Castilian Jewry, and Don Isaac b. Judah *Abrabanel. In the
early days of the Christian reconquest, the services of able Jewish
financiers and administrators were even more indispensable.
Members of the Cavalleria and Ravaya families were particularly
prominent in 13th-century Aragon. For one example,
Judah b. Labi de la Cavalleria served from 1257 on as bailiff of
Saragossa, from 1260 on as chief treasurer to whom all royal
bailiffs had to submit regular accounts, and finally in 1275 also
as governor of Valencia. Jews were also active in diplomatic
service, for which their familiarity with various lands and
languages made them especially qualified. In vain did Pope
Honorius II address a circular letter to the kings of Aragon,
Castile, Navarre, and Portugal, warning them against dispatching
to Muslim courts Jewish envoys who were likely to reveal
state secrets to the Muslim enemies, since “you cannot expect
faithfulness from infidels.” Yet his successor, Gregory IX, generally
even more insistent on the observance of all canonical
provisions, conceded in 1231 and 1239 that the Portuguese and
Hungarian monarchs had no workable alternative.
In other countries Jews exerted political influence more
indirectly. Even in some antagonistic German principalities of
the 14th and 15th centuries some Jews were called upon to provide
the necessary funds for raising mercenary forces as well
as to supply them with food, clothing, and other necessities.
Such a combination of large-scale financing and contracting
was performed, for example, by a Jewish banker, Jacob Daniels,
and his son Michael for the archbishop-elector Baldwin of
Trier in 1336–45. This adumbration of the future role of *Court
Jews in helping build up the modern German principality
was cut short, however, by the recurrent waves of intolerance
which swept Germany in the last medieval centuries and resulted
in the expulsion of the Jews from most German areas.
Economic Doctrines
Notwithstanding these constant changes in the Jewish economic
structure and the vital role played by the Jewish economic
contributions for the general society, no ancient or
medieval Jewish scholar devoted himself to the detailed interpretation
of these economic facts and trends. No Jew wrote
economic tracts even of the rather primitive kind current in
Hellenistic and early Muslim letters. All Jewish rationales must
therefore be deduced indirectly from the legal teachings. Even
Maimonides who, in his classification of sciences, recognized
the existence of a branch of science styled domestic economy,
or rather the “government of the household” (a literal translation
of the Greek oikonomia), did not feel prompted to
produce a special monograph on the general or Jewish economic
life. Speaking more broadly of political science which
included that branch of learning, he declared: “On all these
matters philosophers have written books which have been
translated into Arabic, and perhaps those that have not been
translated are even more numerous. But nowadays we no longer
require all this, namely the statutes and laws, since man’s
conduct is [determined] by the divine regulations” (Treatise
on Logic [Millot ha-Higgayon], Arabic text, with Hebrew and
English translations, by Israel Efros, 1937, 18f.). In consonance
with this conception, the great codifier devoted the last three
sections of his Mishneh Torah to economic matters regulated
by civil law. He also often referred to economic aspects in the
other 11 books, following therein the example of both Bible
and Talmud. None of these normative sources, however, which
always emphasized what ought to be rather than what is or
was, can satisfactorily fill the lacuna created by the absence of
dispassionate analytical, theoretical, and historical economic
studies. From the outset we must, therefore, take account of
the idealistic slant of our entire documentation. The emphasis
upon ethics and psychology far outweighs that of realistic
conceptualism. Only indirectly, through the use of the extant
subsidiary factual source material, can we balance that normative
slant by some realistic considerations.
Typical of such idealistic approaches is the biblical legislation.
For example, the commandment of a year of fallowness
may have resulted from the practical observation that land
under constant cultivation was bound to deteriorate and to
yield progressively less produce. Similar experiences led other
agricultural systems to adopt the rotation of crops and other
methods. But there is no hint to such a realistic objective in
the biblical rationales. The old Book of the Covenant justifies
the commandment by stating that in this way “the poor of
the people may eat” (Ex. 23:11). The more religiously oriented
Book of Leviticus, on the other hand, lays primary stress on
the land keeping “a Sabbath unto the Lord” (25:2) so that it
provide “solemn” rest for servants, foreign settlers, and even
cattle. Similarly, the Jubilee Year was conceived as a measure
of restoring the landed property to the original clan, envisaging
a more or less static agricultural economy, at variance
with the constantly changing realities of the then increasingly
dominant urban group. No less idealistic were the provisions
for the poor, particularly widows and orphans. We also recall
the extremely liberal demand that, upon manumitting his
Hebrew slave, the master should also provide him with some
necessaries for a fresh start in life.
That these and other idealistic postulates did not represent
the living practice in ancient Israel we learn from the reverberating
prophetic denunciations of the oppression of the
poor by the rich and other social disorders. But here again we
deal with even more extravagant idealistic expectations than
had been expressed by the lawgivers. In the main, the Bible
reflects in part the “nomadic ideals” carried down from the
patriarchal age and in part the outlook of the subsequently
predominant agricultural population. But the landowning
aristocracy, as well as the priesthood and royal bureaucracy
often residing in Jerusalem and Samaria, and the impact of
foreign relations, especially wars, shaped the actual affairs of
the people to a much larger extent than normative provisions
or prophetic denunciations, although the latter’s long-range
effects far transcended in historic importance the immediate
realities.
Even the far more realistic legal compilations of the
Mishnah, the Talmud, and other rabbinic letters are still in the
114 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6