JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

economic history
however, through their emphasis on psychology. They taught
that if a seller openly declared to the purchaser that he had
overcharged him by so and so much and the purchaser accepted
the deal, there was no redress. Also by removing such
important areas as land, slaves, and commercial deeds – the
latter particularly important in transferring properties from
one individual to another – from the operation of this principle,
the economic realities could reassert themselves without
formally altering the law. The same exception facilitated
barter trade. A man could trade, for example, a needle for a
coat of mail if, for some psychological reason, he preferred the
needle. This was particularly true in the case of jewelry where
emotional preferences might well have outweighed purely
market considerations.
Among the transactions also not subject to the law of
“misrepresentation” was free labor. Although the economic
importance of hired workers was much greater than that of
slaves, there was no comprehensive labor legislation in rabbinic
law (see *Labor Law). Generally, the leaders preferred the
employment of Jewish workers as a matter of ethnoreligious
policy. Typical of the rabbinic attitude was Maimonides’ contention
that “he who increases the number of his slaves from
day to day increases sin and iniquity in the world, whereas
the man who employs poor Jews in his household increases
merits and religious deeds” (Yad, Mattenot Aniyyim 10:17).
This doctrine implied a general right to work for Jewish laborers,
just as it conversely stressed everybody’s duty to work
in order to make a living. “Skin a carcass on the streets [the
lowest type of labor], rather than be dependent on other people”
was an old rabbinic watchword. Because of the primarily
psychological interpretations, an employer could overtly arrange
with a free laborer to do work which he could not impose
upon a slave, since this was but a voluntary agreement
on both sides. Similarly, the ancient protective regulation in
the Bible that the payment of a daily worker’s wages must not
be delayed overnight could be modified by mutual agreement
if a labor contract extended over a longer period. On his part,
the employee was obliged to do an honest piece of work and
not waste any time. Following ancient precedents, however,
the rabbis allowed agricultural workers to partake of some of
the grapes or grain on which they were working, though not
of the fruit from orchards or vegetables from truck gardens.
There also were many specific regulations concerning different
categories of labor, such as shepherds. Each category had
its own regulations, largely derived from age-old customs prevailing
in particular localities.
The most difficult problem confronting the Jewish leaders
was that of moneylending on interest. From biblical times
there existed the outright prohibition, “Unto thy brother
thou shalt not lend upon interest” (Deut. 23:21). Once again
the approach of the ancient and medieval interpreters to that
passage was based on ethics and psychology rather than
economics. We are told in the same verse that “unto a foreigner
[or stranger] thou mayest lend upon interest,” but it did
not occur to any of these interpreters to look for an economic
rationale for this distinction. Under the conditions of ancient
Palestine, lending money to a fellow Israelite usually meant
extending credit to a needy farmer or craftsman for whom
the return of the original amount plus the prevailing high
interest was an extreme hardship. At the same time the foreigner,
that is, the Phoenician-Canaanite merchant, as a rule
borrowed money to invest it in his business for profit. Such
a productive form of credit fully justified the original lender
to participate in some form or other in the profits derived by
the borrower.
Instead, the interpretation was always purely moralistic,
namely a demand that lending to a fellow Jew had to be
purely charitable, while extending credit to a non-Jew could
be a businesslike proposition. Without going to the extreme
of St. Ambrose who considered lending to a stranger a legitimate
hostile act against an enemy (ubi ius belli ibi ius usurae),
nor sharing the equally extreme view of some Jewish jurists
who considered the biblical phrase, la-nokhri tashikh a commandment:
“thou shalt,” rather than “thou mayest,” lend on
interest to a stranger, most rabbis followed the talmudic rule
that for segregationist reasons all but well informed scholars
should abstain from moneylending to gentiles altogether. Yet
they admitted that many Jews could not make a living any
other way. Remarkably, not even the medieval Jewish Aristotelian
philosophers quoted, as did their Christian counterparts,
Aristotle’s doctrine of the essential sterility of money. Whatever
the theoretical justification of this point of view was, it
ran counter to the daily experience of most Jewish sages that
money could, in fact, earn greater increments than did land
or any other movable property.
In their extremist ethico-psychological bent of mind
the rabbis even outlawed such external forms of “usury” as
nonmonetary gains. They taught, for example, that, unless
the borrower used to do so before securing the loan, he was
not entitled to greet the lender first or even to teach him the
Torah. Echoing talmudic teachings Maimonides insisted that
“it is forbidden for a man to appear before, or even to pass
by, his debtor at a time when he knows that the latter cannot
pay. He may frighten him or shame him, even if he does
not ask for repayment” (Yad, Malveh ve-Loveh 1:1–3). Needless
to say, only a few pietistic moneylenders could live up to
these high expectations. On the other hand, economic realities,
particularly in countries like medieval England, France,
northern Italy, and Germany, where banking became the very
economic foundation of many Jewish communities, forced the
Jews to make some theoretical concessions. In his apologetic
tract, Milḥemet Mitzvah of 1245, Meir b. Simon of Narbonne
argued that “divine law prohibited usury, not interest… Not
only the peasant must borrow money, but also the lords, and
even the great king of France… The king would have lost many
fortified places, if his faithful agent, a Jew of our city, had not
secured for him money at a high price” (cited by Adolph Neubauer
from a manuscript in Archives des missions scientifiques,
3d ser., 16, 556). Addressing his own coreligionists, a German
rabbi, Shalom b. Isaac Sekel, insisted that “the reason why the
116 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6