Credit And Usury In Jewish Society In The Mishnah And Talmud
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Credit and Usury in Jewish Society in the Mishnah and Talmud by Ben Zion Rosenfeld Pdf
Credit is the oxygen of every society. In many cases we wonder why the rabbis prohibit certain business credit transactions considering them usury. The writer uses literary and epigraphic sources to decipher the rabbinic approach. This book shows how rabbinic legislation innovatively expand the Torah prohibition of usury in loans to all fields of credit. It is a pioneering inquiry regarding rabbinic literature compiled under Roman and Sasanid rule, helping to fill the void in research concerning credit. It also distinguishes various kinds of credit differentiating credit of money for money, or products, exposing the ramifications of the rabbinic legislation.
The prohibition against lending on interest (Exodus 22:24) is a well-known biblical law: "If you lend to any one of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be to him as a creditor, and you shall not exact interest from him." This prohibition was intended to prevent the wealthy from exploiting the unfortunate. In the course of time, it was seen to have consequences that militated against the economic welfare of Jewish society as a whole. As a result, Jewish law (halakhah) has over the centuries relaxed the biblical injunction, allowing interest charges despite the biblical prohibition. Hillel Gamoran seeks to explain how and when this law of high moral standing collapsed and fell over the course of the centuries. Talmudic rabbis believed that business agreements violated the biblical prohibition against lending in five areas: loans of produce, advance payment for the purchase of goods, buying on credit, mortgages, and investments. The Bible does not consider any of these activities, but all arise in postbiblical literature. How was the biblical law to be applied to situations that had not occurred in biblical times? And how could the rabbis allow these activities when they were hampered from doing so by the laws against lending on interest? To answer these questions, Gamoran examines the biblical prohibition against lending and postulates when it was written, why it was written, and to whom it applied. He then considers the early and later teachers of the Oral Law, the Tannaim and Amoraim, who expanded discussion of the ban in light of various business activities from 70 C.E. to 500 C.E. Finally, he explores how the original tannaitic proscriptions for each of the five activities were upheld or relaxed over the centuries. Each activity is considered in the period of the Geonim (ca. 650-1050), the Rishonim (ca. 1000-1500), and the Aharonim (ca. 1500-2000). For each period, Gamoran shows how the rabbis struggled with the law and with one another and used inventive interpretation to create the legal fictions necessary for business life to flourish.
The Chosen Few by Maristella Botticini,Zvi Eckstein Pdf
Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein show that, contrary to previous explanations, this transformation was driven not by anti-Jewish persecution and legal restrictions, but rather by changes within Judaism itself after 70 CE--most importantly, the rise of a new norm that required every Jewish male to read and study the Torah and to send his sons to school. Over the next six centuries, those Jews who found the norms of Judaism too costly to obey converted to other religions, making world Jewry shrink. Later, when urbanization and commercial expansion in the newly established Muslim Caliphates increased the demand for occupations in which literacy was an advantage, the Jews found themselves literate in a world of almost universal illiteracy. From then forward, almost all Jews entered crafts and trade, and many of them began moving in search of business opportunities, creating a worldwide Diaspora in the process.
Religion and Finance by Mervyn K. Lewis,Ahmad Kaleem Pdf
Judaism, Christianity and Islam all impose obligations and constraints upon the rightful use of wealth and earthly resources. All three of these religions have well-researched views on the acceptability of practices such as usury but the principles and practices of other, non-interest, financial instruments are less well known. This book examines each of these three major world faiths, considering their teachings, social precepts and economic frameworks, which are set out as a guide for the financial dealings and economic behaviour of their adherents.
The Promise and Peril of Credit by Francesca Trivellato Pdf
How an antisemitic legend gave voice to widespread fears surrounding the expansion of private credit in Western capitalism The Promise and Peril of Credit takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West’s centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credit markets. By the close of the Middle Ages, new and sophisticated credit instruments made it easier for European merchants to move funds across the globe. Bills of exchange were by far the most arcane of these financial innovations. Intangible and written in a cryptic language, they fueled world trade but also lured naive investors into risky businesses. Francesca Trivellato recounts how the invention of these abstruse credit contracts was falsely attributed to Jews, and how this story gave voice to deep-seated fears about the unseen perils of the new paper economy. She locates the legend’s earliest version in a seventeenth-century handbook on maritime law and traces its legacy all the way to the work of the founders of modern social theory—from Marx to Weber and Sombart. Deftly weaving together economic, legal, social, cultural, and intellectual history, Trivellato vividly describes how Christian writers drew on the story to define and redefine what constituted the proper boundaries of credit in a modern world increasingly dominated by finance.
The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion by Rachel M. McCleary Pdf
This is a one-of-kind volume bringing together leading scholars in the economics of religion for the first time. The treatment of topics is interdisciplinary, comparative, as well as global in nature. Scholars apply the economics of religion approach to contemporary issues such as immigrants in the United States and ask historical questions such as why did Judaism as a religion promote investment in education? The economics of religion applies economic concepts (for example, supply and demand) and models of the market to the study of religion. Advocates of the economics of religion approach look at ways in which the religion market influences individual choices as well as institutional development. For example, economists would argue that when a large denomination declines, the religion is not supplying the right kind of religious good that appeals to the faithful. Like firms, religions compete and supply goods. The economics of religion approach using rational choice theory, assumes that all human beings, regardless of their cultural context, their socio-economic situation, act rationally to further his/her ends. The wide-ranging topics show the depth and breadth of the approach to the study of religion.
Moneylending provided the major source of livelihood for the Jewish communities of medieval Christian Europe, particularly in the centuries following the First Crusade. Even after Jews were expelled from England and most regions of Western Europe, the Jewish moneylender, usually imagined, like Shakespeare's Shylock, as an avaricious and editor, remained a potent inhabitant of the European mind. This well-documented volume challenges this negative image by examining evidence from the archives of Marseille of a fourteenth-century lawsuit involving Bondavid Draguignan, a Jewish moneylender accused by a Christian debtor of making a fraudulent claim. Shatzmiller uses this court action as the basis for his discussion of the general issues of medieval moneylending, usury, indebtedness, and Jewish-Christian relations. The study of the documents lead us to cast aside the perception of an unbroken history of hatred and misunderstanding between Jews and Christians, and to acknowledge the existence of friendship, consideration, magnanimity and mutual recognition instead. He also explores the medieval ambivalence towards matters of usury as evidenced through Christian opposition of such gain in spite of the need for a credit system, and the welcome profits gained by the Crown from the activity of Jewish money lenders. Additionally Jews were never the only moneylenders in the Middle Ages, nor were they predominant. Shatzmiller describes the Jewish category of ma'arifiya, or preferred customers, with whom a Jew had an established business relationship and whose custom the Jew cultivated by providing special services, such as postponement of repayment, remittance of part of the owed interest, or not asking security for a loan.
The Jews and Modern Capitalism by Werner Sombart Pdf
Since its first appearance in Germany in 1911, Jews and Modern Capitalism has provoked vehement criticism. As Samuel Z. Klausner emphasizes, the lasting value of Sombart's work rests not in his results-most of which have long since been disproved-but in his point of departure. Openly acknowledging his debt to Max Weber, Sombart set out to prove the double thesis of the Jewish foundation of capitalism and the capitalist foundation of Judaism. Klausner, placing Sombart's work in its historical and societal context, examines the weaknesses and strengths of Jews and Modern Capitalism.
With truly startling statistics and a wealth of anecdotes, Silbiger reveals the cultural principles that form the bedrock of Jewish success in America.
The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 2, The Hellenistic Age by William David Davies Pdf
Vol. 4 covers the late Roman period to the rise of Islam. Focuses especially on the growth and development of rabbinic Judaism and of the major classical rabbinic sources such as the Mishnah, Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud and various Midrashic collections.
In this second volume of his essays on the history of halakhah, Haym Soloveitchik grapples with much-disputed topics in medieval Jewish history, including the roots and culture of Early Ashkenaz and its knowledge of the Babylonian Talmud; martyrdom as perceived and practised by Jews under Islam and Christianity; and the interpretation of Maimonides’ Mishneh torah
Acclaimed writer and thinker Douglas Rushkoff, author of Ecstasy Club and Coercion, has written perhaps the most important—and controversial—book on Judaism in a generation. As the religion stands on the brink of becoming irrelevant to the very people who look to it for answers, Nothing Sacred takes aim at its problems and offers startling and clearheaded solutions based on Judaism’s core values and teachings. Disaffected by their synagogues’ emphasis on self-preservation and obsession with intermarriage, most Jews looking for an intelligent inquiry into the nature of spirituality have turned elsewhere, or nowhere. Meanwhile, faced with the chaos of modern life, returnees run back to Judaism with a blind and desperate faith and are quickly absorbed by outreach organizations that—in return for money—offer compelling evidence that God exists, that the Jews are, indeed, the Lord’s “chosen people,” and that those who adhere to this righteous path will never have to ask themselves another difficult question again. Ironically, the texts and practices making up Judaism were designed to avoid just such a scenario. Jewish tradition stresses transparency, open-ended inquiry, assimilation of the foreign, and a commitment to conscious living. Judaism invites inquiry and change. It is an “open source” tradition—one born out of revolution, committed to evolution, and willing to undergo renaissance at a moment’s notice. But, unfortunately, some of the very institutions created to protect the religion and its people are now suffocating them. If the Jewish tradition is actually one of participation in the greater culture, a willingness to wrestle with sacred beliefs, and a refusal to submit blindly to icons that just don’t make sense to us, then the “lapsed” Jews may truly be our most promising members. Why won’t they engage with the synagogue, and how can they be made to feel more welcome? Nothing Sacred is a bold and brilliant book, attempting to do nothing less than tear down our often false preconceptions about Judaism and build in their place a religion made relevant for the future. From the Hardcover edition.
Arthur Samuel Peake,Matthew Black,Harold Henry Rowley
Author : Arthur Samuel Peake,Matthew Black,Harold Henry Rowley Publisher : Taylor & Francis US Page : 1130 pages File Size : 40,8 Mb Release : 1962 Category : Religion ISBN : 0415263557
Peake's Commentary on the Bible by Arthur Samuel Peake,Matthew Black,Harold Henry Rowley Pdf
Now available in paperback, this classic commentary, drawing on the expertise of over sixty scholars, gives students of the Bible a thorough grounding in the origin and meaning of all the books of the Bible. Special attention is given to how the teaching of Scripture has been affected by archaeology, more accurate translations of the text, and the discovery of new manuscripts. The General Editors had the help of over sixty contributors, each being an expert in his own subject, They are representative of every branch of the Prostestant Church in Europe and America. This Commentary is based on the revised Standard Version of the Bible. Key Features include: 32 special introductory articles Full bibliographies and an extensive index 62 contributors Over 1000 double column pages 16 maps in full colour
