Economic Ideas of Judaism

Jewish Morality on Wealth

Abstract

At the time of acquisition of modern citizenship in the West, Jews had already established a sophisticated economic community in which they were accustomed to behave in the spirit of the economic morality of bourgeoisie. K. Marx referred to it as a behavior of the ordinary Jew distinguished from the Sabbath Jew. It meant that upon the rigid separation of the sacred and the profane in Judaism, Jews could behave devoutly in the Sabbath days and other holy days, while Jewish economic life had been secularized in ordinary economic transactions on weekdays. This article analyzes the origin and development of this economic view in Jewish legal documents of the Halakhah.

The Bible regarded the acquisition of interest between Jews as a kind of torts which men of power exerted toward the weak and poor people, and then the Mishnah took it as a kind of torts of transaction. In the Middle ages, non-profit money lending was regarded as a greater act than charity, Tsedakah in Hebrew, in the codex of Halakhah of Maimonides. Then in the early Modern period, the authoritative codex of Shulhan Arukh ordained that the transaction of money lending with fair interest between Jews was permissible as well as between Jew and Gentile, because the lender shared the risk of loss with the borrower. Here the dual morality concerning money lending with interest was resolved.