cultural meanings of money in medieval ashkenaz: on gift, profit, and value in medieval judaism and...

Jewish History (2014) 28: 125158 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014DOI: 10.1007/s10835-014-9212-3

Cultural Meanings of Money in Medieval Ashkenaz:On Gift, Profit, and Value in Medieval Judaism and Christianity

JULIE L. MELLNorth Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USAE-mail: [email protected]

Abstract This article explores the cultural history of money in medieval Judaism and Chris-tianity. In doing so, it reassesses a historical narrative describing the emergence of a newmoney economy in the High Middle Ages. In the prevailing narrative, money is positionedas a causal agent: it is said to effect and symbolize the profit motive, becoming a locusfor anxiety about the new money economy. But a close reading of moral literature suggeststhat money per se was not a locus of anxiety. Moralists had a sophisticated understandingof economic value and its relation to moral economy. Anxiety among Jewish and Christianmoralists focused on the possible disjuncture between moral and economic values, not oneconomic value per se. Through close readings of medieval exempla, this article demonstratesthat moralists regarded the economic act of acquisition as creating a moral value. When badmoral value adhered to coins, they sought to devise means for redeeming that value throughpenitential acts. This ideology, which was shared by Jewish and Christian authors, suggeststhat cultural assumptions about money were more sophisticated than a straightforward fear ofthe profit economy and profit motive and that the narrative of European economic developmentas a shift from gift economy to profit economy ought to be problematized. Binary oppositionsbetween gift and profit and between an altruistic Christianity (linked to a gift economy) and amodernizing Judaism (linked to a profit economy) ought to be broken down.

Keywords Gift Profit Value Gift economy Profit economy European economichistory Medieval Judaism Medieval Christianity Monasticism Sefer H. asidim Exempla

Three classics in medieval economic history appeared in the 1970s: RobertLopezs The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 9501350, GeorgesDubys Guerriers et paysans, VIIXIIe sicle: Premier essor de lconomieeuropene, and Lester Littles Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy.1

1Robert Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 9501350 (Cambridge,1976); Georges Duby, Guerriers et paysans, VIIXIIe sicle: Premier essor de lconomieeuropene (Paris, 1973), translated by Howard Clarke as The Early Growth of the Euro-pean Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century (Ithaca, NY,1974); Lester Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca,NY, 1978). Although Duby was a well-known public intellectual in France and Lopez anItalian migr who retained close ties to Italy, this group of works seems not to have influ-enced British, French, Italian, or other European medievalists as profoundly as North Ameri-can scholars.

mailto:[email protected]

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Lopez synthesized the scholarship on the high medieval expansion of trade,markets, and money by a generation of medieval economic and business his-torians on both sides of the Atlantic.2 Duby applied the sociological conceptof gift exchange to early medieval economy, and in his conclusion he con-trasted this early medieval gift economy with Lopezs commercial take-off of the High Middle Ages.3 Little adopted Dubys juxtaposition of earlymedieval gift economy and high medieval profit economy as the startingpoint for a study of the social and cultural effects of the commercial revo-

2The most prominent scholars working in this area were Italian, Belgian, and American bynationality: Gino Luzzatto, Armando Sapori, Raymond de Roover, and Florence Edler deRoover. For recent examples of the continuing force of Lopezs paradigm commercial rev-olution, see Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought (Cambridge, 2002), 7981, 11031,where she seems unaware that she is recycling the concept of medieval commercial revolu-tion under the Smithian nomenclature mercantile system; and Martha Howell, Commercebefore Capitalism in Europe, 13001600 (Cambridge, 2010). British and French scholarshipdeveloped along different trajectories. In Britain, the concept of a commercial revolutionwas paralleled in the work of Michael Postan, among others, under the rubric of economicexpansion. The difference in terms connotes a greater emphasis on agriculture and demogra-phy as the powerhouses of economic change. With the development of a Marxist-influencedstrain of historiography, as in the work of Rodney Hilton, British historiography came to ne-glect market and trade altogether, focusing on the transition debate. See T. H. Ashton andC. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Devel-opment in Pre-industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985). A recent generation of British historianshas brought back an emphasis on markets and trade, focusing on commercialization. SeeRichard Britnell and Bruce Campbell, eds., A Commercialising Economy (Manchester, 1995);R. H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 10001500 (Cambridge, 1993). Forrecent surveys of British historiography, see John Hatcher and Mark Bailey, Modelling theMiddle Ages: The History and Theory of Englands Economic Development (Oxford, 2001);James Davis, Medieval Market Morality: Life, Law, and Ethics in the English Marketplace,12001500 (Cambridge, 2012), 322. For the discussion of gift economy and profit economyat issue here, the British historiography is peripheral.3As will be discussed below, Duby draws most evidently on Marcel Mauss, The Gift: TheForm and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (1990; repr., NewYork, 2000), originally published as Essai sur le Don: Forme et raison de lchange dansles socits archaque, LAnne, n.s., 1 (1925): 30186. He also draws, less obviously, onK. Polanyi, C. Arensberg, and H. Pearson, eds., Trade and Market in the Early Empires(Glencoe, IL, 1957). His work followed the lead of the medievalists Philip Grierson, Com-merce in the Dark Ages: A Critique of the Evidence, in Studies in Economic Anthropology,ed. George Dalton (Washington, DC, 1971), 7483; and Aaron Gurevich, Wealth and Gift-Bestowal among the Ancient Scandinavians, in Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages(Chicago, 1992), 17789. For recent surveys of gift theory in relation to medieval history, seeFlorin Curta, Merovingian and Carolingian Gift Giving, Speculum 81, no. 3 (2006): 67199; Janet Nelson, introduction to The Languages of Gift in the Early Middle Ages, ed. WendyDavies and Paul Fouracre (Cambridge, 2010).

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lution.4 He posited that the radical economic transition from a gift economyto a profit economy generated a disjuncture between the new socioeconomicrealities and the traditional spirituality and morality of a medieval agrariansociety. Duby and Little both positioned money as a central, causal agent forthe emergence of a new profit economy. Money, in their accounts, both ef-fected and symbolized the profit motive, becoming a locus for anxiety overa new money economy among medieval Christians.5

This paradigm of early medieval gift economy versus high medieval profiteconomy continues to stimulate scholarship and spur critical engagementamong a wide range of medievalists. Since 2000, four collections of arti-cles have been published around these themes, with contributions from overforty medievalists across Eurasia and North America representing disciplinesas diverse as art history, English, romance languages, history, music, and pa-leography.6 The themes and chronologies evident in the titles of the mostrecent of these volumesThe Languages of Gift in the Early Middle Agesand Money, Morality, and Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Eu-rope demonstrate the continuing force of the paradigm.7 For example, the

4Little, Religious Poverty, ixx. He also draws heavily from Marc Bloch, Dubys predecessorin the Annales school.5Duby and Little conceptualized money as the causal agent for a new profit economy de-spite the earlier critiques of Marc Bloch and Michael Postan, who objected to the simplisticnotion of a rise of a money economy. Marc Bloch, Natural Economy or Money Econ-omy: A Pseudo-Dilemma, in Land and Work in Medieval Europe (Berkeley, 1967), 23043;Michael Postan, The Rise of a Money Economy, in Essays on Medieval Agriculture andGeneral Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge, 1973), 2840. Recent works thatcontinue this focus on money include Jacques Le Goff, Money and the Middle Ages: An Essayin Historical Anthropology, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 2012); Peter Spufford, Money andIts Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1988).6Esther Cohen and Mayke B. de Jong, eds., Medieval Transformations: Texts, Power, and Giftsin Context (Leiden, 2001); Gadi Algazi, Valentin Groebner, and Bernhard Jussen, eds., Nego-tiating the Gift: Pre-modern Figurations of Exchange (Gttingen, 2003); Juliann Vitullo andDiane Wolfthal, eds., Money, Morality, and Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Eu-rope (Farnham, 2010); Davies and Fouracre, Languages of Gift. See also Barbara Rosenwein,To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Clunys Property, 9091049 (Ithaca,NY, 1989); Stephen White, Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to Saints: The Laudatio Parentum inWestern France, 10501150 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988); Patrick Geary, Living with the Dead inthe Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1994); Philippe Buc, Conversion of Objects, Viator 28 (1997):99144; Curta, Merovingian and Carolingian Gift Giving. A recent and important exampleof the application of the concept of gift exchange to early modern European history is Na-talie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison, WI, 2000). For the use ofLittles thesis of anxiety over money, see Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the FourteenthCentury: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (Cambridge,1998). It is noteworthy that these models have held little interest for economic historians.7Not all scholarship fits into the Duby/Little paradigm. See, e.g., Algazi, Groebner, and Jussen,Negotiating the Gift. Algazi explicitly constructed the volume as concerned with pre-modern

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intellectual problem tackled by the collection Money, Morality, and Culture isdefined wholly within Littles framework: this volume explores the contra-dictions, fears, and anxieties that arose as capitalist values competed with tra-ditional classical and Christian ethics.8 The editors refer repeatedly to thedeveloping monetary economy, see money itself in the late Middle Agesas the target of theological condemnation, and regard Christian ethics asthe site of contestation.9

Occasionally individual contributors challenge this paradigm and raisenew questions. Chris Wickham makes the most explicit attack in the conclu-sion to The Languages of Gift in the Early Middle Ages when he argues: Wesee no significant difference between the economic structures of the early andcentral Middle Ages, even if the eleventh century was rather more economi-cally active than before. . . . There was commerce in both; negotiation in both;contract in both. It is not only unhelpful and misleading, but pointless, to ex-oticize the pre-1050 period, to turn it into the only period without the profitmotive, or whichever other aspect of modernity any given scholar wishes toprivilege.10 Wickham here builds on an earlier critique by Florin Curta thatchallenges the concept of an early medieval gift economy.11 But this critiquehas not yet permeated the scholarship on the early Middle Ages. Nor hasit carried beyond the early medieval scholarship to that of the High MiddleAges, despite the continuing appearance of new studies of money, markets,and trade in early medieval Europe.12 It must be said that one contribution toMoney, Morality, and Culturethe essay by Giacomo Todeschinimight be

societies which are neither archaic nor modern in accordance with any prevalent accepta-tion of those terms. In all of them, gift exchange was neither the sole nor necessarily the dom-inant transaction mode; they were all stratified societies, familiar with both political authorityand market exchange. Gadi Algazi, Introduction: Doing Things with Gifts, in ibid., 14.8Vitullo and Wolfthal, introduction to Money, Morality, and Culture, 3.9Ibid., 14.10Chris Wickham, conclusion to Davies and Fouracre, Languages of Gift, 25960. Althoughthe conclusion was written on behalf of all the contributors, there is little evidence that allhave moved this far in their perspective. Some, like Wendy Davies, undoubtedly have, whileJanet Nelson only edges in this direction in her introduction to the volume; ibid., 56. See alsotwo articles that complicate any simple division of gift and sale: Wendy Davies, When GiftIs Sale: Reciprocities and Commodities in Tenth-Century Christian Iberia, in ibid., 21737;Chris Wickham, Compulsory Gift Exchange in Lombard Italy, 6501150, in ibid., 193216.11Curta, Merovingian and Carolingian Gift Giving, esp. 67374, where he refers to Dubyand Little.12See, e.g., Rory Naismith, Money and Power in Anglo-Saxon England: The Southern En-glish Kingdoms, 757865 (Cambridge, 2012); Michael McCormick, Origins of the EuropeanEconomy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300900 (Cambridge, 2001).


read as unraveling Littles framework, but neither the author nor the editorsexplicitly make this argument.13

This article contributes in three ways to this small but lively scholarshipon gift, profit, money, and morality in medieval Europe. First, it furthersWickhams and Curtas critique, not by elaborating the complexity of giftin the early medieval period as they do, but by deconstructing money as asymbol and agent of profit economy in the High Middle Ages. Applying re-cent cross-cultural anthropological studies of money and the morality of ex-change to high medieval moral literature, I argue that neither money nor themoney economy per se generated anxiety among medieval Christian au-thors.14 Rather, high medieval religious authors had a sophisticated ideologyof value; they recognized economic value, but they insisted upon moral valuetied to that economic value. Their anxiety lay in the potential for a disequilib-rium between these two values. They resolved the difficulty by constructingan elaborate divine economy in which money functioned as a Maussian giftthat carried ones moral value with it even as it circulated.15

Second, this article attempts to contribute to a new trajectory called for byscholars on both sides of the 1050 divide. This new trajectory seeks to breakdown barriers between economic value and moral value. Giacomo Todes-chini has pointedly remarked that currently, the main problem lies in a his-toriography that asserts a forced and timeless separation between the lay andreligious rationalities and assumes an everlasting conflict between economicand moral codes.16 In other words, historians of high medieval Europe as-sume too readily the merchants function as a hero of self-centered, rationalchoice theory. Recently, James Davis has taken up this issue in his mono-graph Medieval Market Morality.17 With regard to early medieval Europe,

13Giacomo Todeschini, The Incivility of Judas: Manifest Usury as a Metaphor for the In-famy of Fact (infamia facti), in Vitullo and Wolfthal, Money, Morality, and Culture, 3352.14In this respect, I build on the work of Richard Newhauser, who argues in The Early Historyof Greed: The Sin of Avarice in Early Medieval Thought and Literature (Cambridge, 2000)that those who have examined avaritia as a vice of money in the later Middle Ages havetended to overlook its frequent definition at this time as the desire for intangible objects (honor,knowledge, life itself), as well as for material goods (xiv).15In this respect, I depart from Wickham, who says that he cannot detect a specifically reli-gious or spiritual element to the obligation to reciprocate . . . which Mauss was so keen on.His readings of gift stress their alienability and their social and strategic nature. Wickham,conclusion to Davies and Fouracre, Languages of Gift, 258. I stress the inalienability and thepresence of moral value in monetary exchanges, whether in an unreciprocated gift or in saleand loan.16Giacomo Todeschini, Theological Roots of the Medieval/Modern Merchants Self-Representation, in The Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists, ed. Margaret Jacob andCatherine Secretan (New York, 2008), 18.17Davis, Medieval Market Morality.

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Chris Wickham has contested the radical separation of (economic) gift fromdivine countergift proposed by Bernhard Jussen.18 The present article placesvalue in the foreground rather than on one side or the other of the gift/profitbinary. In doing so, it begins to trace a complex medieval ideology of valueacross gift and profit, human and divine, moral and amoral. No single articlecan fully work out this complex medieval intellectual thought, however, andthe heart of the argument here lies in another direction. It concerns a subjectalmost wholly neglected in the literature on gift economythat is, the Jewishthread woven into the paradigm of gift/profit.

Finally, this article seeks to revise Littles and Dubys placement of Jewsvis--vis the profit economy. Both scholars assume that the gift economy islimited to the Christian community and that the profit economy is associatedwith Jews. They draw this linkage from the older sociological and historicalliterature from which they derived their concept of money. It is not essentialfor their intellectual framework, yet left unmarked and unchallenged it con-tinues to perpetuate false premises detrimental to our understanding of Jew-ish history. The assumption that Jews were moneylenders in medieval Europeand hence the commercial carriers of a new profit economy can be found inrecent popular and scholarly publications.19 This assumption has only be-gun to be challenged, principally through Giacomo Todeschinis study ofFranciscan economic thought and medieval Christian stereotyping of Jews.20

18Wickham, conclusion to Davies and Fouracre, Languages of Gift, 24344; Bernhard Jussen,Religious Discourses of the Gift in the Middle Ages: Semantic Evidences (Second to TwelfthCenturies), in Algazi, Groebner, and Jussen, Negotiating the Gift, 17392. See also the fol-lowing discussions of how possessions and givers are transformed by giving alms and offer-ings: Curta, Merovingian and Carolingian Gift Giving, 674; Eliana Magnani S.-Christen,Transforming Things and Persons: The Gift pro anima in the Eleventh and Twelfth Cen-turies, in Algazi, Groebner, and Jussen, Negotiating the Gift, 26984. Unlike Magnani, how-ever, I do not restrict the cultural framework to the sacrifice of the Eucharist or even toChristianity more broadly.19See, e.g., Jerry Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, NJ, 2010), 89, 1571; YuvalLevin, With Interest, Jewish Review of Books 2 (Summer 2010): 1718; Jonathan Karp, ThePolitics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 16381848(Cambridge, 2008), 1314; Derek Penslar, Shylocks Children: Economics and Jewish Identityin Modern Europe (Berkeley, 2001), 52. See also the excellent discussion of why Sombartsanalysis of Jews and capitalism appealed to so many scholars, which applies beyond thoseciting Sombart directly, in Nico Stehr and Reiner Grundmann, introduction to Economic Lifein the Modern Age, by Werner Sombart (New Brunswick, NJ, 2001), xxxiiixl.20Giacomo Todeschini, Franciscan Economics and Jews in the Middle Ages: From a The-ological to an Economic Lexicon, in Friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,ed. Steven McMichael and Susan Myers (Leiden, 2004), 99117, and Christian Perceptionsof Jewish Economic Activity in the Middle Ages, in Wirtschaftsgeschichte der mittelalter-lichen Juden: Fragen und Einschtzungen, ed. Michael Toch and Elisabeth Mller-Lucker(Munich, 2008), 116, and Theological Roots of the Medieval/Modern Merchants Self-


Todeschini has unraveled the complex lines of theological and linguistic de-velopment that led to Christian usurers being called Judaei nostri (our Jews).This was not, he argues, because usury was a typical Jewish profession, ashas been assumed by historians, but because the infamy of Judas and theJews became a clear representation of manifold types of civic irregularity.21

This article complements Todeschinis intellectual history with evidencefrom cultural history that denaturalizes Jewish usury. I argue that the sameideology of values found in the moral literature of Latinate Christian au-thors is found in the contemporary Jewish text Sefer H. asidim. This evidencesuggests that Jews were not an economic other but shared a common cul-tural history with medieval Western Christians. Though only a single Jewishtext, Sefer H. asidim negates the assumption in Littles model that Christianityis both the defining structure and the causal agent for the changes in eco-nomic attitudes. Because it precedes most of the Christian texts, it cannot betreated as derivative of Christian thought. I would argue, therefore, that me-dieval attitudes toward economic values ought to be approached as Europeanrather than Christian, for this ideology was not limited or defined by medievalChristianity. The implication is that medieval Jews were not always alreadycommercialized and therefore were not fundamentally different in their eco-nomic activities and economic thought from medieval Christians. Futureresearch might more fruitfully (and more faithfully) conceptualize Jews asfellow travelers undergoing commercialization along with Christians.

The first part of this article will lay out the arguments of Duby and Little,locate their conceptualization of money and its linkage with Jews in older so-ciological literature, and discuss anthropological approaches to money, gift,profit, and value that have developed since the 1970s. The second part willexamine the cultural ideas about money found in the moral texts of high me-dieval Christian authors, particularly in regard to moral value, the danger ofbad moral value, and the place of penance in this moral economy. Finally,the third part will demonstrate the parallels to these Christian ideas in the textof Sefer H. asidim.

Representation. See also Giacomo Todeschini, La ricchezza degli ebrei: Merci e denaro nellariflessione ebraica e nella definizione cristiana dellusura alla fine del Medioevo (Spoleto,1989). A cautionary note is also raised by Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Represen-tation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralise (Berkeley, 1999), 33.21Todeschini, Incivility of Judas, 43.

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I

From Gift Economy to Profit Economy

Duby described the growth of the European economy as a long-term shiftfrom the mentalit of an early medieval gift economy to that of a high me-dieval profit economy. The circulation of gifts and return gifts, pillage andoffering, characterized the mental attitudes underlying the social structuresof early medieval Europe. The new money economy with its drive to profitcharacterized the modern attitudes. Duby borrowed the concept of the giftfrom Marcel Mausss formative 1925 essay22 and melded it with the laterexpansions of the idea of the gift economy by anthropologists, ancient his-torians, and the acclaimed economic thinker Karl Polanyi.23 Duby adoptedPolanyis critique of market-centered teleological narratives and, in doing so,was able to sketch the shape of the early medieval European economy be-yond the zones made visible by the application of modern economic modelsof money, market, and trade.24 But in describing the trajectory of long-termeconomic change, Duby fell back on a model of premodern traditionalism

22Mauss, The Gift. Duby, Early Growth, cites Mauss directly (50) and develops his idea ofgift exchange extensively in chap. 3.23Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time(Boston, 2001); Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson, Trade and Market. On Polanyi, see KariPolanyi-Levitt and Marguerite Mendell, Karl Polanyi: His Life and Times, Studies in Politi-cal Economy 22 (1987): 739; S. C. Humphreys, History, Economics, and Anthropology: TheWork of Karl Polanyi, History and Theory 8 (1969): 165212; J. R. Stanfield, The EconomicThought of Karl Polanyi: Lives and Livelihood (New York, 1986). Polanyi drew on sociol-ogists such as Mauss, historians such as Henri Pirenne, and anthropologists such as Bronis-law Malinowski and Raymond Firth; in turn, Polanyis methodological and theoretical worksserved as the inspiration for the development of the approach known as substantive eco-nomic anthropology. This term was adopted from the theoretical statement in Karl Polanyi,The Economy as Instituted Process, in Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson, Trade and Market,24369. Two key examples of the influence Polanyi had on anthropology and premodern his-tory are George Dalton, Economic Anthropology and Development (New York, 1971); MosesFinley, The World of Odysseus (New York, 1954).24Duby, Early Growth, 35, 16568. Duby does not cite Polanyi directly, but shortly be-fore Duby published Early Growth, members of the Annales school attended a seminar onPolanyis work that had been organized to coincide with the publication of the French trans-lation of Trade and Market (Karl Polanyi and Conrad Arensberg, Les systmes conomiquesdans lhistoire et dans la thorie, trans. Claude Rivire and Anne Rivire [Paris, 1974]). Theproceedings of the seminar were published as Pour une histoire anthropologique: La notionde rciprocit, Annales: conomies, Socits, Civilisations 29, no. 6 (1974): 130980, andsubsequently translated and republished with additional case studies as Symposium: Eco-nomic Anthropology and History; The Work of Karl Polanyi, Research in Economic An-thropology 4 (1981): 193. Polanyi was already known among French anthropologists andhis work was being discussed in various seminars at the cole pratique des hautes tudes;


versus modern profit motive that came out of older sociological studies ofcapitalism. The story he tells is one of the emergence of a new money econ-omy prompted by the increasing circulation of coins set in motion by pil-lage.25 Coins in combination with demographic growth and new agrariantechnologies spurred greater productivity, stimulated trade and commercialactivities, and unleashed a new mentalit of profit. Money was not simply aunit of measurement in Italian towns, he says; it was a living value, capa-ble of bearing economic fruit. Let us have no hesitation in describing such anattitude towards money as capitalist. 26

Dubys concept of the capitalist attitude as defined by the profit motivealigns with the conceptual framework of the major works on capitalism byKarl Marx, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber.27 But Duby is not drawingdirectly from these giants. Rather, he draws from the pathbreaking researchof a generation of medievalists on both sides of the Atlantic whose researchlocated a modernizing profit motive in the investment contracts, commer-cial credit, accounting, and currency exchange of medieval merchants. Thisrich work has come to be known under the rubric of a commercial revolu-tion of the high Middle Ages. That phrase, coined by Raymond de Rooverand popularized by Robert Lopez,28 suggests that the commercial develop-ment of the High Middle Ages was as dramatic a turning point for Europe as

see L. Valensi, Anthropologie conomique et histoire: Loeuvre de Karl Polanyi, Annales:conomies, Socits, Civilisations 29, no. 6 (1974): 1311 n. 1. His work was also discussed inthe early seventies in the French journal La Pense: see Yvon Garlan, La place de lconomiedans les socits anciennes, La Pense 171 (1973): 11827.25This narrative runs throughout the book, but for especially pointed passages on money seeDuby, Early Growth, 179, 253, 255, 261.26Ibid., 261.27Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Funkes (Oxford, 1995);Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (NewYork, 1958), and Economy and Society, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al., ed. Guenther Rothand Claus Wittich (Berkeley, 1978); Werner Sombart, Jews and Modern Capitalism, trans.Mordecai Epstein (London, 1913), originally published as Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben(Leipzig, 1911), and The Quintessence of Capitalism: A Study of the History and Psychologyof the Modern Business Man, trans. Mordecai Epstein (London, 1915), originally published asDer Bourgeois: Zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen (Munich, 1913),and Der moderne Kapitalismus (Munich, 1928). Of course the use and definition of profitmotive varies between Sombart and Weber. Weber recognizes profit motive in all periods anddefines the distinctive element of modernity around rationalization, whereas Sombart retainsa more simplistic notion of profit motive. Dubys conceptual categories look similar to thecategories of traditionalism and profit motive used by Sombart and Weber, but Duby datesthe shift earlier and analyzes the causal agents differently.28Raymond de Roover coined the phrase commercial revolution of the high Middle Agesin a comment delivered at a meeting of the American Historical Associations chapter of busi-ness historians in 1940. His comment was later published as The Commercial Revolutionof the Thirteenth Century, in Enterprise and Secular Change, ed. Frederic Lane and Jelle

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the Industrial Revolution.29 The research embodied in the concept of com-mercial revolution explicitly challenged Sombarts notion of a precapitalistMiddle Ages, even as it employed much of his conceptual framework. Dubyassimilated the model of the commercial revolution into his narrative, locat-ing this precocious new mental attitude in Italy, but he reduced the nuanceddiscussions of contracts, credit instruments, and trade to the concept of a newmoney economy. Money, in Dubys account, came to occupy an unequiv-ocal position, central to every aspect of growth.30 When money came totransform the core feudal zones of Europe around 1180, the profit motivesteadily undermined the spirit of largess.31

The cultural and religious implications of the radical shift from gift econ-omy to profit economy were explored by Lester Little.32 Little argued thatmedieval urban culture underwent a profound crisis in the twelfth and thir-teenth centuries as the new profit economy replaced the old gift economy:

Riemersma (Homewood, IL, 1953), 80. Robert Lopez had assimilated de Roovers paradigmby 1950, when he wrote his pathbreaking chapter The Trade of Medieval Europe: The South,in Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages, ed. M. Postan and E. E. Rich, Cambridge EconomicHistory of Europe 2 (Cambridge, 1952), 257354; he popularized the term in his synthesisThe Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages. Raymond de Roover and his wife, FlorenceEdler de Roover, a medieval economic historian in her own right, were close friends withLopez. Both commented on a draft of his chapter for the Cambridge Economic History ina series of letters: see Raymond and Florence Edler de Roover to Robert Lopez, March 9,1946, through February 27, 1947, The Robert Lopez Papers, de Roover correspondence, YaleUniversity Archives, MS 1549, box 3, folder 60. On de Roover as an economic historian,see R. Goldthwaite, Raymond de Roover on Late Medieval and Early Modern EconomicHistory, in Business, Banking, and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early ModernEurope: Selected Studies of Raymond de Roover, ed. Julius Kirshner (Chicago, 1974), 314;J. Kirshner, Raymond de Roover on Scholastic Economic Thought, in de Roover, Business,Banking, and Economic Thought, 1536.29On the formation of the paradigm of the commercial revolution, see Julie Mell,Twentieth-Century Jewish migrs and Medieval European Economic History, Religions3, no. 2 (2012): 55687, doi:10.3390/rel3030556. On Lopez, see also Paul Freedman,Robert S. Lopez (191085), in Rewriting the Middle Ages in the Twentieth Century, ed.Jaume Aurell i Cardona and Francisco Crosas Lpez (Turnhout, 2005), 27993; Antonio Var-sori, ed., Roberto Lopez: Limpegno politico e civile (193845) (Florence, 1990); ArchibaldLewis, Jaroslav Pelikan, and David Herlihy, Robert Sabatino Lopez, Speculum 63 (1988):76365; Felice Lifshitz, Lopez, Robert S., in Encyclopedia of Historians and HistoricalWriting (London, 1999), 73233.30Duby, Early Growth, 256.31Ibid., 270.32Lester Little, The Function of the Jews in the Commercial Revolution, in Povert e ric-chezza nella spiritualit dei secoli XI e XII (Todi, 1969), 27187, and Pride Goes beforeAvarice: Social Change and the Vices in Latin Christendom, American Historical Review 76,nos. 12 (1971): 1649, and Religious Poverty.


The spiritual crisis is seen in a growing discordance between new eco-nomic and social realities and a traditional, initially unresponsive, clergy andtheology.33 A symptom of this crisis was the emergence of medieval anti-semitism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For the Jews functioned as ascapegoat for Christian failure to adapt successfully to the profit economy.34

The friars, Little argued, resolved the spiritual crisis of urban society by for-mulating an intellectual and spiritual ideal properly suited to the new socialand economic reality.35

For Little, as for Duby, money was both the prime causal agent of eco-nomic transformation and the cultural symbol of spiritual crisis:Expanding commerce and industry was both paralleled and facilitated byan increase in the amount and use of money in the European economy.36

The impersonal quality of new urban centers, the substitution of monetarytransactions for personal relations, and the moral uncertainty caused by anoutmoded Christian morality were all problems generated by the new profiteconomy. Money underlay all three. Because it was durable, compact, andmobile wealth, it was intimately linked to urban life:

The relationship between money and urban society follows di-rectly from the definitions thus far presented. Urban society is asociety so large as to include total or at least partial strangers. Thereason that these strangers can deal with one another is that theyare willing to receive money in exchange for goods they give oth-ers or services they render others. Money, said Max Weber, isthe most abstract and impersonal element that exists in personallife. This impersonal medium of exchange, which even a strangerwould accept, is the vital fluid of the urban organism.37

Money was consequently both the causal agent and the symbol of the newprofit economy, and therefore, Little argued, it became the locus of anxiety.The vice of avarice supplanted the vice of pride in moral literature. Satiresagainst money, simony, and cupidity proliferated, as did artistic represen-tations of Avarice counting his coins, apes defecating coins, and grotesqueheads vomiting coins.38

As the reference to Weber above suggests, Littles and Dubys influen-tial works were rooted in the sociological literature concerned with the rise

33Little, Religious Poverty, xi.34Ibid., 55.35Ibid., xi.36Ibid., 15.37Ibid., 33.38Little, Pride Goes before Avarice, 2427, and Religious Poverty, 3541.

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of capitalism (as well as anthropological theories concerning primitive gifteconomies). In this classic sociological literature, money was treated as thesymbol for commodity exchange, as an abstract measure of value, as anony-mous and impersonal, transforming society in its image.39 Littles conceptualmodel echoed a scholarly literature in which profit economy was definedas an exchange of alienable things between independent actors and gift ex-change as an exchange of inalienable things between dependent actors.40

These two radically different types of exchange were given radically differ-ent moral valuations: money was seen as amoral or immoral, gift as moral.

Jew/Christian

The binary Jew/Christian was linked to profit/gift in the classic socio-logical literature, and when Lopez and Duby adopted the concept of a profiteconomy, they adopted as well the notion that Jews were always alreadycommercialized. Werner Sombart, for example, glorified medieval Chris-tendom as precapitalism par excellence. He identified Judaism with thespirit of capitalism and made premodern Jews the causal agents of theprofit motive.41 Sombart was building on the work of Wilhelm Roscher,a founder of the German historical school of political economy, whose 1873essay Die Stellung der Juden im Mittelalter catapulted into the mainstreamacademic discourse a philosemitic historical narrative about the Jewish eco-nomic function.42 Twentieth-century elaborations of this narrative depictJews as tragically propelled into moneylending: their religious differenceopened an economic opportunity while closing the more traditional and pro-ductive economic activities associated with agriculture and crafts.43 Jewish

39Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, Introduction: Money and the Morality of Exchange,in Money and the Morality of Exchange, ed. Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch (New York,1989), 27.40C. A. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities (New York, 1982), 12.41Sombart, Jews and Modern Capitalism.42Wilhelm Roscher, Die Stellung der Juden im Mittelalter, betrachtet vom Standpunktder allgemeinen Handelspolitik, in Ansichten der Volkswirthschaft aus dem geschichtlichenStandpunkte (Leipzig, 1878), 2:32154. Guido Kisch published a celebratory assessment ofRoschers essay together with a portion of the essay translated by Solomon Grayzel: GuidoKisch, The Jews Function in the Mediaeval Evolution of Economic Life in Commemora-tion of the Anniversary of a Celebrated Scholar and His Theory, Historia Judaica 6 (1944):112; and Wilhelm Roscher, The Status of the Jews in the Middle Ages Considered from theStandpoint of Commercial Policy, Historia Judaica 6 (1944): 1326.43Numerous examples of this narrative can be found in both textbooks of medieval history andmonographs in Jewish history, both dated and recent. Examples of textbooks include Wood,Medieval Economic Thought, 16768; Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe: A Short History,5th ed. (New York, 1982), 15152, 15961; Daniel Frankforter, The Medieval Millennium:


concentration in the profession of moneylending elicited a backlash from theChristian majority, culminating in tragic pogroms and expulsions during thelate Middle Ages. Even as Jews promoted European economic development,they suffered for it.44

Several medieval Jewish historians have suggested that it is time to discardthe narrative of the Jews economic function.45 Yet, as illustrated above, itis still found widely in popular, public intellectual, and scholarly accounts.Although it has only a questionable empirical base, it still conjures an asso-ciative logic that particularly clicks with the larger framework of profit andgift. To put it plainly, modern scholarsand, following them, journalists andthe educated publicmistake a high medieval rhetoric, which identified theJew with the money trade, for an empirical description of social reality.

Lester Little sensed this dangerous terrain. He was one of the early inno-vators who drove a wedge between this historical rhetoric and historical fact.His project Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy may even have sprung,like Athena fully formed, from the very problem of medieval antisemitism. Inan early article entitled The Function of the Jews in the Commercial Revolu-tion, Little argued that the onset of the commercial revolution explained the

An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2003), 19495. Monographs most to thepoint here are Duby, Early Growth, 6061, 1012, 218, 231, 241, 255; Lopez, CommercialRevolution of the Middle Ages, 6062; Little, Religious Poverty, 4257. It also appears in oth-erwise excellent pieces of scholarship by Jewish historians, e.g., Robert Chazan, MedievalAnti-Semitism, in History and Hate: The Dimensions of Anti-Semitism, ed. David Berger(Philadelphia, 1986), 63; Kenneth Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Eu-rope (Cambridge, 1992), 21518.44Even the exclusion of Jews from feudal structures and craft guilds is open to question,though it has been little studied. Toni Oelsner raised questions about both in The Economicand Social Condition of the Jews of Southwestern Germany in the 13th and 14th Centuries,Toni Oelsner Collection, Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, and The Place ofJews in Economic History as Viewed by German Scholars: A Critical-Comparative Analysis,Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 7 (1962): 183212. In the latter, she discusses evidence thatin 1331 Jews were members of a tanners guild in Esslingen-on-Neckar and that in 1268 aJew was admitted to the Merchants Guild in England. See also Michael Adler, Benedict theGildsman of Winchester, Jewish Historical Society of England: Miscellanies 4 (1942): 18.45Toni Oelsner, Wilhelm Roschers Theory of the Economic and Social Position of the Jewsin the Middle Ages: A Critical Examination, YIVO 12 (195859): 17695, and The Placeof Jews in Economic History; Michael Toch, Die Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden im Mit-telalter: Stand, Aufgaben und Mglichkeiten der Forschung, Wiener Jahrbuch fr JdischeGeschichte Kultur & Museumswesen 4 (1999/2000): 924, and Jews and Commerce: Mod-ern Fancies and Medieval Realities, in Peasants and Jews in Medieval Germany (Aldershot,2003), xv, 4358; Giacomo Todeschini, Les historiens juifs en Allemagne et le dbat surlorigine du capitalisme avant 1914, in criture de lhistoire et identit juive: LEurope ashk-naze XIXXX sicle, ed. D. Bechtel et al. (Paris, 2003), 20928; Julie Mell, Economy andReligion: The Economic Function of the Jews during the Medieval Commercial Revolution(PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007).

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deterioration in Jewish-Christian coexistence, but not in the way that Roscherenvisioned.

The Jew came to be increasingly associated in Christian mindswith the Commercial Revolution. . . . The Jew was so identifiedwith the money trade, and the money trade was such a source ofuneasiness to Christians that the Christians just reversed the iden-tification: they identified the entire money trade with the Jews. . . .The money tradethe very heart of the Commercial Revolutionwas thus considered to be the work of the Jews. The Jews werebeing blamed for the Christians own involvement in a complexpattern of behavior that lay wholly outside the churchs range ofacceptable occupations. They were being blamed by Christiansfor doing what countless Christians were doing, but without beingable to admit the fact.46

In short, Jews became the scapegoats for Christians anxiety about the newprofit economy. Littles innovative insight in redefining medieval Jewish-Christian relations as a Christian problem cannot be overemphasized. Andyet, Little still maintained the assumption of a Jewish specialization in themoney trade, as in this passage: Within the market economy, there devel-oped in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a high degree of specializationand the Jews were the ones who came to specialize in the money trade. Theimportance of the bankers of Europes first money economy should not be un-derestimated. Small numbers of people had a most far-reaching influence.47

Although Little emphasized that Christians outnumbered Jews in everysignificant branch of commerce, his argument, as bold and innovative asit was, did not go far enough. For it still maintained an essential differ-ence between Jews and Christians. Jews and Judaism were portrayed asalways already commercialized, while Christians and Christianity wereadapting anxiously to a new profit economy. Littles paradigm, even as itrevised Roschers, still encoded the binary opposition between Judaism and

46Little, Function of the Jews, 28586. The fact that this piece preceded his 1971 articlePride Goes before Avarice and his 1978 book Religious Poverty suggests that his thinking onJews, economy, and antisemitism may have shaped his later publications on religious povertyand the profit economy. The other innovator who should be mentioned is Gavin Langmuir, whobegan thinking in new and bold ways about medieval antisemitism in the late 1960s. NeitherLittle nor Langmuir were Jewish themselves, nor were they trained as Jewish historians, butboth saw the question as vital and important in the context of twentieth-century genocidegenerally and the Holocaust in particular. Langmuir of course went on to profoundly shapethe field through the articles collected in his Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley,1990). See also Gavin Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Berkeley, 1993).47Ibid., 285.


Christianity found in Roschers and Sombarts narratives. Roschers Jewishnarrative began with the opposition between a commercialized Jewish nationand the noncommercial Germanic tribes; Sombarts counterposed the capi-talistic profit motive of Judaism with Christian anticapitalism.48 Despite thefact that the German historical schools analyses of economic developmentare antiquated, their definition of profit economy and their association of thateconomy with Jews and Judaism is still operative. Duby, Lopez, and Little allintegrated Roschers Jewish narrative into their seminal monographs, ensur-ing that the narrative remained alive even as the historical schools theoreticalframework has been forgotten.49

Beyond Gift/Profit: Christian/Jew

The gift has been a particularly rich theoretical concept, and contempo-rary anthropological literature has moved beyond the formulations currentbetween the late 1960s and late 1970s when Duby and Little were writ-ing.50 Anthropologists have worked and reworked the concepts of gift,gift exchange, and gift economy. Most recently they have deconstructedthe binary opposition between gift and profit and queried the universalityof the cultural meaning of money. A recent collection edited by JonathanParry and Maurice Bloch contests the Weberian assumption that money inall cultures is an alienable commodity that generates anonymity betweeneconomic agents, a placeholder of economic value that can be substitutedwith any equal placeholder, and a causal agent of modernizing change. Thecross-cultural studies in Parry and Blochs collection deconstruct not only thebinary gift/profit but other binaries linked with them as well: non-money

48Sombart maintains a more gradual narrative of stages of economic development in his workon capitalism. See esp. Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus.49Duby, Early Growth, 6061, 1012, 218, 23132, 241, 255; Lopez, Commercial Revolutionof the Middle Ages, 6062; Little, Religious Poverty, 4257. See also the discussion of ideason Judaism and capitalism in Stehr and Grundmann, introduction to Sombart, Economic Lifein the Modern Age, xxxiiixl.50Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago, 1972); Annette Weiner, Inalienable Pos-sessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley, 1992), and Women of Value, Menof Renown: New Perspectives in Trobriand Exchange (Austin, TX, 1976); Marilyn Strath-ern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melane-sia (Berkeley, 1988); Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, andColonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, 1991); Alain Caill, Don, intrt et dsintressement:Bourdieu, Mauss, Platon et quelques autres (Paris, 1994); Maurice Godelier, The Enigma ofthe Gift (Chicago, 1999); Jacques Godbout and Alain Caill, The World of the Gift (Montreal,1998); James Carrier, Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700(London, 1995); and David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The FalseCoin of Our Own Dreams (New York, 2001).

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economy / money economy; premodern/modern; communal concern / self-interest; and religion/economy. But these anthropologists have left the Euro-pean sphere untouched, surmising that money may have worked in Europe inthe ways that the classic theorists said it did.51

The next two sections of this article will apply the theoretical critiquesof gift and profit and the studies of cross-cultural meanings of money toLatin and Hebrew exempla (short moral tales).52 The authors of the Latin ex-empla come principally from the orders of the Cistercians and Franciscans,known for their innovations in economic theory and practice. Their Latintexts will be paired with a prime example of medieval Hebrew exempla,Sefer H. asidim, whose author has often been compared with St. Francis.

53

A close reading of passages concerned with coins and commodities will beused to elucidate the cultural meanings (mentalits) associated with money.These texts, I suggest, reveal complex concepts of value that cut across binarycategories of gift and profit. In contrast to Little (and the editors of Money,Morality, and Culture), I will argue that money is not feared as an abstractholder of value that is anonymous and impersonal, generating an anonymousand impersonal profit economy. Rather, the medieval authors considered hererecognize metallic currency as an abstract placeholder of economic value andargue against its potential to be anonymous and impersonal. Both the Chris-tian monastics and the Jewish author of Sefer H. asidim argue against the as-sumption that a coin is a coin is a coin by insisting on a moral value thatinheres in coins. Their moral value is determined by the mode of acquisi-tion and governed by the theological definitions of just and unjust price.54

Money with bad moral value is dangerous, both to its owner and to thosethrough whose hands it passes. In its capacity to acquire moral value, moneyacts like a classic Maussian gift, taking on the personal, moral characteristics

51Parry and Bloch, Introduction, 1819. See, e.g., Diana Wood, ed., Medieval Money Mat-ters (Oxford, 2004); John Munro, ed., Money in the Pre-industrial World: Bullion, Debase-ments, and Coin Substitutes (London, 2012). These are both very fine collections by eco-nomic historians. My point is not to deny the classic functions attributed to money by earlyeconomists, but to suggest that historians ought also to consider the cultural history of money,particularly when discussing economic thought.52Particularly important for me have been the cross-cultural essays in Parry and Bloch, Moneyand the Morality of Exchange; Jonathan Parry, The Gift, the Indian Gift, and the IndianGift, Man, n.s., 21 (1986): 45373; and Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory ofValue.53Yitzhak Baer, Ha-Megamah ha-Datit ha-H. evratit shel Sefer H. asidim [The religious-socialorientation of Sefer H. asidim], Zion 3 (1937): 150.54On just price, see John Baldwin, The Medieval Theories of the Just Price: Romanists,Canonists, and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Transactions of theAmerican Philosophical Society, n.s., 49, pt. 4 (Philadelphia, 1959). Just price is definedin the Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metziah 40b.


of its owners. What the authors of these medieval religious texts feared wasthe potential for a disjuncture, a disequilibrium, between economic value andmoral value. Money in this medieval thinking is neither causal agent nor sym-bolic representation of profit economy. Ultimately, then, this refined readingof their anxiety challenges the very categories of gift economy and profiteconomy. Deconstructing a clear binary of gift and profit in religious think-ing in the chronological period central to Littles account challenges us toreconsider the grand narrative of a radical shift from gift economy to profiteconomy. The comparison of Latin and Hebrew texts deconstructs what haveremained half-conscious linkages between Judaism and profit, on the onehand, and Christianity and gift, on the other hand, challenging us to recon-sider how we configure Jews into narratives of commercialization.

II

The genre of exempla flowered in the thirteenth century along with a newinterest in preaching to the laity initiated by the mendicant orders.55 Theseshort moral tales probably often originated in oral culture, and much likejokes they circulated far and wide and changed in the telling. When pre-served in a collection by literate clerics, the exempla became part of literateculture. But when used by preachers to juice up their sermons, these taleswere transported back into oral culture. Often variants of exempla can betraced across sweeps of space and time, much like folktales. Consequently,the exempla collections are richer, more multivocal cultural artifacts than theelite texts of high theology or philosophy. Unlike folktales, however, exemplawere shared and shaped for specific didactic ends. Essential to their didacticforce is their status as fact, however miraculous their content. This com-bination of factors makes them an ideal source for exploring cultural ideasabout money and profit.

The Latin exempla used here originate from the entire span of western Eu-rope over a century and a half or more. This diffuse geographical and chrono-logical range means that the exempla speak with a multiplicity of voices(which my academic argument may mute in its quest for larger patterns).The Hebrew collection Sefer H. asidim, on the other hand, is one of our fewfull-fledged collections of Hebrew exempla, though Hebrew exempla can be

55For an overview of the genre of exempla and their historical development, see Claude Bre-mond, Jacques Le Goff, and Jean-Claude Schmitt, L Exemplum, Typologies des sourcesdu Moyen ge Occidental 40 (Turnhout, 1982); Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo deBeaulieu, eds., Les Exempla mdivaux: Nouvelles perspectives (Paris, 1998).

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found scattered in responsa and in texts on customs, ethics, and mysticism.56

Sefer H. asidim shares a close historical context with one of the Latin col-lections used most heavily below, Dialogus Miraculorum. Both date to thefirst quarter of the thirteenth century and were two of the earliest collectionscomposed. Both originated in German-speaking regions. Sefer H. asidim wascomposed by a rabbinic authority (or authorities), principally Judah the Pious(Yehudah he-H. asid), in the town of Regensburg.

57 Dialogus Miraculorumwas composed by a Cistercian monk, Caesarius of Heisterbach, in an outly-ing region of Cologne.58 This shared historical context supports the argumentfor a shared culture.

Moral Value

A humorous exemplum from the late thirteenth-century English collectionSpeculum Laicorum provides a good illustration of the moral value adher-ing to coins.59 The exemplum tells of a man who made his fortune through

56For a general introduction to Sefer H. asidim, see Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale: History,Genre, Meaning, trans. Jacqueline Teitelbaum (Bloomington, IN, 1999), 28397; Israel Zin-berg, A History of Jewish Literature (Cleveland, OH, 1972), 2:3556. There is a rich secondaryliterature on Sefer H. asidim and the H. asidei Ashkenaz; see, e.g., Ivan Marcus, Piety and Soci-ety: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany (Leiden, 1981); Baer, Ha-Megamah ha-Datitha-H. evratit shel Sefer H. asidim; Haym Soloveitchik, Three Themes in the Sefer H. asidim,AJS Review 1 (1976): 31157; E. Yassif, Ha-Sipur ha-eksemplari be-Sefer H. asidim [Theexemplary tale in Sefer H. asidim], Tarbiz 57 (1987/1988): 21755; Talya Fishman, The Pen-itential System of H. asidei Ashkenaz and the Problem of Cultural Boundaries, Journal ofJewish Thought and Philosophy 8 (1999): 20129; Haym Soloveitchik, Piety, Pietism, andGerman Pietism: Sefer H. asidim I and the influence of H. asidei Ashkenaz, Jewish QuarterlyReview 92, no. 3/4 (2002): 45593; Tamar Alexander-Frizer, The Pious Sinner: Ethics andAesthetics in the Medieval Hasidic Narrative (Tbingen, 1991). Many of the passages dis-cussed in this article are also discussed with reference to social justice in Abraham Cronbach,Social Thinking in the Sefer H. asidim, Hebrew Union College Annual 22 (1949): 1147.57Modern scholarship on Sefer H. asidim generally refers to two recensions, the Bolognaprinted edition and the Parma manuscript. The following notes cite the Parma text from thepublished edition Sefer H. asidim, ed. Judah Wistinetzki (Frankfurt am Main, 1924), hereafterSHP, and the Bologna text from Sefer H. asidim, ed. Reuven Margoliot (Jerusalem, 1964), here-after SHB. Full information on the recensions and the 14 manuscripts and printed editionsbelonging to either SHP, SHB, or a mixture of the two is available through the Princeton Uni-versity Sefer H. asidim Database (PUSHD), https://etc.princeton.edu/sefer_hasidim/index.php.I thank Edward Fram for making me aware of this new resource. Despite the variations amongthe manuscripts and early printed editions, Sefer H. asidim is generally considered the work ofJudah the Pietist. Some versions, however, begin with the short work Sefer ha-Yirah [Bookof the proper fear of God] by R. Samuel the Pietist, R. Judah the Pietists father.58Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum (Cologne, 1851).59Jean-Thibaut Welter, ed., Le Speculum Laicorum (Paris, 1914), 6, no. 14. This exemplum isfound in many collections with minor variations. The earliest that I know of comes from a late

https://etc.princeton.edu/sefer_hasidim/index.php


unjust means of acquisition. Wishing to revisit Flanders, the land of hisbirth, he converted all his worldly wealth into gold and set sail on a ship. Hebrought along a tame ape he intended as a gift for his lord. When the shipwas in the middle of the sea, the ape seized his bag of gold coins and scaledthe mast. Opening the bag, the ape held each coin in turn to his nose, as ifhe were smelling them. He threw most of the coins in the sea, but a few hethrew on to the ships deck. When the apes owner learned of this, he wishedto throw himself in the sea. But a wise old man among the company stoppedhim, saying, The ape is just, for that which was unjust he destroyed andthat which was just he preserved. So collect those which were preserved andcease weeping for that which was less than justly acquired.60

The coins were anonymous and impersonal on the surface: they all lookedthe same, and they were all mixed up in a single bag. But the ape sortingthe coins by smelling them dramatizes the didactic point that not all coinsare alike. Superficially their economic value is evident and equivalent, buttheir moral value depends upon the mode of acquisition. Coins that wereacquired in an unjust way quite literally stink. We are not told what the il-licit economic activity was, and different versions cast the tale differently.The Speculum Laicorum categorizes it under unjust acquisition. Anotherversion categorizes it more loosely and describes the principal character asa Flemish merchant who made his fortune against canonical decree (contrasententiam Cardinalis) at the taking of Constantinople in 1204.61 The old-est version, that in the French Tabula Exemplorum, probably compiled by aFranciscan, cast the principal character as a pilgrim but categorizes the taleunder the rubric usury.62 The potential for using bad money for a sa-cred journey heightens the danger, just as the stench of the coins heightensthe central didactic function of the exemplum: to underscore the differencebetween economic value and moral value. The nature of the illicit activityitself is a lesser issue, as the nebulous character of the mode of acquisitionand the shifting contours of the characters and settings clarify. The exemplumrather plays off the audiences supposition that all coins are alike. It dislodgesthe anonymity and impersonal nature of the coins by insisting on the moralspecificity that adheres to each one.

thirteenth-century French collection drawn on heavily by Speculum Laicorum: Jean-ThibautWelter, ed., Tabula Exemplorum Secundum Ordinem Alphabeti (Paris, 1926), 83, no. 306.60Speculum Laicorum, 6, no. 14.61J. A. Herbert, ed., Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the BritishMuseum (London, 1910), 3:497, describing the manuscript Royal D7i. The reference is possi-bly to canon 24 of the Third Lateran Council (1179), which forbade Christians from profitingby providing arms to Saracens or serving as captains or pilots in their galleys or pirate ships.See Norman Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London, 1990), 1:223.62Tabula Exemplorum, 83, no. 306.

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The juxtaposition between the ape and the merchant is a careful liter-ary construction that underscores the tales central concerns. The exemplumdraws on rich symbolic motives connected with apes in medieval art: thefigure of the ape as fallen man, sinful, sunk in animal appetites, lacking ra-tio; the figure of the tame, fettered ape whose antics amused the audiencesof jongleurs and musicians and whose chains symbolized for moralists hu-mankinds fetters to animal desires; the ape in the monde reverse of gothicmarginalia whose mimicking of human actions amused and delighted itsviewers; the ape as fool, folly, and vanitas.63 The visual image of the apeseizing its owners moneybag, scaling the mast, melodramatically smellingthe coins, and throwing the coins into the sea must have raised a chucklefrom a medieval audience used to viewing the antics of apes as amusement.But by sorting the bad coins from the good, the roles of ape and human arereversed. The ape, sinful and desirous, lacking reason, sees beyond the facevalue of the coin to its inherent moral value. The man, blinded by his avarice,mistakes a coin for a coin for a coin. The ape, playing the holy fool, purgesthe purse of its ill-gotten gain and thereby purges its master of bad money.

Here money is neither anonymous nor impersonal, as modern social andeconomic theory would have it. Nor is money unequivocally evil for me-dievals, as some historians have suggested. The exemplum starts from theassumption that money is an abstract holder of value. But both the humorof the exemplum and its deadly serious didactic lesson work to negate thepresumption that all coins are equal. Its lesson: that one ought not forget thatmoral value is created by the economic mode of acquisition; that those coinstainted with ill deeds ought to be cast aside and destroyed.

Destruction

The ape destroys the bad coins simply because they are tainted. But otherexempla warn explicitly of the danger bad coins pose through contact and cir-culation. The early thirteenth-century Cistercian collection Dialogus Mira-culorum composed by Caesarius of Heisterbach describes the danger posedto good money by contact with bad money.

A usurer once entrusted a certain sum of money to a cellarer ofour Order to keep for him. He sealed up this money and put it inthe safe by the side of the monastery money. Later when the otherreclaimed his deposit, the cellarer, unlocking the safe, found thatboth it and the monastery money had disappeared. Now when he

63H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London, 1952),chaps. 47.


found that the locks of the safe were untouched, and the seals ofthe bags unbroken, so that there could be no suspicion of theft, heunderstood that the money of the usurer had destroyed both themonastery money and itself.64

The money literally consumed itself after consuming the monasterys money.The exemplum illustrates the point that money acquired by usury not onlydiminishes but is destructive as well. In the commentary following the ex-emplum, the narrator (depicted as a Cistercian monk training a novice) statesthat bad money quickly fails in itself and sometimes destroys that whichis mixed or associated with it. Not only should one not give safe harbor tothe money of usurers: one should also guard against contact with it. For theproperty of a monastery is not only not increased, but actually diminishedby the alms of usury.65 Like the classic gift in Marcel Mausss essay, thecoin carries with it a part of its owner: bad moral value circulates under thecover of economic value.66 Bad moral value is dangerous because it spreadsby contact. The exemplum forms part of a larger set of teachings that con-sider gray areas around usurious money: alms generated from usury, handlingmoney acquired through usury in economic transactions, safe harbor givento a usurers money. The point for our historical purpose is clear: while eachcoin looks like another, the mode of acquisition marks each coin with a differ-ent moral value. Ill-gotten gain is dangerous, but money in and of itself is not.

The destructive quality of bad coins spreads beyond material objects tohuman agents. Usurers and misers meet untimely and graphic deaths throughthe bags and chests holding their money. In an early fourteenth-century ex-empla collection, a usurer plays with his money while his people go tochurch. One day the lid of his money-chest falls on him, and his peopleon returning find him dead within the chest.67 An often-repeated exemplumreports the death of a usurer in Dijon. As he was being betrothed before thechurch portal, the stone statue of a usurer threw his bag of money on to thehead of the living usurer and killed him instantly.68 The usurer was quiteliterally knocked off by money bags.

64Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, 1:108, no. 34, translated by H. vonE. Scott and C. C. Bland as The Dialogue on Miracles (London, 1929), 1:121, no. 34.65Ibid.66See, e.g., the discussion on the spirit of the thing given in Mauss, The Gift, 1013.67Herbert, Catalogue of Romances, 3:548, no. 106.68Stephanus de Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, lgendes et apologues, tirs du recueil inditdEtienne de Bourbon, Dominicain du XIIIe Sicle (Paris, 1877), 60, no. 53. This exemp-lum also appears in the thirteenth-century Liber de dono timoris, the early fourteenth-centuryAlphabetum narrationem, and the fifteenth-century English translation of the Alphabetum nar-rationem (London, 1904), 349, no. 515. For the full references, see Frederic Tubach, IndexExemplorum: A Handbook of Medieval Religious Tales (Helsinki, 1969), 381, no. 5044.

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Other Latin exempla equate the danger of dirty money to that of com-modities with bad economic value. One tells of a man whose soul wasclaimed by devils because he died wearing a coat that once belonged to ausurer.69 The moral character of the possessors attaches to their possessions.Here the contagion spreads from person to person, and the locus of bad moralvalue is not a coin but a coat. The equivalency of commodities and currencyis yet another indication of the sophistication of the economic thought of themedieval monastics. They recognize the principle of abstract economic valuewhile insisting on the presence of moral value. All of the above exemplainsist on the moral difference between coins and attempt to diminish the dan-gerous differential between moral value and economic value through moralexhortation.

These rather crude miracles can contain highly sophisticated theolog-ical principles. The exemplum in which a usurers coins consumed themonasterys coins plays upon the intellectual and theological definition ofmetallic currency as a nonproductive thing. Metallic currency does not gen-erate or produce itself. It has no body, and therefore it neither consumes norproduces. Nor can it be consumed or made to reproduce. The miracle of theexemplum is a reversal of nature. (This is, in fact, the definition of a miracle.)It is a supernatural occurrence for a nonbodied thing to consume a nonbod-ied thing. And the unnatural consumption reveals the truth of the unnaturalact of usury. Usury produces money from money. Hence, in the miracle, theusurers money devours money. To this, the additional horror is added of athing consuming itself. So the usurers money becomes embodied in the fullmeaningit produces, consumes, and is consumed. And each of these acts,we are to understand, is unnatural. But the process of consumption rectifiesthe unnatural process of usury by reversing the production of profit.

Redemption

In a more gruesome tale, the usurer himself is devoured by the fruits of hisusury. Touched by divine mercy, the repentant usurer went to a priest, madeconfession, and promised to give all his goods to the poor to appease God.The priest instructed him to take alms from some of his loaves of bread andplace them in a chest. The next morning when the chest was opened, the almshad turned to reptiles, the food of hell. The didactic aim of the exemplum isclear: money acquired by usury cannot be used for alms. Terrified by thedivine rejection of his offering, the usurer begged the priest to tell him whathe must do to be saved. The priest instructed him to lie naked among thereptiles all night. The usurer agreed, and the priest closed him in the box and

69Herbert, Catalogue of Romances, 3:476, no. 67.


left. In the morning, nothing was found but a skeleton. It was buried in theporch of the church of the martyr St. Gereon, and it is said that the bonesare of so great sanctity that up to this day no living reptile has been able topass them.70 The unnatural act of usury is underscored by the unnaturalnessof the miracle: bread devours the body rather than the body devouring bread.The earthly suffering seems to substitute for eternal suffering. The usurer isredeemed, but his property is not.

In another tale, however, alms were given from the possessions of a usurerand were not rejected. The narrator of Dialogus Miraculorum, who tells thetales for the instruction of a novice, explains that in this other case, a usureron his deathbed had begged an abbot to take over the care of his soul. Theusurer, carried to the monastery with all his goods, promptly died. The ab-bot, not unmindful of his promise, took pains to restore the products of usuryas far as he possibly could and bestowed bountiful alms for the soul of theusurer; the rest he used for the good of the convent. But, the novices teacheremphasized, if contrition had been lacking, his alms would have profitedhim but little.71 The negative moral value of the usurers property had beenredeemed by his contrition and restitution before positive moral value hadbeen purchased with alms. Only because restitution of ill-gotten gains hadfirst been made by agency of the abbot were his alms acceptable.

Giving of alms without contrition never diminishes the disequilibrium be-tween moral and economic value. Contrition begins as sincere repentance,but it must be completed through some kind of mortification (except whenthe sinner dies too quickly, as in the example above). Another exemplum tellsof a repentant usurer who was instructed by a bishop to give all his money forthe building of the Church of Notre Dame. The usurer, uncomfortable withthis advice, asked a precentor what he should do. First he was instructed tomake restitution to all from whom he had taken more than was due. Onlyfrom what was left over might he give alms. Then he was instructed to dopenance by walking naked through the streets shamed by a servant.72 Badmoney must be redeemed through restitution, and bad moral value throughcontrition.

These Latin exempla all recognize that: (1) Money (metallic currency) isan abstract holder of economic value and, in this respect, it is anonymousand impersonal.73 (2) In addition to economic value, it has moral value that

70Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, 1067; Scott and Bland, Dialogue onMiracles, 1:118-9.71Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, 1035; Scott and Bland, Dialogue onMiracles, 1:11618.72Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, 1078.73These attributes have been recognized by historians of economic thought: Wood, MedievalEconomic Thought, 6988.

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is generated by the mode of acquisition. Bad moral value makes coinage andcommodities dangerous and destructive. (3) Bad money, i.e., money withbad moral value, cannot be cleansed by a good economic deed (alms). (4) Al-though restitution must be made, it is not enough. The sinner must do penancefor the bad moral value. Some exempla, particular those from Caesarius ofHeisterbach, also show awareness of the high theological and intellectualdefinition of coins as nonproductive holders of value that neither producenor consume nor are consumed. In sum, money in the medieval worldviewof regular clergy is neither simply impersonal, anonymous, and abstract, norsimply a dangerous evil that corrodes society. Rather, the danger that lurksin coins arises from the potential for disjuncture between its economic facevalue and its inherent moral value.

III

Shared Culture: Moral Value

The general contours of this mentalit emerge in the Hebrew exempla as well.Bad moral value is created through unjust acquisition or ungenerous hoardingand bad money becomes dangerous, just as in the Latin exempla. For moralvalue adheres to the material coins acquired unjustly and those held or usedungenerously. Speaking of misers and usurers, Sefer H. asidim says: One whois a miser, or who deposits his money with another without allowing them tomake a profit from him or who will not lend anything of his own to another,or one who takes usury (ribit): those into whose hands that mans moneycomes never will prosper; either they will die or they will become poor.74

This exemplum recognizes the face value of the coinsthat is, the economic

74SHP, 1233; SHB, 1075. In pairing usury and miserliness, the passage in Sefer H. asidim goesbeyond the unjust acquisition portrayed in the Latin exemplum involving the merchant andthe ape with which it is likened here. This may reflect a subtle difference between the con-ceptual categories of sin in Sefer H. asidim and the Latin exempla discussed above. While theLatin texts would categorize both usury and miserliness under avarice, the linkage may bemore tightly constructed in Judaism. Two examples: the Hebrew word tzedak has a range ofmeaning, stretching from justice to charity. Exodus 22:2426, one of the biblical passageskey for the definition of the halakhah on usury, speaks explicitly about tempering ones gainwith mercy when dealing with the needy. It is possible that the tight coalescence of these con-cepts in Hebrew language and law generates a moral dictum more tightly interwoven in SeferH. asidim than in the Christian texts. While the minor variations between medieval EuropeanChristianity and Judaism are not unimportant, the principal point here emphasized is theirgeneral similarity. Both Sefer H. asidim and the Christian exempla regard the immoral actionof the coins possessor as inhering in the physical coins.


value that is equivalent from coin to coin. But the exemplum insists on thenegative moral value created through unjust acquisition or ungenerous use.

While economic value is anonymous and impersonal (a coin is a coin is acoin), moral value is highly personal and dangerous. All those through whosehands the money passes are endangered. The concluding lines of the passagefrom the Parma text of Sefer H. asidim refer to the money acquired throughthese acts as menudeh, which can be translated as untouchable or evenexcommunicated. Here money itself becomes a repository for moral value.The negative moral value of the coins remains even when it circulates beyondthe wrongdoers: It is decreed on that money (in whoevers hand it comes)that it will be lost.75 Money with negative moral value becomes dangerous,because that negative value circulates through the coins.

Another passage warns against coins with bad mazal (fortune or fate):One should not take money from many people [for the purpose of] mak-ing a profit with it, lest the mazal of another cause him to lose what he hasin his hands, even the money of others that he has in his hands. For thereis a man who in every instance that his money touches, in whoevers handsit is, his goods will decrease, or he will die. Therefore one should be care-ful.76 Mazal, moral value, is transferred from person to person through thecoins, just like material value. Like the hau, the spirit of the thing, in MarcelMausss classic study, the mazal of the owner circulates with the coin.77

Shared Culture: Death and Destruction

Sefer H. asidim emphasizes the potential of money to circulate negative value.The refrain therefore one should be careful is used to conclude a number ofpassages. For example: Money of usurers and misers and shaved coins andthat which comes from their moneywhosever hands it touches, his posses-sions will decrease. Therefore one should be careful.78 The most frequentlymentioned danger is that bad money, like a bad apple, will destroy what-ever it touches. At times, Sefer H. asidim warns that one will not only sufferthe destruction of ones worldly goods but also suffer death oneself, as in thepassages quoted above.

The taint of rotten money, Sefer H. asidim often warns, passes beyond thewrongdoer to the wrongdoers business associates, dependents, and support-ers: One who lends on usury (ribit): his money will be destroyed. One whoclips coins or who cheats in weighing, measuring, trade, or in any other way:

75SHP, 1233.76SHB, 1072.77Mauss, The Gift, 11.78SHB, 1073.

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in the end they will become impoverished, and their children will be sepa-rated from each other in a strange land, and they will be needy. All those whoare their associates and all who are their dependents: they will lose theirmoney as will any who assist them.79 Here, Sefer H. asidim emphasizes net-works of economic association, rather than coins, as the medium circulatingnegative moral value. The sinner is linked to children, associates, dependents,and benefactors not by a market exchange but by economic circles of con-sumption, association, or support. The distinction resembles the one madeby Karl Polanyi between formal and substantive meanings of economic, inwhich formal refers to market exchange and substantive to cycles of reci-procity and redistribution.80 In the economic conceptions of Sefer H. asidim,coins carry bad moral value across market exchanges, and bad moral valuecompletely permeates substantive economic networks.

This subtle distinction may be particular to Sefer H. asidim. But the kernelof the exemplum contains the same principle asserted in the Latin exemplumin which a dead mans soul was carried off by devils because he was wearinga usurers coat: enjoyment of the fruit of an unjust gain brings down heav-enly punishment appropriate to that gain, whether one committed the unjustact or not. Both the Latin and the Hebrew exempla mark out moral value,alongside economic value, and warn of the dangers.

Objects too tainted by negative moral value will suffer destruction in Se-fer H. asidim, just as the usurers money devoured itself in Dialogus Miracu-lorum. If you see books being burnt, know that in sin they were acquired, orin sin they came to the hands of the owners fathers, or they were not loaned toothers desiring to study them, or they were not written for their own sake.81

Books are burned when acquired unjustly or composed unjustly. Unjust ac-quisition, unjust use, or a profit motive in their making becomes bound upwith the materiality of the books: their loss and their owners impoverish-ment are the result of the owners or their ancestors sins.82

The Hebrew exempla, like the Latin exempla, treat commodities no differ-ently than metallic currency. Both contain economic value and moral value.Economic value is created through an economic act, and moral value is cre-ated through either an act or a failure to act. Both commodities and currencycirculate moral value together with economic value. One such exemplum,fascinating for its description of Jewish participation in urban crafts, contrasts

79SHP, 1233; SHB, 1076 (my emphasis).80Karl Polanyi, Economy as an Instituted Process, in Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson,Trade and Market, 13974.81SHP, 677, SHB, 871. See also SHP, 673, SHB, 869.82On the sacralization of books in Sefer H. asidim, see Talya Fishman, The Rhineland PietistsSacralization of Oral Torah, Jewish Quarterly Review 96, no. 1 (2006): 916.


a bad Jewish employer (perhaps a master craftsman) with a good Christianemployer.83

One man did not allow his workers to leave their work until sun-down, and these craftsmen were Jewish. Nearby was a non-Jewwho let his workers go before sundown. On erev Shabat, the Jewwould oppress his Jewish and Christian craftsmen, making themwork until it was time to go to the synagogue, even until it wastime to say the barechu.84 But the non-Jew let his hired labor-ers and workers go on erev Shabat a full hour before evening.The sage said, I would be surprised if the buildings of the Jewremain standing or if they are inherited by his heirs. And further-more, the non-Jew paid his workers in a spirit of goodwill (be-ayinyafah), while the Jew postponed payment. God did not restrainhimself [from punishing] all this. And it happened according tothe words of the sage: the building of the non-Jew was inheritedby his heirs.85

Like Latin exempla that move effortlessly between coins, coats, and bread,this Hebrew exemplum moves between the economic value of labor and theeconomic value inherent in capital. Moreover, the sophistication in notions ofeconomic value is matched by the sophistication in notions of moral value.Negative moral value is generated not just through hoarding, cheating, orusury but also through the more nebulous act of oppressing laborers by beingstingy, either in paying wages or in releasing laborers from work. Like theLatin exempla, the Hebrew exempla attempt to inculcate positive values intheir audience by demonstrating the real danger that lurks in negative moralvalue.

Conversely, good moral value can generate economic gain. In the samecluster of exempla, Sefer H. asidim defines good moral value in relation togenerosity, but generosity is not set in opposition to commercial ventures orprofit.

One who is liberal with his money toward others so that they mayprofit from him, and he is happy and loans on half profit and is

83SHP, 1499.84The barechu is the liturgical formula that marks the beginning of the evening prayer service.In the thirteenth century, the evening prayers on erev Shabbat would have begun with thebarechu, as the Kabbalat Shabbat was developed later by the early modern Kabbalists. Thescenario here seems to be one in which the Jewish employer kept his craftsmen at work untilmoments before Shabbat began. Had he kept them longer he would have been violating theShabbat, but the general sense of the exemplum seems to tell against this. The sin is one ofstinginess, not of Shabbat violation.85SHP, 1499.

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not miserly toward others who may benefit by him and welcomesguests warmly: all those into whose hands his money comes willprosper. Such was the case with the money of Job. Whoever tooka prutah from Job had luck with it (Bava Batra 15b).86

The reference here to lending on half profit is a standard commercial loan(iska) permitted in rabbinic law, which parallels the Christian commenda.87

The commenda, historians often note, did not violate the canonical laws onusury because the investor shared the risk. But this passage in Sefer H. asidimemphasizes sharing profit, rather than sharing risk. The investor, by provid-ing a source of livelihood to another, becomes like a generous host welcom-ing guests into his home. The coins of the investor, like the penny of Job,have good mazal. Judah the Pious deploys Talmudic proof texts (here themidrash on Job from Bava Batra)88 and, repeatedly, Talmudic principles,such as midah ke-neggd midah. But by framing these in new contexts andby virtue of writing a new text in a new historiocultural context, the authorof Sefer H. asidim makes them medieval and European. The economic issueswith which Judah the Pious grappled were ones shared by Christian authorsin western Europe. The answers that he devised were built out of rabbinicprecepts and rooted in rabbinic texts, but they moved, all the same, in a tra-jectory shared with Christian authors.

Shared Culture: Redemption

Sefer H. asidim shares in the religious culture of medieval Europe in one par-ticularly striking way. It too developed an economic system that fused materi-ality and morality in a penitential logic. In many passages in Sefer H. asidim,penitential practices are directed by a sage (h. asid). External evidence forthe practice of penance is attested by the penitential manuals of the H. asideiAshkenaz, and at least one prominent scholar considers penance as the onlydecisive influence that Sefer H. asidim had on Ashkenazic Judaism.

89 As inthe Latin exempla, Sefer H. asidim insists on the insufficiency of alms alone

86SHP, 1233; SHB, 1075.87On the iska, see Hillel Gamoran, Jewish Law in Transition: How Economic Forces Over-came the Prohibition against Lending on Interest (Cincinnati, 2008), 13275, and Investingfor Profit: A Study of Iska up to the Time of Rabbi Abraham ben David of Posquieres, He-brew Union College Annual 7071 (19992000): 15365. On the commenda and its historicaldevelopment, see Lopez, Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 7379; Norman J. G.Pounds, An Economic History of Medieval Europe, 2nd ed. (New York, 1994), 42225.88Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 15b.89On penance among the H. asidei Ashkenaz, see Marcus, Piety and Society; Fishman, Peni-tential System. On Hebrew penitentials in manuscript, see Ivan Marcus, H. asidei AshkenazPrivate Penitentials: An Introduction and Descriptive Catalogue of Their Manuscripts and


as a means of rectification. Restitution of ill-gotten gains can be a part of thepenance, but penance must encompass physical mortification. Rotten moneycannot redeem a sin through its own exchange. The following exempla onviolating the Shabbat illustrate this principle.

A Jewish merchant had a cart loaded with garments. When he reached thetown where he wished to sell them, his cart broke down. As it was Friday,he sanctified the Shabbat at the inn there. But when marauders entered thetown that evening, pillaging homes, the merchant acted to save his merchan-dise. He fixed the cart and harnessed horses, even though he was violatingthe strictures against working on Shabbat. In the meantime, messengers ofthe king came and ordered the marauders not to take anything from Jews.

When the Jewish merchant returned home, he went to a sage whoinstructed him how to make full penance. The sage said to him,Fill the cart with the same quantity of garments; place your handon the earth, and have them pass the wheel over your hand; andgive the money that you received for the garments to charity orhire [a scribe] to copy books . . . . Let orphans and the children ofpoor who cannot afford books read them . . . . If there is any moneyleft over, give it to [the poor] who are children of good men andashamed to accept [charity] openly.90

Negative moral value must be redeemed through the penance of physicalsuffering and the dispersal of economic value equivalent to that for whichthe merchant violated the Shabbat. The bad moral value of the garments isredeemed by using their economic value to produce books that are circu-lated among the poor. (Only the leftover money is distributed to the righteouspoor.) But the act of giving away the value of the goods is not enough: asin the Latin exempla, where usurers must both make restitution and showtrue contrition, usually through bodily mortification, here too the dispersal ofeconomic value must be joined to a physical penance.91

In another exemplum, a man violated the Shabbat by carrying money.(The act of carrying in public space, but not in private space, on Shabbat

Early Editions, in Studies in Jewish Mysticism, ed. Joseph Dan and Frank Talmage (Cam-bridge, MA, 1982), 5783. For an evaluation of the influence of Sefer H. asidims penitentialsystem (and its lack of other types of influence), see Soloveitchik, Piety, Pietism, and GermanPietism.90SHP, 630.91Both the Latin and Hebrew texts make a distinction between restitution and

cultural meanings of money in medieval ashkenaz: on gift, profit, and value in medieval judaism and...

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