Last month there was a workshop in Jerusalem on charity in rabbinic literature that I was sorry to miss. There has been a great deal of scholarly interest lately on the topic of charity generally in antiquity, among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. While Peter Brown’s book, Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD takes a broad approach to issues that involve charity and aid for the poor in antiquity (while scarcely mentioning Jews), recent books by Alyssa Gray, Gregg Gardner, Yael Wilfand, Noam Zion, and Rivka Ulmer all make solid contributions to thinking about rabbinic attitudes toward the poor and our responsibility to them. A book that I edited, Judaism and the Economy: A Sourcebook contains contributions that further advance our understanding of Jewish ideas and practices of charity from antiquity to the present.
I recently published another essay that deals with this topic from what I think is an unusual angle. It is titled, “The Poor and Their Relief in the Mishnah: An Economic Analysis,” Studies in Judaism, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences 2 (2019): 61-72. I do not have an offprint to share, but below is the Abstract:
The Mishnah, it has long been argued, assumes an economy in “stasis”; the economy is eternal and never-changing. If this is indeed the case, then the Mishnah should neither acknowledge nor promote economic mobility, even among the poor. This paper, which views the Mishnaic portrayals of the poor and of poor-relief through from an economic perspective, largely confirms this conclusion. The Mishnah, I argue, acknowledges a binary class system, “the poor” and everyone else, and sets the poverty line quite high by modern standards. It is assumed that only the situationally poor (i.e., the formerly rich) will move between classes. While, following the Torah, the Mishnah prescribes relief for the poor, it minimizes the amount necessary to be left for the poor while also changing the mechanism of poor relief in a way that reinforces social hierarchy.