Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

Wealth and Poverty

The Poor and Their Relief in the Mishnah

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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.

Judaism and the Economy: A Sourcebook

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I am delighted to announce the publication of my (edited) volume, Judaism and the Economy: A Sourcebook.  Here’s the publisher’s description:

Judaism and the Economy is an edited collection of sixty-nine Jewish texts relating to economic issues such as wealth, poverty, inequality, charity, and the charging of interest. The passages cover the period from antiquity to the present, and represent many different genres. Primarily fresh translations, from their original languages, many appear here in English for the first time. Each is prefaced by an introduction and the volume as a whole is introduced by a synthetic essay.

These texts, read together and in different combinations, provide a new lens for thinking about the economy and make the case that religion and religious values have a place in our own economic thinking. Judaism and the Economy is a useful new resource for educators, students, and clergy alike.

The contributors, and their contributions, are tremendous.  So have your library order the hardback and you can order the (significantly less expensive) paperback.  It should interest anyone thinking or teaching about the intersection of religion and the economy.

Routledge: https://www.routledge.com/Judaism-and-the-Economy-A-Sourcebook/Satlow/p/book/9780815353232

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0815353235?pf_rd_p=d1f45e03-8b73-4c9a-9beb-4819111bef9a&pf_rd_r=CV4JR1XXYWFEE62SKVSP

 

What is “Money”?

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The Supreme Court recently heard a case that turns on the meaning of “money”: What counts as “money compensation” for the purpose of a particular kind of taxation?  The case seems abstruse and the write-up at Scotus Blog is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the issue – or at least the real heart of the issue – goes back to antiquity.

The Hebrew Bible prohibits the charging of interest.  There are a few versions of this prohibition (Exodus 22:25, Leviticus 25:36-37), each of which defines its scope differently.  The version in Deuteronomy 23:19 reads:

You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent. (Translation NRSV)

This verse seems to clear up a problem that pops up in the other versions, which is what the prohibition of interest actually applies to.  According to Deuteronomy, not only am I prohibited from charging interest on monetary loans that I make, but even on food.  I am to get back exactly what I lent, with no profit or recompense for the opportunity cost that I pay for the time during which I cannot use the money or stuff I lent.  So far so good, but this opens another question: What, exactly, is “interest”?  Is it only money?

In a complicated chapter in the Mishnah, the rabbis of antiquity sought to answer this question.  Mishnah Bava Metzia, chapter 5, begins with a straightforward case of what we would consider monetary interest: I lend you money on condition that you return to me more money than I lent you.  It is not sufficient, though, to stop there.  The Mishnah goes on to discuss cases in which a lender may benefit in other ways from the loan.  Can a lender, for example, live for free in the house of the borrower while the loan is outstanding? (No.)  Can I take a down payment from you on a field but continue to use it until you bring the balance of the payment? (No.)  Can one set a price for a future delivery of a commodity? (No – because the market price might rise prior to delivery of the goods and thus the seller has profited in a way that the rabbis consider to be “interest.”)  They even consider the case of a loaf of bread:

And Hillel would say thus: A woman may not lend a loaf to her friend until she sets a price for it, lest wheat become more expensive [in the interim], and it turns out they have come to [transgress] usury. (Mishnah Bava Metzia 5:9)

To the rabbis, there are many forms of “compensation” and the law demands for an accounting of each.  Next to their discussion, the one recorded by Scotus Blog looks almost quaint.

Corporations and Covenents

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Photo: https://globalizer.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/

Corporations are legal fictions, and recent ones at that.  Growing out of royal and governmental “charters” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, governments gave to individuals the right to create a legal body – a legal “person” – distinct from themselves but yet which they own and control.  Over the past two centuries corporations have become so ubiquitous that we hardly pause to consider how truly weird and brilliant they are as well as the trade-offs that are inherent to them.

A recent New York Times article revealed that BlackRock, a giant investment firm, is considering telling corporations that they need to demonstrate more social responsibility in order to receive their support.  Although unlikely to cause massive changes in corporate behavior, the move does have the potential to open up a wider conversation about the very nature of corporations and to what extent a nineteenth century legal fiction is suited for the twenty-first century.

Corporations are really one of the truly great human innovations.  Legally separating the “company” from its owners – and thus, most importantly, limiting the legal risk of its owners – sparked a wave of business activity.  Individuals who otherwise might have hesitated to form their own businesses did so, sparking a vast wave of economic growth and the formation of jobs.  Over time, corporations of all types began to acquire additional benefits, such as preferential tax treatment and even a political voice.

Yet all of these benefits come at a societal cost.  The cost of shielding corporate owners from liability claims is the potential for corporate malfeasance in an environment in which no actor can be held personally responsible to the law.  The cost of providing tax benefits is the redirection of resources from public good into the hands of private owners.  The cost of allowing corporations to make political donations is giving their owners another, less transparent, way of influencing public policy.

We, as the society that allows corporations to exist, have been willing to bear these costs because we have decided that the overall costs of supporting those who wish to increase their own wealth are outweighed by the general economic benefit they bring to us all.  In the past, however, that benefit was not weighed entirely in economic terms.  We made an implicit deal with corporations.  We will allow this legal fiction of the corporation to exist and pay the societal costs of your own quest for wealth, but in return you must give back more than simply your legal share of taxes.  You must provide some benefit for the larger society.  This entails in large measure providing a fair and stable environment for your employees in which they not only produce profit for you but also can grown and thrive as individuals.  You must also never forget that you have a responsibility – this is part of our bargain – to do no or minimal social harm.  You can continue to make money at our expense in return, simply, for behaving decently.  A corporation has a covenantal relationship with the society that allows it to exist.

There was no real “golden age” of corporate responsibility, of course.  Yet since the 1970’s the terms of this covenant, such as they were and imagined, have been unraveling.  Responsibility to society is being replaced by responsibility to shareholders; management’s primary responsibility is to deliver maximum profits to the owners.  Employees are disposable tools for profit and corporate responsibility to their larger communities – say, to the environment – is defined as minimal compliance with the laws.  And where those laws interfere overmuch with profits, corporations can aggressively pay to have them changed.  When we take the legal fiction of the corporation for granted we risk forgetting that its very existence mandates a much more capacious sense of corporate responsibility.

BlackRock’s move is narrowly tailored within the discourse of current expectations: corporate responsibility is good because it maximizes profits.  That may or may not be true, but it should encourage us to go much further in recognizing that the legal fiction of incorporation is one side of a deal.  It is a deal in sore need of renegotiation.

 

Poverty and its Relief

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I recently had the opportunity to speak at Connecticut College on the topic of poverty and its relief in Jewish thought.  It was great fun, in part because the discussion helped me to better articulate something that has been bothering me for some time.

The issue is this: Early rabbinic texts define a poverty line, usually as an objective value of assets (which is itself an interesting measure, as opposed to income, which is how we usually calculate it).  If a person owns eligible property (there are some exclusions) of under 200 zuz, s/he is entitled to glean the leftover produce from the field and to receive some other minor forms of relief.  The Mishnah, which promotes this approach, seems quite aware that it is engaged in an academic exercise.  Who, after all, is going to certify that someone has met this standard and how?  Even if there was such a certification (as there was in some medieval Jewish communities) who would check it at the entrance to a field?  There seems to be a subtle acknowledgment of this problem in the very next passage of the Mishnah, that goes on to declare that if someone who is not entitled does glean, s/he will ultimately fall into poverty as a divine punishment.  Poor relief was to work under an honor system “enforced” by the promises of divine threat and reward (for those who do not take relief for which they are eligible).

While all early rabbinic texts are not in complete agreement about this, there is a gradual move over time from an objective definition of poverty to a subjective one.  Medieval and recent rabbinic texts declare that when determining whether someone should be considered poor for the purpose of receiving communal support, the person’s entire context should play a role.

Now – and this is the thing that has been bothering me –  in our society we have given ourselves over entirely to objective measures for the determination of poverty.  There are some rather obvious benefits to such an approach (e.g., it assures equal and just treatment and is potentially efficient) but it has a downside.  Such an approach dehumanizes the poor in two ways.  First, it quite literally considers them only as a set of numbers.  Second, though, it reinforces a system designed to relegate responsibility for our poor to the “government,” away from us.  It turns poor relief in a “commons problem” that allows it to slip between the cracks as few want ownership of it.

Jewish texts (or at least some of them) resist this move in ways that do not map easily onto our modern political approaches.  On the one hand, they assert an absolute obligation on each and every one of us to support the most vulnerable at at least a level of sustenance.  On the other, though, they recognize that such support takes the full humanity of the poor into account, something that is very difficult if not impossible for large, state-scale programs to do.

I do not think that these reflections lead to simple or easy programmatic conclusions.  Some other countries (particularly of Switzerland, which I blogged about here) embed their notion of poor relief in larger social contexts.  There has been much discussion of the role that “mediating institutions” (e.g., faith communities and NGOs) did and can once again play in our civic lives.  Liberals especially tend to downplay the role that these groups can play (when compared to the massive power of the state) but they have the potential of better humanizing poor relief.  I am entirely unsure if transferring more responsibilities of poor relief to them is for better or worse, but I have the feeling that given the current political situation that may increasingly become the reality.