The Valuation of Coins in Medieval Jewish Jurisprudence

Abstract

The corpus of Jewish legal writings contains many discussions of economic issues and ideas. Yet, aside from a small group of scholars, historians of economics have tended to ignore the texts of Jewish law. As Ephraim Kleiman (1997) points out, the sheer size and inaccessibility of the Jewish law corpus presents a major barrier. Economic ideas are scattered across a vast amount of material. The canonical text of Jewish law is the Talmud, which spans 2,700 folio pages and two million words. Hundreds of commentaries have been written on the Talmud (or parts of it). There are three major codes of Jewish Law (based on the Talmud and selected commentaries), plus commentaries on the codes and lesser known codes (based on the major codes). About one million responsa (questions and answers in Jewish law) are known to exist; these are collected in hundreds of books. Today, new commentaries and responsa appear each year, in addition to multiple rabbinic journals. In order to understand these materials, the scholar must be well versed in Hebrew, Aramaic, and the reading of the Talmud.

Rabbinical perspectives on money in seventeenth-century Ottoman Egypt

“…If produce prices did not change, and the new coin differs from the old coin in weight by 25% or less, the debtor must pay in new coin exactly the number of coins he borrowed, with no adjustment being made (see Table 5 for a tabular representation). This rule, which we shall call the '25% rule,' is perplexing because it combines an element of valuation by weight with an element of valuation by purchasing power; the commentaries on the Talmud struggled to explain it (Schiffman 2005). …”

The World's First Competitive Business Model (Hint: it was Divine)

“…It should be strongly stated that Levy's democracy role existed in both the first and second commonwealths of Israel. "…the prophet Ezekiel described a map that conveyed, in symbolic form, a vision that is consistent with the ideals of a modern democratic society" [21]. The Bible demands that capitalism with a social contract exists as part of a healthy democracy.…”

“…If many areas had limited access to most basic foods, then an extensive logistic network of transport and merchandising needed to exist. For this to work distribution centers and carting services needed to be formed and these must be geographically distributed-again, based upon the Levite cities [21].…”

“…That is, many cities had quite small population sizes, numbering perhaps hundreds or a thousand persons-and yet may still have qualified as a city. This is highly significant because, if it was defined as one of the 48 Levite cities, then it also had a minimal area, of twelve and one-quarter square kilometers [13,[21][22][23] (the built area plus surrounding parts). That means that in Toto, the tribe of Levy received at least 588 square kilometers of territory (assuming all cities minimally sized, in fact, some were larger).…”

“…These persons were the manpower basis that worked for logistics, industry, management and more [20,21]. These were the entrepreneurs-the ancient "Start-up Nation"-and more than this; they were the human-resource basis for Israel's success in every area.…”