8 - Halakhah, Taboo, and the Origin of Jewish Moneylending in Germany

Summary

I SPENT many of my student years researching both usury and the laws forbidding wine touched by a Gentile (setam yeinam). The first was the subject of my doctorate, the second that of my Master's thesis. I never dreamt, however, that the two might be related. In the late 1990s I began to prepare for publication a much-expanded version of my Master's thesis, and naturally had to read up on the literature that had accumulated on subjects related to viticulture in the thirty years that had elapsed since I had last engaged with the topic. Works from the Arye Maimon Institut für Geschichte der Juden were also beginning to appear, and they changed my perspective on a number of issues. One of them was the possible relationship between the ban on benefiting in any manner from yein nesekh and the fateful Jewish involvement in moneylending. I developed the argument in a book in Hebrew, but presented the gist of it in the following lecture.

SO LARGE A TOPIC AND SO SHORT A LECTURE! Yet it is only appropriate that the thesis be first presented here in Speyer, even though the constraints of the conference allow only twenty-five minutes for its presentation. I am about to offer a bold thesis drawing lines between points stretching over hundreds of years. Most of these points are known to many here, and to some better than to me. More importantly, the lines between these points traverse territories known to many here far better than they are to me. I am an intellectual historian, not an economic one, and by no possible stretch of the imagination a historian of medieval German agriculture. The value of my remarks depends entirely on the degree of persuasive correspondence between the thesis advanced and the data with which many of you here are so intimately familiar.

It is also fitting that the presentation be made here as it draws on the researches of the past two decades of the Trier school generally, and, more specifically, on that of the Arye Maimon Institut für Geschichte der Juden of the University of Trier, which have transformed our understanding of German Jewry in the late Middle Ages and ineluctably challenged some of our received notions of German Jewish history in the high Middle Ages. The case at hand is an excellent example.