The Attitude to Poverty and the Poor in Early Rabbinic Sources (70-250 CE) (original) (raw)

Care for the Poor in Early Rabbinic Literature (2015)

Wealth and Poverty in Jewish Tradition, 2015

Gregg E. Gardner, "Care for the Poor and the Origins of Charity in Early Rabbinic Literature,” Pages 13-32 in Wealth and Poverty in Jewish Tradition. Edited by Leonard J. Greenspoon. of Studies in Jewish Civilization 26. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015.

Pursuing Justice: Support for the Poor in Early Rabbinic Judaism (HUCA 86)

Hebrew Union College Annual, 2016

Treatment of the poor is a central concern of rabbinic Judaism. This paper examines the earliest discussions of allocations to the poor made at the harvest (pe’ah [ פאה , “corner” of a field], gleanings, forgotten produce, etc.) in Tannaitic or early rabbinic literature (especially Mishnah Pe’ah and Tosefta Pe’ah 1:1–4:7). Challenging recent scholarly assessments, I find that these allocations do not constitute “charity” because the householder gives nothing of his own. The framework of social or distributive justice also misses the mark, as the minuscule amounts prescribed for the poor suggest that the Tannaim did not formulate these laws to reduce inequalities. Rather, this article demonstrates how early rabbinic laws aim to achieve procedural justice to ensure equality of opportunity among the poor by instructing the householder how to refrain from interfering with God’s direct distribution of produce to the needy. In doing so, the Tannaitic authors and redactors accept the persistence of inequalities between the poor and the well-off. The emphasis on procedure complements other forms of Tannaitic support that focus on the outcome of allocations to the poor.

“Philanthropy in Ancient Judaism and Why It Matters Today,” review essay about "Wealth, Poverty, and Charity in Jewish Antiquity," by Gregg Gardner, Marginalia Review of Books (2024).

In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson use the metaphor "time is money" as one of their primary example of a conceptual metaphor (e.g., "How do you spend your time these days?"). A similar conceptual metaphor appears in Roman sources, including in the writings of the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger, who begins his treatise On the Shortness of Life by comparing someone who complains about life being too short to a person who wastes their fortune on unnecessary luxury. Rabbinic logics of money and time are similarly intertwined in ways that betray their embeddedness in these Roman conceptual frameworks -which imagine both time and money as commodities that can be spent well or wasted -even as they also forge their own path in this Roman world. Gregg Gardner's Wealth, Poverty, and Charity in Jewish Antiquity examines the centrality of wealth in the ancient conceptions of poverty and charity, focusing on these interconnected topics in the early rabbinic corpus and the history of ancient Judaism more broadly. Gardner reframes rabbinic attitudes towards poverty and charity by arguing that early rabbinic sources conceive of charity primarily through a lens of wealth -that is, from the perspective of well-to-do givers -rather than from the vantage point of poverty or the point of view of the impoverished. Recognizing the importance of discourses and material realities of wealth shifts how we understand early rabbinic conceptions of charity and poverty. This perspective also illuminates discourses of poverty and charity today, as they are so often developed and filtered through the lens of wealthy donors and philanthropists rather than their beneficiaries. Gardner identifies wealth as the central axis around which early rabbinic sources about poverty and charity revolve. In doing so, the book engages a robust ongoing conversation in the fields of New Testament, early Christianity, and rabbinic literature about poverty, disability, philanthropy, charity, giving and gifting, money, and the ancient economy in work by Yael Wilfand, Alyssa Gray, Michael Satlow, Krista Dalton, Shulamit Shinnar, and Amit Gvaryahu, among many others, including Gardner's previous publications. Gardner's foregrounding of the topic of wealth draws in particular on Peter Brown's insights regarding the role of wealth and philanthropy in early Christian history, developed in publications including Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (2012) and Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (2001). The Roman context, in which agriculture, land, commerce, and the use of money constituted important parts of daily life and the practical and conceptual world which the rabbis inhabited and in which they participated, informs Gardner's close reading of rabbinic texts. The study as a whole also proves that the examination of wealth illuminates aspects of the authorship, audience, and cultural and institutional contexts of the early rabbinic corpus, as well as dimensions of rabbinic social history, about which the texts themselves are surprisingly sparing.

Mark R. Cohen, “Poverty and Charity in Past Times,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 35, no. 3 (Winter 2005): 347-360

The problem of poverty and charity across historical space has rarely been approached from an interdisciplinary, crosstheological, comparative perspective. Research since the 1960s has focused almost entirely on the Christian world-medieval and early modern Europe and, to a lesser extent, Byzantium. Until recently, this aspect of Judaism and Islam has gone virtually unstudied. The collection of essays that follows, however, offers an unprecedented opportunity to compare diachronically how Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have dealt with poverty and charity throughout history.