Rabbi Freedman’s Shabbat Message

A number of years ago I had the rare privilege of being introduced to and subsequently advising one of Australia’s leading actors, Mitchell Butel. He was about to tour Australia starring in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Looking forward to playing the character of Shylock, he asked me for advice on how to bless a child according to Jewish tradition and also for some advice and information regarding the wearing of Jewish prayer shawls. The play went ‘on the road’ coming to Sydney around six months later. Mitchell very kindly sent us complimentary tickets to see the performance at the Sydney Opera House.

My wife and I attended with my friend, who had arranged the original meeting, together with his partner. Four of us sat in the stalls and at the end of the evening there was a heated discussion whether or not the play should be considered anti-Semitic.

The truth is the Merchant of Venice is a deeply disturbing play, whose interpreters over time have sought to purge it of its most dangerous and disturbing energies. It is a play in which the question of intention, of what Shakespeare may have intended, is relevant but not recoverable, and finally not determinative. Portia the goddess, or Portia the spoiled rich girl, the wealthy heiress? Shlylock, the noble man of suffering and dignity, or Shylock, the Jew, an evil, small-minded man, who prizes spiteful victories? Bassanio the impassioned lover, or Bassanio the fortune-hunter? Comedy or tragedy? The history of the play’s interpretations encompasses all of these alternatives, and more.

Shylock’s speeches however convinced me that Shakespeare understood the tragedy of the Medieval Jew.

Signior Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances:
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
Well then, it now appears you need my help:
Go to, then; you come to me, and you say
‘Shylock, we would have moneys:’ you say so;
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold: moneys is your suit
What should I say to you? Should I not say
‘Hath a dog money? Is it possible..
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ Or
Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key,
With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this;
‘Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last;
You spurn’d me such a day; another time
You call’d me dog; and for these courtesies
I’ll lend you thus much moneys’?

And then the most famous speech in the entire play:

To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew.

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?

If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

I argued strongly that Shylock had been presented in a favourable light not just by Shakespeare, but by the director and the actors of this production. When Mitchell joined us for drinks in the bar afterwards, he tended to agree with my analysis. Nonetheless, there are elements of the play which dramatize a reality of Medieval Europe – that Jews were singled out to become money-lenders and that this occupation led to an even greater mistrust and dislike of Jews than already existed due to early Christian anti-Semitism.
Money lending was an offshoot of two inter-connected factors in Medieval Christian Europe – one was that Jews, barred from owning land and prohibited from participating in most normal occupations turned to commerce. Jewish traders such as the Rhadanites successfully expanded the trade routes between Western Europe, the Middle East and the Far East – and with the profits they made, they were able to create the earliest forms of lending institutions. The Rothschilds did not establish their international banking corporation until the 18th century, but the origin of Jews and banking began centuries earlier.

The second reason was because Christianity forbade the practice of charging interest on a loan, following the instructions set down in the ‘Old Testament’. So it was that beginning in the late twelfth century and throughout the thirteenth, Canon Law placed absolute prohibitions and harsh penalties on Christians lending with interest. Not that these statutes were always obeyed by the Church but enough Christians observed this command to leave more than enough room for Jewish financiers.

One of the most infamous episodes in Jewish history with regard to money-lending is what occurred in England in the 13th century. During the reign of Edward 1st the role of Jewish money-lenders had been usurped by the Knights Templar. This being the case, Jews found their work was downgraded into small-scale lending and pawn-broking. With less financial advantage accruing to the monarch from his Jewish subjects, he was determined to milk them for every last sovereign. He planned a seizure of their assets. In 1275 he passed an anti-Jewish law making usury illegal, though to include Jews and exclude Christians, he linked this statute with blasphemy. In 1278 groups of Jews were arrested, some report that up to 300 were hanged. Naturally their assets were transferred to the Crown. A further group of Jews were accused of ‘coin-clipping’, suffering the same fate. By 1290 it was clear that Edward had appropriated everything from the few remaining Jews of England – the richest Jew in Norwich had given him 300 pounds – others around the kingdom managed to collect at the most 20,000 pounds. With only 2500 Jews left in England, their value to the king had completely evaporated and so they were expelled, only to return some 350 years later at the time of Oliver Cromwell – a time when no avaricious, acquisitive, anti-Jewish monarch sat on the throne of that great land.

The historian Howard Sachar estimated that in the 18th century, “perhaps as many as three-quarters of the Jews in Central and Western Europe were limited to the precarious occupations of retail peddling, hawking, and ‘street banking,’ that is, moneylending.” The fact that Christians regarded such occupations as incompatible with their religious principles fed the notion that Jews were morally deficient, willing to engage in unethical business practices that decent people had rejected.
Of course the natural question to ask is if Christians could not lend money on interest because it says so in the Bible – how could the Jews be permitted to engage in these practices. For this one needs to look carefully at the wording in this week’s sidra:

אִם-כֶּסֶף תַּלְוֶה אֶת-עַמִּי אֶת-הֶעָנִי עִמָּךְ-לֹא-תִהְיֶה לוֹ כְּנֹשֶׁה לֹא-תְשִׂימוּן עָלָיו נֶשֶׁךְ
If you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, do not press him for repayment. Do not exact interest from him. (Exodus 22:24)
This verse, found in the sidra of Mishpatim is the first of three occasions that the Torah expressly forbids the taking of interest. In Sefer Vayikra and again in Sefer Devarim, the Torah returns to this topic.

If your fellow Israelite becomes impoverished and is unable to support himself, help him, whether he is a proselyte or a native (Israelite), so that he may continue to live among you. Do not exact from him advance or accrued interest, but fear your God. (Leviticus 25: 35-38)
Do not charge a fellow Israelite interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest. You may charge a foreigner interest, but not a fellow Israelite, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings in the land that you are about to enter and possess.

(Deuteronomy 23: 20-21)
In his masterful history of the Jewish people, Paul Johnson explains the background:
The Jews were thus burdened with a religious law which forbade them to lend interest among themselves, but permitted it towards strangers (i.e. non-Jews). The provision seems to have been designed to protect and keep together a poor community whose chief aim was collective survival. Lending therefore came under philanthropy – but you were not obliged to be charitable towards those you did not know or care for. Interest was thus synonymous with hostility. (A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson)
In any event the words of the Torah are plain enough – and anyone who has faced crippling repayments on a loan will understand them quite clearly. On those occasions when interest rates rise steeply, as they did in 1989, when the Reserve Bank of Australia raised interest rates to almost 20% to combat asset price inflation, and in more recent years as the RBA raised interest rates twelve times over a two year period, we see all too often good people in society struggle with the financial burden. The impact of such steep and often unexpected rises in the monthly mortgage repayments extends beyond financial difficulties; it almost always impacts the equilibrium of family life, the social cohesion of the community and the mental health of millions of people.

Judaism understood this at the outset of its peoplehood. In his classic work, With All Your Possessions, Jewish Ethics and Economic Life, Meir Tamari explained the verse above from this week’s sidra (Exodus 22:24) as the basis for the positive precept of extending interest-free loans. Tamari makes a telling comment on the opening word of the verse – the word אִם. This word, Tamari explains, is often translated ‘If’; however he correctly points out that in Classical Hebrew it can also mean ‘When’. The difference between the two translations is critical. By understanding the word as ‘When’ made giving interest-free loans a binding obligation rather than a voluntary act.

To help a fellow Jew in this way is unquestionably one of the foremost examples within Judaism of Gemilut Chasadim – performing acts of lovingkindness. Maimonides ruled that the interest-free loan is the highest form of charity. To the poor person the interest-free loan represents a chance to establish himself in a craft or business, thus breaking the cycle of poverty. To the rich person, the interest-free loan represents a form of assistance during periods of extreme liquidity problems, thus preventing bankruptcy. In either case it is a magnanimous gesture that can have the effect of changing the trajectory of a human life in the most positive and compassionate way.

Tamari makes the point that from the earliest days of Jewish society, the interest-free loan was not limited to the simple act of making small temporary loans. Irrespective of the country in which Jews lived, the sophistication of its economy, or the particular economic conditions of the Jewish community, these free loans were an integral part of the Jewish economic world. Throughout history and down to the present day, almost no Jewish community in an organized form has ever existed without the free loan as a permanent part of its communal structure.

He adds that one does not have to go back too far in our history to find examples of the implementation of this concept. To be sure, the great Jewish migrations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, the United States, South America, South Africa and Australia can serve as an illustration of the persistence of this mitzvah. Many Jews being poor emigrants had neither the physical assets which could serve as collateral for bank loans, nor a personal history of financial activity sufficient to secure a credit line. In addition, Jews literacy in the languages of the new countries to which they had come, and their being strangers to its social network, further militated against their being able to raise funds from the usual financial institutions.

In an Australian context, many stories have been told how Jewish immigrants to Australia during the twentieth century were met by representatives of the Jewish community, more often than not by the legendary Syd Einfeld (1909-1995), and offered immediate financial assistance so that they could begin the process of establishing themselves in their new country. In many cases loans that had been given were paid back and used for future communal projects as the post-war influx of European Jews prospered and were able to make their contribution to advance the welfare of the Jewish community at home and abroad.

To introduce such moral awareness into normal financial dealings is the purpose of an incomparable Jewish legal system. In a medieval work on Jewish Law known as the Sefer Hachinuch, Rabbi Aharon of Barcelona wrote that according to the normal morality of the world one should be entitled to charge for the use of one’s money. However, since the whole purpose of the mitzvot is to purify the Jew, God instructed us to forego this particular business practice when engaging with a fellow Jew due to the damage that might be caused. This was best expressed by Rashi, who in commenting on the word נֶשֶׁךְ or ‘interest’ explains that the primary meaning of this word is ‘to bite’. A snake bite, one is told, is hardly felt when it occurs and not particularly uncomfortable – yet as the minutes go by the pain and danger to life increases exponentially. So too, infers Rashi נֶשֶׁךְ or ‘interest’ at the very beginning of the business transaction is quite bearable, but as the debt mounts, the debtor’s suffering increases exponentially.

One may also compare this law with many others in the Torah, for example Kashrut where we are forbidden to partake of certain animals not because they are inedible or would necessarily damage our health – indeed many non-Jews live most healthily on a diet of non-kosher animals, but because by applying self-restraint we are able to elevate our material needs to a higher plane. No doubt, our sages understood that providing a moral framework for our business and financial affairs would similarly change the nature of a Jew onwards and upwards to a life of sanctity, which in the final analysis is the ultimate objective of Torah Judaism and a Jewish way of life.

Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi David Freedman