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ON THE WORD OF A JEW Religion, Reliability, and the Dynamics of Trust Edited by Nina Caputo and Mitchell B. Hart Indiana University Press This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing In memory of Yarnton Manor Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 1oth Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu © 2019 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Tue paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements ofthe American National Standard for Information Sciences­ Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Caputo, Nina, [date] editor. I Hart, Mitchell Bryan, [date] editor. Title: On the word of a Jew: religion, reliability, and the dynamics of trust / edited by Nina Caputo and Mitchell B. Hart. Description: Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, [2019] I Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018019382 (print) 1 LCCN 2018021056 (ebook) 1 ISBN 9780253037411 (e-book) 1 ISBN 9780253037398 (cl : alk. paper) 1 ISBN 9780253037404 (pb : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Judaism-Relations-Christianity. I Christianity and other religions-Judaism. I Jews-Public opinion. I Gentiles-Attitudes. I Reliability. Classification: LCC BM535 (ebook) 1 LCC BM535 .048 2018 (print) J DDC 305.892/4-dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019382 1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: On the Word of a Jew, or Trusting Jewish History / Nina Caputo and Mitchell B. Hart 1 Section One: To Swear an Oath 1 Oaths, Vows, and Trust in the Bible J Robert S. Kawashima 17 2. "Andin Most ofTheir Business Transactions They Rely on This": Some Reflections on Jews and Oaths in the Commercial Arena in Medieval Europe / Ephraim Shoham-Steiner 36 3 Tue Oath of a Jew in the Thirteenth-Century English Legal Context / Joshua Curk 62 4 What Is an Infidel?: Jewish Oaths and Jewish History in the Making of English Trust and Tolerance J Mitchell B. Hart 81 5 Trusting Adolphe Cremieux: Jews and Republicans in Nineteenth-Century France /Lisa Leff 101 Section Two: Tue Business ofTrust 6 "A Kind of Republic and Neutral Nation": Commerce, Credit, and Conspiracy in Early Modern Europe ! Joshua Teplitsky 119 7 Jewish Peddlers and Non-Jewish Customers in the New World: Between Profit and Trust / Hasia Diner 8 Belonging and Trustworthiness: Jewish Businessmen in the Public Rhetoric around the "Trustworthy Businessman" in Post-World War I Germany /Stefanie Fischer Section Three: lntimacy of Trust 9 Tue Voice of a Jew? Petrus Alfonsi's Dialogi contra Iudaeos and the Question ofTrue Conversion /Nina Caputo 181 nu i Co11tents 10 A Return to Credibility? Tue Rehabilitation of Repentant Acknowledgments Apostates in Medieval Ashkenaz / Rachel Furst 201 11 Tue Jewish Physician as Respondent, Confidant, and Proxy: Tue Case of Marcus Herz and Immanuel Kant / Robert Leventhal 222 HIS VOLUME BEGAN as an eight-month-long Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jew­ Section Four: The Politics of Trust T ish Studies at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in 2013-14. We' d 12 Perspectives from the Periphery: Tue East India like to thank the core seminar members 'who made those eight months such an Company's Jewish Sepoys, Anglo-Jewry, and the Image of intellectual and social pleasure. Our thanks to Marco Di Giulio, Todd Endel­ "the Jew" / Mitch Numark 247 man, Stefanie Fischer, Rachel Furst, Sara Lipton, and Ron Schechter. Thank you as well to the weekly seminar and conference participants: Nicholas Cole, David 13 Between Honor and Authenticity: Zionism as Theodor Feldman, Adriana Jacobs, George Rousseau, Miri Rubin, Adam Sutcliffe, Daniel Herzl's Life Project / Derek Jonathan Penslar Strum, and Frank Wolf, as well as to all those who have contributed their essays to this volume. 14 Tue Most Trusted Jew in America: Jon Stewart's Earnestness I Special thanks to Josh Teplitsky, whose participation in the seminar and the Shaina Hammerman 297 social gatherings added so much to the enjoyment of the year. We'd also like to acknowledge and thank Martin Goodman for his support 319 Index and encouragement of the seminar and Martine Smith-Huvers and Sue Forteath for their professional logistic support and their constant good cheer in the cen - ter's office. Thanks to the staffs of the Bodleian Library and the British Library and to the Alexander Grass Chair for financial assistance. Our thanks to the two readers for Indiana, Gil Anidjar and Rebekah Klein­ Pejfova, for their careful readings and comments, and to Dee Mortensen, Paige Rasmussen, and Julia Turner for all their help in the publication process. Also, Anna Lankina was incredibly thorough and attentive to detail in her preparation of the index. Finally, we owe our deepest gratitude to David Rechter, who facilitated the seminar and who, with his family-Lynne Hirsch, Ella, Noah, and Laura­ graciously hosted and entertained us throughout the year. Same Reflections on Jews and Oaths 1 37 Tue evidence I will discuss comes, for the most part, from internal Jewish "And in Most of Their Business sources, penned, compiled, preserved, and distributed in relatively closed circles 2 by members of the male rabbinic learned elite of the Jewish communities. In Transactions They Rely on This" the past, scholars took statements made by this rabbinic elite at face value and attributed the information gleaned from these sources such credence that mod­ Some Refiections on Jews and Oaths in the ern readers were given the impression that it represented the thoughts, actions, mind-set, and mentality of the whole body of medieval Jewry. While this is par­ Commercial Arena in Medieval Europe tially true, we should read through the rabbinic sources against the grain. In my reading of these sources, I wish to present the rabbinic attitudes, the internal Ephraim Shoham-Steiner conversation among the individuals who constructed and consumed these texts, but in addition, I will suggest that a close examination reveals rabbinic anxieties regarding what seem to be other trends among medieval Jews, trends that some rabbis were attempting to curb or regulate. A close observation enables us to see through the rabbinic agenda and reconstruct what we may define as the vox populi, or better yet voces aliae, the suppressed voices of those individuals whose JEws AND CHRISTIANS in the European Middle Ages were opposin~, competin~~ lives rabbis attempted to regulate, with oscillating levels of success. We will see d t times mutually hostile groups.1 Yet they were also close ne1ghbors, bus1 how the attempt tobe trustworthy and credible in the eyes of non-Jewish busi­ ::ss a artners and associates, especially in the tightly knit medieval urban ness associates prompted medieval European Jewish merchants and financiers to . p ,It laborious task but almost a prime directive, to overcome environment. was a ' . t take steps that were deemed by some rabbis tobe an erosion ofJewish core values. ained hostility and mutual feelings of suspicion and bmld c~mmon t~us on These trends were aimed at neutralizing the invocation of the name of foreign ~nl::el required to sustain daily life. However, building trust am.1~ the feehng~ or deities while swearing oaths in the marketplace, turning them in essence into a . t d over almost a millennium of religious compet1t10n, theolog1ca tens1on nur ure 1. · 1 · d. · 1 d form of currency to enhance credibility. Thus, invoking the names of Christian . h . h t·11·ty and the innately unbalanced po lt1ca , icia , an antagomsm, et mc os 1 ' JU saints, an act that seemed to some rabbis to be highly problematic, appears to legal status required a sincere effort. have been registered very differently by other Jews in their quotidian mercantile In this chapter, I will focus on an internal Jewish debate about the use ~f oaths exchange.5 in the marketplace. In medieval Europe, most oaths sworn for .comm~rc1al pur- As is clearly evident from both Jewish Hebrew and Christian Latin sources, oses involved invoking the name of the deity or a saint, ~r pl~cmg one s hand o~ Jews gave trust-based loans to their Christian neighbors. A short entry from the p d b. t (a holy codex or a relic) as a means of vahdatmg the speech-act. a sacre o JeC · · 1 th twelfth-century Book ofRemembrance (Sefer Zekhira in Hebrew), a memoir com­ A t' . ants in the marketplace, Jews also used oaths; not surpnsmg y, e piled by Rabbi Ephraim ben Jacob of Bonn, illustrates this clearly.6 This short . s par :c1p f th me of a deity or a saint by Jews elicited different responses mvocatlon o e na 1 ·ddl composition is an amalgam of religious poetry (piyyut), a personal memoir, and a h lakhists Tue use of an oath represented a type of conceptua mi e selection ofhistorical anecdotes from various sources. Its main theme is the doc­ of oath utterances do not reflect the ingrained fear of amon~ ;iscussio~s co~ver­ umentation of the persecutions of Jews during the twelfth century in northwest­ ~;:::l~hough the problem rabbis attributed to this speech-act was a ~onfess1~nal ern Germany, northern France, and England.7 After discussing the events of the 'Rather oaths represented the delicacy and fragility of commerc1al relation­ Second Crusade in northern France (1146), Rabbi Ephraim concludes by praising betw:en two individuals from two different religions.
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