Jewish Economic Ethics

There have been many hypotheses as to the religious origins of the market economy. Max Weber wrote a famous study entitled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Recently the distinguished scholar Michael Novak has written a volume entitled The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Karl Marx, in an essay written in 1844, had no doubts. Capitalism was a bad thing; therefore it was Jewish. Ironically, Marx’s own family background and that of some of his followers was later turned against them, and Jews were blamed for communism as well. My concern here is not with such contentious matters. It lies with the morality, not the history, of markets; not with “The Jewish Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” but with “The Jewish Spirit and the Ethic of Capitalism.” For as Adam Smith saw, there is more to the market than its transactions. There is a spirit that drives its transactions. The author of The Wealth of Nations was also the author of The Theory of the Moral Sentiments. More than most, he understood that the open economy rested on a subtle balance between self-interest and fellow-feeling, egoism and altruism, individual and collective gain. That balance is easily disturbed, and one of the tasks Judaism set itself was to maintain it: to set enterprise in a moral frame.

As we survey the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic literature we find less concern with the question, “What kind of economy should we have?” than with the question, “How can we ensure that the economy we have is an ethical enterprise?” Within a given system, how can we mitigate its hazards and injustices? How can we protect human dignity? How can we preserve fair dealing and integrity? How can we recognise the exigencies of economic endeavour and at the same time keep alive other and more spacious values? Jewish law and ethics devote great attention to what John Gray calls “the moral foundations of market institutions,” sometimes at the level of broad principle, often in minute detail. But it does not seek to determine a particular economic regime. Its values are timeless, whereas economic systems, like political ones, change over time. That is why a religious voice will always be important in economic affairs, judging the present against less relative standards than its own, sifting out the bad from the good in any particular dispensation and taking its stand on the ought not the is of human affairs.

The literature on Jewish business ethics is large and I attempt here no more than a brief survey of a few leading themes. It is, though, an important subject. Religious ethics can sometimes seem bland and anodyne for they evoke a world without conflict, far removed from the market-place, the industrial dispute and the competitive economy. The Judaic tradition has the virtue of being rooted firmly within these realities. Yeshayahu Leibowitz called Jewish law the prose rather than the poetry of religious life, and that is one of its strengths. Michael Novak, comparing Jewish faith with his own Catholicism, notes that:

In both its prophetic and rabbinic traditions Jewish thought has always felt comfortable with a certain well-ordered worldliness, whereas the Christian has always felt a pull toward otherworldliness. Jewish thought has had a candid orientation toward private property, commercial activity, markets, and profits, whereas Catholic thought – articulated from an early period chiefly among priests and monks – has persistently tried to direct the attention of its adherents beyond the interests and activities of this world to the next.

I cannot vouch for the contrast, but certainly the prophets and the rabbis felt that their teachings had as much to do with the market-place as with the house of prayer, for it is here that religious values are put to the test.

Work and Its Ethic The first thing to be said is that, for Judaism, work matters. If not itself a religious act, it comes close to being a condition of the religious life. “Six days shall you labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.” With few exceptions, Jewish tradition understood the verb in this verse as “shall” rather than “may.” We serve God through work as well as through rest. By labour we become, in that striking rabbinic phrase, “partners with God in the work of creation.”

The rabbinic attitude is well brought out in the following passage:

Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar said: Great is work because even Adam did not taste food until he had performed work, as it is said, “The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to till and preserve it” (Genesis 2:15). Only then do we read, “The Lord God commanded the man: From every tree of the garden you may eat” (Genesis 2:16).

It is a subtle observation. A superficial reading of Genesis can convey the impression that work is not a blessing but a curse. For it was only when he was exiled from paradise that man was told that his fate would be toil: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.” Not so, says Rabbi Shimon. For in Eden itself Adam was told to till the earth. Though food lay all around him, he had to labour first.

The Jewish liturgy for Saturday night – as the day of rest ends and the time of work begins again – culminates in a hymn to the values of work and the family (Psalm 128): “When you eat of the labour of your hands, you are happy and it shall be well with you.” On this the rabbis commented: “You are happy” refers to this life; “it shall be well with you” refers to life in the world to come. Work has spiritual value. How so? A talmudic comment provides us with a clue:

When the Holy One, blessed be He, told Adam, “The ground will be cursed because of you…it will bring forth thorns and thistles,” Adam wept. He said, “Lord of the Universe, am I and my ass to eat in the same manger?” But when he heard the words, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat bread,” he was consoled.

Labour elevates man, for by it he earns his food. What concerned the rabbis was the essential dignity of work as against unearned income. To eat without working was not a boon but an escape from the human condition. Animals found sustenance; only mankind created it. As the thirteenth-century commentator Rabbenu Bachya put it, “The active participation of man in the creation of his own wealth is a sign of his spiritual greatness.” Jewish law invalidates gamblers from serving as witnesses since they are not members of the productive economy. They do not “contribute to the settlement of the world.”

The mainstream of Jewish thought was set against the various temptations to see work as demeaning. These came from many directions. Some lay in the early history of rabbinic Judaism. Its protagonists, the Pharisees, were confronted with other groups such as the Sadducees and the Essenes. The Sadducees were a propertied aristocracy. The Essenes, like the Qmran sect known to us from the Dead Sea Scrolls, were an apocalyptic group living in imminent expectation of the end of the world. For the former, physical labour may have been unnecessary. For the latter it was an unspiritual compromise with the world of everyday.

There were significant voices within rabbinic Judaism itself – most famously Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai – who believed that the ideal was unceasing Torah study, and any time taken to earn a living was time diverted from the pursuit of eternal life. Against these views, and summing up the dominant consensus, Rabban Gamliel III said, “Torah study is good together with a worldly occupation, for the exertion needed for them both causes sin to be forgotten. All Torah study that is not accompanied by work will be abandoned in the end, and leads to sin.”

The greatest of medieval rabbis, Moses Maimonides, waged a war against the institution of supporting a leisured class of rabbinic scholars through public charitable funds. “One who makes his mind up to study Torah and not to work but to live on charity, profanes the name of God, brings the Torah into contempt, extinguishes the light of religion, brings evil upon himself, and deprives himself of life hereafter.” It was a controversial campaign, never entirely successful, for in Judaism study is the highest value, and there were always those who believed that there should be a scholarly elite relieved of the burden of having to enter the labour force. Maimonides, though, saw the dangers of such an arrangement. It compromised the independence of the scholar. “Better,” he told his disciple Joseph ibn Aknin, “to earn a penny as a tailor, carpenter or weaver than to depend on the income of the Exilarch.” It removed the rabbi from the world in which his disciples had to live. And it turned a religious vocation into a paid profession.

The result was that Judaism never developed either an aristocratic or a cloistered ethic, dismissive of the productive economy. The great rabbis were also labourers or businessmen or professionals. They were called on to advise on communal economic policy and to adjudicate in business disputes, and they knew whereof they spoke. They knew too that “the world which is entirely rest” is “life in the world to come,” not in the here-and-now. In the meantime, the Jewish community needed an economic as well as a spiritual base. Accordingly, the Talmud lists as one of the religious duties of a parent, to teach one’s child a craft or trade through which he can earn a living. Maimonides rules that one who is wise “first establishes himself in an occupation which supports him, afterwards he buys a home, and after that he marries.” More powerfully still, he states that the greatest charity is to provide a person in need with a job:

The highest degree of charity, exceeded by none, is that of a person who assists a poor Jew by providing him with a gift or a loan or by accepting him into a business partnership or by helping him find employment – in a word, by putting him where he can dispense with other people’s aid. With reference to such help, it is said, “You shall strengthen him, be he a stranger or a settler, he shall live with you” (Leviticus 25:35), which means strengthen him in such a manner that his falling into want is prevented.

All other forms of charity leave the recipient dependent on charity. This alone restores his dignity and independence. “Make your Sabbath a weekday (i.e., eat less on that day),” said Rabbi Akiva, “rather than depend on other people’s charity.” “Flay carcasses in the market-place,” said Rav, “and do not say: I am a priest and a great man and it is beneath my dignity.”

The significance of these teachings is that they do not belong to a Tolstoyian love of labour nor to an ethic of acquisitive individualism. The same rabbis who spoke of the dignity of work also taught its limitations. Judaism is as much defined by the times in which it is forbidden to work – the Sabbath and festivals – as by those in which it is permitted. Besides which, Jews are enjoined to spend time every day throughout their lives in study. Hillel taught, “Anyone who is excessively occupied in business cannot become a scholar.” Rabbi Meir taught, “Reduce your business activities and engage in Torah study.” If Judaism has a distinctive genius it lies in the principled pursuit of balance. Work has intrinsic value but only within a framework of other values. It is part of what it means to imitate God, but not all. There are other realities: the Sabbath world of rest, the festival world of celebration, and the house of study with its service of the mind. A Jewish life is above all a structured life in which each of these worlds has its dedicated days and hours. This, as we will see, is crucial to a Jewish economic ethic.

Wealth Creation and Its Responsibilities No less important than the value placed on work is Judaism’s positive attitude to the creation of wealth. The world is God’s creation; therefore it is good. Asceticism and self-denial have little place in Jewish spirituality. What is more, God has handed the world over to human stewardship. The story of man’s creation begins with the command, “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.” To be sure, we must conserve as well as create. We do not own, we merely hold in trust. But prosperity is God’s blessing so long as we see it as God’s blessing and do not say, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me” (Deuteronomy 8:17).

God, taught Rabbi Akiva, left the world unfinished so that it could be completed by the work of man. Industry is more than mere labour. It is the arena of human creativity, “perfecting the world under the sovereignty of God.” The late Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik taught that the more control man develops over his environment, the more he is transformed from object to subject, and the greater his moral dignity. Above all, human creativity provides us with the resources to alleviate poverty and suffering and is therefore a religious good.

The rabbis had the sanest view of poverty I know, and they did so because most of them were poor men. They refused to rationalise it. It is not a blessed condition. It is, they said, “a kind of death,” and “worse than fifty plagues.” They said: “Nothing is harder to bear than poverty, for he who is crushed by poverty is like one to whom all the troubles of the world cling and upon whom all the curses of Deuteronomy have descended. If all other troubles were placed on one side and poverty on the other, poverty would outweigh them all.” They would have agreed wholeheartedly with David Hume when he wrote, “Nothing tends so much to corrupt and enervate and debase the mind as dependency and nothing gives such noble and generous notions of probity as freedom and independency.”

They neither valued poverty nor did they see in the distribution of wealth a divinely ordained social order. I know of nothing in the literature of Judaism that speaks of submissively accepting one’s “station in life.” Rabbinic Judaism is not a religion of class and hierarchy. If anything, it is a protest against them. Admittedly, at most times there were considerable disparities between gevirim, the wealthy, baalei batim, the householders, and itinerant traders and the poor. What concerned Jews was not the construction of a society in which no one was poor. That was a utopian dream, devoutly to be wished but not imminently expected. What mattered instead was a society in which the poor had access to help when they needed it, through charity or better still job-creation, and one in which their dignity was at all times, and with the utmost sensitivity, preserved.

Hence with wealth came responsibilities. Those who had were expected to share it with those who did not. Successful businessmen (and women) were expected to set an example of philanthropy, and to take on positions of communal leadership. Wealth was sharply distinguished from consumption. Conspicuous consumption was frowned upon, and periodically banned through local “sumptuary laws.” Judaism is not puritanical but it does not look with favour on excessive luxury. The governing principles of consumption were to be satisfied with little – “Who is wealthy? He who rejoices in what he has” – and never to give way to envy, forbidden by the last of the Ten Commandments.

One of the great questions about Judaism, as about any concrete embodiment of social life, is how it manages the inescapable tensions between liberty, equality and fraternity. There can be little doubt that Judaism sets a higher value on liberty than economic equality. It is the religion of a people born in slavery, longing for redemption. At its heart is the free God who seeks the worship of free human beings. It recognises private property and values economic independence. Its ideal society is one in which each person is able to sit “underneath his own vine and fig tree.” The prophet Samuel, in his famous speech on the dangers of monarchy, warns against the intrusions of government into private life and its tendency to expropriate persons and property for the public good. Government is necessary, but the less of it and the less coercive it is, the better.

Yet Judaism undeniably values equality: the equality of human dignity as the image of God. The reason economic inequality gave the rabbis relatively little concern was that they did not see worth in terms of what a person earns and spends. The “other worlds” mentioned above are central to Jewish life, its value structure and status attribution. The Sabbath is a day without earning and spending in which every family, even the poorest, shares in a kind of royal rest. The house of study is a democracy of the mind in which wealth carries no advantage and poverty no stigma. Precisely because access to education could depend on wealth, from earliest times (since the first century of the Common Era) Jewish communities have consistently built and supported Jewish schools from public funds, and subsidised education so that it is available to all. Equality, as Judaism understands it, means open access to those things which give life its value. That meant, for rabbinic law, the means of subsistence, sufficient capital to marry, religious education, and more recently health care provision. These are communal responsibilities to be met by public funds.

What binds liberty and equality together is fraternity. Not accidentally does the Hebrew Bible couch its social laws in the language of kinship: “If one of your brothers becomes poor…” This is not for Jews what it was for the French Revolution, an abstract statement of “the rights of man.” It belongs to a concrete historical sense. The history of the people of the covenant is of a community sharing a collective fate and responsibility. When Jews celebrate the festival of Passover they eat the “bread of affliction” and remember what it is to be a slave. When they celebrate Tabernacles, they know what it is to live in a temporary home. These enactments and reminders are a more powerful education than any other of the responsibilities of wealth and its creation. However successful they might be, Jews annually tasted the salt tang of poverty and homelessness and they could not be indifferent to those for whom it was a reality, not a ritual.

Jewish experience would tend to confirm Ronald Dworkin’s thesis that “the best defense of political legitimacy…is to be found not in the hard terrain of contracts or duties of justice or obligations of fair play that might hold among strangers, where philosophers had hoped to find it, but in the more fertile ground of fraternity, community, and their attendant obligations.” The resolution of the conflicting principles of social order lay in the strong sense of kinship and covenant which bound the members of the community to one another, mitigating what might otherwise have been intolerably arbitrary distributions of material blessings.

The Morality of Markets This was the moral environment in which the market was set. But the market itself had to function ethically. At one of the critical points in the Jewish calendar, on the Sabbath before the Ninth of Av, the day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple, we read in the synagogue the great first chapter of Isaiah with its insistence that without political and economic virtue, religious piety is vain:

Seek justice, encourage the oppressed, Defend the cause of the fatherless, Plead the case of the widow… Your silver becomes dross, Your choice wine is diluted with water, Your rulers are rebels, companions of thieves; They all love bribes and chase after gifts.

The same message is carried through into the teachings of the rabbis. According to Rava, when a person comes to the next world for judgement, the first question he is asked is, “Did you deal honestly in business?” In the school of Rabbi Ishmael it was taught that whoever conducts himself honestly in business is as if he fulfilled the whole of Jewish law. The Talmud suggests that one who wishes to achieve sainthood should occupy himself in study and practice of the laws dealing with commerce and finance. The perennial temptations of the market – to pursue gain at someone else’s expense, to take advantage of ignorance, to treat employees with indifference – needed to be fought against. Canons of fair trading had to be established and policed. This was part of the religious life, for the relationship between man and God could not be divorced from that between man and man. God’s law belongs to the marketplace no less than to the synagogue.

The Hebrew Bible places great emphasis on accurate weights and measures, and the rabbis established supervisors to check on them. On the basis of the biblical command, “When you buy or sell to your neighbour, do not cheat one another” (Leviticus 25:14) they established a threshold for fair profit. An overcharge of more than a sixth above the market price was in most cases sufficient to invalidate the sale. It was forbidden to mislead customers by making old goods look new, or covering bad produce with a layer of good. Jewish law recognises no concept of caveat emptor. The onus of fair representation lies with the vendor, not the purchaser. Giving misleading advice was forbidden under the biblical rubric of not “putting a stumbling block before the blind.” These and a host of similar provisions legislated for fair dealing and integrity. The rabbis recognised that a perfect market would not emerge of its own accord. Not everyone had access to full information, and this gave scope for unscrupulous practices and unfair profits, against which they took a strong stand.

In general, they were in favour of markets and competition. These lowered prices and increased choice. The rabbis were fully aware that competitiveness as such was not a virtue. But they knew also that “all labour and achievement spring from man’s envy of his neighbour” (Ecclesiastes 4:4). As they themselves put it: “Were it not for evil inclination no man would build a house, marry a wife, have children or engage in business.” Competition released energy and creativity and served the general good. Jewish law permitted protectionist policies in some cases to safeguard the local economy, especially where the outside trader did not pay taxes. There were also times when the rabbinic authorities intervened to lower prices of essential commodities. But in general they favoured the free market, nowhere more so than in their own professional sphere of Jewish education. An established teacher could not object to a rival setting up in competition. The logic of this ruling illustrates the rabbis’ general approach to such matters. They said simply, “Jealousy among scholars increases wisdom.”

They knew too that the fair workings of an economic system could not always be defined in terms of strict law and justice. There was law and there were obligations that went lifnim mishurat hadin, “beyond the letter of the law.” If a transaction had been agreed but not finalised and one of the parties retracted, there was no legal recourse. Nonetheless the offending party could be brought before a court and the following rebuke administered: “He who demanded payment from the generation of the Flood and of the Tower of Babel will exact penalties from one who does not stand by his word.” The Talmud records a case in which a rabbi employed porters to transport a cask of wine. They broke it, and he seized their coats in compensation for the loss. They brought the case to court, and Rav ruled that the rabbi should return the coats and pay their wages. “Is this the law?” he asked. Rav replied: “It is what is required by the verse, ‘Thus shall you walk in the ways of good men and keep to the paths of the righteous’ (Proverbs 2:20).” The Talmud, in a deeply reflective moment, says: Jerusalem was destroyed because its inhabitants administered the law and did not go beyond the letter of the law.

In particular, the rabbis were willing to intervene to enforce arrangements which conferred a benefit on one party without the other suffering loss. One could be forced to sell a field (at the market price) to the owner of a neighbouring field, since one does not lose, and one’s neighbour gains. To deprive someone of potential benefit which causes no loss to oneself is described in the rabbinic literature as middat Sedom, behaviour characteristic of Sodom whose inhabitants were famed for their unneighbourliness. Jewish behaviour was expected to be governed by middat chassidut, generosity, and though this was normally a moral requirement only, it was occasionally made a legal one.

The underlying principles of the market were mutual benefit and mutual responsibility, and the same applied to relationships between employer and employee. Workers were expected to give full commitment in return for their pay. Moonlighting was considered to be a form of robbing your employer by depriving him of your full energy and concentration. The rabbis even stipulated that workmen could say a shortened form of grace so as not to deprive their employers of their time. But employers, in return, had a duty to be considerate. Biblical law is particularly severe against delaying wage payments and against denying agricultural workers the right to eat from the produce they are gathering. Good labour relations have deep theological undertones in a religion which begins by seeing slavery as a denial of the human condition. The marvellous passage in Marcus Sieff’s autobiography in which he describes how Marks and Spencer stopped trading with a supplier who refused to improve conditions for employees is a contemporary application of this spirit.

Conclusion I have done no more than to hint at some of the leading features of Jewish economic ethics. The subject is vast – perhaps a quarter of Jewish law is devoted to it – and much of the literature is highly detailed and case-specific. Throughout the centuries, Jewish businesspeople sought rabbinic guidance in difficult cases, as did communal leaders in framing public policies. The glory of Jewish law lies in its concreteness: the rabbis would have appreciated Mies van der Rohe’s dictum that “God is in the details.”

What the Hebrew Bible and its rabbinic interpreters understood so well is that the market cannot be sustained by market values alone. It depends on a surrounding matrix of virtue and on the institutions that sustain it: families, communities, beliefs and traditions. It needs rules of integrity and fair dealing, and a mindset that sees the market as a place not of exploitation, but of mutual gain. Without these, its workings are too arbitrary and abrasive. With them, it is the best way we know of matching one person’s talents to another’s desires, of encouraging freedom, creativity and dignity, and of enhancing the conditions of life for all. If the Jewish experience of economic enterprise teaches one thing it is that ethics and business are not adversaries. In the long run they need one another. It is one of the tasks of religious teaching to show that the long run must always inform the short-term, so that economic profit does not lead to moral loss.