3.1 Tanakh

Because the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, includes writings of vastly different genres that were composed over a thousand-year period, it cannot be said to represent a single viewpoint on anything, including economic theology. Much of the relevant material in it is capably discussed elsewhere in this encyclopaedia, albeit under its Christian designation ‘Old Testament’ (Oslington 2023). Themes emphasized there which are also relevant to later Jewish economic thought include the fundamental goodness of creation (Gen 1:31), the human being as the divine image (Gen 1:26–27), and the identification of ‘blessing’ (berakhah) with material abundance, as in the identification of the promised land as ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ (Exod 3:8). Ultimately, even wealth acquired through human effort is conceived as divinely provided (Deut 8:17–18).

These basically positive orientations toward materiality provide theological context for the interpretation of the ‘economic’ mitzvot (commandments). Economic activity grinds to a halt on Shabbat, reminding us that we are more than labourers (Exod 34:21; Isa 58:13; Neh 13:15–18). Both the prophets and the wisdom literature emphasize the obligation to care for the poor (Isa 58:7; Jer 5:28; Amos 2:6–7; Prov 14:31). Such commandments are invariably directed to the ‘haves’, rather than to the ‘have-nots’; it is they who must be instructed as to the proper uses of wealth. In particular, they must understand how to distinguish between that which is theirs, acquired through honest effort (Prov 10:4–5), and that which remains God’s and can never finally belong to human beings (e.g. land, Lev 25). The harvest is an especially important site of such distinctions. The commandments of pe’ah (‘corners’, parts of the field which cannot be harvested but must be left for the poor and the stranger, Lev 23:22) and leket (‘gleanings’, portions of the harvest which have fallen to the ground and must similarly be left behind), as well as the tithes to the priests and Levites (Num 18:21–32; Deut 14:22–29; Deut 26:12–15), the Sabbatical (Deut 15:1–11), and the Jubilee (Lev 25), all arise from the divine rather than human ownership of land.

The ancient Israelites were an agrarian people who distrusted traders, referring to them by the inimical name ‘Canaanites’ (Hos 12:8; King and Stager 2001). The prophets inveighed against fraudulent trade (Amos 8:5, Mic 6:11). Much of the Hebrew Bible is written or set in a time prior to the invention of coinage (the shekel is a weight system and not a quantity of money embodied in a coin; Gen 23:15–16; Exod 21:32; Jer 32:10; Klatter 1998). Laws forbidding lending at interest (Exod 22:24; Deut 23:20–21; Lev 26:35–37) must therefore not be conceived as though they related to a market economy, even if their relevance to commerce and markets become a concern of later Jewish Law (Gamoran 2008). They ought rather to be seen as part of a broad effort to imagine ways to protect the poor and constrain the development of inequalities in wealth, which are also inequalities in power as noted by the prophetic condemnation of those who join house to house and field to field (Isa 5:8). Debt in general is a major source of inequality, which can lead to slavery (Neh 5; Chirichigno 1993). The connection between debt and slavery appears again in the various mechanisms of debt cancellation built into the Sabbatical and Jubilee years. The political-economic nexus represented by slavery is further discernible in the ambivalence about the permissibility of enslaving Israelites (cf. Exod 21:2–6; Deut 15:12–18; Lev 25:39–55), and in the warning that Israelites would become slaves to their human monarch if they rejected Yhwh as their king (Westbrook and Wells 2009; 1 Sam 8:17). All of this betokens anxiety about the place not just of slavery but of debt itself within ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ (Exod 19:6).

This anxiety does not extend to the political-economic power imbalance represented by patriarchy, however. A woman typically lived in a household under the authority of either her own father or grandfather or her husband’s father or grandfather (patrilocality or virilocality; Num 30:4–9); one who did not, such as a widow, became an exemplary case of a helpless person in need of special protection or charity (Exod 22:21–22). The labour of women as domestic servants often closely matched that done by enslaved persons, although this does not become the direct object of Jewish theological reflection until the Rabbinic period (Wegner 1988; Gopalakrishnan 2020). The relevant categories and considerations with respect to this labour are endogamous, polygamous marriage (Ezra 9:2; Gen 29:27–28), reproduction (Gen 16:2), bride-price (Gen 31:15; Exod 22:15–16), inheritance (Num 27:1–11), and divorce (Deut 24:1). In all of these regulations, there is little concern for women’s agency; even the famous case of the daughters of Zelophehad’s plea for inheritance is framed in terms of concern for their ‘father’s name’ (Num 27:4; but see Pardes 1992 and Meyers 1999).

All these ‘laws and ordinances’ (chukim u’mishpatim, Lev 25:18) are communally oriented even when they pertain to individuals. Underlying the diversity of the Tanakh materials is a covenantal perspective in which Israel, the covenant partner of Yhwh, arranges its institutions in accordance with the divine will. Its struggles to do so produce the tension and drama of the texts. Ultimately, however, at the point of origin of Jewish economic theology we find a wide-ranging imaginary of control: a world in which individual and collective life is divinely ordered. When this order is disrupted (Jeremiah, Lamentations), it is because Yhwh wills it.

3.2 Rabbinic literature

The term ‘Rabbinic literature’ is broadly applied to the collectively authored works of generations of scholars living in Roman Palestine and Sasanian Babylonia between the first and seventh centuries CE. This massive corpus is classically divided in two ways: by generation and by genre. The Tannaim, or ‘repeaters’, lived in the aftermath of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Roman Empire (c. 70–250 CE). The Amoraim, or ‘speakers’, lived in both Roman Palestine and Sasanian Babylonia, and commented upon and expanded the works of the Tannaim. Both generations produced works in two main genres: Halakhah (literally ‘way’, although typically translated ‘law’) and Aggadah (‘legend’ or ‘telling’). Both genres include material that may be considered ‘economic theology’. The Rabbis, referred to in Jewish tradition as chachameinu zichronam levracha (our sages of blessed memory), or chazal for short, also arranged or authored significant aspects of the daily liturgy, as found in the siddur (ordering), the Jewish prayerbook.

Rabbinic literature is characterized by a sense of comprehensive regulation of all aspects of life, and in this way builds upon the covenantal ambition of Tanakh. Also like Tanakh, its rhetoric is not to be uniformly read as reflective of realities on the ground. This is acknowledged by even the most fervently ultra-Orthodox Jews, who believe Rabbinic literature to represent ‘oral Torah’ given to Moses on Sinai; for example, the Rabbis discuss Temple sacrifices and the purity status of Temple vessels in great detail, even though the Temple no longer stood in their own day. A final resemblance to Tanakh is its heterogeneity – not only does the Rabbinic corpus span centuries and regions, but it is characterized by an extraordinary level of disagreement between its protagonists, all of which is represented on the page and sometimes goes unresolved. A brief summary here can only trace a few significant developments.

The Rabbinic corpus includes both many volumes of Midrash (‘seeking’), a type of commentary on the Torah that follows the order of verses line by line, and Mishnah (‘repetition’), a compendium of Rabbinic discussions that is organized according to a new rubric and only rarely refers to the scriptural basis for its rulings. That rubric is the shisha sidrei Mishnah (six orders of the Mishnah), an idiosyncratic division of topics including Zeraim (‘Seeds’ – agricultural matters including the aforementioned pe’ah and tithes), Nashim (‘Women’ – family law), and Nezikin (‘Damages’ – this order includes the trilogy of masekhtot or tractates most often cited in ‘economic’ discussions). These divisions further underscore the point made above that the Rabbis did not think in terms of the ‘spheres of life’ that seem natural to those living in contemporary Western societies, e.g. ‘religion’, ‘politics’, and ‘economics’. Following the trail of the topics we discussed in the Tanakh section alone would lead us through tractates in all three of these orders, and beyond.

One of the chief concerns of the Rabbinic movement was to account for the possibility of ongoing Jewish life in the absence of Temple sacrifice, which had previously restored right relations between the people and Yhwh whenever the people went astray. Sacrifices not only atoned for sin but served as means of thanksgiving and were incorporated into commanded celebrations. Beginning with the Tannaim, Rabbinic thought began to elaborate ways that gemilut hasadim (acts of lovingkindness) could substitute for Temple sacrifice (Avot de-Rabbi Natan A4, citing Hosea 6:6). The continuing performance of pe’ah, leket, and ma’aser ani (the poor tithe), for example, was said to be considered ‘as if the Temple still stood and he offered sacrifices in it’ (Sifra Emor 13:11). Tzedakah, or charity, came to assume a central place among such substitutions (BT Sukkah 49b, citing Prov 21:3; Gray 2019). Together with teshuva (repentance) and tefillah (prayer), tzedakah is named in the Yom Kippur liturgy as a means of ‘averting the evil decree’ which would otherwise be deserved by the people. The Rabbis developed formal and informal ways of delivering tzedakah, including the tamhui (soup kitchen), as well as the quppa or communal charity fund, administered by a central body and distributed according to that body’s determination of who was needy. Some scholars consider this a way to alleviate concerns about the dignity of the poor being diminished when receiving charity directly from the hand of a known donor (Gardner 2015). The Rabbis engaged in complex discussions to determine the nature of poverty based on various metrics (M. Peah 8:8–9; T. Peah 4:10).

The Tannaim also had to deal with the wide proliferation of situations in which individuals could potentially be implicated in lending at interest (M. Bava Metzia 5:1). No longer was lending merely a matter of either helping or exploiting a poor person in need of aid: business loans and investments, leases and mortgages, loans of produce, advance payments, and buying on credit all threatened to violate the prohibition on receiving more in repayment than one had loaned out (Gamoran 2008). But a business partnership was hardly identical to an extractive loan intended to create a debt-slave. The Rabbis therefore had to pursue creative solutions in order to prevent a wide array of ordinary practices from falling under the scope of the prohibition (Christian and Muslim communities faced similar quandaries in the Middle Ages; see section 4). However, the original connection between the usury prohibition and the poor was remembered and revived in later midrashim (Ex Rabbah 31; Gvaryahu 2019).

The Roman political-economic context of the Tannaim has been extensively studied by Rabbinicists and scholars of late antiquity (Neusner 1990; Safrai 1994; Lapin 2001; Verboven and Laes 2016). The higher volume of trade and waged labour and the greater presence of markets all make their mark on the sources (M. Bava Metzia 4:12; BT Pesachim 30a). Slavery and domestic life were also transformed. The Rabbis understood that domestic labour such as grinding grain, baking, washing, cooking, nursing, cleaning, and weaving had economic value, that enslaved women relieved free women of their burden to produce this value (M. Ketubot 5:5), and that the head of household mediated dependents’ access to markets and remuneration (Gopalakrishnan 2020). The basic idea of property in human beings in general and women in particular is as natural here as in the Tanakh, now in line with the pervasive Hellenistic cultural atmosphere. However, the Rabbis – although primarily concerned with the free male Israelite householder, the baal habayit (equivalent to the Roman paterfamilias) – do seem to be vexed by women’s autonomous personhood and their attendant obligation in some commandments versus their status as chattel whenever ‘some man has a proprietary interest in the sexual and reproductive function of a specified girl or woman’ (Wegner 1988). The management of this problem is true oikonomia (household management).

3.3 Excursus: Second Temple literature

The move from the Hebrew Bible, whose latest texts describe the return from Babylonian exile in the late sixth century BCE at the beginning of the Persian imperial era, to Rabbinic literature, which begins in the Roman period, skips over centuries of Jewish thought known as the Second Temple period. This is in accordance with the traditional practice of Jewish memory, which treats Hellenistic Jewish writings with suspicion, especially when they are written in Greek. Writings which Christians call ‘apocryphal’ or ‘deuterocanonical’, such as 1 and 2 Maccabees, Tobit, and Jubilees, as well as first-century authors such as Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE–40 CE) and Flavius Josephus (c. 37–100 CE), are all indispensable sources for scholars of Jewish history but essentially non-existent for later Jewish thought until the emergence of Wissenschaft des Judentums (scientific study of Judaism) in the nineteenth century. Even now, it is rare for Jewish thinkers to draw constructively on this material for theological rather than historical reasons. The surviving texts of the Qumran community, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, were similarly lost to Jewish history and memory. As such, all this literature has been relegated to secondary status for the purposes of this article, with full awareness such a procedure may be questioned on entirely reasonable grounds.

It is repetitious but necessary to insist upon the radical heterogeneity of this literature. The historical mythmaking of 2 Maccabees has little in common with the apocalyptic numerology of Jubilees. The economic perspectives represented throughout these texts similarly combine fidelity to older themes with innovative iteration, often in ways that highlight tensions of Hellenization (2 Macc 4:18–20). The Gospel of Luke picks up on the warnings of older wisdom literature against gaining wealth through injustice (Prov 16:8), then extends this into a radical choice between God and Mammon (Luke 16:13). The narrative of Jesus expelling the moneychangers from the Temple court is told in all four gospels (Matt 21:12–17; Mark 11:15–19; Luke 19:45–48; John 2:13–16), and may be variously interpreted. Although not claimed by Jews directly as part of their own literary patrimony, such teachings would eventually have an impact on Jewish economic theology nonetheless through the complex process of religious co-production between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Middle Ages.

4.1 In the Islamic world

Jewish thought in the medieval Islamic world is usually considered in terms of the consolidation of Rabbinic learning by the Geonim, the heads of the great academies at Sura and Pumbedita. The ‘geonic period’ in Jewish memory covers the second half of the first millennium CE, and represents the moment when the Talmuds came to form the basis of a widely-shared curriculum for Jewish study (although not without facing a challenge from the dissenting Karaite movement). After the turn of the millennium, the ‘main events’ in Jewish theology concern the controversies surrounding Graeco-Islamic philosophy and Kabbalah, both on their own and in conflict with each other. In all of this, ‘economic’ thought has not been at the foreground.

However, the Islamic empire under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates created profound shifts in the real-world economy, which did reverberate through Jewish thought as it became necessary to develop the areas of commercial and maritime law that were relatively neglected in the Talmuds. The Prophet Muhammad was a merchant, and Islam is often presented as friendlier to commerce than either Roman culture or the Christian church that grew up within it (Koehler 2015; but see Kuran 2011). The relative peace that prevailed within the massive territory from al-Andalus in the west to Central Asia in the east enabled long-distance trade and urbanization to flourish, and it is widely held that it was only at this time that Jews shifted away from agriculture as a predominant occupation (Goitein 1967; but see Ackerman-Lieberman 2015).

Arguably, Jewish legal texts from the medieval Islamic world could be said to evidence a shift from the ideal of ‘control’ imagined in Tanakh and Rabbinic literature to one of ‘lack of control’ (which is not to say laissez-faire). The Tanakh presents an ideal for a divinely-ruled nation, and Rabbinic literature – whatever the actual level of influence of the Rabbinic movement may have been at the time of its composition – speaks with an authoritative voice empowered to continually regulate that nation in its exile. Medieval texts, by contrast, are more frank in their acknowledgment of the need for Jews to shape and bend their collective life around circumstances beyond their control, including the beliefs and practices of other nations, even when this means making law accommodate custom and the necessities of trade (Cohen 2017).

A clear example of this can be found in the greatest intellectual figure of the Jewish Middle Ages, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides, 1138–1204). In his groundbreaking Mishneh Torah (1178 CE), a fourteen-volume code of Jewish Law, Maimonides made Halakhah available to those who could not engage in intense Talmud study. He reorganized the topics and themes according to his own schema, which was rather clearer than the classical Rabbinic one (e.g. ‘Laws of Agents and Partners’ within the Book of Acquisition, instead of the Talmudic ‘Middle Gate’). He also clearly adjusted Halakhah to meet challenges posed by contemporary economic circumstances (Baron 1941). Maimonides advises that in cases of business partnership where nothing particular is stipulated, one ‘should not deviate from the local custom regarding that particular commodity’ (MT Laws of Agents and Partners 5:1).

Studies of the Cairo Geniza, a collection of texts discovered in a medieval synagogue in Old Cairo (Fustat) in the nineteenth century, have revealed a trove of materials concerning everyday life in Egypt between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, such as letters, contracts, gittin (bills of divorce), etc. (Hoffman and Cole 2016). These allow us to illuminate the ‘local custom’ that Maimonides was referring to, in ways that were impossible prior to such studies. We can therefore see clearly the ways in which Maimonides and other poskim (decisors) were aware of Islamic law on commercial matters, as well as of the advantages and disadvantages to Jewish traders of approximating shari’a versus diverging from it, and took all of this into account in their responsa and taqqanot (decrees). The broad thrust is one of accommodation to the mercantile economy rather than resistance, although there are cases in which Talmudic precedent was insisted upon more rigidly, such as laws of sale requiring physical actions such as lifting (hagbaha), pulling (meshikha), or handing over (mesira) in addition to verbal consent (Cohen 2017). Such cases may indicate that Jews ‘on the ground’ were imitating Islamic practice to a far greater degree than poskim were comfortable with. Similar conformity holds true for the economics of marriage, as seen in the perception that a husband was obliged to provide his wife, including a second or third wife, with private lodging rather than compelling them to live together under one roof (Libson 2003; Krakowski 2017).

4.2 In the Christian world

Medieval Ashkenaz begins to come into view for historians of Jewish thought after the turn of the millennium, beginning with Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (1040–1105 CE), the biblical and Talmudic commentator known as ‘Rashi’ whose work is still consulted daily by Jews around the world. Like Maimonides in Egypt, Rashi in France interpreted the law flexibly in order to accommodate the perceived needs of his community. In this case, it was by allowing interest-bearing loans between Jews as long as there were Gentile intermediaries; his grandson Rabbenu Tam (d. 1171) continued down this path. Without doing so, it has been argued, ‘the end of both Jewish autonomy and the essence of Jewish community in the Middle Ages would soon be in sight’ (Soloveitchik 1970–1971: 215). This is held true despite the far lower volume of trade and commerce in Christendom compared to the Islamic world prior to the fourteenth century.

What is the ‘theology’ of this kind of legal accomodationism? Scholars of all three Abrahamic religions have often noted the common culture of trade that developed between them, as seen in the development of parallel legal devices to evade the shared problem of scriptural interest bans (Udovitch 1970; 1972). Although there are many variations due to local circumstances between the Jewish isqa, the Christian commenda, and the Muslim qirad, as well as variations of each type, the goal of all three financial instruments is to ultimately overcome interest bans by redefining commercial loans as partnerships in which the lender becomes an investor bearing partial risk of loss should the enterprise fail. This in turn entitles them to receive more in return than they initially provided. Justification for such manoeuvers in theological terms would perhaps be out of place in legal literature; it is, however, often proffered by modern scholars, who are apt to describe it in terms of ‘ideals’ needing to come to some kind of settlement with ‘realities’ (Fram 1997; Gamoran 2008; Satlow 2019b). These realities are sometimes defined in terms of practical situations (e.g. lenders refusing to loan to the poor in advance of the Sabbatical year), and sometimes in terms of ‘economic forces’ as understood by modern economic theory. I would argue that such ‘realities’ are undertheorized in Jewish economic theology, a point I will return to below (section 6).

It would be a mistake, however, to restrict our reading of Jewish economic theology in the medieval world to legal texts. Insight may be found even in the most unlikely places, such as kabbalistic thought. Throughout the Zohar, for example (a product of thirteenth-century Castile), the divine feminine presence known as Shekhinah is described as ‘poor’, and biblical verses that refer to the poor are reread to refer to her (Zohar I:168b–169a). This is because in her kabbalistic guise as the lowest of the ten divine emanations known as sefirot, the one closest to human beings, she ‘has nothing of her own’ but must receive the flow of divine shefa (bounty, abundance) from the upper sefirot. At the same time, however, what is true of Shekhinah may be reread back into the verses about the poor, so that the promised redemption of Shekhinah becomes theirs: ‘the prayer of a poor person reaches the blessed Holy One before all prayers of the world […] breaking through gates and doors, penetrating to be received in His presence.’

Other economic theologies of Jews in medieval Christendom display influence from the Christian environment, cutting against hoary scholarly tropes that emphasize strong Jewish/Christian contrasts on matters of wealth and commerce. The Sefer Hasidim attributed to R. Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg, for example, a key work of the thirteenth-century Hasidei Ashkenaz, offers an account of how penitence can be performed to atone for wealth acquired immorally (Mell 2014; but see Seif 2015). Both the concern and the means of addressing it were shared by Jewish and Christian writers, who saw freestanding ‘economic’ value as a threat and sought to neutralize that threat by devising ways for increasingly sophisticated economic activity to be carried on morally and with religious sanction.

4.3 Excursus: medieval Christian anti-Judaism and its construction of the ‘economic’ Jew

For Christians, a discourse developed over the course of several centuries in which immoral economic practices were also coded as Jewish, a process which led to Jews themselves becoming identified with ‘manifest usury’ and fraud, with deadly consequences (Cohen 1982; Wood 2002). There is a vast literature on the question of whether, how, and why Latin Christendom became a ‘persecuting society’ between 1000–1500, and particularly how and why Jews became increasingly targeted (Moore 1987; Chazan 1989; Stow 1992; Nirenberg 1996; Laursen and Nederman 1998; Pick 2004; Marcus 2024). It is generally agreed both that negative economic figuration played a role in the worsening fortunes of Jews in western Europe and that the contrast to dar al-Islam, where Jews did not have a narrow occupational profile and were not identified with disfavoured professions or practices, was stark. However, these matters are far from settled and disagreements continue as to how much weight to assign to the idea of the Jewish moneylender in anti-Jewish persecution overall, how much culpability to assign to the crown and the Church, how much variation existed between the cases of Anglo-Norman England, Capetian France, and Reconquista-era Iberia, and why expulsion eventually emerged as the ‘solution’ to the problem of usury, applied to ‘foreign’ Christian usurers as well as Jews (Shatzmiller 1990; Mundill 1998; Mell 2017; Dorin 2023).

Important for present purposes is that the image of the savvy and ruthless Jewish moneylender, epitomized in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1605), had an impact upon Jewish self-conception, Jewish historiography, and thus inevitably upon Jewish economic theology. As the image persisted into modernity and began to shape ‘secular’ antisemitism as well as ‘religious’ anti-Judaism, it generated apologetic responses and reactions across the political spectrum. Jewish socialists and communists were accused of overcompensating in an attempt to prove that they did not match the stereotype; Jewish capitalists proclaimed that actually, the old image was good, and the rest of the world was still catching up to what medieval Jews had always known, even as it made them suffer for their success (Muller 2010). The idea of ‘Jewish’ commerce was not restricted to debates about interest, but also involved debates over the relative merits of retail versus wholesale trade, peddling, freelancing, financial speculation, etc. (Karp 2008). At the extremes, myths were woven out of whole cloth regarding the purportedly extraordinary contributions of Jews to the rise of capitalism through the invention of financial instruments such as letters of exchange (Trivellato 2019), or disproportionate control of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (Faber 1998). Scholarship itself was inflected by these apologetics, as economic historians attempted to either emphasize or downplay the medieval Jewish ‘economic function’ or role in the rise of early-modern capitalism according to their polemical analyses (Sutcliffe 2015; Mell 2017).

5.1 The early modern period

The date of the beginning of Jewish modernity is contested. However, it has been notably argued that while ‘economic history cannot date the inception of Jewish modernity […] the history of economic attitudes by and about Jews possibly might’ (Karp 2011: 34). By that measure, we would turn to thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the first hints of ‘modern’ Jewish economic theology. And this is indeed the time period when we start to see treatises dedicated to economic topics, although their names do not always reflect this as evidenced by R. Yehiel Nissim Da Pisa’s (1507–1534) Hayei Olam (Life Eternal) and R. Simone Luzzatto’s (1583–1663) Discorso circa il stato de gl'Hebrei et in particolar dimoranti nell'inclita città di Venetia (Discourse on the state of the Jews, and in particular those living in the fair city of Venice). These texts of Renaissance Italian Jews reflect awareness and concern about economic change (da Pisa; Rosenthal 1962; Dimant 2019) as well as a close imagined tie between economic growth and Jewish presence in a city (Luzzatto 2019). The latter connection is also evidenced in the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel’s (1604–1657) letter to Oliver Cromwell, requesting the readmission of Jews to England on the grounds of their economic utility (Nadler 2018).

Together with Joseph de la Vega’s (1650–1692) Confusion de Confusiones (1688), said to be the first treatise dedicated to the operations of a stock market (Cardoso 2002), these texts testify to the existence of a distinct ‘early modern’ period of Jewish economic thought overlapping with both the mercantilist era in western Europe (Israel 1998) and with Sephardi diasporic maritime trade networks elsewhere, established in the wake of the Spanish expulsion of 1492 (Israel 2002; Trivellato 2009). They also begin to raise the question of secularity, which will accompany Jewish economic thought throughout modernity, as with de la Vega it becomes unclear what exactly makes the text ‘Jewish’ other than its being by a Jewish author. Jewish modernity is often described in terms of increasing distance from ‘traditional’ thought and authority, and commercial life often indexes this distance in both the Ashkenazi (Fram 1997) and Sephardi (Bodian 1999) contexts. This raises the question of the extent to which any discussion of Jewish economic thought in the modern period must be drastically restricted if it is to remain ‘theological’. May sources beyond Rabbinic responsa, legal decisions, and other explicitly ‘religious’ texts be considered, and if so, on what grounds?

5.2 Excursus on ‘secular Judaism’

There is an immense literature on ‘secular Judaism’ and its associated categories such as ‘Jewishness’ as applied to some of the major nonreligious thinkers of Jewish background in the modern era, e.g. Baruch Spinoza (Goetschel 2003; Schwartz 2012), Heinrich Heine (Goetschel 2019; Prochnik 2020), Karl Marx (Avineri 2019), Sigmund Freud (Yerushalmi 1993), and even Albert Einstein (Gimbel 2013). They are frequently construed to constitute a Jewish secular tradition unto themselves. Sometimes it is argued that the secularity of these figures can be traced to premodern precedents (Biale 2010); more frequently it is taken to mark the radical rupture between Jewish modernity and the past (Batnitzky 2011). The trend in scholarship is usually to continue to consider from what angles secular thought may profitably be thought of as Jewish, even when the thinker is doing work broadly considered value-neutral (as with Einstein) or is widely accused of antisemitism (as with Marx). This article will follow this broad pattern. Authors who produce normative reflection on Torah obligations through careful sifting of Jewish traditions, in the service of the Jewish community, will be discussed alongside authors who understood themselves to be engaged in value-neutral scientific investigation, revolutionary transformation, and national liberation.

5.3 Liberalism, socialism, and nationalism

The emergence of economic liberalism, like its cognate categories of ‘capitalism’ and ‘modernity’, is variously dated (Freeden 2015; Sonenscher 2022). Working backwards from Adam Smith’s 1776 milestone, The Wealth of Nations, scholars often see arguments in favour of private vice (i.e. the pursuit of self-interest) leading to public virtue (i.e. material welfare) popping up throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Hirschman 2013). The aforementioned works of ben Israel and Luzzatto may to some degree be considered alongside this trend, although they are more representative of a form of economic raison d’etat usually associated with ‘mercantilism’ (Israel 1998). Historians of economic thought sometimes treat this time period as the beginning of ‘economics’ proper, with the conceptualization of ‘the economy’ as a distinct sphere of human activity separate from others, although the development of this thought would take centuries and not be fully realized until the late nineteenth century (Heilbroner 1995; Tribe 2015; Backhouse 2023). ‘Liberal’ thinkers may thus for our purposes be understood as those who accept this emerging understanding, viewing ‘the economy’ as something distinct from politics and religion, obeying its own laws of motion in a manner akin to that of nature, and thus worthy of being studied by a science similar to those that study nature. This understanding differs from many other widely used definitions for the term ‘liberalism’ and does not indicate a particular stance on which political regime is to be preferred (e.g. constitutional monarchy or republicanism), the appropriate reach of the regulatory and welfare functions of the state, or social policy.

Modern Jewish thought is sometimes said to begin with Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), and although he was probably not the first Jewish ‘liberal’, he is a paradigmatic one. Like Luzzatto and ben Israel, he frames some of his comments on economics in the form of a defence of the economic utility of the Jews. He had ben Israel’s 1656 Vindiciae Judaeorum (Defence of the Jews) translated into German, and wrote a new preface to it in which he asserted powerfully that ‘[n]ot only making something but doing something also, is called producing […] the pettiest trafficking Jew is not a mere consumer, but a useful inhabitant (citizen, I must say) of the state – a real producer’ (Mendelssohn 2010: 38–39 [first published 1782], original emphasis). The German Jewish generation that followed him, largely embracing haskalah (enlightenment) and emancipation’s offer of acculturation to Christian society, went further than he had in extending liberalism to political and religious matters in hopeful imitation of their French and English neighbours to the west (Sorkin 1999). A century later the great majority of German Jews were still liberals, having internalized liberal values of self-reliance and diligence, and understanding liberalism as the source and guarantee of emancipation (Penslar 1997; Niewyk 2001; Penslar 2001; Volkov 2012). They also carried both economic liberalism and Reform Judaism with them to the US in their nineteenth-century migrations. The example of the American Reform leader Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900) shows that this outlook was compatible with a blistering critique of ‘mammonism’ that nonetheless did not take socialist form (Wise 1857). Liberalism was also predominant among the Jews of England (Endelman 1990; Ruderman 2000), France (Hyman 1998; Hammerschlag 2018), and the colonized countries of the Middle East, where it could take the form of identification with the West or local patriotism, but in either case supported economic liberalization (Behar and Benite 2013).

Many other Jews did, however, turn to socialism. Moses Hess (1812–1875) was an early, perhaps the first, example of a religious Jewish socialist (Koltun-Fromm 2001). His book The Holy History of Mankind (1837) was the first book-length socialist tract to appear in Germany (Hess 2004). It was idiosyncratic and unorthodox, bearing the traces of influences from Christianity and Spinoza among others; his later work Rome and Jerusalem (1862) foreshadowed the Zionist project by calling for the establishment of a socialist Jewish state in Palestine (Hess 1918). Other Jewish socialists were more Jewishly traditional than Hess, like the neo-Kantian democratic socialist Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), who saw socialism as a logical development of prophetic universalism (Cohen 1993; Schwarzschild 1956; Vatter 2021). But most Jewish socialists were more secular or even radically atheist than Hess, especially in the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi heartland of the Pale of Settlement and its diaspora in New York City (Mendelsohn 1997; Michels 2005; 2012). Jews joined socialist and communist parties in significant numbers in Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco as well (Behar and Benite 2013; Heckman 2020). In addition, there was a powerful Jewish anarchist movement, which combined anti-clericalism, internationalism, and socialism with anti-statism. This movement overlapped sociologically with the Yiddish socialist movement (Zimmer 2015; Torres and Zimmer 2023; Torres 2024), but also appeared among Central European Jewish intellectuals who sought to combine Jewish messianism with revolutionary aspirations (Löwy 2017). Perhaps it was the greater distance from Marxist materialism that made some Jewish anarchists more likely to maintain religious loyalties than non-anarchist socialists (Stern 2018; Rothman 2021). However, even Marxist Jewish intellectuals such as those affiliated with the Frankfurt School had complex relationships to Jewish ideas which continue to be studied by scholars (Jacobs 2014), and evidence from the early years of the USSR shows that Marxism could indeed be reconciled with religion, if not without difficulty (Slater 2023).

Scholarly literature on Jewish socialism, as well as on Zionism, makes it clear that socialism and nationalism often overlapped (Frankel 1984; Mendelsohn 1993). In proposing the building of a new, autonomous homeland from the ground up, nationalism allowed free rein to the imagination, providing a sense of ‘control’ to Jewish economic thought in a way that laissez-faire liberalism could not and would not. This, in many cases, made for ostensible compatibility with socialist aspirations to harness the means of production in the service of the proletariat, as well as with religious Jewish aspirations to renew the observance of ancient agricultural Halakhah that had been in abeyance during the time of exile. Religious kibbutzim (socialist collective communities) sprung up alongside the secular ones in the Zionist Yishuv or settlement in Palestine (Fishman 1992; Near 2007; Abramitzky 2018). The theology of the religious kibbutz was that it was a unit or cell of a new Jewish society; more grandly, it was theorized as a libertarian-socialist alternative to both the capitalism of the West and the state socialism of Moscow (Buber 1949). Even more grandly than that, Zionism as a whole – including the activity of the secular kibbutzniks – was conceived by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) as linked directly to the imminent redemption of the world (Kook 1978). The first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine under the British Mandate, Rav Kook, notably ruled that it was permissible to evade the requirement to allow the land to lie fallow during the Sabbatical year by selling the land to non-Jews (Mirsky 2014). This might seem out of line for an ultra-Orthodox rabbi who saw Zionism as a movement of messianic significance – surely keeping the Sabbatical would be part of the sacred return of the Jews to their land? – but Kook argued that the economic ruin that would ensue from strict Sabbatical observance would deter future immigrants, thus defeating the project itself. We see then that even in a mystical, ostensibly unworldly figure like Rav Kook there is a willingness to allow economic ‘realities’ to condition Halahkhic observance, postponing the autarkic fantasy of nationalism until the moment of full redemption.

Most Jewish nationalism, however, like most Jewish socialism, was avowedly secular. Zionism in particular was staunchly opposed by religious Jews for seeking to force the divine hand by resettling the Jewish people in Palestine under human power (Ravitzky 1996), while Zionist leaders like Mapai party chair David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) drew on the Bible as a warrant for Zionist settlement without committing themselves to the Shulchan Aruch. The Yishuv’s economy thus developed according to general strategic and technocratic considerations, acquiring land and setting up industries separate from those of the Palestinian Arabs (Kimmerling 1983; Stein 1984; Shafir 1996). The process was led, guided, and managed by the labour parties, which provided direct employment through their general labour union, the Histadrut, and their network of companies such as Solel Boneh (infrastructure), Bank Hapoalim (finance), Tnuva (produce distribution), etc. (Zeira 2021). This ultimately meant giving the nationalist element priority over the socialist one in the fusion that characterized Mapai (Lockman 1996; Sternhell 1998), something noted with dismay by orthodox communists as well as Palestinians of all political and economic persuasions (Budeiri 2010; Seikaly 2016). Nonetheless, it was not nearly enough to satisfy the right-wing opposition of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist party (Kaplan 2005). While nationalism had been shown to be compatible in theory with both socialism and with economic liberalism, in the decades after the founding of the state the pendulum would swing back towards the liberal side (Nitzan and Bichler 2002).

6.1 Technical and non-technical senses of ‘Jewish economic theology’

As noted in section 1, the phrase ‘Jewish economic theology’ has an ordinary-language meaning, which we provided as ‘thought about economic matters that takes its fundamental grounding and orientation from Jewish traditions and experiences’. However, it may also have a technical meaning: Jewish theology that engages in sustained methodological reflection on the emergence and boundaries of the economic sphere itself, as well as on the possibility of economic science and the relationship of that science to theology (Brody 2022). The Christian theologian Philip Goodchild defines the task of economic theology as ‘to illuminate each of these realms in terms of the other’ (Goodchild 2020: 392). This is different enough from the ordinary-language sense of the phrase that he describes Christian theological outlooks centred on the economy, such as the prosperity gospel and the social gospel, as ‘Christian social ethics’. The next section will follow his lead. Note that the Islamic parallel to these discourses is usually referred to neither as ‘ethics’ nor as ‘theology’, but rather as ‘Islamic economics’, a terminological choice that implies a closer tie to professional academic economics as well as a scientific, investigative function (Philipp 1990; Zaman 2009; El-Ansary 2011; Zaman 2015). Despite this apparent difference, the situation and challenges faced by the three discourses are quite similar, and I would argue that some parallels extend to non-Abrahamic traditions as well, as evidenced by the work of the Salish-Kootenai economist Ronald L. Trosper on Indigenous Economics (2022).

6.2 Jewish social ethics today

Jewish theological reflection on the economic behaviour of individuals and institutions, which draws on Jewish textual traditions and history to make recommendations about what those individuals and institutions should do in light of their Jewish commitments, may be thought of as ‘Jewish social ethics’. The contemporary state of this literature is divisible along the same lines characteristic of Jewish modernity described in section 5, suggesting that the twenty-first century does not yet constitute a truly new intellectual era despite the epochal events of the 1940s and after. The difference, however, is that liberalism and nationalism are far stronger, socialism far weaker.

Liberalism continues to thrive in Jewish social ethics. A recent entry into the genre, a collection of commentaries on the Torah by an American–Israeli venture capitalist, opens with the claim that ‘the world is inherently, naturally economic’; the religious-Zionist rabbi Benny Lau, commenting on the Hebrew publication of the same book, reads it as showing that ‘things have not changed fundamentally in thousands of years since the Torah was written’ (Eisenberg 2021: 1, 7–8). This kind of transhistorical thinking permeates much of Jewish business ethics, which is liberal in the sense discussed above regardless of whether it is more free-market or more welfare-state oriented (Levine 1980; 2012; Tamari 2014). There are important exceptions that see the anachronism of applying contemporary liberal ideas of spontaneous order to traditional Jewish sources, but which nonetheless seek to bolster a case that the alternatives are even more contrary to the spirit of the sages (Lifshitz 2012).

On the other side of the political spectrum, Jewish social justice activists mine the sources for inspiration for their activist work in support of living wages, robust unions, housing justice, full employment, universal healthcare, restorative justice instead of mass incarceration, and ecological awareness (Jacobs 2009; Cohen 2013; Brandow 2014; Seidenberg 2015; Kahn 2019). These thinkers incorporate many of the classic socialist demands, in the tradition of social democracy, without necessarily calling for the replacement or overthrow of the capitalist system. To this extent, the socialist horizon has largely receded, living on primarily in nostalgic memory, although that memory does fuel a resurgent activist Jewish left which may yet produce its own new, extended economic-theological statements (Crabapple 2018; Rubin 2022).

Meanwhile, the place of nationalism as an economically significant factor is ambiguous. The utopian rhetoric of Zionism has been replaced by the reality of the State of Israel, in which the Likud party has successfully beaten back Labor socialism over the past half-century in line with the victories of neoliberalism elsewhere around the globe. The vanguard of this movement in Israel today is the Kohelet Policy Forum (KPF), which promotes deregulation, the elimination of trade barriers, and other conservative policy standards (Weinberg 2022). While such policies were held at one time to constitute threats to national unity insofar as they promote exposure to global market forces, which in turn dissolve social solidarity and increase class divisions, their advocates today experience no friction between what they perceive as traditional religious identity, neoliberal economics, and the promotion of ‘national sovereignty’, as with KPF founder Moshe Koppel’s authorship of the 2018 ‘Nation-State Bill’. This combination too mirrors other right-wing populist tendencies around the world, such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement in the US (Adcock and Moodie 2025).

6.3 Jewish economic theology as a form of political theology

An analogy may be discerned between economic theology and political theology. Like economic theology, political theology has an ordinary-language meaning (‘theology that is about politics’) and a technical meaning. The academic discourse of political theology is still defined largely by the parameters laid down by the conservative jurist and erstwhile Nazi party member Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), who used it to expose the pretension of some political theories to be wholly grounded in value-neutral natural facts. To the contrary, Schmitt argued,

all political systems pursue ideological agendas, even liberal systems that claim to be ideologically neutral or tolerant all the while clearly acting on the basis of philosophical and theological positions that have already been decided upon. (Rashkover and Kavka 2014: 3–4, original emphasis)

The Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss (1899–1973) also saw the liberal emphasis on proceduralism and rules as a way of suppressing questions of fundamental values, and believed political philosophy was necessary to recover these questions and pose them anew. Schmitt, following the seventeenth-century English political theorist Thomas Hobbes, believed that auctoritas, non veritas, facet legem (authority, not truth, makes law); Strauss believed that the unsettled arguments over truth contained the potential to threaten authority. Political theology today thus deals primarily with fundamental questions of values and legitimation and only secondarily with practical questions of right conduct in political affairs.

Jewish economic theology has primarily been pursued as if it were identical with social ethics, i.e. responsible for adjudicating questions of right conduct in economic affairs. If it were to undergo a turn comparable to political theology, it would transform into a discourse addressing more fundamental questions about the nature of Jewish tradition’s relationship to the economic sphere as understood in modernity, and to the question of legitimation as well. That is, the analogy between economic and political theology would cease to be an analogy, and economic theology would understand itself to be a form of political theology, concerned about authority and power within the economic sphere – oikonomia or ‘household management’ having always contained an explicit element of concern with such power – as well as the philosophical legitimacy of that sphere itself. I have alluded throughout this article to ways in which Jewish sources’ treatment of power disparities embodied in patriarchy and slavery are directly related to their treatment of wages and labour, debt and finance, etc. These relationships, if taken seriously, offer a potential programme for the development of Jewish economic theology in the future.