Last month there was a workshop in Jerusalem on charity in rabbinic literature that I was sorry to miss. There has been a great deal of scholarly interest lately on the topic of charity generally in antiquity, among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. While Peter Brown’s book, Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD takes a broad approach to issues that involve charity and aid for the poor in antiquity (while scarcely mentioning Jews), recent books by Alyssa Gray, Gregg Gardner, Yael Wilfand, Noam Zion, and Rivka Ulmer all make solid contributions to thinking about rabbinic attitudes toward the poor and our responsibility to them. A book that I edited, Judaism and the Economy: A Sourcebook contains contributions that further advance our understanding of Jewish ideas and practices of charity from antiquity to the present. I recently published another essay that deals with this topic from what I think is an unusual angle. It is titled, “The Poor and Their Relief in the Mishnah: An Economic Analysis,” Studies in Judaism, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences 2 (2019): 61-72. I do not have an offprint to share, but below is […]
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