Maimonides and the Merchants. Mark R. Cohen
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the scriptural text for phylacteries and other ritual objects and selling them if need be for one’s own livelihood (Mo‘ed Qaṭan 18b–19a). An early post-Talmudic compilation comparing Palestinian and Babylonian customs reports that Palestinian Jews did not work on the intermediate days of the festival (ḥol ha-mo‘ed), whereas those in Babylonia did.10
3.4.1 Gaonic Background
In the increasingly urban setting of early Islamic Iraq, as the Geonim report, most Jews no longer owned land. Archaeology confirms that this was a period of overpopulation in the agricultural lands around the capital of Baghdad and of land flight to the cities.11 R. Naṭronai b. Hilai, Gaon of Sura (ca. 857/58–865/66), presumably reflecting the Babylonian custom just mentioned, extended the permission to work on the intermediate days of the festival to include poor craftsmen who had no choice but to work on those days, even if they had to work in a public place in order to be spotted by potential customers (the question posed to him concerned tailors and sandal makers).12 Naṭronai also permitted people to engage in trade (seḥora) on the intermediate days of the festival if transacted in the privacy of their houses, since business entails only talking, and he permitted doing business openly, if necessary, to avoid a lost business opportunity. Naṭronaii cites a precedent in the same tractate of the Talmud (Mo‘ed Qaṭan 10b) that allows work on the intermediate days to prevent produce (dates) from going bad, deemed analogous to making a business deal that, if postponed, would entail economic loss—the Talmudic concept of “lost business opportunity,” praqmaṭia ovedet (from Greek pragmateia, “business dealings”) or davar ha-aved.13
Elsewhere, Natronai takes cognizance of the expansion of long-distance trade in the Islamic world. He considers a situation where a caravan departs only twice a year and one of them is scheduled to leave on the intermediate days of the festival. The Gaon expands the Talmudic dispensation about copying religious texts and adds that one may write and send a letter with the caravan to accompany merchandise or to convey instructions to a business associate located in a distant city, in order to avoid financial loss or to protect the well-being of his own family.14 This allowance has all the earmarks of a concession to Jewish merchants. As the Geniza letters abundantly show, long-distance traders relied heavily upon letters reporting the activities of business associates, the progress of consignments of merchandise, and market fluctuations, and they regularly sent written instructions to partners or agents, instructing them about buying and selling and other matters vital to maximizing profits.15 One of the constant refrains in the letters of Geniza merchants is the complaint that letters have not arrived, causing anxiety. This is true of Muslim business letters as well.16
3.4.2 Andalusian Background
Merchant labor on the intermediate days of the festival occupies center stage in a fascinating question submitted to the Spanish legist R. Joseph ibn Migash (d. 1141), head of the yeshiva of Lucena, Spain, and teacher of Maimonides’ father. The questioner writes that he had “warned some people not to buy and sell on the [intermediate days of the] festival.” The violators complied by adhering to an even stricter standard, as prescribed by Ibn Migash in his teaching, by refraining from opening their shops or working even to avoid “lost business opportunity” or to meet the basic need for food. “Later,” the questioner writes, “some people arrived from Córdoba and ‘tore down this fence’17 by permitting buying and selling openly in the marketplaces. When I expressed my astonishment, they deferred in this matter to your excellency, may God exalt you. As a result, God’s name is being profaned in the presence of the Gentiles.”18
Ibn Migash praises the questioner for encouraging his own townsmen to go beyond the call of religious duty by suspending their economic activities on the intermediate days of the festival. At the same time, he rules that the outsiders from Córdoba should be permitted to trade if it means avoiding lost business opportunity or hunger. He also categorically denies that he had taught that trade on those days was permissible, even in the absence of the extenuating circumstances spelled out in the Talmud.
3.4.3 Maimonides’ Position on Work on the Intermediate Days
Like Naṭronai Gaon and like Ibn Migash, Maimonides addresses the issue of doing business on the intermediate days of the festival in his own responsa. He praises a rabbinic authority in Palestine for proclaiming a ḥerem (excommunication) against anyone working on the intermediate days of the festival (in Palestine, we recall, it was customary to avoid work on all days of the festival, including the intermediate ones). But in the next breath, he qualifies, following the Babylonian Gaon Naṭronai: “If it is a case of a business deal to avoid lost business opportunity, people should engage in business transactions” (yis’u ve-yittenu).19
Maimonides codified this opinion in the Code. In Hilkhot shevitat yom ṭov (Laws of Repose on a Festival) 7:22, a halakha informed by his own merchant perspective on daily life, he ruled: “One should not engage in trade [seḥora] on the intermediate days of the festival, whether selling or buying. But if it is something that, if postponed, would entail lost business opportunity [davar ha-aved] regarding something that is not always available after the festival, for instance, when ships or caravans have just arrived or are about to depart and people are selling cheap or buying dear—in such cases, a person is permitted to buy or sell (on the intermediate days). One may not, however, buy houses or slaves or cattle except if needed for the festival.”
Maimonides’ intimate knowledge of the realities of long-distance trade stands out boldly in his comments about ships and caravans and how their arrival or departure could affect market prices, an elaboration that goes beyond Naṭronai Gaon’s dispensation for writing letters to business associates. But Maimonides does not, like Naṭronai, restrict business to discussions in the privacy of one’s home. Rather, he resorts to a ruling in the rival Palestinian Talmud that allows doing actual business with a caravan that is arriving and then departing on the intermediate days of a festival to avoid lost business opportunity.20
Notably, too, Maimonides extends Naṭronai’s ruling on caravans to include ships. This is not surprising. Maimonides lived in Fustat, a city intimately linked to commerce in the Mediterranean through the port of Alexandria and with India through the port of Aden and the Indian Ocean. He knew as well as anyone that the arrival and departure of ships was one of the determining factors in marketplace activity, and conceded that merchants needed to be on the spot to take advantage of their movements into and out of the harbor if they were not to forfeit business opportunities.21
Two halakhot later, Maimonides sanctions work on the intermediate days of a festival in a different context (Hilkhot shevitat yom ṭov 7:24): “Whatever is forbidden to do on the intermediate days of the festival one may not instruct a Gentile [goy] to do. If he has nothing to eat, he may do whatever is forbidden to do on the intermediate days of the festival to provide enough for his livelihood. Likewise, he may engage in commerce [‘oseh seḥora] to provide enough for his livelihood. It is permissible for a wealthy man to hire a poor man who has nothing to eat to do work that is otherwise forbidden on those days, so he may earn wages with which to provide for his livelihood. Likewise, one may buy things that are not needed for the intermediate days of the festival if the seller is in need and has no food to eat.”
The supposed Talmudic source for the first statement is: “Whatever he may do, he may instruct a Gentile to do, and whatever he may not do, he may not instruct a Gentile to do” (Mo‘ed Qaṭan 12a). The concern with the alleviation of poverty, also present in the Talmudic discourse, had particular immediacy in Maimonides’ Egypt. As I have discussed elsewhere, the Geniza attests to the presence of a large population of poor in the Jewish community of Fustat, local poor as well as transient indigents or needy people seeking to settle down in that charitable community.22 Each week, hundreds of hungry people, locals and foreigners, received a dole of loaves of bread and sometimes wheat as well.23 The poor received subsidies to help defray the poll tax levied on every healthy, non-Muslim adult male. Geniza letters reveal that Maimonides was personally involved in charity in the community, particularly on behalf of redemption of