Chronicles and Commentaries

By Eliezer Segal

The controversial history of sermons, the physics and philosophy of rainbows, lions in the synagogue, hares in the Greek Bible, the gold standard, God in human disguise—these are but a few of the many topics that are introduced in this lively miscellany of glimpses into exotic frontiers of Jewish literature, history, and tradition. In the present compendium of short studies, Dr. Eliezer Segal once again introduces the public to the fruits of Judaic scholarship, while employing a charming style that combines learning and wit. Chronicles and Commentaries is the latest addition to the author’s distinguished series of collections that includes: Why Didn’t I Learn That in Hebrew School? (1999), Ask Now of the Days that Are Past (2005), A Meeting-Place for the Wise (2008), and On the Trails of Tradition (2011).

The new digital edition from Quid Pro Books features proper ebook formatting, active Contents, and all the illustrations from the paperback edition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quid Pro, LLC
• Release date: Jun 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781610278232

Eliezer Segal

Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary.

Book preview

Going for the Gold

The value of the official currency has been severely undermined by inflation and depreciation brought on by concerns about the economy’s health. This situation impelled many people to forsake the official legal tender and place their trust in a more stable standard, that of gold.

Such indeed was the mood in the Roman empire during the third and fourth centuries C. E., a situation that is reflected in the important works of rabbinic law that were produced at that time. The volatility of the economy and the questionable status of various currencies had a palpable impact on the teachings of the Jewish sages as they related to several practical questions of civil and ritual law.

In order to properly understand the ancient sources, we must recall that paper money did not exist in those days, and that all currency was in the form of coins—usually silver (the denarius), and occasionally copper, or gold (the aureus). Furthermore, the relationships between the different denominations were not constant or uniform. Though talmudic texts speak of a silver-gold ratio of 25:1 or 24:1, a coin’s actual value was based on the amount of metal that it contained, and this value was subject to broad fluctuations. Therefore, notwithstanding the attempts at fiscal reform by several emperors, the relative values of gold, silver or copper coins could not be reduced to a fixed ratio.

Aureus of the Emperor Caracella

The Talmuds relate that the Babylonian sage Rav submitted an inquiry about how he should pay back a loan that he had taken in gold coins and the market value of gold (calculated in terms of silver denarii) had risen in the meantime. The answer involved a ruling on whether gold was to be regarded as the coin that defined the fixed value, or as a commodity whose price was measured in units of silver denars. The answer to this question would determine whether or not the repayment involved the taking of interest which is forbidden by the Torah.

According to the conventions of rabbinic law, purchases of movables do not become fully binding when the seller receives the payment, but only when the merchandise is physically transferred to the buyer. Questions therefore arose as to how to define merchandise and money in certain types of transactions. This kind of question arose, for example, where two different types of coins were being exchanged. When gold coins are traded for silver, which of them is considered the merchandise (whose conveyance effects the sale) and which is the currency?

The talmudic sources record that there existed two opposing textual traditions for the passage from the Mishnah that deals with exchanges of silver for gold. One version stated that silver acquires gold and the other that gold acquires silver. As noted, the metal that does the acquiring (whose conveyance finalizes the sale) is considered the commodity, whereas the one that is acquired is the currency. The Talmud explains that Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi, the Mishnah’s compiler, changed his mind about this matter over the course of his lifetime: in his younger years he had ruled that silver acquires gold, but later he reversed his position. Other authorities from that generation and the following one seemed to concur that silver acquires gold, such that Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi’s later espousing of the contrary view emerges as an isolated and temporary exception.

Scholars have sought historical explanations for this shift in the rabbinic attitudes toward gold and silver. Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi’s later position was formulated during the closing years of the first century. Indeed, this period was marked by a temporary decrease in the weights of the principal denomination of imperial gold coinage, the aureus, that began during the reign of Caracalla and was not restored until the time of Elagabalus (around 219).

During the period in question, the value of silver coins was not usually calculated according to their metallic content, but rather as a fixed fraction of the reigning gold coin. It is therefore understandable how the perception arose that the economy was based on a kind of gold standard, as the aureus was the de facto currency of the empire. To be sure, by the second half of the third century unspecified references to denars in the Talmud were assumed to refer to gold coins rather than silver.

At the time that the older Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi was insisting that silver was the primary currency, his view was consistent with what we know from the numismatic evidence—as some 529 different silver coins were minted over the four-year period between 193 and 196, while gold coins were being issued only infrequently.

All this coincided with the process that historians refer to as the crisis of the third century, characterized by widespread inflation as the public lost confidence in the real value of the abundant silver currency. The crisis has been imputed to a various causes including costly military adventures and fiscal mismanagement. It is possible that this state of affairs was the reason why Rabbi Judah’s own son Simeon opposed his father and insisted that silver not be treated as currency, but as a commodity subject to price variations. The denarius, fixed by Augustus at 95% real silver, was redefined by Caracalla at 50%—and the fiction of its silver content would eventually be abandoned. Consumer prices rose at that time by almost a thousand percent; and Diocletian’s comprehensive fiscal reforms were able to slow the inflationary process down to a mere 100%.

Gold thus replaced the silver denarius as the real coin of the realm. However, the stability of gold was also impaired after 106 C. E. when Rome came into possession of new gold mines in Dacia. There was widespread awareness that the official exchange rates amounted to an artificial overvaluing of silver that was intended to retard the rampant depreciation of the silver denarius. In the popular view, it was gold that was functioning as the real monetary standard—and even the imperial government refused to accept taxes that were paid in its own silver coins. This skepticism toward the official silver currency underlay several legal rulings in the Talmud.

The erosion of silver’s value led several prominent Jewish authorities to adopt the view that gold’s relative stability entitled it to be perceived as the true monetary standard. In fact, rabbinic traditions from this time mention discoveries of troves of gold coins, indicating that people were hoarding gold and stashing it inside walls or burying it in fields.

The perceived advantages of gold over silver were vividly expressed in the mid-second century in a parable of Rabbi Meir. His point was to stress the crucial importance of mastering the underlying logic of Torah teachings. If a student does no more than memorize the lists of unconnected rules without appreciating the reasoning on which they are based, then the enterprise will prove unmanageable.

Rabbi Meir illustrated his point by comparing the intellectual coherence of Torah study to gold denarii, and the individual laws to silver tetradrachms. Accordingly,

... a person who goes to Beit Ilanim [a well-known market town] and is in need of ten or twenty thousand denarii for expenses—if he carries the sum in single tetradrachms they will weigh him down and he will not know what to do with them all.

Instead, he should consolidate them into gold denarii, which he may then change into small denominations that he can spend at his convenience.

Now I am probably the last person you should approach for advice on investments—but I do claim to know a thing or two about educational values. If Rabbi Meir’s financial insights are as well founded as his astute pedagogic outlook, then you should probably give serious thought to acquiring some bullion.

Bibliography:

Heichelheim, F. M. Roman Syria. In An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome, edited by Tenney Frank, 4:121-257. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938.

Jacobs, Louis. Economic Conditions of the Jews in Babylon in Talmudic Times Compared with Palestine. Journal of Semitic Studies 2, no. 4 (1957): 349-359.

Marmorstein, Arthur. Dioclétian à la lumière de la Litterature rabbinique. Revue des Études Juives 98 (1934): 18-43.

Sperber, Daniel. Denarii and Aurei in the Time of Diocletian. The Journal of Roman Studies 56 (1966): 190-195.

———. Gold and Silver ‘Standards’. A Study in Rabbinic Attitudes to Roman Coinage. The Numismatic Chronicle (1968): 83-110.

———. Roman Palestine, 200-400: Money and Prices. 2nd ed. Bar-Ilan Studies in Near Eastern Languages and Culture. Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1991.

———. The Inflation in 4th Century Palestine. Archív Orientální 34 (1966): 54-66.

Warhaftig, Shillem. The Jewish Law of Money. Jerusalem: The Harry Fischel Institute for Research in Jewish Law, 1980, 237-250.  

Male Pattern Baldness

One of the most beloved literary treasures of the ancient world was the corpus of fables that the Greeks ascribed to the storyteller Aesop, a legendary figure whom they situated some time between the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. As befits a genre that derives from oral traditions, Aesop’s fables circulated in numerous collections that differed with respect to which tales were chosen for inclusion, and in the details of their plots and characters.

In ancient times as in our own days, you did not have to be an expert in Greek literature to be familiar with fables from the Aesop collection. Today, tales such as the hare and the tortoise or the grasshopper and the ant belong to the minimal level of literacy, even for those who do not know exactly where those stories originated. Probably this was also true in the Jewish rabbinic circles that produced the Talmud and Midrash.

Thus, the Talmud tells of Rav Ami and Rav Asi, two disciples of Rabbi Isaac Nappaha, who sat before their master imploring him to lecture to them (a scenario that should warm the heart of any educator). The problem was that one of the students insisted on a lesson in halakhah, religious law, while the other wanted aggadah, a discourse on a moral or inspirational theme. Whichever topic Rabbi Isaac began, one of the students would immediately interrupt.

In order to convey his frustration to his uncooperative students, Rabbi Isaac illustrated his predicament with the help of a parable: Once there was a man who was married to two wives, a young one and an older one. The young one would pluck out her husband’s white hairs and the old wife would remove his dark hairs. In the end, between the two of them, the husband emerged with a completely bald head!

The moral of the story was that as long as each of his students refused to compromise on his demands, they would end up with no lesson whatsoever. After making his point, Rabbi Isaac went on to deliver an erudite discourse that masterfully combined legal and homiletical themes.

Rabbi Isaac Nappaha’s parable was, in fact, a fable that was well-known from the Aesop collections. While this fact is of interest in itself, it is particularly fascinating to compare the rabbinic version with its Greek and Latin counterparts, with respect both to the details of the story and the moral lessons that were derived from it.

The Aesop fable has been preserved in a number of different versions. Its earliest appearance is in a compilation known as the Augustana, considered to be the oldest of the surviving collections. Its telling of the story of the two wives is remarkably similar to Rabbi Isaac’s, but some of the differences are of interest. For one thing, it fills in a few more details about the characters and their motivations. It states clearly that the man was half-grey, a circumstance that is only implied in the Jewish story. Whereas Jewish law allowed polygamy, so that the parable could be depicted within a marriage, the Greeks and Romans who were strictly monogamous had to situate the protagonists within non-marital relationships. The women were beloved ones or concubines whom the man visited alternately. The older lady was moved by shame at her lover’s youth, whereas the younger was put off by his advanced age.

To my mind, the most extreme differences between the versions are to be discerned in their respective moral lessons. As noted, the talmudic tale does not provide us with an explicit moral, but the context implies that it has to do with the self-defeating consequences of stubborn inflexibility. The official moral of the Augustana Aesop fable reads An anomaly (or: unbalance) is hurtful. This has been generally understood to refer to the deviant nature of the romantic triangle.

Other collection of Aesop’s fables were composed in verse. Such were the Greek compendium by Babrius and the Latin by Phaedrus both of which offered the story as an object lesson about the perils intrinsic to the female sex. To be sure, Babrius introduces the male hero by mocking him for his mid-life crisis, still pursuing liaisons and carousals that were inappropriate to his mature age. However, the main focus soon turns to the women themselves who by their selfish interferences have succeeded in leaving each other a bald lover. Aesop’s stated purpose in telling this fable is to demonstrate how pathetic is a man who becomes a victim of women. They are like the sea—first it laughingly entices them, and then it smothers them.

Phaedrus’ fable is even more aggressive in its hostility to the unfair sex. The moral, set forth at the outset, is that men are always fleeced by women, whether they are the lovers or the beloved. The older sweetheart is painted as a cougar, a seasoned temptress who has mastered the cosmetic ploys for concealing her advanced age. In this version, the sweet young thing is impelled not so much by a desire to make her boyfriend seem more youthful, but because she wants to appear closer to his age. The narrative also deals with the question of how the plucking was accomplished without the man protesting. It was not (as I would have imagined it) that the ladies went about their shearing while their victim was asleep—rather, they were able to persuade him that he was being pampered and coiffed.

When I compare the Talmud’s use of the fable to the competition, I find it more