sures. We cannot even know how faithfully the normative precepts of the
Talmud reflect the actual lived experience of the poor and their benefac-
tors during its own time. To say that the Geniza material reflects the prac-
tice of charity in late antiquity might not be an unreasonable assumption,
given the conservative nature of Jewish society (and of societies in gen-
eral) in premodern times. Much that we see in the Geniza world does in
fact mirror the world reflected in the Talmuds. Here, again, we are in the
longue dureé. That the Jews practiced a sophisticated system of regular,
public food distribution as prescribed in the Talmud, while Muslims had
no government food-relief system, is strong evidence of diachronic conti-
nuity since pre-Islamic times.
Apart from practice, what do our sources tell us about ideas of poverty
and the relationship between ideas of poverty and poor relief?
1
How
much of this, further, is embedded in Jewish tradition and where can we
identify similarities with the surrounding culture? Ideas of poverty in rab-
binic Judaism vary greatly, and many of them appear in our documents
from everyday life. Probably the most constant idea in rabbinic sources is
that poverty is always a misfortune, never holy, not to be idealized or ex-
alted.
2
There is hardly any hint of the virtue of the poor in Jewish thought,
and the same goes for the Geniza letters. Connected with this, begging,
understood as door-to-door solicitation, was frowned upon in Judaism
from early rabbinic times. Maimonides later codified Jewish law on this
matter: “In the case of a poor man who goes from door to door, one is
not obligated to give him a large gift, but only a small one. It is forbid-
den, however, to let a poor man who asks for alms go empty-handed, just
so you give him at least one dry fig.”
3
In practice, of course, the destitute
got more than a dry fig. They turned to the public dole, where they re-
ceived rations of bread, wheat, cash, or clothing, all purchased with char-
itable donations from members of the community.
This unfavorable attitude toward begging in ancient Judaism might
have been reinforced in our period by a similar disapproval, or rather low
estimate, of begging in Islam, exemplifed by a popular saying in the
Muslim tradition literature (which, we noted, echoes a Jewish midrash):
“The hand on top is better than the hand below. The hand on top gives,
CONCLUSION 245
1
A far-reaching compilation of biblical and rabbinic ideas of poverty is to be found in the
eighteenth-century Meil sedaqa (written in Ottoman Smyrna by Elijah ha-Kohen b. Solo-
mon Abraham, d. 1729, and published posthumously in 1731); see Abraham Cronbach,
“The Meil Zedakah,” who reorganizes these concepts into a concise summary by theme.
The context of this treatise is the rampant poverty afflicting the Jewish communities of the
Ottoman Empire at the time. Rabbi Elijah explicitly took the part of the poor in some of his
other writings. See Ben-Naeh, “Poverty, Paupers, and Poor Relief in Ottoman Jewish
Society,” 200–201, 203, 207, and in the English version of this article, 156–57.
2
Cronbach, “The Meil Zedakah,” 519–20.
3
Hilkhot mattenot aniyyim 7:7.