RT Article
T1 The formerly wealthy poor: from empathy to ambivalence in rabbinic literature of late antiquity
JF AJS review
VO 33
IS 1
SP 101
OP 133
A1 Gray, Alyssa M.
LA English
YR 2009
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1650551312
AB Students of poverty in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim social, literary, and legal contexts in late antiquity and the Middle Ages have noted the phenomenon of wealthy people who fall into poverty and the provision of charitable assistance to them. This essay's principal purpose is to point out an important difference between the development of attitudes toward the formerly wealthy poor in rabbinic literature of late antiquity and in other religious and legal contexts. Peter Brown notes evidence of late Roman empathy for the wellborn poor, hypothesizing that this empathy can be attributed to a desire to preserve these remnants of the old, proud plebs romana in the uncertain sixth century. Ingrid Mattson demonstrates that between the eighth and tenth or eleventh centuries CE, Islamic jurists moved in the direction of taking the “social and economic context” of a poor person into account in determining that person's legitimate needs. By contrast, as this essay will show, rabbinic literature of late antiquity moved in the opposite direction, from third-century empathy for the formerly wealthy poor to growing ambivalence in the fourth through the seventh centuries.
K1 Poverty
K1 Rabbis
K1 Talmud
K1 Fraud
K1 Redaction
K1 Jewish Culture
K1 Slaves
K1 Late Antiquity
K1 Social classes
K1 Horses
DO 10.1017/S0364009409000051