Gifts Make Slaves, Whips Make Dogs, and Covenant With Yahweh Makes Charity
A couple months ago, I read Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism by Schwartz. As suggested by the subtitle, in this sense “Mediterranean” is not a geographic designation but a synonym for clientelism. This combines two of my favorite interests, Western civ history and comparative exchange, and so naturally I had to read it when I saw it in the PUP catalog.
As background, it helps to understand that clientelism (aka hierarchy, patronage, or authority ranking) is one of the basic modes of human organization. One of the many ways that our culture is WEIRD is that to us clientelism is relatively unimportant in fact and even less so in salience. The logic of clientelism is premised on reciprocity under conditions of inequality. So you have higher status people giving gifts to lower status people, who in turn incur social obligations to the higher status people. In the process the former become patrons and the latter clients. In the extreme case this can turn into debt slavery, but even short of that you see the clients reciprocating with deference (thereby conferring status to their patrons), votes, and fighting in the patron’s military unit. My favorite example of reciprocity through deference comes from JLM’s Social Structures (p. 206), when he notes that non-military feudal reciprocity “was usually minor or degrading or both: in return for the manor of Hemingstone, the tenant was required to `leap, whistle and fart for the king’s amusement’ every Christmas day.“ (For more background on clientelism, read Graeber’s Debt, JLM’s Social Structures, and Fiske’s RMT).
Anyway, back to the Hellenistic/principate era Judaism that is Schwartz’s empirical focus, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that his conclusion is that Jews exhibited both clientelism and solidarity during this period. Nonetheless, he sees Jews as exhibiting relatively less clientelism and relatively more solidarity than your typical Hellenistic culture. That is, Jewish culture was unusual in providing charity to the poor without turning them into clients, and in particular with constraints on debt slavery and weak institutions of euergetism (civic philanthropy as clientelism). In this respect it makes sense to take a sort of glass half full approach and ask where did the solidarity come from?
The source of solidarity is God, or to be more precise about it the Bible, and to be even more precise about it, P, D, and the prophets. (For background on Hebrew source criticism concepts like “P,” listen to the Yale OT course by Hayes or read Who Wrote the Bible by Friedman). The prophets and priests who wrote these parts of the Bible, and to a certain extent the rabbis who developed the subsequent interpretive tradition, were developing an ideology of mutual support and a polemic against reciprocity since to hold a client in debt implies that they are not members of the same community with obligations to one another on the same level as between members of the same household. This is seen most clearly in passages like Deuteronomy 23:19, which prohibits charging interest to another member of the community and likewise in other parts of the Bible that demand debt jubilees in which debts are forgiven (and in anticipation of which one is supposed to nonetheless continue making “loans” to those who need them despite the imminent foreseeable mass debt amnesty). That is, in Fiske’s terms, these strands of the Bible are engaging in polemic against authority ranking and in favor of communal sharing. It is telling that debt jubilees come from the P source, which suggests an underlying class dynamic of priests contesting with landowners for the support of the masses, very similar to the oratores/bellatores split of the mediaeval elite or the models of a semi-autonomous intellectual class found in Gramsci, Bourdieu, and new class theory.
However the glass half empty is that, as Schwartz emphasizes, this was to a large extent an aspirational ideology and in practice Hellenistic/principate (and presumably Biblical) era Jews didn’t always live up to it, but still had a fair amount of clientelism. In some cases this was genteel clientelism, as with the rabbinic traditions in which one reciprocated the mentorship of a master rabbi with praise (much as a 21st century academic will write journal articles citing her doctoral advisor), and yeah, this is a form of clientelism but it’s a pretty far cry from debt slavery. At the other extreme you’ve got The Wisdom of Sirach, which Schwartz reads as a sort of a Hellenized Jew’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” type deal, complete with full-blown Bourdieu among the Kabyle-ism in which the instrumentality of gift giving is just barely sublimated.
It’s interesting that Joshua ben Sira was a thoroughly Hellenized chap, living in Alexandria (the same diaspora community that included his book in its great cultural achievement, the LXX Bible). This cosmopolitanism and cynicism to a large extent go together. Part of the logic of communal sharing is that it only works within tightly bound communities and indeed in lab experiments you prime communal sharing by emphasizing the alter’s common membership in a highly salient community. We also see this logic in the parts of the Bible that demand egalitarianism. For instance, the very next verse after Deuteronomy 23:19’s famous prohibition against interest allows the exception that one can charge interest to foreigners (including resident aliens).
Parts of the Bible are downright genocidal, but what’s interesting is that these parts are uniformly directed towards what we might call an especially energetic form of boundary work. That is, the Bible reserves its most bloodthirsty passages for other peoples who threaten to undermine the particularity of Israel through intermarriage and encouraging apostasy (issues which the Bible sees as nearly synonymous). (e.g., Numbers 31:15-17, Deuteronomy 20:16-18). Nor can you really separate the “nice” Bible that discourages exploitation from the “mean” Bible that demands men divorce their foreign wives and that the nation wage genocidal campaigns against the nations within Canaan. Intense social closure (at least in aspiration) and intense altruism (at least in aspiration) were mutually supportive. What undergirds both of these issues is that the nation is defined by relationship to Yahweh. The Bible defines Israel not primarily by common descent from Abraham’s twelve legitimate great-grandsons but rather by common affirmation of the covenant Abraham cut with Yahweh. Notably, most of the covenant language follows the genre conventions of Near Eastern vassalage treaties. Although the Bible vacillates on such issues as whether Yahweh’s protection is contingent, all versions of the covenant establish Yahweh as patron of Israel which means that relations of Jews to one another are as mutual clients to a single patron. Now in general co-clients often lack horizontal ties, but this structural equivalence means that there’s the ideological raw material there to build an aspirational case that horizontal ties among these co-clients are as members of a common household. We see this view make the jump to Christianity, yet again primarily as an aspiration, in Paul’s view of the church (including the laity) as the new Israel and internal to which there were to be altruistic relations (e.g., his letters to the Corinthians, which both encapsulate supersessionist covenant theology by rejecting circumcision and demand egalitarian relations within the community through internal arbitration of disputes, sharing the agape feast, etc).
Conversely, the decline of particularism and closure is associated with the decline in altruism. Nelson’s thesis is that the taboo against usury relaxed with the decline of a notion of tribalism. Similarly, we see a close reflection of this in the common observation that welfare states are most likely to arise in highly homogenous high trust societies like Scandinavia and less so in heterogenous societies like the United States. However much there might be an aspiration towards universal altruism it looks much like the product of universal and altruism are more or less a constant, such that if you increase one, you tend to decrease the other. An extremely open society is one in which we can hope people will refrain from swindling one another, but it’s probably too much to expect that they will consider highly inegalitarian relationships to be inappropriate or engage in unreciprocated altruism.
cross-posted to Code and Culture
