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The Valuation of Coins in Medieval Jewish Jurisprudence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

Daniel A. Schiffman
Daniel A. Schiffman
Affiliation:
Department of Economics and Business Administration, College of Judea and Samaria, Ariel, Israel44837.
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Extract

The corpus of Jewish legal writings contains many discussions of economic issues and ideas. Yet, aside from a small group of scholars, historians of economics have tended to ignore the texts of Jewish law. As Ephraim Kleiman (1997) points out, the sheer size and inaccessibility of the Jewish law corpus presents a major barrier. Economic ideas are scattered across a vast amount of material. The canonical text of Jewish law is the Talmud, which spans 2,700 folio pages and two million words. Hundreds of commentaries have been written on the Talmud (or parts of it). There are three major codes of Jewish Law (based on the Talmud and selected commentaries), plus commentaries on the codes and lesser known codes (based on the major codes). About one million responsa (questions and answers in Jewish law) are known to exist; these are collected in hundreds of books. Today, new commentaries and responsa appear each year, in addition to multiple rabbinic journals. In order to understand these materials, the scholar must be well versed in Hebrew, Aramaic, and the reading of the Talmud.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , June 2005 , pp. 141 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2005

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