The Brother and the Other
The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood.
by Benjamin N. Nelson.
Princeton University Press. 258 pp. $3.00.
Under this suggestive title, we are offered a penetrating work in the history of ideas. Before we are half through with this account of the adventures in the Western world of the prohibition in Deuteronomy against the taking of usury by Jew from Jew, but not from a non-Jew, we cannot fail to realize that what is probably the longest debate of world literature revolved not so much around the mere idea of usury as about the relation of Jew and Gentile. To the thoughtful reader of Mr. Nelson’s study, the usury dispute appears less ah aspect of economic history (to which the author in scholarly self-denial confines it) than a symptom of a hidden weakness of Western civilization: the relation of the Old to the New Testament. It was only in the Jewish-Christian tradition that the question of usury achieved a moral-theological dignity. Why this should have been so, emerges very clearly when Mr. Nelson’s data are considered in a wider framework.
Usury is, of course, an obsolete term for interest. But what once was a major source of income has become in our days a dwindling addition to capital—and what was once considered nefarious has become an indispensable tool of a market economy; and even the Russian planners would feel hampered if they had to go without it. When John Maynard Keynes in the 20’s raised doubts concerning the efficacy of the bank rate of interest as a regulator of the economic life of the planet, he had to suffer the reprobation which is the lot of those who lay hand to the root of ordered human existence. It then appeared that we had come to think of interest as one of the foundations on which civilization itself rested. To replace it by some newfangled banking techniques seemed as sacrilegious as to rely for propagation of the race on artificial insemination.
So it needs an effort to recall that for at least a thousand years Jewish-Christian civilization had been subject to recurrent outbreaks of conflict over usury, and that it was hardly more than four centuries ago that Calvin started the new dispensation under which the taking of interest was finally removed from the threat of excommunication. It is the merit of Mr. Nelson’s book to show how Calvin’s act symbolized a veritable change of the emotional and intellectual climate in which Western man lived. The closeness of feudal-tribal existence had passed forever and the wider but chillier skies of universal humanity were preparing to receive him. The medieval church, which had battled for the maintenance of the taboo against usury throughout Christendom, had suffered final defeat. It made its peace with capitalism, whose lifeblood was profit; the new economic order created a sufficiency of wealth, which made society immune against the dangers of usury. The idea of interest thus lost its horrors for a society which was maturing towards the tepid serenities of a non-sectarian prosperity.
Benjamin Nelson has placed the problem for the first time in its proper context. His “Brotherhood” versus “Otherhood” is a revival of Maine’s “Status” versus “Contractus,” later reformulated by Toennies as “Community” versus “Society.” These are also the poles between which Max Weber’s sociology oscillated. The condemnation of usury as a breach of community was born in Hebrew tribal surroundings, and every time the tribal spirit was reembodied in Mediterranean lands the same violent hostility against the taking of interest reemerged. Seven hundred years after the promulgation of the Deuteronomic prohibition the early Christians resuscitated the ban on usury; and another thousand years later, the advent of the Germanic tribes recreated the pristine climate of anti-commercialism.
Mr. Nelson’s Idea of Usury, for all its pellucid scholarly remoteness, has truly dramatic implications for the relation of Jew and Gentile. Not for nothing does his account reach its literary climax in the figure of Martin Luther, whose conscience was torn, during the peasant revolts, between the Christian universalization of the Jewish tribal taboo against usury and the fear of weakening the forces of law and order with which he had sided. Luther was caught on both horns of the dilemma: he had to recognize the moral superiority of the Jewish taboo on interest, while yet rejecting its application for fear of its worldly consequences.
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For a student of the sociology of economic institutions, the idea of usury as it percolated through the Western world bears the imprint of the Jewish-Christian calvary. In numerous other countries of the past, usury either posed no problem or, if it did, a variety of solutions proved equally acceptable. Solon abolished debt bondage in Greece, but the sources almost fail to mention usury. In Rome, the XII Tables ordered the defaulting debtor to be sold into slavery, yet Cato the Elder was convinced that the XII Tables had prohibited the taking of interest for all times. The Kwakiutl Indians regarded veritable orgies of usury as a national sport, while the Bunyan sect of India, whose members would refuse to eat fruit for fear of unwittingly harming a maggot, were notorious for their practice of hounding the victims of their usurious dealings to death. In effect, Jewish-Christian civilization is the only civilization known to us in which the taking of interest became a problem.
And what a problem! What a moral and spiritual rack on which Jew and Christian were stretched! The New Testament was grafted on the Old. It was invalid without it. The son of God was the offspring of a Jewish woman. And the spirit of the new religion (as the Jew, too, recognized) was an offspring of Jewish prophetic teaching. And yet the Jews had to reject their son, whose alleged claim to be the Messiah might have spelled their doom as a people. The New Testament had repeated the injunction: “Take no interest on loans.” In this, too, Jesus was fulfilling the Mosaic law. But that law enjoined the Jew to refrain from usury only towards his brother Jew, not also towards the Gentile. The outcome was a combination of Old and New Testaments fraught with peril, a veritable symbiosis of death. This, and this alone, explains the enormous exaggerations of the role played by Jewish usury in the Middle Ages, as well as the bitterness of the hatred generated by this monstrous situation. The Gentile could never confess to himself his envy of the Jew who had evaded the cross of a supererogatory ethic, while the Jew must have been conscious of the privilegium odiosum conferred on him by the restriction of the Deuteronomic injunction to his own kind.
Mr. Nelson vividly depicts the Protestant dilemma which involved identification with the Old Testament laws in its emphasis on social justice, while at the same time the universalist postulate of Christianity drove the Reformation towards an ever sharper rejection of tribal seclusionism. The result was universalism—with a vengeance. Instead of the universal extension of the prohibition of usury, it was the abolishment of this prohibition that was universalized. Jew and Gentile gave way to Economic Man—who, in turn, in a bath of blood, became once again Jew and Gentile. The Idea of Usury, which seems to recount only the story of two verses of Deuteronomy dealing with economic matters, is nothing less than a guide to the Divina Commedia of Jew and Gentile.
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