Cultural Meanings of Money in Medieval Ashkenaz: On Gift, Profit, and Value in Medieval Judaism and Christianity

Abstract

This article explores the cultural history of money in medieval Judaism and Christianity. In doing so, it reassesses a historical narrative describing the emergence of a “new money economy” in the High Middle Ages. In the prevailing narrative, money is positioned as a causal agent: it is said to effect and symbolize the “profit motive,” becoming a locus for anxiety about the new money economy. But a close reading of moral literature suggests that money per se was not a locus of anxiety. Moralists had a sophisticated understanding of economic value and its relation to moral economy. Anxiety among Jewish and Christian moralists focused on the possible disjuncture between moral and economic values, not on economic value per se. Through close readings of medieval exempla, this article demonstrates that moralists regarded the economic act of acquisition as creating a moral value. When “bad” moral value adhered to coins, they sought to devise means for redeeming that value through penitential acts. This ideology, which was shared by Jewish and Christian authors, suggests that cultural assumptions about money were more sophisticated than a straightforward fear of the profit economy and profit motive and that the narrative of European economic development as a shift from gift economy to profit economy ought to be problematized. Binary oppositions between gift and profit and between an altruistic Christianity (linked to a gift economy) and a modernizing Judaism (linked to a profit economy) ought to be broken down.