Conclusion and Implications

Abstract

Perhaps it is unfitting to open the conclusion of a thesis on talmudic management ethics with Karl Marx, given his anti-Semitic and anti-capitalistic sentiments. Yet he picked up on a Hegelian concern that most likely applies to this thesis as well: the inability of philosophers and social scientists to transcend the times they live in, whereby their work reflects given or developing structural conditions. Jewish business ethics are of course no exception, as one preeminent scholar in the field notes: “[w]e find that in the first half of this [20th] century many studies in Jewish economic history and behavior were heavily influenced by the socialist or liberal philosophers of the time and tend, therefore, to present a Judaism synonymous with those philosophies. At the present time, the pendulum seems to have swung in another direction, and now scholars tend to equate Judaism with the most extreme free market philosophers.” Like the joke of the Jewish schoolboy telling a priest that Jesus is the greatest prophet of all times, scholars of Jewish business ethics are prone to give their audience that which it wants.