Past the Limits of Usury: Jews and the Moral Economy of Moneylending in the Late Medieval German Territories

Scholarship on Jews and medieval economic thought is often devoted to the theological debate over usury. Beyond this debate, many of the daily economic interactions between Jews and Christians in the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire revolved around moneylending and complications arising from credit transactions. Recent literature has exposed the multiple and complex ways that Christians and Jews reacted to the changes brought on by the expanding economy as of the eleventh century, mainly in the context of the numerous discussions on usury as a moral and legal concern. However, this article will argue that the prevalence of credit transactions, in both interreligious as well as intra-religious exchange, brought with it other forms of ethical and moral concerns for both Jews and Christians. This article examines some of Jews’ moral concerns arising from the practice of extending credit, mostly focusing on moral conceptions regarding the boundaries of competition. With Jews embedded in the legal and cultural traditions of medieval Christian society, their attitudes toward economic morality will be discussed within the wider context of Christian cultural norms.