This is just an idle thought that came to me after watching a video by that secular Buddhist guy on Youtube (Doug's Dharma) that discussed the question "Is forgiveness not Buddhist?"
The video is about an article by Ken McLeod that appeared in Tricycle, the glossy Buddhist magazine, which argued that forgiveness only makes sense in the context of a transactional religious view, such as in the Abrahamic religions, where the idea of God engaging in agreement (covenants) leads to the idea of debt and forgiveness too - as part of putting broken deals right. I don't think he mentioned it specifically, but a "transactional" God in the Jewish sense includes the idea of divine bargaining. God engaged in a negotiation with Abraham as to how many
righteous men it would take for Sodom to be spared is the great example. The idea of deals or transactions being done at the divine level continues into Christianity - with the ransom theory of atonement, for example.
As to how unique the Jewish origin of the idea of a transactional God is, I suppose you could argue that any religion that practices sacrifice or offerings as a placation to a god or the gods has an element of "bargaining" too; but then again, the Old Testament portrays a very direct and personal involvement of God being prepared to "do deals". I mean, there were temples all through ancient Greece and Rome (and over in the Americas) at which sacrificial offerings were routine; but as far as I know, you don't have traditions of (say) Zeus coming down and having lengthy negotiations with religious figures about the exact details of a bargain.
And this led me to think - is the Jewish reputation for success at capitalism traceable to a cultural attraction to the idea of bargaining that was there from the very start?
The topic of Jews and success at capitalist enterprises is not exactly a new topic, and this book sounds interesting:
...in his slim essay collection “Capitalism and the Jews,” Jerry Z. Muller presents a provocative and accessible survey of how Jewish culture and historical accident ripened Jews for commercial success and why that success has earned them so much misfortune.
As Muller, a history professor at the Catholic University of America, explains it, much anti-Semitism can be attributed to a misunderstanding of basic economics. From Aristotle through the Renaissance (and then again in the 19th century, thanks to that Jew-baiting former Jew Karl Marx), thinkers believed that money should be considered sterile, a mere means of exchange incapable of producing additional value. Only labor could be truly productive, it was thought, and anyone who extracted money from money alone — that is, through interest — must surely be a parasite, or at the very least a fraud. The Bible also contended that charging interest was sinful, inspiring Dante to consign usurers to the seventh circle of hell (alongside sodomites and murderers). In other words, 500 years ago, the phrase “predatory lending” would have been considered redundant.
Lending at interest was thus forbidden across Christian Europe — for Christians. Jews, however, were permitted by the Roman Catholic Church to charge interest; since they were going to hell anyway, why not let them help growing economies function more efficiently? (According to Halakha, or Jewish law, Jews were not allowed to charge interest to one another, just to gentiles.) And so it was, Muller explains, that Judaism became forever fused in the popular mind with finance. In fact, Christian moneylenders were sometimes legally designated as temporary Jews when they lent money to English and French kings.
As Europe’s official moneylenders, Jews became both necessary and despised. The exorbitant interest rates they charged — sometimes as high as 60 percent — only fed the fury. But considering the economic climate, such rates probably made good business sense: capital was scarce, and lenders frequently risked having their debtors’ obligations canceled or their own assets arbitrarily seized by the crown.
This early, semi-exclusive exposure to
finance, coupled with a culture that valued literacy, abstract thinking,
trade and specialization (the Babylonian Talmud amazingly presaged Adam
Smith’s paradigmatic pin factory), gave Jews the human capital
necessary to succeed in modern capitalism. It also helped that Judaism,
unlike many strains of Christianity, did not consider poverty
particularly ennobling.
Most of
Muller’s strongest arguments are in his first essay, which draws on
everyone from Voltaire to Osama bin Laden to illustrate how the world
came to conflate the negative stereotypes of Jews with those of
capitalism’s excesses. The book’s remaining three essays deal somewhat
unevenly with the fallout of the Jews’ economic success, and in
particular the resentment it inspired among history’s economic
also-rans. Muller explores, for example, how Jews improbably became
associated with both abhorred poles of political economy:
hypercapitalism and Communism.
I'm not sure that he covers "because they always thought a deal could be cut - even with God" - but it seems worthy of consideration!
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