Intermediate Days
Like Naṭronai Gaon and like Ibn Migash, Maimonides addresses the issue of doing business on the intermediate days of the festival in his own responsa. He praises a rabbinic authority in Palestine for proclaiming a ḥerem (excommunication) against anyone working on the intermediate days of the festival (in Palestine, we recall, it was customary to avoid work on all days of the festival, including the intermediate ones). But in the next breath, he qualifies, following the Babylonian Gaon Naṭronai: “If it is a case of a business deal to avoid lost business opportunity, people should engage in business transactions” (yis’u ve-yittenu).19
Maimonides codified this opinion in the Code. In Hilkhot shevitat yom ṭov (Laws of Repose on a Festival) 7:22, a halakha informed by his own merchant perspective on daily life, he ruled: “One should not engage in trade [seḥora] on the intermediate days of the festival, whether selling or buying. But if it is something that, if postponed, would entail lost business opportunity [davar ha-aved] regarding something that is not always available after the festival, for instance, when ships or caravans have just arrived or are about to depart and people are selling cheap or buying dear—in such cases, a person is permitted to buy or sell (on the intermediate days). One may not, however, buy houses or slaves or cattle except if needed for the festival.”
Maimonides’ intimate knowledge of the realities of long-distance trade stands out boldly in his comments about ships and caravans and how their arrival or departure could affect market prices, an elaboration that goes beyond Naṭronai Gaon’s dispensation for writing letters to business associates. But Maimonides does not, like Naṭronai, restrict business to discussions in the privacy of one’s home. Rather, he resorts to a ruling in the rival Palestinian Talmud that allows doing actual business with a caravan that is arriving and then departing on the intermediate days of a festival to avoid lost business opportunity.20
Notably, too, Maimonides extends Naṭronai’s ruling on caravans to include ships. This is not surprising. Maimonides lived in Fustat, a city intimately linked to commerce in the Mediterranean through the port of Alexandria and with India through the port of Aden and the Indian Ocean. He knew as well as anyone that the arrival and departure of ships was one of the determining factors in marketplace activity, and conceded that merchants needed to be on the spot to take advantage of their movements into and out of the harbor if they were not to forfeit business opportunities.21
Two halakhot later, Maimonides sanctions work on the intermediate days of a festival in a different context (Hilkhot shevitat yom ṭov 7:24): “Whatever is forbidden to do on the intermediate days of the festival one may not instruct a Gentile [goy] to do. If he has nothing to eat, he may do whatever is forbidden to do on the intermediate days of the festival to provide enough for his livelihood. Likewise, he may engage in commerce [‘oseh seḥora] to provide enough for his livelihood. It is permissible for a wealthy man to hire a poor man who has nothing to eat to do work that is otherwise forbidden on those days, so he may earn wages with which to provide for his livelihood. Likewise, one may buy things that are not needed for the intermediate days of the festival if the seller is in need and has no food to eat.”
The supposed Talmudic source for the first statement is: “Whatever he may do, he may instruct a Gentile to do, and whatever he may not do, he may not instruct a Gentile to do” (Mo‘ed Qaṭan 12a). The concern with the alleviation of poverty, also present in the Talmudic discourse, had particular immediacy in Maimonides’ Egypt. As I have discussed elsewhere, the Geniza attests to the presence of a large population of poor in the Jewish community of Fustat, local poor as well as transient indigents or needy people seeking to settle down in that charitable community.22 Each week, hundreds of hungry people, locals and foreigners, received a dole of loaves of bread and sometimes wheat as well.23 The poor received subsidies to help defray the poll tax levied on every healthy, non-Muslim adult male. Geniza letters reveal that Maimonides was personally involved in charity in the community, particularly on behalf of redemption of captives (usually foreigners), the most costly item in the community’s charity budget.24
The statement in 7:24 about protecting the hireling or the store owner from dearth addresses the plight of the “working poor” in Maimonides’ Egypt, who earned meager, subsistence wages and could not afford to sacrifice income for an entire week twice a year (ḥol ha-mo‘ed plus the festival days that precede and follow). Both weeklong Jewish festivals fell within the Mediterranean sailing season, which ran from April through October: the week of Passover in early spring and the week of Sukkot at the dawn of the fall/winter season.25 Noteworthy is the clear allusion to Maimonides’ own “ladder of charity” near the end of the Laws of Gifts for the Poor (10:7), which puts employment of a poor person, entering into partnership with him, giving him a loan, or making an outright gift at the top of the list of commendable methods of charitable giving (“workfare” rather than “welfare,” to invoke anachronistically a political policy of some conservative opponents of government subsidies to the unemployed poor in American politics).
Most significant in terms of Jewish commercial life is the phrase sanctioning commerce: “Likewise, he may engage in commerce [seḥora] to provide enough for his livelihood.” By using the word “likewise” (ve-khen), Maimonides separates this clause from the sentences before and after it that address the needs of the poor and signifies that he is adding something new. Seemingly, according to the codifier, the permission to engage in trade exceeds the Talmudic rationale—the concern that people might starve.
The Geniza merchants, we must remember, were not indigent. For them, the threshold of basic livelihood was higher than the subsistence level assumed by the Talmud in its discussion of work during the festival interlude. The Geniza merchants’ livelihood depended upon doing business continually, with minimal interruption, constantly offsetting losses or potential losses with gains, always keeping their capital moving. Ships delivered and exported goods, and, for merchants, the inability to engage in trade during the full week of each of the two Jewish festivals could cost them dearly, especially because, as Maimonides himself states two halakhot earlier (Hilkhot shevitat yom ṭov 7:22), prices for buying or selling could be at their optimum when ships or caravans arrived. The halakha in question (7:24) follows naturally, therefore, from the earlier one, which explicitly allows transacting business with merchants traveling by ship or by caravan on the intermediate days of the festival and, by implication, in the marketplace itself, not just in the privacy of their homes, as stipulated more conservatively by R. Naṭronai Gaon. Refraining from work on the intermediate days of the festival could truly entail lost business opportunity—praqmaṭia ovedet.
Seemingly, Maimonides does not limit merchants’ activities to corresponding with business associates, as stipulated by Naṭronai Gaon. In his merchant guise, Maimonides knew that traders needed to have direct and immediate access to markets to take advantage of business opportunities and favorable prices that might not be available if they had to wait until after the conclusion of the festival week, especially if caravans or ships were arriving or departing. This reality, more typical of the commercial Islamicate economy than of the agrarian world of the Talmud, called for greater halakhic flexibility. In his rulings on work on the intermediate days of the festival, both in the opinion he addressed to the rabbinic authority in Palestine and in his Code, Maimonides appears to have had in mind the reluctance of Jewish merchants like those of his native Córdoba to take time off from their business affairs for so many consecutive days twice a year. The responsum of Ibn Migash, which Maimonides is likely to have known, describes explicitly the habit of those merchants to engage in buying and selling on the intermediate days. Ibn Migash responds that they should not be barred from doing so if it meant avoiding financial loss. What Maimonides appears to have done in the Code, and to have gone further in this respect than Naṭronai Gaon, is to stretch the definition of praqmaṭia ovedet to accommodate contemporary merchant habits.
Writing three and a half centuries later, R. Joseph Caro seems
