Charité et Institutions Charitables

The first act of this story unfolds in the academies of Palestine and Babylonia in the first centuries of our era, where rabbinic law established the concrete forms of mutual aid. Talmudic literature distinguishes two cardinal institutions. The kuppah, the "fund," collects money weekly and redistributes it each Friday evening to the poor residents of the city, in the form of allowances intended to cover the week's needs. The tamhui, the "tray" or communal soup, distributes daily food, accessible to any indigent passer-by. This duality — regular assistance reserved for community members, immediate aid open to the stranger — already reflects a refined understanding of charity, one that distinguishes between needs and statuses.

The Talmud also establishes the rules of management: the fund must be collected by at least two people and distributed by at least three, so that neither the collection nor the distribution rests on a single person and opens the door to suspicion. These requirements for collegiality and transparency anticipate, by several centuries, the principles of public accounting. Maimonides, in the twelfth century, systematized this heritage in his Mishné Torah, where he orders the degrees of tsedaka in a celebrated hierarchy: the apex belongs to one who helps the poor person cease to be poor — through a loan, a partnership, employment. The anonymous gift, where neither the giver nor the recipient know each other, occupies the rank immediately above the rest, precisely because it spares shame. Jewish charity thus conceives of itself from the outset as a science of dignity as much as of aid.

No source documents the actual practice of tsedaka as finely as the Cairo Genizah, that repository of used manuscripts from the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, which yielded tens of thousands of documents from the 10th to 13th centuries. Lists of beneficiaries, appeals for donations, collectors' accounts, requests from the shame-faced poor: the Jewish community of Egypt appears there endowed with a dense, salaried and bureaucratized assistance system. Research on this corpus shows how communal institutions — and not merely private gesture — framed the circulation of resources, trust and mutual obligations in the medieval Mediterranean world, where long-distance commerce relied on networks of codified reputation and solidarity [Goldberg, 2012].

The documents reveal regular distributions of bread and clothing, financed by pious foundations — the revenues from buildings bequeathed to the community — and by collections. They also reveal a social category that the registers name with discretion: the nizharim, those who "formerly gave and now receive," these fallen families aided discreetly so as not to expose them. The ransoming of captives — pidyon shevuyim — considered by the rabbis as the most urgent of obligations, holds a recurring place there: when a Jew was captured by pirates or brigands, letters circulated from community to community to gather the ransom. The Genizah thus gives us to see, through raw archive and not through prescription alone, what Jewish charity actually did, day after day.

For relief to be permanent, it had to be removed from the randomness of collections. From this emerged the institution of hekdesh: a property—house, shop, field, orchard—consecrated, whose revenues were assigned in perpetuity to a determined charitable purpose. This mechanism of pious mortmain, close in its logic to the Islamic waqf with which it long coexisted in Eastern lands, made it possible to anchor charity in patrimony and duration. A donor could thus bequeath a building "for the bread of the poor," "for the dowry of orphan girls," or "for the oil of the synagogue," creating a stream of revenues that crossed generations.

The term hekdesh designated by extension, in many Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities, the hospice itself: the building where indigent travelers, the sick, and the elderly without family were sheltered. One perceives in it a slow but decisive transformation: charity ceased to be a flow—the gift given, immediately consumed—to become capital, a walled institution, endowed with administrators, the gaba'ei tsedaka, accountable to the community. This permanence had its downside: the property of the hekdesh, coveted, sometimes poorly managed, became the subject of disputes of which rabbinic registers bear witness, and the position of gaba'i, though honorific, could become a stake in communal power.

Alongside the funds managed by the community as a whole, the late medieval and modern period saw the flourishing of hevrot, voluntary confraternities each devoted to a specific cause. The most venerable, and the most universally widespread, was the Hevra Kadisha, the "holy confraternity" charged with ritual washing and burial of the dead. A work of supreme disinterestedness — since the deceased cannot give thanks — it was considered the highest act of kindness, the hessed shel emet, the "true kindness." Its members, often notables, enjoyed considerable prestige and gathered in an annual banquet.

Other confraternities divided the field of solidarity: the Bikur Holim visited and cared for the sick, watched over the dying and provided remedies and broths; the Hakhnasat Kalla dowered poor young girls to enable them to marry; the Malbish Arumim clothed the destitute; the Hakhnasat Orhim welcomed travelers. This associative fabric transformed charity into shared commitment, distributed among specialties, where each work had its statutes, its membership fees and its registers. By entrusting each need to a particular body, Jewish communities built, long before the welfare state, a true division of labor in philanthropy.

In the Sephardic and Maghrebi world, charity was closely articulated with rabbinic authority and communal organization. In Morocco, the progressive structuring of the Grand Rabbinate and rabbinic courts framed the management of pious endowments, the arbitration of disputes relating to hekdesh and the distribution of relief among needy families, making the rabbi not only a judge and decision-maker, but an administrator of collective solidarity [Kenbib, 1994]. The great dynasties of scholars — foremost among which the lineage of Abehsera in the Tafilalet — combined spiritual authority with a reputation for generosity, and tradition attributes to them numerous gestures of assistance to the poor and to travelers.

It is here that Memory and the archive respond to each other with the greatest tension. The oral tradition of Moroccan Judaism has preserved the memory of wonder-working saints who fed the poor, whose generosity is celebrated during pilgrimages, the hiloulot. The archive, more prosaic, attests above all to structures: the ma'amad, committees of notables, communal coffers, taxes on kosher meat — the gabela — a portion of which fed relief funds. Between the hagiographic account and the accounting register, the historian reads two complementary truths: that of the fervor which gave meaning to the gift, and that of the administration which made it sustainable.

Few cities better illustrate the scale reached by Jewish charitable institutions than Ottoman Salonique, this "Jerusalem of the Balkans" where Jews, who were the majority for several centuries, formed a mosaic of congregations stemming from the expulsion of Spain in 1492. Each kahal — community attached to a synagogue of Iberian origin — had its own assistance institutions, in a city where communities and constituted bodies wove an order of remarkable social complexity under Ottoman tutelage [Gounaris, 2008].

There were relief funds, brotherhoods for visiting the sick, hospices, societies for the dowering of young girls and funds for study, financed by bequests, contributions and especially by the gabela levied on meat and wine. The multiplicity of congregations generated duplications and rivalries that community authorities periodically sought to federate, especially when plagues — fires, plague epidemics — required a collective response. Salonique thus exemplifies Jewish charity at its urban apogee: no longer just a few funds, but a parallel assistance system covering all social life, from birth to burial, which lasted until the annihilation of the community during the Shoah.

The emancipation of Jews in Western Europe at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries profoundly transformed the economy of charity. Where the traditional community, autonomous and fiscally sovereign, had been able to compel giving through taxation and excommunication, new citizenship dissolved these coercive powers. Obligatory tsedaka gave way, in part, to voluntary philanthropy, in the manner of the bourgeois charitable societies of the era. There emerged then the great modern organizations: consistories managing assistance, relief committees, and then, on an international scale, the Alliance israélite universelle founded in 1860, which extended to the Orient and North Africa a network of schools and social works.

This modernization was not a pure rupture. The old institutions—Hevra Kadisha, Bikur Holim, hekdesh—survived, sometimes refounded as registered associations, hospitals, orphanages, and retirement homes. The great waves of migration and the catastrophes of the twentieth century finally imposed a rescue charity on a world scale: relief for refugees, aid to survivors, reconstruction. Through these metamorphoses, one constant remains, which connects the weekly collection box of the talmudic town to contemporary foundations: the idea that care for the poor is not a favor but an obligation of justice, inscribed at the very heart of Jewish collective life.

The subject of this book is a collective institution rather than a lineage: the great figures connected to it are therefore the thinkers who formulated its law and the scholars whose communities associated their name with charitable work. They are named here in all honesty, without attributing to them deeds that are not attested.

Maimonides — Moses ben Maimon, the Rambam (1138–1204) — Born in Cordova, died in Cairo, physician and codifier of Jewish law. In his Mishné Torah, he systematized the laws of tsedaka and formulated the famous hierarchy of eight degrees of giving, placing at the summit the aid that makes the poor self-reliant. His thought remains the classical reference for all Jewish reflection on charity, meditated upon to this day in communities throughout the world.

Shlomo Dov Goitein (1900–1985) — Historian and orientalist, born in Bavaria, active in Palestine and then in the United States. Through his monumental work on the documents of the Cairo Genizah, he revealed the economic and social life of medieval Jewish communities of the Mediterranean, including their relief institutions, relief funds, and lists of beneficiaries. He made aid to the poor an object of documented history, founded on the archive rather than on law alone.

Rabbi Yaakov Abehsera (1806–1880) — Master of the Tafilalet in Morocco, patriarch of a celebrated dynasty of scholars. The tradition of Moroccan Judaism attributes to him exemplary piety and generosity toward the poor and travelers, and his memory is celebrated during annual pilgrimages. His figure illustrates the link, characteristic of the Sephardic world, between spiritual authority and the exercise of communal charity.

Tracing the history of Jewish charity means following the concrete unfolding of an idea: that the poor have a right, in justice, to a share of the common good. From the kuppah and tamhui of the Talmud to the meticulously recorded distributions of the Genizah, from the pious foundations of the hekdesh to the specialized confraternities of life and death, from the great North African rabbinates to the flourishing congregations of Salonika, to modern philanthropies, the same logic unfolds: that of an institutionalized, permanent, accountable solidarity, withdrawn from the caprice of feeling. What this book sought to show is that Jewish charity was less a private virtue than an architecture—a set of organs which, in the absence of a State, served as social security for a dispersed people. The archives, when they survive, attest to this permanence; Memory, when the archive falls silent, preserves its fervor. Between the two, the historian reads the persistence of a people determined to make justice toward the poor not a supplement to the soul, but the very foundation of their common life.