Legal Prohibitions on Usury and the Documents of the Cairo Geniza

Abstract The Cairo Geniza contains a plethora of loan agreements, many of which were executed in the Jewish court. Despite a widely known prohibition on collecting interest on loans, some of these agreements stipulated the payment of interest. I have already explored elsewhere why the court might be willing to give its imprimatur to such agreements despite the fact that they ran afoul of Jewish law. In this brief note, I hope to explore why the parties to such agreements – who might otherwise care what Jewish law had to say – would agree to a relationship that so clearly and publicly transgressed Jewish legal norms. Was this simple economic expedience, or were other factors at play? Did they not know the law? Were they deliberately choosing to violate it? These agreements offer us an unparalleled window into the daily life of the medieval Jewish community and its relationship with the law.