On 13 Aug 2002 03:08:30 -0700, (Mohsin Raja) wrote:

I did not believe that Judaism was the true religion because apparently you shouldn’t give loan to your brother without interest but you can charge interest to others” I don’t believe that religion can be selfish ever. We need to learn to care about human for what they are.

Les Brown replied:

Brother, of course, here meaning brethren, ie; A Jew cannot charge interest to another Jew, just as a Moslem is not permitted to charge interest to another Moslem (mostly ignored, these days anyway), but can to an infidel.

A Christian wasn’t permitted to charge another Christian interest until about 400 years ago when Christian merchants complained that the only way they could get finance was to go to a Jewish moneylender. Upset by this reliance on the Jews, the Church then permitted the prohibited. The Christian has always been permitted to charge non-Christians interest and their rapacious interest rates to non-Christians made the Jews look positively benevolent in comparison.

The reason why a Jew could charge interest to gentiles was because he knew the gentile would charge him interest as well. And if any dispute arose from a loan, the Jew could take another Jew to a Jewish court (beth din) and get fair justice. If he had a dispute with a gentile over a loan, then assuming he wasn’t killed first, the gentile authorities offered little opportunity to have a fair hearing since they automatically favoured the gentile.

Some church authorities actually encouraged the Jews to make loans available since Christians wouldn’t do it for no interest. The church authorities would keep all loan contracts (called a “shtar” in Hebrew) in a certain safe location within the church where the borrower couldn’t retrieve it and destroy it. It has been proposed that the chamber where they were kept was called the “Star Chamber” as in York Minster.

All the same, isn’t it strange that a person would claim a religion as being not the “true religion” because they would do exactly the same thing as their own religion?

Les Brown