What Property Rulers May Confiscate from Jews

Aquinas’s “Letter on the Treatment of the Jews,” part 3

At the same time, Aquinas is not interested in allowing Christian rulers to take the possessions of their Jewish subjects for just any reason whatever. For the next thing he says is that rulers may not take from their Jewish subjects, at least for their own use, any wealth that the Jews may have acquired by means of usury. On Aquinas’s view, usury is a form of theft, a theory he takes for granted here but attempts to demonstrate, for example, in his Summa Theologiae question on the sin of usury (ST II-II, q. 78). As I argued above in my commentary on the latter passage, Aquinas’s moral critique of usury suffers from a number of decisive errors, for the charging of interest is in itself a morally innocent application of the monetary value that human beings naturally and inevitably place on time (all other things being equal, we value higher the possession of a good in the present over delaying our possession of the same good until the future). Given his view of usury as a form of theft, however, one may at least appreciate here Aquinas’s consistency in holding that rulers therefore may not confiscate possessions gained by means usury on the mere legal pretense that it was acquired by immoral means.[1] Aquinas may not like Jews, but he dislikes usury even more. Any possessions taken from the Jews acquired through usury, therefore, must be returned, if possible, to the victims of the usurious practice, and if they are unable to be returned, then the ruler may not keep or use it for himself, but must put it to some “pious” (i.e., religious or charitable) purpose.

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[1] Aquinas says in his letter that his understanding from Marguerite is that the Jews of her land owe virtually the entirety of their wealth to usury.