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Comment by jasonkostempski | Hacker News Reader

Lending money?

I suggest the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Almost all early religious entities, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, condemned the concept of using money to make money as immoral. The belief was that money was meant to exchange debt, not make people wealthy off that debt.

Today Islam still holds this as a majority view in many places (not universally). I'm simplifying it a lot, so I really recommend the book. There is a strong correlation between debt and guilt. In Christian doctrine, they're very interchangeable (forgive us our debts/sins as we forgive those who are indebted to/have sinned against us).

Guilt, Sin and debt are the same word in many ancient languages, including old English. Guilt and debt are still the same word in German.

I thought that Judaism had some sort of exception that allowed usury in the case of lending to non-Jewish people. This was why many banks back then were run by them.

My understanding is that a lot of banking was jewish simply because of their legal system. You could reasonably expect a jewish bank to obey a jewish court decision, even if that court was on another continent. This lent an otherwise unheard of level of credibility, and allowed jewish banks to network like no other.

In ye old days people thought charging interest was a sin right in there with adulatory

And yet people lent money anyway, they just used complex accounting maneuvers to obfuscate it.

And they still do. Look up "Islamic Mortgages". The level of hoops people will jump through to keep some semblance of logical consistency in their nonsense is just absurd.

Usury is not without controversy.

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