Abstract: This chapter explores the transfer of patterns and institutions of philanthropy among Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in Europe and North America over the last two millennia. The teaching within these three religions provided instructions for philanthropic behavior— zakat and sadaqa in Arabic, zedakah in Hebrew, and philanthropy in English— that resulted in the formation of philanthropic institutions of the waqf in Islam, the heqdesh in Judaism, and the foundation in Christianity. These three institutions of philanthropy share significant communalities. And it is these communalities that have caused scholars to consider the possibility that these institutions did not emerge in isolation but from interreligious and intercultural transfer processes. This chapter, further, discusses the transformations of philanthropy within Christianity that were caused by the Protestant Reformation as well as the introduction of the voluntary association within Judaism and its appropriation by Christian women in the context of the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

This chapter was first published in Charity in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Traditions, edited by Julia R. Lieberman and Michal Jan Rozbicki, Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Books, 2017, 45– 65.

Introduction

Scholars of religion and scholars of philanthropy agree that the tradition of philanthropy has been intrinsic to most of the world's cultures and religions. And while the giving and sharing of excess funds with individuals beyond the circle of family and friends might have been caused by a variety of motives, which were grounded in empathy and religion as well as in the desire to secure a particular social status, philanthropy appears to have been an anthropological condition that defines humanity and is as old as human civilization itself.1 Our modern academic system with its high level of national specialization in the humanities and social sciences, however, appears to be ill-equipped to research a universal and complex phenomenon such as philanthropy. Researchers working on waqfs in the Islamic tradition and researchers working on the tradition of foundations in the Christian tradition rarely communicate with each other, and if specialists from these distinct fields meet in the same room for a conference, they often employ a different terminology that hides connections and common characteristics rather than revealing them.