BARRING a brief study of some fine point in the esoteric lore of German Pietism, this was my first article in Jewish studies, and in many ways it remains the densest and most multi-layered. This is a result of both the nature of the topic and its target audience. An analysis of pawnbroking requires parsing simultaneously three areas of Jewish law: debt, pawns, and usury, none of which are simple. Any analysis must also incorporate the practices of moneylending in medieval France and Germany and equally the laws governing pawnbroking in these countries.

Every essay is written for an imagined audience, and mine was intended for the eyes of Jacob Katz, Saul Lieberman, and my father. Knowing that all three appreciated brevity, I tried to say as much as possible in as few words as possible. I may have succeeded, but short writing makes for long reading, and I have long since regretted the terseness of the formulations. When I submitted the Hebrew version for publication some five years later (it took another six years for it to appear), I expanded the presentation somewhat and incorporated numerous points that had been clarified in my seminars. While not pursuing any further research on the topic, I have, over the years, chanced upon various materials and registered them on the margins of my Hebrew copy. The study thus reflects systematic research up to the mid-1970s. Upon republishing my essays, it seemed foolish to reproduce the original English version when an expanded one existed in Hebrew. So I have freely translated many passages of the Hebrew text, incorporated my notes and jottings, and tried to further loosen the tautness of the original presentation. Barring two points, that of ‘economic moralism’ and the length of German resistance to certain French allowances, most of the changes are expositional or they elaborate and nuance points in the original essay, so the reader is receiving, in a more accessible form I hope, the substance and the argument of that essay. Indeed, many pages hew closely to the original. To better orient the reader, I have prefaced the essay with some brief general remarks about pawnbroking, drawn from the Hebrew. (As to the significance of recent research in Germanic law, see the Appendix.)