Die Bedeutung des antiken jüdischen Rechts für das römische Recht und die antike Rechtsgeschichte am Beispiel der rabbinischen Rezeption und Modifikation der griechisch-hellenistischen diathēkē als dîjathîqî und der donatio mortis causa

Author(s):  
Matthias Armgardt

AbstractReuven Yaron (1924–2014) in memoriamThe importance of Ancient Jewish Law for Roman Law and Ancient Legal History – the example of the Rabbinic reception and modification of the Greco-Hellenistic diathēkē as dîjathîqî and the donatio mortis causa. This paper aims to show that ancient Jewish law is of greatest importance for interpreting Roman law and understanding ancient legal history. After exemplifying the close relation of the Pentateuch and the cuneiform law, we focus on the reception and modification of the Greco-Hellenistic diathēkē (testament), which came into Jewish law during tannaitic times as dîjathîqî and was reinterpreted by the rabbis as donation. Finally, we compare the rabbinic dîjathîqî and the Roman donatio mortis causa.

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns

This article, in earlier versions presented as a paper to the Edinburgh Roman Law Group on 10 December 1993 and to the joint meeting of the London Roman Law Group and London Legal History Seminar on 7 February 1997, addresses the puzzle of the end of law teaching in the Scottish universities at the start of the seventeenth century at the very time when there was strong pressure for the advocates of the Scots bar to have an academic education in Civil Law. It demonstrates that the answer is to be found in the life of William Welwood, the last Professor of Law in St Andrews, while making some general points about bloodfeud in Scotland, the legal culture of the sixteenth century, and the implications of this for Scottish legal history. It is in two parts, the second of which will appear in the next issue of the Edinburgh Law Review.


Author(s):  
Clifford Ando

Roman law has been a system of practice and field of academic study for some 2,400 years. Today, the field enjoys unprecedented diversity in terms of linguistic, disciplinary, and national context. However, the contours of contemporary study are the product of complex and imbricated historical factors: the non-codification by the Romans of the classical period of their own public law; solutions taken in the classical period and later to resolve conflicts among sources of law of very different antiquity; the codification in late antiquity of academic jurisprudence regarding private law; the on-going prestige of Roman civil law in medieval and late medieval Europe, which made it a resource for analogical argumentation in both public and international law; and much else besides. This chapter evaluates the contribution made by some of these factors to Roman legal history as a contemporary endeavour, with an eye to its future.


Author(s):  
Heikki Pihlajamäki

This chapter begins with a brief introductory note on the role of legal history in ancient Roman law, and the legal scholarship of medieval glossators and commentators. It then turns to the dominant schools of continental legal scholarship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ‘Neo-Bartolists’ and the usus modernus pandectarum. It considers the rise of the Historical School in Germany and the corresponding movements elsewhere in continental Europe. Methodologically, the representatives of the Historical School were the first professional legal historians in the modern sense of the term. Finally, the chapter retells the story of the rise of European legal history in the post-war period, and the recent trends towards a creation of global legal histories. It shows that legal history’s turns have in many ways followed from not only legal scholarship in general, but also from developments in historical science and global politics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 29-63
Author(s):  
Marie Seong-Hak Kim

The idea of the dynamic movement of law—diffusion of legal institutions, rules, and culture—is deeply embedded in European legal history since antiquity. All the while, a potent spirit of local custom has sustained national history, forming an equally integral part of Europe’s legal tradition. This chapter examines the sources of law in late medieval France and the doctrine of custom. It also discusses the growth of royal justice and the relationship between private law and political power. An overview of major historiographical debates concerning the theory and nature of custom sheds light on the question as to whether the notion of common law (droit commun) emerged autonomously in France or only after custom was written down on the model of Roman law as jus commune.


2020 ◽  
pp. 379-393
Author(s):  
Haym Soloveitchik

This chapter discusses the laws regulating usury (ribbit). In the course of studying ribbit, more specifically, the problem of personal surety in usury contracts, certain peculiar developments in Provençal halakhic thought came to the author's attention which were not explainable by indigenous forces. The geographical distribution of the discussion seemed oddly disproportionate, the fictions too blatant, the types of problem that were raised seemed inappropriate for the period, and the terminology was occasionally alien. The author was compelled to look outside Jewish law for possible stimuli. Placing the Jewish developments within the context of twelfth-century Provençal law shed light on a number of seemingly inexplicable points. The Jewish literature, on the other hand, provided new information about the Gentile law of the time and yielded fresh corroboration for theories of the penetration of Roman law in Provence. However, at the same time this material seemed to point to an earlier date for certain legal developments than is generally accepted. It is these findings that the author wishes to bring to the attention of the scholars of Provençal law.


Traditio ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 381-394
Author(s):  
Hans Julius Wolff

The monumental volume with which we are dealing is the legacy left to his science by a man who will always be counted among the most distinguished and most influential scholars of Roman law and ancient legal history in the first half of the twentieth century. As early as 1902, when he first began to teach Roman law at the University of Graz, Leopold Wenger had conceived a plan of writing a history of the whole legal order of the Romans that would comprise the total of public, procedural, and private institutions in one great unit. He proposed to see his unit in the light of its general political and cultural setting and to interpret it as bringing to its climax and final achievement, under Justinian, the evolution of law and legal thought of all antiquity; antiquity itself he understood as one single historical process interrelating the multitude of peoples and civilizations of the Mediterranean area that grew and declined, succeeded and influenced each other, until they were absorbed into the Roman Empire and were thus enabled to transmit their common heritage to later centuries. Understandably enough, this gigantic project involved more than one scholar could accomplish in one lifetime. Wenger was not able to carry it out. He did, however, succeed in completing, in this detailed description and discussion of the sources, the first instalment, and happily lived to see its publication shortly before his death on September 21, 1953, at the age of seventy-nine.


2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Goede

This article aims to construct the rights and duties of slave- owners in antiquity as part of the socio-historical context of the New Testament. In order to achieve this aim, the primary sources referring to Greek, Roman and Jewish law of slavery will first be described. Three aspects of the law of slavery, namely legal definitions of freedom and slavery, the legal status of slaves, and the rights of slave-owners are investigated in Greek, Roman and Jewish law. Relevant texts from these sources are then identified, analysed and interpreted. The re- sults of this process of analysis and interpretation are used to construct the legal context within which the exhortations directed at slave-owners in the New Testament should be read. We submit that Jewish law provided a sound alternative legal and religious context to the writers of the New Testament addressing Christian slave-owners. This alternative context functioned as a counterweight to the strict legal contexts pro- vided by Greek and Roman law.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yifat Monnickendam

To date, early Christian sources have drawn the scholarly attention of theologians, scholars of biblical commentary, and historians, but not of legal historians, presumably because such sources do not offer sufficiently substantial material for legal historical research. Nevertheless, a few studies have blended legal history and late antique Christianity, and an analysis of these studies shows they are based on a “centralist,” or “formalist–positivist,” conceptualization of law. In this paper I review the scholarship of legal traditions in the eastern Roman Empire— namely, Roman law and Greek legal traditions, the halakha in rabbinic literature, and the halakhic traditions in Qumranic literature and in the New Testament—and contextualize it within developments in legal theory and legal sociology and anthropology (that is, the rise of legal pluralism). This review shows that developments in legal theory, in legal sociology and anthropology, and in legal history of the late antique world are producing new paradigms and models in the study of late antique legal history. These new models, together with new methods in reading early Christian non-legal texts of the eastern Roman Empire, can be utilized in the study of early Christianity, thereby opening gateways to the study of its legal traditions and revealing independent legal traditions that have remained hidden to date.


2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 646-676
Author(s):  
Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman

Abstract It is the consensus of scholars that Jewish merchants in the medieval Islamic world structured their economic relationships according to the norms of a broad, “Islamic” marketplace. Legal agreements found in the Cairo Geniza show that, on the contrary, these merchants adhered to the norms of Jewish law. I discuss the implications of this finding for the study of Jewish and Islamic social, economic, and legal history, for which the Geniza documents are an important direct witness.


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