עיון במשנה, בבא מציעא ד, א, לאור דיונים במשפט הרומי על חוזה מכירה ("emptio venditio")

This paper observes the role of money in Roman contract of sale (emptio venditio) in the second and third centuries CE, and in Jewish law of the period as practice in Roman Palestine. Its first part reviews the school controversy in Roman law regarding the pecuniary nature of a price (pretium) in Roman contract of sale. The triumphal stance in the controversy favored a binding pecuniary requirement from pretium to distinguish sale (emptio venditio) from barter (permutatio). The existence or absence of money eventually distinguished between the two legal procedures; a line of reasoning which stemmed from a clear, though implicit, dichotomy between money and everything else. The second part of the paper shows how this dichotomy also affected discussions of Jewish sages preserved in Jewish legal sources from the period regarding sale transactions in acquisition by drawing (qinyan meshikhah); in particular, Bava Metzia 4.1 and the relevant Talmudic discussions. The paper argues that the same pattern of thought, which decided the Roman school controversy in favor of a pecuniary purchase price (pretium in numerata pecunia), dictated the rulings of Jewish sages. The two legal traditions reflect a common conceptual framework, which distinguished between money and any other type of goods and affected the economic reality of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire