The Talmud on Moving Out of a City to Avoid Taxes

Tale of Tiberias foreshadows New York and Chicago

Samuel Adams, religiously inspired opponent of taxation without representation, signer of the Declaration of Independence. Painting by Seth Lipsky, 2008.

As I mentioned before (in “How High a Price Is Exploitation? The Talmud’s answer foreshadows Costco’s”), one of the first things I do every morning is study a page of Talmud. The “page” is actually two sides of a traditional printed text. In a contemporary published edition, with the Aramaic and an English translation and explanatory notes and commentary, the “page” can run to ten actual pages or so. I started in January 2020 (at the urging of my friend Dominic Green, a contributor to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal who has been helping a bit with The Editors, including coming up with the name), and am on track, along with hundreds of thousands of other Jews, to finish the cycle of Daf Yomi, or page-a-day, study in June of 2027, which is 2 Sivan 5787 on the Hebrew calendar.

Yesterday’s “page” was about people moving away from a city to avoid a tax. When enough people moved away, the powers imposing the tax realized it was a bad idea and repealed it. Here is the text, from the Koren/Steinsaltz edition English translation of tractate Bava Batra (Aramaic for “The Last Gate”), page 8a:

Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi says: Suffering comes to the world only due to ignoramuses. This is like the incident of the crown tax that was imposed on the residents of the city of Tiberias. The heads of the city came before Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi and said to him: The Sages should contribute along with us. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi said to them: No, the Sages are exempt. They said to him: Then we will run away and the entire burden will fall on the Torah scholars. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi said to them: Run away as you please. Half of the city’s residents ran away. The authorities then waived half the sum that they had initially imposed on the city.

The half of the population that remained in the city then came before Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, and said to him: The Sages should contribute along with us. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi said to them: No, the Sages are exempt. They said to him: Then we too will run away. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi said to them: Run away as you please. They all ran away, so that only one launderer was left in the city. The authorities imposed the entire tax on the launderer. The launderer then ran away as well. The crown tax was then canceled in its entirety. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi said: You see from this that suffering comes to the world only due to ignoramuses, for as soon as they all fled from the city, the crown tax was completely canceled.

Rabbi Judah HaNasi lived from approximately 135 to 217 CE, and the scholars say the Talmud dates from between 300 to 600 (though some say it was transmitted along with the Torah at Mount Sinai), so however you look at it, this is a nice early example of the dynamic effects of tax increases, or of the Albert Hirschman “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” framework, or of the idea, that, as Citibank CEO Walter Wriston used to say, “capital goes where it’s wanted and stays where it’s well treated.” 

I’ve been telling a contemporary version of this story about the many, many rich people (Ken Griffin, Sylvester Stallone, Sean Hannity, Jeff Bezos, Billy Joel, Tom Brady, Lionel Messi, Carl Icahn, Paul Tudor Jones, Donald Trump; many of these links are to FutureOfCapitalism.com, which was a predecessor site to The Editors) moving to zero-state-income-tax Florida from higher-tax New York, Illinois, Washington, California, and Massachusetts. These moves all happened notwithstanding the February 15, 2013, New York Times article by James B. Stewart that appeared under the headline “The Myth of the Rich Who Flee From Taxes.” It’s validating to see this phenomenon foreshadowed in the Talmud. Perhaps eventually the politicians in New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and California will take after the ones in long-ago Tiberias and, in response to the outflow of taxpayers, rethink their self-defeating policies.

It’s an idea especially worth marking on July 4, the birthday of a country that began in part with people leaving England for more religious freedom in America, in part with a religiously inspired revolt against taxation without representation—a story told in my biography of Samuel Adams.

As for the talmudic dichotomy between sages and “ignoramuses”—a somewhat harsh translation of a term that literally means people of the land, people who aren’t Torah scholars—that’s a topic for another day, and possibly another place. It’s worth mentioning, though, that at least one possible read of the story is that Yehuda HaNasi had it not completely right, and that the “ignoramuses” don’t only bring on the problems, but also, with their reactions, help do their part to build pressure for corrections of the errors.

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