Almsgiving

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Almsgiving is the giving of money, food, or goods to the poor performed as a religious obligation rather than ordinary kindness — an act framed, in the traditions that prize it, as worship in its own right. The English word descends through Old English ælmesse from the Greek eleēmosynē, “mercy” or “pity,” by way of a worn-down Late Latin eleemosyna that the medieval ear shortened until two syllables survived. The Greek itself stands on eleos, pity, and eleēmōn, the one who pities; so the very name of the act keeps the link it everywhere insists on — the gift to the poor is the outward shape of an inward movement of mercy, and to give is to enact, in the world, a disposition first turned toward God. The same coin carries two faces from the start: the relief of a hungry body and the cleansing of a soul.

Gabriël Metsu, “The Alms-Giver” (c. 1650s), a Dutch genre scene of the everyday gesture of giving to the poor — Gabriël Metsu (1629–1667), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Four vocabularies

The discipline appears, in distinct and untranslatable vocabularies, across the major traditions, and the differences between the words are as telling as the resemblance between the acts. Four of them carry most of the weight.

In Islam, zakāt is one of the five pillars, set beside the declaration of faith, the daily prayer, the fast of Ramadan, and the pilgrimage. It is not solicited as a donation but owed as a due — a fixed annual levy on accumulated wealth that has sat above a threshold for a full lunar year, conventionally reckoned at a fortieth of liquid wealth and at varying rates on herds, crops, and mined metals. The Qur’an pairs it with prayer again and again, so that worship of God and care of the poor are named in a single breath. The Arabic root z-k-w turns on purity and on growth at once: to pay zakāt is held to purify the remaining wealth and the giver who holds it, the small portion surrendered making the larger portion clean. The architecture is plain — a calculated obligation, a recognized class of lawful recipients, an act of worship discharged rather than a generosity offered. Its festal release comes at the close of the Ramadan fast, the zakāt al-fiṭr given before the prayer of Eid al-Fitr so that no one is left to beg on the day.

Judaism speaks of tzedakah, and the word resists the English “charity” altogether. It grows from tzedek — righteousness, justice — so that to provide for the poor is not to be generous but to do what is owed, to render the right rather than to bestow a kindness. The Talmud places the obligation at the summit of the commandments and treats the refusal of it as a kind of theft from the one who has a claim. Out of this legal-ethical soil the most influential single ordering of the act was raised by Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, 1138–1204) in his great code, the Mishneh Torah, in the section Hilkhot Matanot Aniyim, the Laws of Gifts to the Poor. There he ranks the degrees of giving into eight ascending rungs — a ladder later readers would name for him. Near the bottom sits the gift given grudgingly; above it, the gift given with a glad face; higher, the gift given before being asked; higher still, the gift in which neither giver nor recipient knows the other, the doubled anonymity that spares the poor man his shame and the giver his pride. And at the summit, above which there is none, stands not a gift of money at all but the act that ends the need for the gift: strengthening the hand of the one who has fallen — by a present, an interest-free loan, a partnership, or the finding of work — so that he need never stretch out his hand to another again. Self-sufficiency restored outranks any public largesse, however magnificent. The poor man helped to stand is, on this reading, the perfect alms, because he ceases to be poor.

The traditional portrait of Maimonides (1138–1204), whose Mishneh Torah ranks the eight degrees of charitable giving — engraving from Blasio Ugolino’s “Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum” (Venice, 1744), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Buddhism and the older Indian traditions know dāna, the open hand — the giving over of what one holds without grasping. It heads the list of the perfections a bodhisattva cultivates across innumerable lives, and in the everyday economy of the saṅgha it is the hinge that joins the lay world to the renouncing one: the monastic, owning nothing and growing nothing, lives on the food set in the begging bowl, and the layperson who fills it earns merit. Here the accounting runs in a direction that startles other vocabularies — the merit accrues chiefly to the giver, and it accrues in proportion to the worth of the recipient, so that the gift to a pure and disciplined renunciant is the paradigm case and yields the richest harvest. The poor person is not, in this scheme, the privileged object; the holy mendicant is. Across Hinduism dāna widens into a vast field — gifts of land, cattle, gold, and food to brahmins, to ascetics, to temples — woven together with the logic of sacrifice and offering that animates the yajña; and in Jainism the support of the wandering monk who will accept only what is freely and faultlessly given becomes one of the lay vocation’s defining acts.

Christianity inherited the Jewish emphasis whole and sharpened it. The Sermon on the Mount treats almsgiving as one of three works of the righteous life — alms, prayer, and fasting — each to be done in secret, the left hand kept ignorant of the right; and the later tradition fixed that triad as the three classic works of penance. Behind it stood the older voice of the Book of Tobit, which declares that alms delivers from death and purges away every sin — a line that would echo for a thousand years and lend almsgiving its redemptive weight. To the early Christian writers the poor were not merely needy but privileged: the treasure laid up in heaven was laid up by the hands of the destitute, who became, in a phrase the age loved, the doorkeepers of the kingdom.

Michael Pacher, “St Lawrence Distributing the Alms” (c. 1465–1470), depicting the deacon-martyr handing the treasures of the Church to the poor — Michael Pacher (c. 1435–1498), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What the act is for

What the traditions report of the act diverges sharply on a single question: whom it is finally for. Some texts present alms as primarily the relief of the poor — justice rendered, a body fed, a debt of righteousness discharged. Others present it as primarily the giver’s own affair: a purification of wealth, an expiation of sin, an accumulation of merit, a transaction with God in which the recipient’s benefit is almost the incidental occasion. The two readings do not sit in separate traditions waiting to be compared; they coexist, unreconciled, inside the same ones. The Qur’anic zakāt both feeds the destitute and cleanses the donor; the Buddhist dāna both sustains the saṅgha and ripens the giver’s own karmic account; the Christian alms both clothes the naked and ransoms the soul that clothes them; Tobit’s saying makes the poor man’s relief and the giver’s deliverance from death a single motion. The act faces two ways at once, and the traditions have generally declined to choose, preferring to hold both faces of the coin in view.

The Sufi reading, set down in the eleventh century in the oldest Persian treatise on the path, presses the giver’s side toward its limit. For al-Hujwīrī, in the chapter on alms in the Kashf al-Maḥjūb, the obligation is not really about wealth at all: Alms is really thanksgiving for a benefit received — health owes alms, dignity owes alms, every blessing owes its acknowledgment, and the truly generous soul, who lavishes everything and keeps nothing, has in a sense already passed beyond the reach of the levy, for one cannot be commanded to give away what one no longer hoards. The renunciant who lives outside the economy of giving — the fakir, whose chosen poverty is itself a station — stands at the far end of the same logic by which asceticism turns the relinquishing of goods into a discipline of the soul.

The poor enter history

Scholars of late antiquity have traced how this elevation of the poor reshaped the ancient world. The classical city had honored a different ideal entirely: euergetism, the benefaction of the rich toward the community of citizens — the games funded, the baths built, the grain distributed to the citizen body in return for honor and a statue in the forum. The beneficiary was the city, the proud collective of those who belonged; the destitute, the resident alien, the beggar at the gate fell outside its accounting altogether, invisible to a generosity aimed at civic glory. The historian Peter Brown, in Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (2002), set out how the Christian bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries effected a quiet revolution by inventing, as a public object of concern, “the poor” — a category the classical city had never needed — and by claiming them as the church’s special charge. The bishop became the guardian of the poor; wealth became something to be redistributed for the soul’s sake rather than spent for the city’s honor; and the focus of public giving shifted from the proud citizen body to the destitute at its margins. Jan Bremmer (2010) and other historians of early Christianity have followed how the new vocabulary of charity, reward, and atonement reworked older Greek, Jewish, and Near Eastern strands into the distinctive Christian synthesis. The destitute, long below the horizon of public virtue, were carried into the center of it.

Texts and scholarship

The primary deposits sit close to hand. The ordering of Jewish giving that shaped all later discussion is Maimonides’ own, in Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Matanot Aniyim (Laws of Gifts to the Poor), chapter 10, where the eight degrees are laid out and the highest is defined as the gift, loan, or partnership that lets the poor man stand on his own; the Hebrew with English is hosted in full on Sefaria at Mishneh Torah, Gifts to the Poor 10:7–14. The redemptive thread of the act runs back to the Book of Tobit, whose saying that alms delivers from death and purges away every sin (Tobit 12:8–9, in the Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha) became the charter text for the giver’s-purification reading across late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Sufi self-understanding of alms as thanksgiving for benefit is set down in al-Hujwīrī’s eleventh-century Kashf al-Maḥjūb, chapter XX, in Reynold A. Nicholson’s 1911 translation.

The transformation of ancient giving is the subject of a now-classical body of scholarship. Peter Brown’s Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Brandeis / University Press of New England, 2002) is the touchstone for the claim that Christianity invented “the poor” as a public object of concern and bent the machinery of euergetism toward them. The contemporary practice of that giving — its promotion from the pulpit and its uneven realization between 313 and 450 — is documented in Richard Finn’s Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire, reviewed in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review at bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2007/2007.07.50. The deeper history of giving as reward and atonement in the earliest churches is taken up in David J. Downs, Alms: Charity, Reward, and Atonement in Early Christianity (Baylor University Press, 2016), and the reworking of Greek, Jewish, and Near Eastern strands into the Christian vocabulary is treated across Jan N. Bremmer’s collected studies, including the 2010 volume on the Pseudo-Clementines whose opening essays examine philanthropy and the theory of the two ways. For the Islamic pillar, the architecture of zakāt — its threshold, its rates, its lawful recipients, its place beside prayer in the Qur’an — is surveyed in the standard reference literature on the five pillars.

Almsgiving sits close to sacrifice and to ascetic renunciation without collapsing into either: it is a giving-up that is also a giving-to, a transfer the traditions read at once as a social act and as a dealing with the divine — kin to the self-emptying love the Christian tradition names agape, kin to the offering laid on the altar, yet identical with neither. The practice is among the most widely shared of religious obligations, and among the most variously explained. The hand opens everywhere; what the opening is taken to accomplish differs from one tradition to the next.

→ In the library: Hujwīrī — Kashf al-Mahjúb, ch. XX: On Alms (al-zakāt) (1911 tr.)

→ Related: Agape · Asceticism · Sacrifice Ritual · Eid Al Fitr · Yajna · Buddhism · Christianity · Islam · Hinduism · Jainism · Sufism · Maimonides · Fakir