Q&A: Citizens’ Consent and Communal Ordinances
Citizens’ Consent and Communal Ordinances
Question
Recurring and reawakened,
what does citizens’ consent have to do with communal ordinances?!!
He neither read nor studied
Answer
Why not? Communal ordinances are based on the consent of the citizens (to accept the authority of the seven leaders of the city). Any community whose members agree to accept upon themselves the authority of a shared governing power—that governing power has validity by virtue of the law of communal ordinances. And the same applies to professional guilds setting their own prices, and what follows from that.
Discussion on Answer
Certainly it would. The law of the kingdom is no different from communal ordinances; it’s just that one applies in a state under a king, and the other in a community under the seven leaders of the city. Any community anywhere in the world can enact communal ordinances, even if they are Eskimos. Is the rule that tradesmen may enforce their set prices found only in a Jewish guild? True, if they enact laws against the Torah, those laws are void—but that is true among Jews as well. But in monetary law, and wherever the law of the kingdom applies, communal ordinances also apply. Therefore a person must observe English law, and also the municipal law of the London city council (so long as it does not conflict with Jewish law, of course), and also the ordinances of the cobblers’ guild of Marrakesh (even if they are non-Jews).
Only when it is founded within the framework of Jewish law, as the Rashba and the Rosh elaborate in their responsa. But can one seriously imagine that English law would be defined as a communal ordinance?!