The Gift of Debt: Agnon’s Economics of Money, God and the Human Other

Money, gifts, and debts play a crucial role in Agnon’s first novella, Vehaya he’akov lemishor (And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight; 1912), which tells the story of the bankruptcy of middle-class shopkeepers Menasheh Ḥayim and his wife Kreindel Tcharni in mid–nineteenth-century Galicia. Following Nietzsche’s claim of the internalization of debt as the origin of monotheist religion, I read Agnon’s novella as the literary construction of an analogy between capitalism and religious faith as two economic systems of debt and credit, destined for crisis. Framed this way, Menasheh Ḥayim’s subsequent journey as a beggar brings up questions of sin, responsibility, and the hierarchy of monetary and divine debts. Whereas Menasheh Ḥayim’s life is constructed via debts to external authorities, his death exchanged for his wife’s life underscores that the debt to the human other functions in Agnon’s novella as a gift which bypasses the economy of debt and credit. Read this way, Menasheh Ḥayim’s death for an other against the demands of an external authority becomes a critique of both the traditional and modern Jewish subject, constituted through debt to religion or its modern substitutes such as capitalism or Zionism.