99 problems and a lamb ain’t one: What the Talmud says about Trump’s hush money trial
Former President Donald Trump in court at the start of jury selection in his hush money trial in New York City. Photo by Getty Images
By Benyamin Cohen April 15, 2024
Jury selection began today in the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president. While the nation has never before seen something like this, the Bible — the good book that brought us a river turning to blood, a woman turning into a pillar of salt and a talking donkey — is, not surprisingly, a tad prescient.
In Deuteronomy 23:19, the Torah explains that items “paid to a prostitute” cannot later be used for a donation to the Temple since the money is tainted. Moreover, if a man paid a sex worker with an animal instead of cash, that animal cannot be brought as a sacrifice in the Temple.
Currency had yet to catch on and people often traveled with a flock of animals, so this was apparently a fairly common practice: Just look to Genesis 38:17 when Judah is traveling and sees a sex worker on the side of the road. (As it turns out, it’s his daughter-in-law Tamar in disguise and, well, that’s a story for another time.) He offers her as payment a “young goat” from his flock.
“So clearly, payment in kind was at least common or common enough,” explains Chaim Saiman, the chair in Jewish law at Villanova University. “The kind of typical payment would be livestock.”
If someone agrees to pay a sex worker one lamb, and then gives them an additional 99 lambs as a bonus, Maimonides writes that all the lambs would be forbidden as Temple sacrifices. But if a man prepaid with a lamb, the prostitute could bring that lamb to the Temple assuming the sexual encounter had yet to take place. (Pay now, buy later?)
On the other hand, in this quid pro quo scenario, Jewish law doesn’t differentiate between when the quid and quo were given. If a man went to a sex worker, but didn’t pay her until years afterwards, she could not bring those lambs as sacrifices in the Temple even though they were not part of a direct, attributable sexual transaction.
Jewish law goes so far as to dictate that even if the sex worker sold the lamb to a third party, that third party also can’t bring that lamb to the Temple because the animal’s unholy nature sticks despite who owns it. “A tainted source is something that Jewish law cares about,” Saiman said. Trump is accused of paying cash in the scandal; no lambs were exchanged.
Continuing down the lamb logic, however, the Talmud points out that when the sex worker sells the lamb, that money can then be donated to the Temple. This would, in theory, apply nowadays in a post-Temple world, with regard to donations to synagogues and other holy purposes.
Self-inflicted self-dealing
But the money in question at the trial of former President Donald Trump was not for sexual services rendered; rather it was used as payment to keep quiet about alleged multiple liaisons. For that, we need to look at another section of Jewish canon.
The Trump case, Saiman argues, is more akin to the halachic prohibition of internal self-dealing. Trump is accused of falsifying business documents, all of which are tied to his role in a hush-money payment to an adult film actress, Stormy Daniels.
The Torah envisions that people would have different accounts: for example, one for charitable contributions and one for business expenses. As Saiman explains, Jewish law states that you cannot use “funds donated for Purpose X and transfer them to Purpose Y, which is really what this Trump case is all about.”
Alas, Trump is in a criminal court, not a rabbinical one. So what Maimonides has to say about the former president’s alleged peccadilloes is not that relevant. However, Jewish ritual did sneak into the proceedings: Judge Juan Merchan reportedly said the trial would take off for Passover if anyone on the jury had a conflict.
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