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Community tokens

Yad

Substitutes for money, mainly for charitable purposes.

Notes

Communities issued these tokens for several reasons – to make possible charitable gifts of minimal value enabling donations to and by very poor people for whom even the smallest official coin was too valuable; to control expenditures for specific communal functions, such as food distribution; or to facilitate trade in times of hardship.

Translations

  • Hebrew
  • German
  • Russian
  • French
  • Dutch
  • Italian
  • Czech
  • Hungarian
  • Spanish
  • Greek
  • Polish
  • Arabic
  • Yiddish
  • Ladino

Bibliography

Eklund, O.P. “Charity Tokens of the Netherlands,” The Numismatist, vol. 60, December 1947, pp. 867–875; vol. 61, January 1948, pp.19–28.

Kindler, A. “Jewish Community Tokens with Hebrew Inscriptions [Hebrew].” Alon-Internal Quarterly of the Israel Numismatic Society, vol. V, no. 3 (April), 1974, pp. 47– 60, Plates, I & II.

Kirschner, Bruno. “Judaica in Nummis,” Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 83 (1939) 590-605.

Kisch, Bruno. “Jewish Community Tokens, a Neglected Field in Jewish Numismatics,” Historia Judaica 13 (1953), 167-182, 4 plates.

Rezak, Ira. “Numismatic Evidence of Jewish Communal Life in Poland,” Scripta Judaica Cracoviensia, vol. 16, 2018, pp. 1-14. https://doi.org/10.4467/20843925SJ.18.001.10815.

Wolf, Albert, “Jüdische Medaillen,” Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde XIII (1904) 51-62, 9 plates.

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