On today’s daf, we learn a curious halakhah:
Rav Yehuda says that Shmuel says: When property of a gentile is sold to a Jew for money, it is ownerless like a desert until the purchaser performs an act of acquisition; anyone who takes possession of it in the interim has acquired it.
Why is this so? The Gemara explains:
The gentile relinquishes ownership of it from the moment when the money reaches their hand, while the Jew who purchased it does not acquire it until the deed reaches their hand. Therefore, in the period of time between the giving of the money and the receiving of the deed, the property is like a desert, and anyone who takes possession of it has acquired it.
Help us keep Jewish knowledge accessible to millions of people around the world.
Your donation to My Jewish Learning fuels endless journeys of Jewish discovery. With your help, My Jewish Learning can continue to provide nonstop opportunities for learning, connection and growth.
According to rabbinic law, a sale of property is not complete until the purchaser takes possession of the land which happens at the moment when they receive the bill of sale. But non-Jews do not operate within this system. It appears that during rabbinic times in Babylonia, a non-Jew would consider the land sold as soon as they received payment and, therefore, they would relinquish ownership at the moment when they were paid.
The fact that the non-Jewish seller has given up their rights to the land before the transaction is complete creates a small window of time when the land is ownerless. Should someone else take possession of the land at that moment — by plowing it, for example — they would become its rightful owner. Some of the traditional talmudic commentators lambast a person who would do such a thing. Others require them to pay the original purchaser for the land they have usurped. But in neither case do they challenge Shmuel’s analysis.
Back in the Gemara, however, Abaye questions the accuracy of the transmitted teaching:
Did Shmuel actually say this? But doesn’t Shmuel say that the law of the kingdom is the law and the king said that land may not be acquired without a document?
According to Abaye, Shmuel holds by the oft-quoted rabbinic principle dina d’malkhuta dina: the law of the land is the law. This means that for civil matters, Jews are supposed to follow the laws of the land in which they live, even in place of Jewish law. And, argues Abaye, since the law in Babylonia requires a document to complete the sale of property, Shmuel would never have made his initial ruling.
Rav Yosef responds to Abaye, claiming not to know one way or the other about what Shmuel actually said, but reporting an incident in the village of Dura, founded by shepherds, where it happened that a Jew purchased land from a non-Jew but before he could take possession it was plowed (a bit) by another Jew.
The two Jews came before Rav Yehuda for a ruling, and he established the property in the possession of the second individual.
This demonstrates that Rav Yehuda acted in accordance with Shmuel’s original teaching (although it does nothing to resolve the tension between this ruling and Shmuel’s support of the principle of dina d’malkhuta dina). But Abaye admonishes Rav Yosef that the Dura example is inadequate proof. The shepherds of Dura were known to hide their fields from the king to avoid paying land-tax and this means no document would ever be written for such a sale. That’s why it makes sense to apply Shmuel’s initial ruling in this case, but it doesn’t provide broad proof of it.
While the rabbis do not approve of a Jew who takes advantage of the differences between Jewish and non-Jewish sales conventions to take a piece of land out from under a rightful purchaser, they have no remedy to change it on their own. However, since the local regulations require a document, the non-Jewish seller and Jewish buyer operate with the same assumptions about their transaction and the property is never abandoned. This closes the loophole that allows a third party to swoop in and take ownership of the land. That is, unless the seller is like the shepherds of Dura and wants to keep the transaction off the books.
Read all of Bava Batra 54 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on August 18, 2024. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
