Or we should not remind a convert of the errant ways of his parents. Moreover, verbal abuse is an assault on one's person rather than one's money, for which restitution is hard to come by. How sad to see a glorious instance of expansive sensitivity compromised by a moral lapse. Over the years, antisemites had a field day recycling this law to indict Judaism as ethically inferior to Christianity. What interests me for the moment is not the historical reason for the slip.
Beleaguered minorities are slow to muster much understanding or compassion for the Other.
Meir Tamari, an Israeli author of a fine recent study of Jewish ethics and economic life, tried to defend it weakly. All the commandments forbidding theft or robbery are understood to include non-Jews as well, whereas ona'ah applied only to Jews. Thus it cannot be understood as fraud or theft, but rather as an extra duty devolving on the Jew to refrain from taking advantage of a position of, say, superior information. I much prefer the eloquent and unequivocal rejection of this position by Baruch Halevi Epstein at the beginning of our century. A paragon of Eastern European Orthodoxy at its best, he took up the subject several times in his incisive commentary on rabbinic passages on the text of the Torah, the Torah Temima.