ABSTRACT
The overwhelming concern in legislation on the poor is to limit aid: to question their entitlement, investigate their legitimacy, to humiliate them, to try to expose them as fakers and frauds; against this background the extraordinary fact emerges with unusual clarity: in the Bible there are no fake beggars or 'welfare scroungers'; biblical law aims to avoid humiliation. Suspicion of the poor, which breaks both with the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, shadowed medieval Poor Law, which aimed to distinguish between genuine beggars and fakes who counterfeited disease and mutilation. Much European literature on the poor, evidently starting in medieval Arabic and spreading throughout Europe, is concerned with fraudulent beggary. In England, there is a literary tradition of going back to medieval times of beggars pretending to have deformities. Chekhov's story 'The Beggar' is a classic dramatization of the harsh letter of Poor Law versus biblical compassion.
