Rambam

I really wonder whether Rambam deserves all his renown.

Let’s read that (Yad, Sefer Kinyan, Hilchot Sheluchin veShuttafin, Pereq 2, Halkhah 1), as translated here:

<<1 A non-Jew may never be appointed as an agent for any mission whatsoever. Similarly, a Jew may never be appointed as an agent for a non-Jew for any mission whatsoever. These concepts are derived from Numbers 18:28: "And so shall you offer, also yourselves." This is interpreted to mean: Just as you are members of the covenant, so too, your agents must be members of the covenant. This principle is applied to the entire Torah.

Moreover, the converse is also true: Just as your principals are members of the covenant, so too, in every aspect of Torah law, the principal must be a member of the covenant.>>

I work in a payment services company (https://www.sia.eu/en), and I can say that all interbank networks are networks of agents, in which banks act as agents for their customers and for each other.

If you shop and pay with a credit card, you can do that because you have chosen a bank as your agent, which is also an agent of the credit card company – and the store has appointed another bank as its agent, which is also an agent of the same credit card company. Therefore your money can safely travel from your virtual wallet to your store’s account.

And either or both banks may delegate a company like mine to deal with the credit card circuits or to send each other payment messages or financial information. Paypal plays a similar role.

Complying with Rambam’s halakhah would require forcibly separating the world’s payment systems into a “Jewish family” and a “Gentile family”, since no Jewish bank or payment system would accept Gentile customers, and no Jew or Jewish organization would use a Gentile bank or payment system.

Such an arrangement is neither unethical nor unwise: it is simply unworkable, because without the reciprocal agency Rambam forbids such banks and payment systems may not interoperate.

Moreover, even if you pay by cash, you can pay the shop assistant because he is an agent of the shop owner, as the former sells the latter’s ware and takes the latter’s money – therefore, as per Rambam’s ruling, neither may a Jewish-owned shop have Gentile employees, nor could a Jew work for a Gentile-owned shop. “Shop” doesn’t just mean “sales place” here, but also “workplace”, because your supervisor is your master’s agent, and you often act as his agent.

Rambam’s "Yad" ends up segregating people according to “covenantal status”, i. e. according to faith and ethnicity, in a way absolutely detrimental to anyone's welfare.

Obviously, nobody obeys Rambam (not even the Chaba"d: here is its donations page, with links to "Gentile" payment systems), but I wonder why nobody has apparently repealed his rulings. The Chaba”d curators of the site I linked are very punctilious in showing where and which authorities have contradicted Rambam, but there is no such annotation on this halakhah.