ABSTRACT
Giving an account of a legal tradition that goes back some millennia is by its nature a pretentious task. Depicting the history of Jewish law, of which there is no unitary or trans-historical conception, is even riskier, because each of its components – ‘history’, ‘Jewish’ and ‘law’ – is highly contested and subject to intensely held ideological perspectives. The manifold comprehensions of and attitudes towards Jewish law and its nature, content and meanings raise severe doubts about the possibility of providing a neutral or at least consensual account of its history. Our point of departure, however, is that sketching the history of Jewish law is possible given adherence to the ‘own terms’ of the traditional discourses and an acute awareness of their ideological, theological and academic predispositions. As a starting point, it will be worthwhile to outline the a priori difficulties posed by our task.
