Joseph E . David

This collection of essays is written by some of the world's leading experts in international human rights law, and corresponds to the main junctures in the professional life of Professor David Kretzmer, a leading human rights academic and practitioner. The different essays focus on contemporary human rights protection challenges. They address conceptual problems such as differences between limits and restrictions, and application of human rights standards to businesses and international organizations; legal doctrinal responses to changing realities in the field of surveillance and identity politics; the weakness of monitoring institutions engaged in standard-setting; and the practical difficulties in applying international human rights law to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a manner sensitive to gender dimensions and the particular political dynamics of the situation. Collectively, the essays offer a rich picture of the current potential shortcomings of international human rights law in addressing complex problems of law, politics and ethics.

Why are we so concerned with belonging? In what ways does our belonging constitute our identity? Is belonging a universal concept or a culturally dependent value? How does belonging situate and motivate us? Joseph E. David grapples with these questions through a genealogical analysis of ideas and concepts of belonging. His book transports readers to crucial historical moments in which perceptions of belonging have been formed, transformed, or dismantled. The cases presented here focus on the pivotal role played by belonging in kinship, law, and political order, stretching across cultural and religious contexts from eleventh-century Mediterranean religious legal debates to twentieth-century statist liberalism in Western societies. With his thorough inquiry into diverse discourses of belonging, David pushes past the politics of belonging and forces us to acknowledge just how wide-ranging and fluid notions of belonging can be.

נומוס ונראטיב, חיבורו המהפכני ורב־ההשפעה של רוברט קאבר, מתאר את חיי החוק כדרמה אנושית, זירת התגוששות בין עולמות נורמטיביים מתחרים שבה נבחנת מחויבותם של קהילות ופרטים לנראטיבים העומדים בתשתית חייהם. החיבור מעצב השקפה חדשה ומקורית על מקומו של החוק בחיי בני־אנוש, תוך שהוא מזקק תובנות מהמסורת הרבנית ודן במקרי בוחן ממשיים מתולדות המשפט החוקתי האמריקני.

בניגוד לתפיסות הרואות בחוק מארג כללים ועקרונות לפיקוח חברתי, ובמערכת המשפטית מנגנון ליישומם, קאבר מציע לראותם כתוצרים של נראטיבים המעצבים את זהויות הפרט והקהילה, מעניקים להן ביטוי, ובסופו של דבר גם עשויים לחתור תחתן. החוק הוא המאפשר את ״תיקון העולם״, והוא גשר המתוח בין המציאות הממשית למדומיינת, בין זיכרון לכמיהה, בין נפילה לגאולה, בין העולם הזה לעולם הבא.

For a journal of law and religion, the decision to confront changes and challenges imposed by novel technologies is no trivial one, yet it is one the Journal of Law and Religion is undertaking.1 Whether the perspective of law and religion is even of any use in comprehending and contending with these technologies is a valid question. Contemporary technologies have reshaped our lifestyles, and their ubiquitous impact on our erstwhile habits and perceptions is intently studied and investigated from every angle. Yet bringing the perspective of law and religion to these challenges demands an especial measure of explanation. To justify the grouping of law, religion, and technology, we must demonstrate a potential unique contribution that the lens of law and religion might make and identify the topics or themes that stand to benefit.

The chapter addresses the complex relationships between law and identity as a jurisprudential problem and as a constitutional concern. It examines several conceptual aspects of identity right claims without taking a stance in the identarian-dignitarian moral and political debate. It sheds light on a neglected facet of identity right claims: the feasibility of the notion of identity as a foundation for constitutional rights. The conceptual feasibility of identity right claims is independent of and unconcerned with the validity and accuracy of moral ideologies. The chapter discusses whether identity right claims are conceptually defensible on the basis of constitutional reasoning. It argues that the notion of identity not only is definitionally vague, but also is a metamorphic concept that suffers from unsteadiness.

Like many others, I believe that the information revolution is a constitutive moment in human history, and not only because of the development of technologies that change our habits and improve the quality of our lives. More than anything else, it is because the information revolution profoundly and dramatically changes our self-concept. That revolution is changing our understanding of the place we occupy in the universe (the erosion of anthropocentrism), forcing us to rethink our uniqueness as human beings and our human essence. I believe that the preconditions of our existence are changing dramatically nowadays, and consequently, our notions of belonging and identity require revision.

How are we to distinguish between law and violence? On what grounds is the former legitimized while the latter is condemned? This modern question sheds light on the essential concepts of law and order and their social value. My task in this paper is to trace the roots of this question in the Jewish jurisprudential tradition by focusing on a unique norm, established sometime during the 5th to the 6th century, in which violence become a legitimized norm when a case could not be determined by means of official legal procedure. This survey shows that while ancient sources legitimized this norm of extra-legal violence, medieval thinkers redefined it and neutralized it, reduced it to an economic procedure or even explicated interesting stances regarding the honor and stability of legal institutions.

ABSTRACT Can the traditional Jewish theological or legal principles provide a moral view on the modern issue of mass destruction? If so, what kind of ethical principles should be counted for that? The fundamental claim of the article is that while distinguishing between conventional war ethics and mass destruction ethics, we can still base our ethical approaches to mass destruction on traditional principles. The author points on three possible sources and evaluates each of them according to the latent moral meaning that is carried with them. The three sources are the biblical idea of the 'Day of the Lord', the symbolic meaning of the rainbow covenant and the modern tragic experience of the Holocaust.

Did Maimonides accept or reject the concept of Natural Law? While initial inquiries asked whether Maimonides accepted or rejected the doctrine as a whole, later studies focussed on whether Maimonidean legal theory could go along with the Natural Law doctrine or not. The aim of my paper is to go a step further and to argue that while Maimonides had a lively interest in the relationship between nature and law, he was not dragged into the Natural Law discourse. In other words, although he didn't overlook the nature-law question in his jurisprudential scheme, he didn't see it as integral to his legal theory

This chapter shows that the history of Jewish law is more a matter of historiosophy, that is, of interpretation and meaning, rather than descriptive historiography, than are the histories of other religio-legal traditions. The historical narration of Jewish law is itself a disputed matter across the generations and one indispensable to ideologies and views concerning the Jewish religion. Depicting the history of Jewish law, of which there is no unitary or trans-historical conception, because each of its components – ‘history’, ‘Jewish’ and ‘law’ – is highly contested and subject to intensely held ideological perspectives. In various discourses, the subjugation of Jewish law to external meanings and conceptions was a choice intentionally made by Jewish thinkers and jurists, so that in different contexts it became the authentic and authoritative manifestation of Jewish law. Because Jewish law was seen as a means of achieving personal perfection, transcending ethnic belonging and history, its particularity to the Jews and its very Jewishness were questioned.

This chapter outlines the major themes and attitudes towards the sources of Jewish law and their nature against the backdrop of the theocentric–anthropocentric predicament. As in Late Antiquity, Jewish attitudes during the Middle Ages were polarized between those who repudiated human involvement in the law and others who celebrated human prudence. Nevertheless, the nature of the sources of Jewish law and the manner in which they function and construct the body of that law and its operation appears to be integral to any depiction of Jewish law. Historical discourses about the sources of Jewish law are typified by a struggle with a biblical paradigm in which epiphany is the ultimate source of law. Clearly, the biblical model raises questions about the role and the weight of human agency in the law and its operation, and thus the various understandings of the sources of Jewish law can be examined through the margin between epiphany and human prudence.

The purpose of the article is to focus on the independency of legal reasoning and its relations to extra-legal modes of reasoning (e.g. logical reasoning, hermeneutical reasoning, etc.) in the Jewish jurisprudential tradition. It will sketch the historical contours of this question in late ancient and medieval Jewish legal tradition by highlighting the major trends and phenomena of this history. The first focal point of this investigation is the midrashic paradigm that predominates the Talmudic literature, and which assimilates legal reasoning with exegesis, or scriptural reasoning. The second focus will be paid to post-Talmudic theoretical controversies about the legitimacy of independent legal reasoning as a valid source of legal knowledge. It will be argued that the later controversy, motivated by theological concerns, demonstrates a divorce from the midrashic paradigm and the introduction of the concept of tradition as a regulatory factor to independent legal reasoning.

Robert Yelle's Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion is not only a spectacular conceptual investigation but also a profound and painstaking intellectual expedition across ancient religions and modern politics. Yelle's mission is to understand the conceptual voyage of two fundamental ideas-sovereignty and sacredness-across these worlds. His well-informed analyses of both the religious and the political portray these realms as mirror universes between which the concepts of sovereignty and sacredness wander and operate.

The emerging field of ‘law and religion’ is an integrative extension of legal studies with another academic field, and it encompasses the study of further themes and topics as informed by the nexus of these two disciplines. Yet, it is also about reconsidering traditional conceptions of and attitudes towards law and the character of law. The study of law and religion injects new blood into old inquiries; it invites a revision of jurisprudential convention and hence demands refreshment of traditional conceptualizations of law. Taken seriously, the field of law and religion revitalizes questions about the independency of the law as normative realm and calls on us to reconsider how religious ideals function...

This essay traces the formation of notions of selfness and kinship in medieval Karaite law through analysis of commentaries on the prohibitions to marry close-kin members. By examining what it takes to become a relative within kinship, either consanguineal or affinal kin-ties, the study explores different notions of selfness that stand at the base of these legal trends and approaches. It also brings forward Karaite texts that have largely been ignored in modern scholarship; some of these are medieval manuscripts presented in print here for the first time. Karaite authors discussed in the essay include Anan b. David, Ya'qub al-Qirqisani, Levi b. Yeft, Yeshuah b. Yehudah, Solomon b. David, and Yehuda Hadassi.

Religious legalism encompasses a wide range of attitudes that assign religious meaning to legal content or to legal compliance. The phenomenology of religious legalism is assuming a significant role in various contemporary debates about legal pluralism, accommodation of religious minorities, religious freedom, and so forth. This article revises this conception and the commonplace equation of Judaism and legalism. It suggests that we ought to regard both as part of the economy of religious differences by which religious identities are expressed and defined as alternatives. The common ascription of religious legalism to Judaism (and Islam) is criticized here through a historical analysis of the law-religion-identity matrix in three cultural settings: late ancient Judeo-Hellenic, medieval Judeo–Arabic, and post-Reformation Europe.

Borrowed from a psychological theory, the principle of ‘separation-individuation’ refers to a developmental phase in which a subject develops sense of differentiation from her past or present origins and sense of autonomous selfhood and independency. The article suggests viewing the typology of anomist and legalist religions not as a consistent phenomenology but rather in relation to the above principle and the need to differentiate and create a religious self-identification.

While histories of ideas in premodern perspectives habitually understood history as divisions of xed periods, modernists tend to narrate these histories in terms of owing streams curving through timelines, intersections, and junctions. Crucial moments, accordingly, are turns and returns, shifts and orientations. I am not sure what it takes to diagnose and proclaim an intellectual turn or how to afrm or refute such a phenomenon, but I take the audacious risk and argue that the last couple of decades have seen a " legal turn " in the study of religions—a renewed focus on legal aspects of religion that includes legal concepts, theories, and practices. This turn is certainly related to broader trends of revitalizing theoretical elds, formerly debarred from the disciplinary treatment of religious histories, texts, and contents. It reects acknowledgment of the realm of conscious thought as a subject matter to be studied—something between systematic articulations, such as philosophical or theological reections, and uninterrogated practice. It also reects a reassessment of the Enlightenment's formulations of " religion " and " law " 1 and the mutual interplay between law and religion in various contexts through history. The study of Jewish history and sources in that regard is no exception, as there has been a patent growth of literature and academic activities demonstrating serious interest in law in different areas of Jewish studies. The legal turn in Jewish studies includes much more than refreshed outlooks on the halakhic literature and praxis; it reects an enhanced predisposition to view Judaism as a law-based religion and to imagine the rabbinic world as legal culture. As a result, this scholarship develops a higher degree of sensitivity to legal themes, tropes, and circumstances, and it borrows methodologies from the study of legal history and comparative law. Likewise, many scholars

What are the assumptions that underline the Jewish Law Project? To what extent is this project relates to Zionism as a political program and national vision? Does the secular version of this project and the religious one have anything in common? I argue that aside from the ideological lines that guide the Jewish Law Project, within it rests a reductionist and utopianist stance vis-à-vis halakhah which are considered to be obvious. I shall attempt to claim that reductionism and utopianism as tacit assumptions, which are neither explicit nor declared by the carriers of the Jewish Law Project, are definitely not trivial. Then, by detrivializing these two assumptions I will suggest viewing the halakhic-legal relations defined by the Jewish Law Project through these same parameters—the reductionism of the halakhah and its utopian approach.

Joseph E. David's Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging provides an erudite demonstration of how an analytical approach that directs attention to negotiations of belonging in exegetical and legal thinking can yield crucial insight into how social boundaries are defined and defended in throughout human history in a broad array of contexts. Among the examples he brings to illustrate premodern efforts to delineate belonging is Nahmanides's interpretation of territory based commandments. David shows that Nahmanides made the radical claim that the covenant was firmly linked to the land, so that any people inhabiting the land were obliged to follow it, and complete compliance with divine law could be achieved only in the Land of Israel. This essay examines David's discussion of Nahmanides's interpretation of law in the Land of Israel and considers the implications of extending an analysis of conceptions of belonging into other corners of Nahmanides's career as a commentator, community leader, and teacher.

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Joseph E. David about his book Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging (CUP, 2020). David is a Visiting Professor (Adjunct) of Law at Yale Law School and a Visiting Professor at the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale University. He is an Associate Professor of Law at Sapir Academic College in Israel. His research focuses on Law and Religion, Legal History, Comparative Law, and Jurisprudence.

Joseph E. David, Professor of Law at Sapir Academic College in Israel, has written an intellectual history of the concept of belonging. David reviews the ancient Greek, Christian Biblical, Talmudic and Islamic conceptions of belonging and how such ideas have affected understandings of familial relations, marriage, and the political role of the family at different points in Western political history. His case studies range from the earliest Christian and, Jewish and Islamic discussions of legally appropriate family relations to the modern concerns with the public versus the private status of the family in the liberal state. David also presents us with the options the modern liberal state has provided policy-makers who are concerned with autonomy and equality in the family.

As society continues to advance technologically, our legal frameworks are faced with an array of multifaceted challenges spanning various dimensions and levels. While advancements in technology require adherence to existing legal structures, they also offer innovations and effective alternatives to traditional law practices, such as the use of legal tech. Simultaneously, these technological advancements demand a comprehensive reassessment of the very foundations upon which our legal systems are built (including notions of equality before the law and territorial jurisdiction, etc.), as well as a reevaluation of the conventional theoretical framework of the law.

In this discussion, our focus will be on the revision of jurisprudential thinking in response to the information revolution and the ongoing evolution of technology. Additionally, we will delve into the impact of the theory of technology on the theoretical understanding of the law, as put forth by the ‘law is technology’ thesis.

We aim to uncover the conceptual similarities between the theory of technology and legal theory and draw reasonable conclusions from these parallels.