OVERVIEW

Concepts of justice are concrete and abstract, culturally specific and philosophically universal. In terms of the formation of concepts, one might say that justice is the attempt of attaining a well-measured equilibrium between concrete/culturally specific and philosophically universal demands that are equally valid and just. In abstract terms, justice aims at the mediation of difference in fields of action and relation. What logic is said to achieve in thought, justice achieves in practice. In concrete terms, related to our task of writing the history of Jewish thought in the modern era, the formation of modern Jewish concepts of justice has been influenced by three major spheres: the cultural (textual, customary, legal) and philosophical roots of Western concepts of justice; the Jewish textual and legal traditions; and the specific permutations of these traditions exacted by the conditio moderna of Jews and Judaism, most notably by processes of legal and political emancipation and the effects these processes had on the formation of what is commonly called modern Judaism. For Jews and Judaism, the modern era is an age of profound challenges and changes that arose, among other factors, from the Enlightenment idea of universal human rights.