21 1 The Jewish tradition A history Joseph E. David 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 concep- tion, 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 adher- ence 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 difculties posed by our task. History I suspect that the history of Jewish law is more a matter of historiosophy, i.e., 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. Tales and theories about the origins of Jewish law, its evolution and its mutability have been, and still are, at the heart of theological and ideological rifts among Jews and non-Jews alike. As a result, we face a variety of contesting histories of Jewish law, each of which is deeply reliant upon a diferent conception of the essence of Jewish law and Judaism writ large. Jewish The juxtaposition ‘Jewish law’ seemingly alludes to an intrinsic link between a law and the attribute – Jewishness 1 – that designates its character, orientation or addressees. Yet this link is evidently a nontrivial statement and defnitely not an exclusive one. 2 Alternate expressions, it must be noted, avoid this connotation and either suggest an independent vocabulary (e.g., mitzvah, din, torah, halakhah) or designate diferent semantic referents: the origins of the law and its value (‘divine law’ 3 ), its constitutive fgures (‘Mosaic Law’ 4 ), territory (‘the law of the God of