Abstract

What follows is a fictive dialogue between a liberal and an ultra-Orthodox on the exclusion of women from Torah study.

In a typical scholarly text the scholar operates within a certain body of knowledge. The following text is written as a dialogue because that is the appropriate scholarly mode for cases of intercultural encounters in which people located in one culture aim at understanding and evaluating the logic of extant practices in another culture.

Being a literary figure, the ultra-Orthodox party to the dialogue is not your typical member of the ultra-Orthodox community. He draws on knowledge borrowed from Western academic disciplines such as anthropology and philosophy, as well as on Western literature, in order to make his arguments as accessible and persuasive as possible to his liberal interlocutor, and in the spirit of what John Rawls, in discussing the idea of toleration, calls “reasoning from conjecture”: “reason[ing] from what we believe, or conjecture, may be other people’s basic doctrines… We are not ourselves asserting that ground of toleration but offering it as one they could assert consistent with their comprehensive doctrines” (John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 152).

More than a third of the dialogue is devoted to a discussion of the preliminary problems of understanding and normatively evaluating the practices of another culture. These are highly intricate questions that cannot be bypassed in the current age of multiculturalism, yet all too often they have been overlooked.

One understanding that emerges from this dialogue is the need to base normative evaluations on a close examination of the facts relevant to the evaluations. Philosophy without thick sociology may prove to be faulty philosophy.

Disciplines

Civil Rights and Discrimination | Constitutional Law | Human Rights Law | Jurisprudence | Law | Religion Law

Date of this Version

2013