The chapter on Jewish interpretation focuses on the role that biblical interpretation has played and still plays in the development of Jewish tradition, and how it has shaped Jewish practices, theology and ethics from antiquity to our own time. It provides a survey of important phases in the history of biblical interpretation from antiquity to the present.

In this chapter, I look at the development of Jewish and Islamic commercial law over the early Islamic centuries to argue that the Islamic "commercial revolution" may be found in the eleventh rather than the eighth century. I argue, therefore, that any migration of Jews westward in the early Islamic centuries was not the result of such a commercial revolution.

This chapter discusses Romans and Galatians, the vexed question of Paul’s use of the Old Testament, his place within the Judaism of his day, early Jewish-Christian relations, and the “New Perspective.”

Chapter 2 recounts the failure of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, to establish an autonomous system of arbitration, the Hebrew Peace Courts. The early and ringing failure of these courts indicates the inability to agree about what is Jewish and what is Jewish law. In the absence of such agreement, it is impossible to develop a binding system of “Jewish” norms, and in the absence of such a system, the Hebrew Peace Courts could not provide the people of the Yishuv with predictable, stable, and coherent rulings, thus sealing the courts’ fate. Even though the Hebrew Peace Courts were autonomous Zionist courts that promised quick and efficient adjudication by Jewish judges, the people of the Yishuv preferred the formalized British system, based on a clear system of substantive and procedural norms—despite their non-Jewish origin—along with binding precedents and an efficient system of enforcement and implementation.

Chapter 6 addresses Israeli legislative policy concerning Jewish law and identity. Like the Zionist movement did early on, Israel’s national governing and judicial institutions refused until the 1980s to allow questions of identity and culture to impinge on political and legal deliberations. The Knesset and the Ministry of Justice did not base Israel’s laws on Jewish law. It was not that they were alienated from Jewish heritage and its legal element; rather they realized that these could not really be translated into laws, simply because there was no consensus on what constituted Jewish culture, and what were the proper ways to constitute a Hebrew-Israeli legal system on its basis. Even those who sought with all their might to base Israeli law on Jewish heritage did not know how to do so in practical terms. Once again, it was a meta-cultural decision to circumvent such cultural conflict

Chapter 3 tells of the rise and fall of the Hebrew Law Society, founded in 1917, which sought to base the law of the Jewish state on secularized and modern Jewish content. All the members of the Hebrew Law Society wanted a national Jewish-Hebrew legal system, but did not agree about what materials would be used in its construction, nor on the way to construct this new legal edifice, or about who would be the architects and builders. The Society’s problem was that it could not limit itself to an academic debate over these questions. On the contrary, it was founded with the purpose of shaping clear, detailed, and explicit legal norms, building legal institutions, and crafting the whole cloth of a legal system that would stand ready for the Jewish state when it was founded. But the practical need to translate Jewish values into clear legal rules paralyzed the Hebrew Law Society and brought an end to the attempts to make Hebrew law into the living law of a modern society. The Society collapsed before World War II, a decade before Israel was founded.

Chapter 4 analyzes abortive attempts to create a national Jewish system of law at the founding of the state. Under the circumstances of the 1948 Jewish-Arab War, the advocates of Hebrew law realized that it would not be possible to institute a comprehensive legal system based on Jewish-Hebrew foundations. Three options thus remained on the table. The first was to legislate as many laws based on Jewish-Hebrew law as possible, or at least to add Jewish-Hebrew chapters or sections to existing laws. The second was to insert into the new country’s declaration of independence or constitution, when they were drafted, a general declaration that Jewish-Hebrew law would be a principal source of legislation for the new country. The third was to have Hebrew law serve as the country’s residual law, meaning that it would apply in cases where there was a legal lacuna. Eventually the young state did not adopt any of these options choosing, at its founding, to circumvent the dispute that would be involved in grounding Jewish-Israeli identity in law.

Chapter 10 discusses the complex interaction between Israeli law and Jewish heritage. I address the Zionist-Israeli resolve to ensure its political and legal independence—that is, an independent Israeli legal system that is not subordinate to foreign law and which legislates for itself in accordance with Israeli society’s needs, interests, and values. I also consider the attention the Israeli legal system gives to symbols of national independence. This includes both what might be called general symbols, such as the Hebrew language, and also specifically legal symbols, such as the effort to promulgate a constitution and civil code. Finally, I show that the Zionist movement and Israel have adopted “a moderate cultural option” centered on muting cultural debates while adopting common cultural symbols that arouse no dissension—the Hebrew language, devotion to the Land of Israel, evocation of Jewish history, and a long list of consensual symbols, values, and concepts with roots in Jewish law and heritage. I show that Israeli law cannot not be Jewish and Israeli, and that Israeli law and culture are today lieux de mémoire of primary importance in the preservation of Jewish law and heritage and an important guarantee of the future of Jewish culture.

An important, contemporary controversy is how the policy balance of incentives that provides the basic rationale for intellectual property (IP) protections should be assessed in the context of protection for genetic sequences. After summarizing this general rationale and the state of the law in the US concerning the protection of genetic sequences, the chapter consider the issues from the perspective of Jewish law. While the classic texts of Jewish law for the most part preceded the rise of IP law by centuries, we argue that a distinctly halakhic theory of IP can nonetheless be derived from the application of Talmudic unfair-competition principles to IP questions by halakhic authorities beginning in the Early Modern period. We further contend that because this Talmudic doctrine is equitable in nature and operates to protect broad social interests, it provided halakhic authorities with a more flexible, context-sensitive model for IP law than does the personal-property basis undergirding much of secular, contemporary patent and copyright law. Finally, we suggest that if contemporary courts were to adopt such a model for IP, halakha could offer various insights regarding policy considerations and value judgments pertinent to determining patent eligibility for genetic inventions.