Ethics

If the question of right action is viewed as the object of ethics in general, the term "Jewish ethics" designates first of all those norms and ideals by which human action is organized, or should be organized, in the context of Jewish culture and religion. Concretely, widely different historical, cultural, and religious phenomena of Judaism could be included in this concept, which overlap only partially with comparable manifestations in other cultures. In the modern period, alongside traditional Jewish conceptions of value, which are further developed in Orthodoxy, many new developments appear as the result of intensive, novel encounters with the surrounding culture: Enlightenment, emancipation, assimilation, antisemitism and Zionism led to challenges to transmitted ethical systems of values and to multiple attempts at reformulation.