ABSTRACT
At various times, Jews lived among Babylonians and Persians, Greeks and Romans, Zoroastrians, Christians and Moslems, to name only a few. As a result of these many cultural influences, Judaism evolved new ways of conceptualizing God, new ritual practices as well as new ways of understanding old ones, and new institutional and social structures. No matter how much they evolve, religious traditions tend by their very nature to be conservative, to preserve the inheritance of prior generations. By way of analogy, US democracy is very different than it was in 1789 when the Constitution was ratified, yet it is still recognizably the same form of the government. The world of the Jewish ethics is vast and complex, and on this journey it will be possible to introduce a person to its main features only in the most general way.
