ABSTRACT
The disparity of Judaism not only in the field of halakhah, but also in the field of theology and philosophy, is well known and painfully felt by many of the Jewish teachers and scholars. The first Jewish teacher to ask what deems him to be the essence of Judaism Rabbi Hillel the Elder who lived at the beginning Christian Era. The dogmatic or pure philosophical approach cannot help to find criteria for Jewishness as a whole, for a doctrine which is specific for Judaism and which different from non-Jewish thought or philosophy. On the other hand, history of ideas shows that Jewish thought in all historical periods is in constant interchange with the debates, trends and questions of its time and environment. Consulting intellectual history does enable to discover Jewish anthropology in general, but not the one single or unique anthropological conception but a plurality of Jewish images of man.
