Valuing Life in This World I: 100–1000 CE

The next value we have to examine to understand why Jews became so successful in the modern period concerns the general question of how to relate to life in this world. To achieve success, both Christians and Jews in Europe not only had to believe that human beings possessed autonomy in relation to God and in relation to each other, they also had to channel these forms of autonomy into this-worldly goals, and that meant they had to view life in this world as good in itself. Yet we will see that prior to the modern period, this value, like