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📌Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Legal Comparability and Cultural Identity: the Case of Legal Reasoning in Jewish and Islamic Traditions Notes * PhD, Leverhulme Fellow in Jewish Studies, Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford University. The first version of this study was presented at the Global Fellows Forum at the New York University School of Law where I enjoyed visiting professorship as Berkowitz Fellow (2007-8).

I wish to thank Professor Joseph Weiler and Professor Moshe Halbertal, the directors of the Tikvah Center for Law & Jewish Civilization, for their kind support and inspiration, and to Professor Richard Stewart , the Director of Hauser Global Law School Program, for the lovely host and learning environment in the Hauser Global research seminars. The chapter about Sa’adya’s attitudes towards legal reasoning was presented at the CNRS, Aix-en-Provence (October 2007). I am very grateful to Richard L.

Claman for his wisdom and comments. [^1] We distinguish between ‘comparability’ and ‘commensurability.’ While commensurability, as used by legal economists and choice theorists, denotes the proposition that all options or choices can be compared by reference to an external ranking scale, comparability is gained due to an isomorphous relation between the two systems with no reference to an external scale or scaling procedure.

See: Jeanne L Schroeder, “Apples and Oranges: The Commensurability Debate in Legal Scholarship” in Cardozo Law School, Public Law Paper No. 48 (2002). pp. 2-[^7]: [^2] Contrary to the popular adage, apples and oranges are in fact comparable. While apples and spaceships, for example, or apples and liberal values, are much more distinct and thus much less comparable, there is a lot of sense in comparing the two fruits in terms of their price, sweetness, color, weight, nutritional value and so on.

On the necessity to presume the existence of ‘universals’ for a comparative project see: Jeppe Sinding Jensen, “Universals, General Terms and the Comparative Study of Religion,” Numen 48 (2001). [^3] See: Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Martin S. Kramer, The Jewish Discovery of Islam: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lewis (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, 1999), pp. 1-[^48]: [^4] See: Patricia Crone and M. A.

Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977). [^5] See: Aaron W.

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