Other attractive and meaningful metaphors are of ‘confluence...

Other attractive and meaningful metaphors are of ‘confluence of rivers’ – Jaroslav Stetkevych, “The Confluence of Arabic and Hebrew Literature,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 32, no. 1/2 (1973), ‘crosspollination’ – Lenn Evan Goodman, Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classic Age (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).

or ‘whirlpool effect’ – Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), xiv. [^11] See: Marsha A. Hewitt, “How New Is The “New Comparativism”? Difference, Dialectics, and World-Making,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8 (1996), Luther H. Martin, “The New Comparativism in the Study of Religion: A Symposium,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8 (1996), William E.

Paden, “Elements of a New Comparativism1,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8 (1996), E. Thomas Lawson, “Theory and the New Comparativism, Old and New,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8 (1996). Also see Robert A. Segal, “Classification and Comparison in the Study of Religion: The Work of Jonathan Z. Smith,” J Am Acad Relig 73, no. 4 (2005), who ascribes such approach to Jonathan Z. Smith.

[^12] This approach is manifested in Ewald’s ‘comparative law as comparative jurisprudence’ thesis. Accordingly, a comparative study of legal systems should not focus merely on contextual data, nor on textual similarities and dissimilarities, but rather on the conceptual self-understanding of the participants in legal theory and praxis. This thesis suggests viewing jurisprudence as the pivotal mean by which an accurate understanding of foreign legal system is to be achieved.

The object of legal comparative studies therefore is neither the ‘law in books’ nor the ‘law in action’, but rather the ‘law in the minds’ – the consciousness of the jurists’ in particular legal reality. See: William Ewald, “Comparative Jurisprudence (I): What Was It Like to Try a Rat?,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 143, no. 6 (1995), idem, “Comparative Jurisprudence (II): The Logic of Legal Transplants,” The American Journal of Comparative Law 43, no. 4 (1995).

[^13] For a legal system to be comparable it must fulfill a dialectic relation – it must be simultaneously unified and plural. Catherine Valcke, “Comparative Law as Comparative Jurisprudence: The Comparability of Legal Systems,” The American Journal of Comparative Law 52, no. 3 (2004), p.