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The religious tradition of male circumcision has come increasingly under attack across a number of European states. While critics of the practice argue that the problem is about children’s rights and the proper relationship between secular and religious traditions, Jews tend to see these attacks within the longer history of attempts to assimilate and remake them according to the norms of the majority. Using the 2012 German legal controversy concerning the issue as my vantage point, I explore how contemporary criticism of male circumcision remains entangled with ambivalence toward Judaism and the Jews as the “other.” Through a close reading of the arguments, I show how opponents use the seemingly neutral language of universal human rights to (re)make Jewish difference according to the norms of the majority. I conclude by arguing that such an approach to this issue runs the risk of turning Jews once again into strangers at a time when cultural anxieties are troubling European societies.

Materiality is a critical and challenging auditing concept. To help auditors improve their materiality judgments, the authors provide examples from Judaism, primarily due to its longevity and the richness and variety of its stories. The authors show how Judaism interprets and applies materiality in many contexts. For each, the authors provide guidance on how auditors might apply these lessons to improve their materiality judgments. The authors examine five areas where Judaic examples can inform modern auditing including: (1) considering both quantitative and qualitative measures; (2) recognizing that small quantitative changes can lead to material qualitative effects; (3) understanding that ignoring small issues can become a slippery slope; (4) considering the importance of financial statement users’ needs in developing materiality criteria; and (5) prioritizing substance over form. In all examples, context is a critical factor to consider when applying materiality. These results should be of interest to auditors, financial statement users and others.

Debates over ritual slaughter, sacred food, fasts, and forbidden foods, perpetuated by religion and tradition, are nothing new. Dietary obligations and prohibitions, in all their diversity, have always been the object of comment, critique, or even concern from one human group towards another. The consumption of meat (or its prohibition) has always been about more than its nutritional function. Reducing religious dietary obligations to hygienic or gustatory practices would be an unrealistic attempt to erase the diversity of the procedures which people undertake to give meaning to life, death, and the world, and to locate themselves in relation to “others”. These rites, ­legitimated by myths, inevitably provoke phenomena of influence, reciprocated within and outside groups. The selection of food – of meat in particular – plays a primordial role as a social marker, the rules of which contribute to the organisation of groups by tracing ­differences between individuals, between men and women, and between communities. Formerly attached to a totemic group and its territory, then to a religion and its society, dietary practices are globalising and encountering one-another. Questions are now raised about the management, in shared spaces, of a diversity of dietary prohibitions and obligations. These questions are at the core of this chapter, notably, what place should be reserved for dietary particularities in collective catering in human organisations? And what limits should be given to the expectations of each regarding dietary purity or fasting?

Despite the existence of a variety of approaches to the understanding of behavioral and managerial ethics in organizations and business relationships generally, knowledge of organizing systems for fidelity remains in its infancy. We use halakha, or Jewish law, as a model, together with the literature in sociology, economic anthropology, and economics on what it termed “middleman minorities,” and on what we have termed the Landa Problem, the problem of identifying a trustworthy economic exchange partner, to explore this issue.

The article contrasts the differing explanations for trustworthy behavior in these literatures, focusing on the widely referenced work of Avner Greif on the Jewish Maghribi merchants of the eleventh century. We challenge Greif’s argument that cheating among the Magribi was managed chiefly via a rational, self-interested reputational sanctioning system in the closed group of traders. Greif largely ignores a more compelling if potentially complementary argument, which we believe also finds support among the documentary evidence of the Cairo Geniza as reported by Goitein: that the behavior of the Maghribi reflected their deep beliefs and commitment to Jewish law, halakha.

Applying insights from this analysis, we present an explicit theory of heroic marginality, the production of extreme precautionary behaviors to ensure service to the principal.

Generalizing from the case of halakha, the article proposes the construct of a deep code, identifying five defining characteristics of such a code, and suggests that deep codes may act as facilitators of compliance. We also offer speculation on design features employing deep codes that may increase the likelihood of production of behaviors consistent with terminal values of the community.

Chris Provis (2017) has discussed Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean and its counterpart in Confucianism. The Doctrine of the Mean informs an agent that ‘acting as a virtuous person will often be constituted by avoidance of choosing excess or deficiency’ (Provis, 2017, p. 118). Indeed, Provis (2017) argues against any act ‘oriented towards maximisation’ (p. 127). Provis’s (2017) focus is the encounter ‘between European and East Asian ethical traditions’ (p. 116). Our chapter is a response to Provis (2017). We respond to Provis (2017) by exploring a debate amongst Jewish scholars which originated in North Africa. Some of these scholars advocated Aristotle’s Mean. But others advocated forsaking that Mean and pursuing the extreme.

In 1911 Sombart published Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Jews and Economic Life). As is well known Sombart conceived his essay – a response to Max Weber’s Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism) – as an attempt ‘to study more carefully’ the influence of religion on economic life, to focus on the relationship between religion and the spread of the ‘spirit of capitalism’ and to explain the historical evolution of modern capitalism (from early to late capitalism).

This analytical work has partially been overshadowed by Sombart’s endorsement of Nazism (1934), especially with reference to the suspicion that he was anti-Semitic. In this chapter we deal (Parts 2 and 3) with the ‘ambiguous relationship’ between Sombart and Nazism, and Sombart’s reflections on the scientific irrelevance of racist theories. Then (Parts 4 and 5), we focus on the limits of Sombart’s methodological approach to the analysis of modern capitalism. The erroneous conclusions of his inquiry emerge if we compare them with those of scholars like Simmel, Schumpeter and Max Weber.