A Confucian-Jewish Dialogue

In this chapter, the authors conjure an experimental dialogue between Confucianism and Rabbinical Judaism. The first part of this chapter discusses one historical example of a Confucian-Jewish dialogue. The second discusses the traditions' modes of theological development as "spiritual harmony" in Confucianism, as opposed to "spiritual disharmony in Judaism" (Patt-Shamir 2006) and locates a common ground between the two traditions in the theme of family reverence. In the third part, the authors imagine a dialogue based on family reverence as the point of departure in understanding the uniqueness of each tradition. The purpose is to acknowledge the differences, and to find likenesses within stark dissimilarity. This chapter was first published in Perry Schmidt-Leukel (ed.), Buddhist Attitudes to Other Religions, St. Ottilien/Germany: EOS-Verlag 2008. We thank EOS for the kind permission to reuse it here.