What is good character? What are the traits of a good person? How should virtues be cultivated? How should vices be avoided? The history of Jewish literature is filled with reflection on questions of character and virtue such as these, reflecting a wide range of contexts and influences. Beginning with the Bible and culminating with twenty-first-century feminism and environmentalism, Jewish Virtue Ethics explores thirty-five influential Jewish approaches to character and virtue.Virtue ethics has been a burgeoning field of moral inquiry among academic philosophers in the postwar period. Although Jewish ethics has also flourished as an academic (and practical) field, attention to the role of virtue in Jewish thought has been underdeveloped. This volume seeks to illuminate its centrality not only for readers primarily interested in Jewish ethics but also for readers who take other approaches to virtue ethics, including within the Western virtue ethics tradition. The original essays written for this volume provide valuable sources for philosophical reflection.

AcknowledgmentsForewordJulia AnnasIntroductionGeoffrey D. Claussen, Alexander Green, and Alan L. Mittleman1. Biblical LiteratureAmanda Beckenstein Mbuvi2. Philo of Alexandria Carlos Lévy3. Titus Flavius Josephus Clifford Orwin4. Rabbinic Literature Deborah Barer5. Bah¿ya Ibn Paquda Diana Lobel6. Solomon Ibn GabirolSarah Pessin7. Maimonides Kenneth Seeskin8. Elazar of Worms Joseph Isaac Lifshitz9. Nämanides Jonathan Jacobs10. The ZoharEitan P. Fishbane11. Gersonides Alexander Green12. ¿asdai Crescas Roslyn Weiss13. Joseph Albo Shira Weiss14. Isaac Arama Baruch Frydman-Kohl15. Moses Cordovero Eugene D. Matanky16. Baruch Spinoza Heidi M. Ravven17. Moses ¿ayyim Luzzatto Patrick Benjamin Koch18. Moses Mendelssohn Elias Sacks19. Menah¿em Mendel Lefin Harris Bor20. ¿ayyim of Volozhin Esti Eisenmann21. Nah¿man of Bratslav Shaul Magid22. Isaac Bekhor Amarachi Katja smid23. Israel Salanter Sarah Zager24. Simh¿ah Zissel Ziv Geoffrey D. Claussen25. Hermann Cohen Shira Billet26. Abraham Isaac Kook Don Seeman27. Martin Buber William Plevan28. Mordecai Kaplan Matthew LaGrone29. Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler Esther Solomon30. Joseph Soloveitchik Yonatan Y. Brafman31. Hannah Arendt Ned Curthoys32. Emmanuel Levinas Richard A. Cohen33. Abraham Joshua Heschel Einat Ramon34. Jewish Feminism Rebecca J. Epstein-Levi35. Jewish EnvironmentalismHava Tirosh-SamuelsonAfterwordAlan L. MittlemanList of ContributorsIndex