Those particular laws were made for Jews alone, thus relieving them of the obligation to force them on anyone else. Hence Judaism was, in fact, the least coercive religion imaginable. But its practices rested on more general principles – to be discovered and mulled over in endless oral conversations with the text: a common core of ethics, available to all. Free men might subscribe to those ethics if they were so persuaded, but there was nothing dogmatic about Judaism. While Christianity demanded unconditional submission to a belief in Christ the Saviour, the salvific meaning of his sacrifice,
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