The fundamental prejudice of the Enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself, which denies tradition its power. (Hans-Georg Gadamer)
The word “understanding” is derived in Old English from the notion of “standing among” or “standing in the midst of,” evoking the act of grasping or comprehending something with the mind. Although to Modern English ears the term “under” carries a sense of depth—as if one were standing beneath the surface of knowledge, upholding and sustaining it from within, in Old English “standing under” implies standing in the place of the other, a posture intrinsic to the very act of understanding, enabling empathetic identification with another’s experience.
Understanding—or more precisely, Verstehen in Max Weber’s sense, the empathetic comprehension of human behavior—constitutes the primary task of the human sciences. Verstehen is at once the means and the end of the interpretive disciplines, and the very medium through which interpretation itself unfolds.
From their very inception, the social sciences set for themselves an additional goal—one implicit in their very definition as sciences: to extend understanding beyond local interpretive contexts and to transform it into a source of scientific knowledge.
Although the social sciences neither fully succeeded in producing—nor at times even aspired to produce—objective knowledge in the strict sense of the term, they were nevertheless oriented from the outset toward expanding understanding beyond the local, with the aim of generating generalizable knowledge. The scientific aspiration of social sciences, born in the wake of the Enlightenment, was to transcend the particularity of interpretive activity and render it universal and uniform.
My decision to join the Jerusalem Circle arose from a growing discomfort, over the past two decades, with the widening gap between my sociological toolkit and the realities of my subjects in the field. The progressive vision that had once guided my understanding of reality—and my hopes for its transformation—shattered before my eyes.
For years, I pursued social reform inspired by the moral and political vision of progressive liberalism, which champions the values of freedom, equality, and human rights. Yet it was precisely the persistent resistance of marginalized groups to the liberal-progressive order—resistance grounded in their loyalty to place and tradition—that marked a turning point in my scholarly trajectory. This encounter led me to a systematic inquiry into non-liberal Jewish and Muslim communities alike. Their resistance, of course, was not absolute: they embraced these values in certain contexts, but not when such identification came into conflict with their loyalty to the Jewish or Muslim collective, or with their inherited traditions. The deep-seated need of local actors to cling steadfastly to their heritage as the sole anchor of their core identity emerged not only as a politically revealing insight but also as a crucial scholarly and theoretical recognition: one that regards tradition as an indispensable resource to produce generalizable knowledge.
Gradually, I came to realize that the interpretive pendulum swings between understanding society from below and from above; between insights that arise from within a place and those imposed from the academic core—primarily North America and Western Europe; between viewing the academic periphery as a playground for theories imported from the center and recognizing it as an autonomous source of insights capable of shaping the shared intellectual core. This marks a shift from a one-directional movement from the center to the margins to a deep and reciprocal dialogue between them—a necessary precondition for the creation of knowledge that aspires to universality. It entails moving from a perspective that regards the center as the sole source of universal insight to one that recognizes the margins as a vital, rich, and inexhaustible site for shaping generalizable knowledge and expanding the horizons of human understanding.
The Jerusalem Circle community, which I had the privilege of helping to found, provides an intellectual and academic home for a diverse, vibrant, and inspiring group of scholars united by their commitment to confronting the pressing challenges facing academia today. Members of this community are acutely aware of the far‑reaching implications of these challenges for the future of the interpretive disciplines and for the university’s role as an open arena for exploring the roots of the global polarization that defines our era.
The Jerusalem Circle serves as a home for local voices seeking to be heard at the center, yet the vision underlying its establishment is far from local. It invites scholars from across the world—and from the academic periphery in particular—to share their local intellectual heritages and to join us in a process of mutual learning and in a deep, respectful dialogue between the periphery and the academic center—a dialogue more urgent today than ever before.
