Violence and Messianism looks at how some of the figures of the so-called Renaissance of "Jewish" philosophy between the two world wars - Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin and Martin Buber - grappled with problems of violence, revolution and war. At once inheriting and breaking with the great historical figures of political philosophy such as Kant and Hegel, they also exerted considerable influence on the next generation of European philosophers, like Lévinas, Derrida and others. This book aims to (...) think through the great conflicts in the past century in the context of the theory of catastrophe and the beginning of new messianic time. Firstly, it is a book about means and ends - that is, about whether good ends can be achieved through bad means. Second, it is a book about time: peace time, war time, time it takes to transfer from war to peace, etc. Is a period of peace simply a time that excludes all violence? How long does it take to establish peace? Building on this, it then discusses whether there is anything that can be called messianic acting. Can we - are we capable of, or allowed to - act violently in order to hasten the arrival of the Messiah and peace? And would we then be in messianic time? Finally, how does this notion of messianism - a name for a sudden and unpredictable event - fit in, for example, with our contemporary understanding of terrorist violence? The book attempts to understand such pressing questions by reconstructing the notions of violence and messianism as they were elaborated by 20th century Jewish political thought. Providing an important contribution to the discussion on terrorism and the relationship between religion and violence, this book will appeal to theorists of terrorism and ethics of war, as well as students and scholars of Philosophy, Jewish studies and religion studies. (shrink)

Modern Jewish Philosophy and the Politics of Divine Violence Is commitment to God compatible with modern citizenship? In this book, Daniel H. Weiss provides new readings of four modern Jewish philosophers - Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin - in light of classical rabbinic accounts of God's sovereignty, divine and human violence, and the embodied human being as the image of God. He demonstrates how classical rabbinic literature is relevant to contemporary political and (...) philosophical debates. Weiss brings to light striking political aspects of the writings of the modern Jewish philosophers, who have often been understood as non-political. In addition, he shows how the four modern thinkers are more radical and more shaped by Jewish tradition than has previously been thought. Taken as a whole, Weiss' book argues for a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between Judaism and politics, the history of Jewish thought, and the ethical and political dynamics of the broader Western philosophical tradition. (shrink)

This paper deals with the role of Judaism in Walter Benjamin's famous 1921 essay on violence and law, Zur Kritik der Gewalt. Despite the intense attention devoted to this essay, the role of Jewish myth in it has not yet been thoroughly explained. This study contends that the association between what Benjamin termed revolutionary violence and the Jewish messianic tradition, which plays a central role in the evaluation of Benjamin's text, is far more problematic than has (...) hitherto been assumed, and poses a serious challenge, which has not been fully examined in its historical context. Second, this essay claims that the subversive elements that many have supposedly found in Benjamin's text and the attempts to link these elements to messianic traditions are also unconvincing. Third, the paper contextualizes Benjamin's thought within the framework of the Jewish political–theological debate of the period. It contends that Benjamin's theory of law and justice should be understood not as a revolutionary, anti-republican text, as has been generally accepted, but as a secularized conservative orthodox one. In doing so, it seeks to shed light not only on Benjamin's early thinking and its influences, but also on the neglected element of Jewish orthodoxy within the broader topic of political theology. (shrink)

We live in an age beset by religiously inspired violence. Terms such as "holy war" are the stock-in-trade of the evening news. But what is the relationship between holiness and violence? Can acts such as murder ever truly be described as holy? In Does Judaism Condone Violence?, Alan Mittleman offers a searching philosophical investigation of such questions in the Jewish tradition. Jewish texts feature episodes of divinely inspired violence, and the position of the Jews (...) as God's chosen people has been invoked to justify violent acts today. Are these justifications valid? Or does our understanding of the holy entail an ethic that argues against violence?Reconstructing the concept of the holy through a philosophical examination of biblical texts, Mittleman finds that the holy and the good are inextricably linked, and that our experience of holiness is authenticated through its moral consequences. Our understanding of the holy develops through reflection on God's creation of the natural world, and our values emerge through our relations with that world. Ultimately, Mittleman concludes, religious justifications for violence cannot be sustained. (shrink)

This paper deals with the role of Judaism in Walter Benjamin's famous 1921 essay on violence and law, Zur Kritik der Gewalt. Despite the intense attention devoted to this essay, the role of Jewish myth in it has not yet been thoroughly explained. This study contends that the association between what Benjamin termed revolutionary violence and the Jewish messianic tradition, which plays a central role in the evaluation of Benjamin's text, is far more problematic than has (...) hitherto been assumed, and poses a serious challenge, which has not been fully examined in its historical context. Second, this essay claims that the subversive elements that many have supposedly found in Benjamin's text and the attempts to link these elements to messianic traditions are also unconvincing. Third, the paper contextualizes Benjamin's thought within the framework of the Jewish political–theological debate of the period. It contends that Benjamin's theory of law and justice should be understood not as a revolutionary, anti-republican text, as has been generally accepted, but as a secularized conservative orthodox one. In doing so, it seeks to shed light not only on Benjamin's early thinking and its influences, but also on the neglected element of Jewish orthodoxy within the broader topic of political theology. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the Black Death there were concerns with memorializing the event. These were part of a somber mood that affected numerous phenomena in different fields. Indeed, the bubonic plague seems to have left traces in such areas as religion, visual arts, literary compositions, commemorations, and attitudes toward death. The historical study of such representations, therefore, cannot be limited to any one field but necessitates an interdisciplinary approach. The following pages examine some aspects of this representation and the (...) afterlife of the fourteenth-century plague and violence in the specific case of Iberian Jewish communities and their texts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Does Judaism Condone Violence? Holiness and Ethics in the Jewish Tradition by Alan L. MittlemanMatthew LeveringDoes Judaism Condone Violence? Holiness and Ethics in the Jewish Tradition by Alan L. Mittleman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), v + 227 pp.Alan Mittleman has written a profoundly thought-provoking book. A main question of the book is whether a higher (revealed) law may in some cases require (...) harm to be done to the neighbor—harm that otherwise would be unjust. Mittleman offers some fascinating examples of cases in which Jews have appealed to God's Law in order to justify oppression of Gentiles. He cites a contemporary halakhic text, Torat ha-Melekh (The King's Torah), as particularly egregious. While Torat ha-Melekh was widely condemned by rabbis and the general public in Israel, it had an audience among the ultra-Orthodox. According to the Torat ha-Melekh, Gentiles' souls are not intrinsically holy in the way that Jews' souls are. This means that killing Gentile children in wartime may be acceptable due to the threat that otherwise these children may grow up to kill Jews. The Torat ha-Melekh observes that many Gentiles do not practice and obey the seven Noachide commandments. Since this is so, the Gentiles who do not obey the Noachide commandments live "in an inhuman state, where the brutish nature of their souls has free rein and their lives have lost value" (186).Another example given by Mittleman is the status of the Holy Land and the Holy People. Insofar as the holiness of the land and people is thought to be intrinsic—an inseparable property—problems can arise. According to a midrash in Bereshit Rabbah, the land is so intrinsically holy that only the dead who are buried in the land—or whose dead bodies somehow travel to the land—will rise from the dead and enjoy everlasting resurrected life. Likewise, the land's air is presented as uniquely making its inhabitants wise, and the divine presence or shekinah comes only in the land. For the medieval Jewish philosopher Yehuda Halevi, in his Kuzari: The Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Most Despised Religion (ca. 1140), the land of Israel is the most temperate climate and the most conducive to producing the ideal human beings. In addition, Halevi thinks that only certain descendants of Adam are "true Adamites" (66). A true Adamite is a son of God, just as Adam was. Specifically, only Seth and some of his descendants are fully human in accord with the Adamic model. It is only in the family of Jacob that "God's influence [finally] becomes the property of an entire people" (67). The true Adamites are Adam's (and Jacob's) seed; other humans are comparatively speaking mere husks. Although people can convert to Judaism, therefore, converts cannot be equal to those born of the Jewish nation. This does not mean that all who descend from Jacob are holy, since [End Page 745] it is possible for a Jew to distort his or her purity of soul. Nevertheless, for Halevi the Jewish people are a holy seed that is intrinsically superior to all other humans, so that it is possible to say that "Israel is an angelomorphic, even theomorphic race" (69).Moses Maimonides responded to Halevi, rejecting his viewpoint completely—on the grounds that holiness is not an intrinsic or biological (let alone racial) property. Yet, Halevi's viewpoint influenced Jewish Kabbalah in a major way. For the Kabbalist text the Zohar, the people of Israel derive from the emanations of the divine, whereas all other nations derive from the impure powers. The Zohar holds, "The other nations count for nothing in God's sight. They are the products of Eve's illicit union with the serpent," rather than coming forth from the theomorphic being who was Adam (70). Similarly, Moses de Leon—thought to be an author of the Zohar—argues that Gentiles ontologically possess impure souls that will carry them to spiritual damnation and will ensure that they have no participation in the resurrection of the dead. Another Kabbalist, Joseph of Hamadan, makes the same point that Gentiles... (shrink)

Filling a gap in knowledge in gender theory, genocidal, and Holocaust studies, this paper operationalizes the concept of phallicism as an analytic explanation of the simultaneous killing and sexual victimization of racialized men in western, capitalist, patriarchal societies. The theory of phallicism posits that racialization lays the basis for a sexualization process wherein racialized males are caricaturized as both salacious savages (who can be raped by the men or women of the dominant racial group) and bestial/wanton creatures deserving of immediate (...) death for the sake of liberal civility. Breaking with the dominant interpretive lenses in scholarly discourses around race and gender that understand racialized femininity as the basis of dehumanization, this paper will operationalize the notion of phallicism through historical and comparative analysis of the writings of political prisoner George Jackson and Primo Levi, a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. With the theory of phallicism—the guiding theoretic of the paradigm of Black Male Studies—we can sharpen our conceptual acumen to account for the function of misandric patterns of intergroup violence and its role as the organizing principle of the negrophobia characteristic of Western, patriarchal, capitalist regimes. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is two-fold: to provide a philosophical justification for the counterintuitive attitude that Judaism seems to have towards proselytism; and to extend the case so as to create a general argument, applicable to all religions, against many forms of proselytism.

According to Christoph Menke, there never was and never can be any law without violence. The reason for this dependency of law on violence lies in its need to be enforced; Menke follows Immanuel Kant's definition according to which law consists in a reciprocal authority to use coercion. Immanuel Kant's definition has been extremely influential, not only in legal and political philosophy, but also in public discourse and in our everyday understanding of law and legal matters. Over centuries, (...) Jewish legal traditions have not only theoretically reflected, but also reliably practiced, a law without any recourse to state-sanctioned violence. Interestingly though, due to the conditions of the Diaspora, Jewish law cannot have recourse to any governmental apparatus of power by way of an enforcement agency. By introducing an argument concerning the strategy of social transformation, Menke leaves the terrain of legal philosophy in favor of a philosophy of history. (shrink)

VIOLENCE AND NON-VIOLENCE SEEN THROUGH THE GANDHIAN PRISM Gandhi and non-violence are ubiquitous. But what was the precise nature of that definition as it played out in Gandhi’s own life and politics? The same man who spoke of turning the other cheek responded sympathetically to Hitler’s rule of Jewish annihilation. The ascetic who had few material needs and personified gentleness was remorseless in his need for complete obedience from his own family. What then constituted his notion (...) of ahimsa? Where lay its genesis and how did his idea of peaceful protest become the central point of the national movement? Chronicling Gandhi’s journey through the fire of experience to initiate his most unflinching mission, the restatement of Hinduism, Jyotirmaya Sharma reopens the debate around ahimsa and its continued relevance―or irrelevance―in the modern world. (shrink)

Recently, indigenous struggles against ongoing colonial violence have become prominent in the context of growing environmental destruction and the ascendancy of the far right in the United States and parts of South America. This article suggests that European radical theory is not always equipped to provide normative frameworks of allyship with such struggles. Exploring the ‘messianic tone’ in European radical theory, and in particular the works of Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, the article argues that the analytical tendency to (...) render the subject entirely dissolute acts against indigenous demands for justice built around the latter’s sovereignty. In an effort to excavate a ‘European’ tradition that might enable relations of allyship between those in relatively privileged positions and indigenous peoples, the article foregrounds the life and thought of Gustav Landauer, a German, Jewish, anarchist revolutionary who lost his life during the 1919 German revolution. Landauer’s anarchism was suffused with his reading of his Jewishness, and as such, although he prefigures Derrida and Agamben in many ways, he ultimately refused to completely reject the sovereignty of the subject, providing a means by which to engage European political theory with indigenous struggles in the world today. (shrink)

According to Christoph Menke, there never was and never can be any law without violence. The reason for this dependency of law on violence lies in its need to be enforced; Menke follows Immanuel Kant's definition according to which law consists in a reciprocal authority to use coercion. Immanuel Kant's definition has been extremely influential, not only in legal and political philosophy, but also in public discourse and in our everyday understanding of law and legal matters. Over centuries, (...) Jewish legal traditions have not only theoretically reflected, but also reliably practiced, a law without any recourse to state-sanctioned violence. Interestingly though, due to the conditions of the Diaspora, Jewish law cannot have recourse to any governmental apparatus of power by way of an enforcement agency. By introducing an argument concerning the strategy of social transformation, Menke leaves the terrain of legal philosophy in favor of a philosophy of history. (shrink)

This book focuses on the paradoxical character of law and specifically concerns the structural violence of law as the political imposition of normative order onto a "lawless" condition. The paradox of law which grounds and motivates Christoph Menke's intervention is that law is both the opposite of violence and, at the same time, a form of violence. The book develops its engagement with the paradox of law in two stages. The first shows why, and in what precise (...) sense, the law is irreducibly characterized by structural violence. The second explores the possibility of law becoming self-reflectively aware of its own violence and, hence, of the form of a self-critique of law in view of its own violence. The Book's philosophical claims are developed through analyses of works of drama: two classical tragedies in the first part and two modern dramas in the second part. It attempts to illuminate the paradoxical nature of law by way of a philosophical interpretation of literature. There are at least two normative orders within the European ethical horizon that should be called "legal orders" even though they forego the use of coercion and are thus potentially nonviolent. These are international law and Jewish law. Understanding the relationship between law and violence is one of the most urgent challenges a postmodern critical legal theory faces today. Self-reflection, the philosophical concept that plays a key role in the essay, stands opposed to all forms of spontaneity. (shrink)

Future prize-winning writer Chava Rosenfarb was seventeen years old when she was incarcerated in the Łódź ghetto. In 1972, she published The Tree of Life [Der boym fun lebn] (1972), a fictional chronicle of that experience of the Holocaust. In this three-volume epic novel, Rosenfarb narrates and interlaces the fates of ten Jewish families from pre-war Poland in 1939 to the liquidation of the ghetto in 1944. The "Tree of Life" is revealed to be the name given by the (...) "ghettoniks" to an iconic cherry tree that stands in the shared backyard of a group of apartment complexes inhabited by many of the protagonists in the ghetto. Far from being an anecdotal presence, the cherry tree becomes the center of Rosenfarb's reflections on the impacts of the environment on one's physical and mental health. In this article, The Tree of Life is analyzed from an ecocritical perspective to examine the interconnections between genocidal intent and environmental precariousness. The first part considers the perpetration angle of the Łódź ghetto establishment as a Nazi tool of ecological violence through its excessive economic program of forced labour and its structural health determinants leading to epidemics. We will then investigate the characters' attempts to reconnect to nature through tangible acts of agency (the development of small gardens to grow one's own food) and symbolism (the cherry tree evoking the freedom of the outside world). The purpose of this article is to explore the links between genocide and ecocide within the framework of literary memory, while appreciating the relevance of Chava Rosenfarb's representations of the Holocaust to our era of renewed ecological awareness. (shrink)

In this volume _Grace M. Jantzen_ continues her groundbreaking analysis of death and beauty in western thought by examining the religious roots of death and violence in the Jewish and Christian tradition, which underlie contemporary values. She shows how man’s fear of the female is often implicated in religious violence and in her critique of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament she examines a range of themes that show the western preoccupation with necrophilia. She examines (...) the relation of death to the Jewish covenant, the nature of monotheism, Holy War and the Christian covenant and kingdom. However, Jantzen recognises that submerged beneath these themes in Judaism and Christianity are traces of an alternative world of beauty and life. Jantzen’s internationally recognised feminist philosophy of religion puts forward a powerful analysis of patriarchy and violence and reveals the hidden power of natality. Her work is a searching challenge for our times and one that gives hope in a violent world. This work is the first of two posthumous publications to complete her impressive genealogy death and beauty of western thought. (shrink)

Introduction -- The Bible -- Rabbinic Judaism -- Medieval Jewish philosophy -- Kabbalah -- Modern Zionism -- Conclusions.

In 1992, Peter Ochs and a few Christian and Muslim colleagues began to gather small groups, in and outside the classroom, to practice close and attentive reading of the sacred Scriptures of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions. The hope was that members of different religions could hear one another through the patient, respectful reading of each other's Scripture. Hearing each other, participants might enter into interreligious relationships that might point a way to the peaceful engagement of religions--especially those (...) who, after September 11, 2001, too often found themselves at each other's throats. It was a hope for religion without violence. In Religion without Violence, Ochs reflects on the practical and philosophic lessons he has learned from hosting hundreds of Scriptural Reasoning engagements. He introduces the "scriptural pragmatism" of Scriptural Reasoning." He painstakingly recounts instances of successful scriptural reasoning and warns where and how it might fail. He provides guidance on how to introduce and facilitate Scriptural Reasoning in the classroom. He shows how reading out of the "hearth" of a faith can contribute to peace building across religions. And, drawing on the resources of rabbinic tradition, Augustine, and Charles Peirce, he moves beyond practice to reflect on the implications of Scriptural Reasoning for discerning what kinds of "reasoning" best address and help repair societal crises like religion-related violent conflict. (shrink)

The article puts into question the idea that the nucleus of religion - the God-talk - is peaceful , whereas all aggression should be located on the side of humankind, through differentiating a conceptual model of relating war to the concept of God in the Jewish-Christian tradition. He urges a more complex model of connecting God to issues of war and peace.

Judith Butler follows Edward Said's late suggestion that through a consideration of Palestinian dispossession in relation to Jewish diasporic traditions a new ethos can be forged for a one-state solution. Butler engages Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism and its practices of illegitimate state violence, nationalism, and state-sponsored racism. At the same time, she moves beyond communitarian frameworks, including Jewish ones, that fail to arrive at a radical democratic notion of political cohabitation. (...) Butler engages thinkers such as Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Mahmoud Darwish as she articulates a new political ethic. In her view, it is as important to dispute Israel's claim to represent the Jewish people as it is to show that a narrowly Jewish framework cannot suffice as a basis for an ultimate critique of Zionism. She promotes an ethical position in which the obligations of cohabitation do not derive from cultural sameness but from the unchosen character of social plurality. Recovering the arguments of Jewish thinkers who offered criticisms of Zionism or whose work could be used for such a purpose, Butler disputes the specific charge of anti-Semitic self-hatred often leveled against Jewish critiques of Israel. Her political ethic relies on a vision of cohabitation that thinks anew about binationalism and exposes the limits of a communitarian framework to overcome the colonial legacy of Zionism. Her own engagements with Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish form an important point of departure and conclusion for her engagement with some key forms of thought derived in part from Jewish resources, but always in relation to the non-Jew. Butler considers the rights of the dispossessed, the necessity of plural cohabitation, and the dangers of arbitrary state violence, showing how they can be extended to a critique of Zionism, even when that is not their explicit aim. She revisits and affirms Edward Said's late proposals for a one-state solution within the ethos of binationalism. Butler's startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical and political ideals of living together in radical democracy. (shrink)

This book is concerned with the connection between the formal structure of agency and the formal structure of genocide. The contributors employ philosophical approaches to explore the idea of genocidal violence as a structural element in the world. Do mechanisms or structures in nation-states produce types of national citizens that are more susceptible to genocidal projects? There are powerful arguments within philosophy that in order to be the subjects of our own lives, we must constitute ourselves specifically as national (...) subjects and organize ourselves into nation states. Additionally, there are other genocidal structures of human society that spill beyond historically limited episodes. The chapters in this volume address the significance--moral, ethical, political--of the fact that our very form of agency suggests or requires these structures. The contributors touch on topics including birthright citizenship, contemporary mass incarceration, anti-black racism, and late capitalism. Logics of Genocide will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, critical theory, genocide studies, Holocaust and Jewish studies, history, and anthropology. (shrink)

The principle of the lesser evil--the acceptability of pursuing one exceptional course of action in order to prevent a greater injustice--has long been a cornerstone of Western ethical philosophy. From its roots in classical ethics and Christian theology, to Hannah Arendt's exploration of the work of the Jewish Councils during the Nazi regime, the author explores its development in three key transformations of the problem: the defining intervention of Medecins Sans Frontisres in mid-1980s in Ethiopia; the separation wall in (...) Israel-Palestine; and international and human rights law in Bosnia, Gaza and Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of new research, the author charts the latest manifestation of this age-old idea. In doing so he shows how military and political intervention acquired a new humanitarian acceptability and legality in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.--Publisher description. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s critical acceptance of the Jewish national liberation movement and her support for the formation of a Jewish Army during the Second World War stand in contrast to her later critique of armed anticolonial struggles. I address this tension in three steps. First, I explain the role of violence in her theory of liberation. Next, I address the problem with liberation in terms of a sovereign nation-state and the alternative of federation. Finally, I return to the (...) case of Jewish liberation to show that the apparent tension can be resolved if it is understood within the framework of federalism. Instead of understanding national liberation as self-determination, federalism allows for a non-sovereign freedom that supports the plurality of nations within a shared political community. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the work of Emmanuel Levinas and René Girard and argues that both of them have as their central problem the phenomenon of human violence and both try to address this problem from their own religious tradition, Jewish for Levinas, Christian for Girard. They both pursue the concept of nonviolence to an extreme point in what each calls saintliness or holiness and both can be considered religious prophets of this extreme version of nonviolence.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND THE INTERPRE.TATION OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE FREDERICK SONTAG Pomona OoUego Olaremont, Oalifornia " It is impossible to remain loyal to Marxism, to the Revolution, without treating insurrection as an art." Lenin, paraphrasing Karl Marx WHENEVER Liberation Theology ·and its contributions to theologicail discussion al'e ·concerned, no aspect has been more controversirul than its association with violence. There is no question that Marxism/Leninism depends on the (...) use of violence. But all liberation theories must take violence into consideration. On the one hand, the ties that hold humans in bondage may be so strong that only violent means ca.n be effective to release us. On the other hand, it is well known that violenre often breeds its own do·wnfall and results in ten·or more often than peace. Since the beginning of time, probably every prrogram seeking to release human beings to their furhl. potential has had to consider the use of violence to achieve its ends, even while awal'e of its potential dangers. Yet this issue takes on a new urgency in our time because of two s[gnificant changes in our situation: (I) Most communist proposals which have resulted in world~wide change have militantly asserted the necessity to use force if we are to be set free; (2) In recent times Liberati.on Theofogy has been espoused by some Christian theologians even while the adoption of pacifism or the abhorrence of violence by most Christian groups is well known. The question of religion's intrusion into the politicaiJ. reailm is problem 271 FREDERICK SONTAG enough, but add to this the question of the use of violence and the discussion becomes very heated indeed. Although many traditions have well-developed positions regarding violence and non-violence, Christianity will be our frame of reference in discussing these issues, since Liberation Theology has, in fact, developed in a Christian context. First of all we havie to ask whether the use of violence to ruchieve politicaJ ends is a;lways ruled out or whether some circumstances might justify it as an ruooeptable tool for Christian use. Where Christianity is concerned, it is always instructive to begin by looking at the life and work of Jesus. Trruditionally, Jesus is seen as rejecting the use of violence and as having suffered vioilence himself. Can anything so change this image as to make violence acceptable on Christian grounds? In ·considering this, we first have to note that Jesus himself lived under po1itiool oppression. We must oons~der the Jewish expectations for the ' Messiah ' and how this role came to be projecbed onto Jesus; their hope for release from Roman oppressors was what plruced mroh high political expectations on Jesus. Christians recognized Jesus as a' Messiah', even though he obvious1ly did not fulfill the role of a political liberato·r. Afiter his death and for centuries fater, Jewish political fortunes went from bad to worse. The people's expectations of gaining release by the hand of Jesus did not result in a change in their political fortunes. Christians diid enter into politics and governments in!Later years, and some welcome changes can be attributed to Christian influence. But still, none of these improvements can be directly attributed to Jesus' efforts in his own fileis a prime :requfoement for success. We 'are aware of the Marxist/Leninist insistency on toeing the line on dogma, for conformity to doctrine. But can the Christian,aiccept the uniformity of interpretation which effective acbion seems to require? If the Christian liberation theofogian argues that aU Christians cannot be required to aiocept some one program of wction, he or she is limited by the division that plurality brings. On the other LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND POLITICAL VIOL]j]NCE '277 hand, the Christian revotutionary activist should not be told that his program is " unchristian " as judged by some singular, authoritative standard. Of course, the chief complication in saying this lies with a hieI"archical church which includes authorities to formulate doctrine. The Christian who wants to act differently from what the srbructure of such a chureh allows will either: (1) have to find a way to act independently and still stay within that community; or (2) convince... (shrink)

The framework of the Israel-Palestinian Arab conflict has evolved over the last half century through an instrumentalization of violence by the parties concerned. Two alternating "structures of violence" have emerged to define this instrumentality: the one Israeli, the other Palestinian. I call these structures of violence "alternating" rather than merely "reciprocating" because the one not only feeds off the other and actually practices on the other that which is merely fancied and projected as the other's intention but (...) also because they have inverse periodicities: The "Great Revolt" of 1936-1939 introduced the principle of "armed struggle" into the practice and lore of a fractured and often factional antiBritish and anti-Zionist insurgency. It was effectively countered by British might coupled with an essentially defensive Jewish posture of consensus and "restraint". By contrast the current Palestinian "Uprising" has the Arab side preaching restraint if not always nonviolence, through a pluralistic consensus on the immediate national ends such practice aims to achieve. Against this is an avowed Israeli policy of "the iron fist" that for the first time since independence has broken the general Zionist consensus with regard not only to the utility and morality of violent means but also to national goals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Phantom Mediators: Reflections on the Nature of the Violence in AlgeriaRéda Bensmaïa (bio)Translated by Hassan MelehyIn order to justify himself, each person depends on the crime of the other. There is a casuistry of blood where an intellectual, it seems to me, has no place, except to take up arms himself. When violence responds to violence in an exasperating delirium that makes the simple language (...) of reason impossible, the role of intellectuals cannot be, as we read every day, to excuse from afar one act of violence and condemn another, which has the effect both of angering the one condemned of violence to the point of rage and of encouraging the one who is not condemned to more violence. If they themselves don’t join the combatants, their role (a more obscure one, to be sure!) must be only to work in the direction of an appeasement so that reason may again have a chance.—Albert Camus, Actuelles IIIAt a secondhand bookstore in Santa Monica, I found a story by Friedrich Torberg: “Mein ist die Rache” (“Vengeance is Mine”). The author describes the sadistic practices of a concentration-camp commandant in 1943 who drives a group of Jewish prisoners to commit suicide one after the other. It is almost unbearable to read. One reader, apparently an emigré German Jew, added some bitter marginal notes after the war. On the last page this reader penciled in, “America is full of Jews who love Germany and long for it.”The night after I read this book, a question occurred to me that has stayed on my mind ever since and that I want to pass on to you: What would we all give, each one of us, each individual German, for this not to have happened? It’s a”pan-German” question. Perhaps we will know something more about ourselves if each one of us tries to answer it individually, as honestly and above all as concretely as possible. And doesn’t it lead to three other questions that are worrying us?: What was? What remains? What will be?—Christa Wolf, “Parting from Phantoms”A few weeks after reading Christa Wolf’s text, the same questions continue to haunt me. “Pan-Maghrebian” questions: what would we be willing to give, each one of us, each Algerian in any case, for what is happening now never to have occurred?What was? What remains? What will be? These are the questions that have guided me in the different steps of writing the text I offer here.In the very fine article he contributed under the heading of “The Intellectual and Society” to the Encyclopaedia Universalis, philosopher François Châtelet wrote, “If we confine ourselves to the three historical groups we have arbitrarily taken as examples—the Greek sophist, the ‘judge’ of the Russell Tribunal, and the eighteenth-century philosopher, it is clear that the would-be intellectual claims to be the teacher and the advocate of political [End Page 85] freedom, of the rights of the person, the architect of a transparent society in which the individual and the citizen coincide.“Doubtless,” added Châtelet, “one aspect or another prevails on him, according to the circumstances; but a certain structure subsists, which may allow us to define, superficially and differentially, intellectuals as a group and an agency” [my emphasis].Beginning with this definition, I would like to examine the following questions: What is the status of intellectuals in a country like Algeria? How can it be explained that they have been and still are the victims of the violence that strikes them today?Given the current situation of international politics, the example of Algeria is inevitable, because in the opinion of numerous analysts what is happening in that country is a test case, a limit case that may serve as an indicator of what the future holds for the formerly colonized countries. For many analysts, the evolution of the political situation in Algeria may also serve as an analytical operator in the large ideological movements that are shaking not only the countries of the Maghreb but also the Arab-Muslim world in its totality. And in... (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to analyse the issues of war and violence in the thought of Hannah Arendt, drawing on articles published in the newspaper Aufbau between 1941 and 1945. In these texts Arendt argues for the organisation of a Jewish army to engage in the struggle against Nazism. Here I attempt to show that this call for a Jewish army is not in contradiction with the separation between power and violence that Arendt posited. (...) With this objective, I will compare Aufbau’s writings not only with On Violence, but above all with Was ist Politik? and I will try to interpret this comparison by means of the concept of impolitical, elaborated by the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito. This way I will suggest a new reading of the relationship between politics and violence. It is not a matter of considering the Jewish question only as a starting point to analyze Arendt’s thought, or to interpret her claim in favor of a Jewish army as the result of a specific historical context, but also to see how these positions spring from a will of transformation of this same context and are coherent with the development of her thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Commandment against the Law Writing and Divine Justice in Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”Tracy McNulty (bio)Pierre Legendre has shown that the Romano-canonical legal traditions that form the foundations of Western jurisprudence “are founded in a discourse which denies the essential quality of the relation of the body to writing” [“Masters of Law” 110]. It emerges historically as a repudiation of Jewish legalism and Talmud law, where (...) the rite of circumcision encodes the subject’s entry into law as an “allegiance to the absolute Writing,” or the “relationship between the human subject and the logical place of the Other” [110–11; see also “les juifs”]. In this shift, one understanding of writing is displaced by another: the material inscription of the letter, as an incommunicable limit or cut, is supplanted by the fantasy of what Legendre calls a “living writing,” a writing “in the heart” that promotes an ideal of perfect communication in which nothing is lost, in which meaning is lodged in an absolute Other who guarantees all knowledge. In his words, “we belong to a culture in which a mystically alienated human body stands in the place of the absolute book. The state has emerged from this structure.... Its basic characteristics can be set out by means of a fundamental Romano-pontifical maxim: the Emperor carries all the archives in his breast (omnia scrinia habet in pectore suo)” [“Masters of Law” 109].The ultimate theological source of this Roman maxim is Paul’s polemic against the Jewish law in the Epistle to the Romans. Paul’s polemic is structured by a distinction between two orders of law: the “law of God” and the “law of sin.” The first is associated with the intelligible “spirit” of the law, which is “written in the heart,” the second with the prescriptive “letter” of the Jewish law, which compromises or corrupts the first by binding it to a particular representation and consigning it to written form. Paul’s solution is to bypass the law, to bypass representation, and perhaps even language itself. The prescriptive “letter” of the Jewish law must be sublated by the law of the spirit, such that “we serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit” [Romans 7: 6]. Christ, as the living embodiment of the law of God, upholds the spirit of the law by “fulfilling”––and so rendering obsolete–its written form.The doctrine of Christ as the “living law” sustains what Legendre describes as a “banalisation of writing” [“Masters of Law” 111], a disregard for its material inscription that holds the letter to be nothing more than a placeholder, a flawed or incomplete representation of a meaning or truth that is itself beyond words. At the same time, it makes possible the legal and political fantasy of a living writing, located in a single body understood as the site of interpretive authority. The extraction of a meaning or truth from the intractable letter becomes the ultimate aim of the legal order and the most lofty task of its sovereign interpreter, uniquely charged with animating the dead letter. This notion permeates what Peter Goodrich describes as “the most standard protocols of legal reading,” according to [End Page 34] which “it is not the letter but the spirit that determines the meaning of the law”:The text is composed of dead letters (litera mortua); the rule is no more than a “mute judge,” a sleeping form, requiring the interposition, anima legis, of jurist or judge.... [T]he meaning of the law is internal to its living body, viva vox iuris or lex loquens, its image, interpreter, or legislator. In classical terms it is spelled out by reference to something beyond words: “to know the law is not to know the words of the law, but its force and power.” In a renaissance formulation we are similarly told that “no words, forms, niceties, or propriety of language is of any regard in the Civil Law, in comparison to truth, faithfulness and integrity. For verba menti, non verbis servire debet; words, are made as instruments to serve and express the mind, and not to command it.”[229–30]1... (shrink)

The Soul of Jewish Social Justice offers a novel intellectual and spiritual approach for how Jewish wisdom must be relevant and transformational in its application to the most pressing moral problems of our time. The book explores how spirituality, ritual, narratives, holidays, and tradition can enhance one's commitment to creating a more just society. Readers will discover how the Jewish social justice ethos can help address issues of education reform, ethical consumption, the future of Israel, immigration, prison (...) reform, violence, and business ethics. (shrink)

In Violence and the Sacred (henceforth, V&S), Rene Girard remarks that when we think of siblings, we often think of affectionate relationships.1 He then proposes, however, that the stories that have come down to us through mythology and sacred scriptures often tell us otherwise. Warring siblings are embedded deeply in history, religion, and literature: Girard lists Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Eteocles and Polyneices, Romulus and Remus, Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland as just a few examples of (...) the fraternal rivalry in our collective consciousness. We might add the biblical Isaac and Ishmael and Joseph and his brothers to this list. The rivalries are so pervasive that Girard declares: “the theme itself is.. (shrink)

Performing reason: Mendelssohn on Judaism and enlightenment -- Jacobi and Mendelssohn: the tragedy of a messianic friendship -- In the year of the Lord 1800: Rosenzweig and the Spinoza quarrel -- Reinhold and Kant: the quest for a new religion of reason -- Beautiful life: Mendelssohn, Hegel, and Rosenzweig -- Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and political theology: beyond sovereign violence -- Beyond 1800: an immigrant Rosenzweig.

Recent flashpoints in Black-Jewish relations--Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, the violence in Crown Heights, Leonard Jeffries' polemical speeches, the O.J. Simpson verdict, and the contentious responses to these events--suggest just how wide the gap has become in the fragile coalition that was formed during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Instead of critical dialogue and respectful exchange, we have witnessed battles that too often consist of vulgar name-calling and self-righteous finger-pointing. Absent from these exchanges are two vitally (...) important and potentially healing elements: Comprehension of the actual history between Blacks and Jews, and level-headed discussion of the many issues that currently divide the two groups. In Struggles in the Promised Land, editors Jack Salzman and Cornel West bring together twenty-one illuminating essays that fill precisely this absence. As Salzman makes clear in his introduction, the purpose of this collection is not to offer quick fixes to the present crisis but to provide a clarifying historical framework from which lasting solutions may emerge. Where historical knowledge is lacking, rhetoric comes rushing in, and Salzman asserts that the true history of Black-Jewish relations remains largely untold. To communicate that history, the essays gathered here move from the common demonization of Blacks and Jews in the Middle Ages; to an accurate assessment of Jewish involvement of the slave trade; to the confluence of Black migration from the South and Jewish immigration from Europe into Northern cities between 1880 and 1935; to the meaningful alliance forged during the Civil Rights movement and the conflicts over Black Power and the struggle in the Middle East that effectively ended that alliance. The essays also provide reasoned discussion of such volatile issues as affirmative action, Zionism, Blacks and Jews in the American Left, educational relations between the two groups, and the real and perceived roles Hollywood has play in the current tensions. The book concludes with personal pieces by Patricia Williams, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Michael Walzer, and Cornel West, who argues that the need to promote Black-Jewish alliances is, above all, a "moral endeavor that exemplifies ways in which the most hated group in European history and the most hated group in U.S. history can coalesce in the name of precious democratic ideals." At a time when accusations come more readily than careful consideration, Struggles in the Promised Land offers a much-needed voice of reason and historical understanding. Distinguished by the caliber of its contributors, the inclusiveness of its focus, and the thoughtfulness of its writing, Salzman and West's book lays the groundwork for future discussions and will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary American culture and race relations. (shrink)

Over the last decades, studies on cultural memory have taken a »spectral turn« and have explored the potential of haunting metaphors for addressing past instances of violence that affect present cultural realities. This book contributes to the discussions on haunting by enquiring into its culturally and historically located modality: the emergence of the figure of the Jewish ghost in contemporary Polish popular culture, literature and critical art. Gathering contributions from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, it locates this new (...) interest in Jewish ghosts on the map of other Polish (and Jewish) ghostologies and seeks to explore their cultural and political functions in the Polish post-Holocaust imaginaire. (shrink)

Over the last several decades there has been an attempt to gender genocide by focusing on sexual as well as lethal violence during the Holocaust. While there has been tremendous consideration of women's experience of rape and sexual abuse during the Holocaust, the rape of men had not been previously engaged as a matter of study or archival investigation. This article is the first to study the rape of Jewish men and boys during the Holocaust through survivor testimonies (...) and theorize the implications these testimonies of male sexual victimization have for our understanding of sexual violence and rape more broadly. (shrink)

Birth and The Jazz Singer ostensibly exploit blacks in opposite ways. Birth makes war on blacks in the name of the fathers; The Jazz Singer’s protagonist adopts a black mask and kills his father. The Birth of a Nation, climaxing the worst period of violence against blacks in southern history, lynches the black; the jazz singer, ventriloquizing the black, sings through his mouth. Birth, a product of the progressive movement, has national political purpose. The Jazz Singer, marking the retreat (...) from public to private life in the jazz age, and the perceived pacification of the fantasized southern black threat, celebrates not political regeneration but urban entertainment.[ … ]Celebrating the blackface identification that Birth of a Nation denies, The Jazz Singer does no favor to blacks. The blackface jazz singer is neither a jazz singer nor black. Blackface marries ancient rivals in both movies; black and white marry in neither. Just as Birth offers a regeneration through violence, so the grinning, Jazz Singer, minstrelsy mask kills blacks with kindness. Michael Rogin teaches political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian , Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville , “Ronald Reagan,” the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:When We Collide: Sex, Social Risk, and Jewish Ethics by Rebecca J. Epstein-LeviJoshua Stein (bio)When We Collide: Sex, Social Risk, and Jewish Ethics by Rebecca J. Epstein-Levi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023Sex is messy:Ethicists have an unfortunate habit of speaking of sex—or "good" sex, anyway—in lofty, aspirational terms: the physical and spiritual union of committed partners, the human sharing in divine creativity, the two becoming one, (...) and so on. This image of choreographed perfection is reproduced in popular culture. … But the actual practice of sex, by ordinary people, is not so lofty, so beautifully synchronous. Real sex, even "good" sex, is carnivalesque, even grotesque. Real sex involves fluids, farts, jiggling, grunting, adjustments of position, arms falling asleep, and accidental pinching or pulling of hair … and the making of a vast number of frankly ridiculous faces (83).Rebecca J. Epstein-Levi's When We Collide (2023) challenges us to think about sex as it is, rather than as we are conditioned to talk about it (or as we might sometimes like to imagine it). This is foundational to the book. There is a familiar tradition of sanitizing sex, reducing it to teleology, idealized bodies, heteronormativity, and venerated social institutions. In dispensing with this sanitized illusion, the book adopts a healthier and more honest relationship with sex; in order to have a productive discussion about the ethics of any human activity, that discussion should represent the human activity faithfully. Part of the reason that Epstein-Levi takes this approach is to distinguish Jewish ethics' discussion of sex, which regards sex, and therefore sexual ethics, "as an empirical, lived, and granular phenomenon" (3).Discussions in Jewish sexual ethics should treat sex as a lived social experience and be responsive to the messiness of that experience. Epstein-Levi argues that sanitizing sex through appeal to a nebulous notion of how historical [End Page 99] religious traditions must have been puritanical is ahistorical, chauvinistic, and inconsistent with scholarship on rabbinic texts.This is a striking and perhaps subversive view in our present context. Centrally, many associate "religious views" (especially in sexual ethics) with politically Conservative and purity-driven views characteristic of some Christian traditions. The term "Judeo-Christian" in American political discourse is often used evocatively of the heteronormative, sanitized, idealized posture toward sex that Levi explicitly rejects. Epstein-Levi's book recognizes that rabbinic scholarship underrepresents marginalized communities, including women, LGBTQ+ people, and disabled people. This is the major moral and practical focus of Epstein-Levi's analysis; historical traditions in which dominant moral views are shaped by a particular group often have glaring blind spots. When we recognize those blind spots, as members of that tradition, need to be updated simply to address sex as it exists, not as we idealize it.The book centers Jewish texts and methods of thought, but (in my view) readers who will benefit most from reading Epstein-Levi's book are non-Jewish readers thinking about sex. Epstein-Levi's book illustrates methodological differences in Jewish ethics from other approaches. The ethics of sex should change as our knowledge of sex changes; as we learn about sexual activity and about the social lives of people, we should apply that knowledge to our understanding. For Jewish thought, ethics is discursive, not fixed; our understanding of ethics requires constant consideration and discussion as our understanding of the world changes and improves.One central focus of the book is risk; our knowledge of sex changes as we understand and mediate against the risks involved in sexual activity and as we learn more about how risk works itself. Risk is tied up in all social activity, including sex. The ethics of sex requires discussion of risk but often does so in a way not congruous with the discussion of risk in other areas of social life. "Sex is dangerous. … Sexual intercourse opens us up to risks of infections, violence, and, if we are in possession of functional ovaries and a uterus, pregnancy" (98). All social activity is risky; we are all acutely aware given the prospects of exposure to strains of a novel coronavirus and the way we have changed our... (shrink)

At the 50 th anniversary of the Jean Améry’s Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten, published in English as At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations By a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, this work is garnering increased attention in the Anglophone world. Perhaps it should not be surprising that there is increased interest in this book at this moment when our attention is repeatedly drawn to the plight of immigrants and exiles, state sanctioned use of torture, and police (...) violence — all themes At the Mi nd’s Limits deals with at length. While this recent attention is certainly appropriate, it nevertheless tends to blur the specific and particular socio-political and cultural contours of the work. Améry becomes a writer about the plight of the victim in general, such that specificity of his Jewishness is lost and the already submerged theological dimensions of his work remain obscure. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial CultureSpencer Hawkins (bio)Mufti, Aamir. Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton UP, NJ: Princeton, 2007. xv + 325 pp.Mufti’s comparison of the Jewish question and the Indian Partition invites readers to join building projects that delineate and then endanger minorities within nations. Literature about minorities speaks (...) a language deliberately distant from the national one. Minority status has little to do with population numbers for Aamir Mufti; instead it signifies [End Page 61] tential victimization through disproportional rights, since “minority is always potentially exile” (Mufti 13). This definition of minority suits his two examples—Jews in Germany and Muslims in India—since in the twentieth century both fledgling nations adopted forms of nationalism that regarded the lives of these minorities as contaminants to the purity of the emergent national body. The prologue catalogues the brutality in India that prompted Mufti to write this book. Among the horrors listed were the destruction of Babri Mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 and the videotaped gang rapes of Muslim women that became a widespread form of entertainment in India. While Mufti reads violence toward minorities as correlative with the rise of nationstates, he considers similarities and differences between nation building in the West and in the subcontinent. In both cases, the new establishment of political equality for citizens came along with the desire to pare down the number of officially recognized citizens. Muslim and Jewish minorities migrated to “minority” nations in the collapsing British Empire, in present-day Pakistan and Israel, respectively, during the respective formations of India and Germany. By founding nations on formerly British-occupied territory, minorities potentially would enjoy the role of nationalist majorities. This solution strikes Mufti as spreading the nationalist contagion onto the minority.The whole book lets literature mark broad cultural attitudes and phenomena. The first chapter observes incipient Jewish nationalism in a work by a British author, Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, who spent time in Germany and grew fascinated with the Jewish question while abroad. Her Britishness reinforces a pattern in Mufti’s schema: British powers facilitate the rise of nationalism among minorities in India and in Germany. Daniel Deronda comes at the tail end of a long discourse on Jews’ relation to Europe. The first of Mufti’s cases within canonical literature is the hope for tolerance and a dialogue of cultures, which G. E. Lessing allegorizes through a drama about Saladin, the Muslim sultan of Egypt and Syria, who learns to trust the eponymous Jewish merchant in Nathan the Wise. “Muslim” stands in for “Christian” since Nathan’s alienation is allegorical for the alienation of Jews in Lutheran Germany. Heinrich Heine weighs in on the advantages to assimilation in this period with his fragmentary novel The Rabbi from Bacherach, where religiously raised Jewish children feel comforted when they hear the Tale of the Nibelungen from Father Rhein, the personification of a river that figures generally for German national myth and, in Heine’s story, as a possible source of comfort for partially assimilated minorities. If we read literature as a barometer of cultural pressures, then the appeal of assimilation for European Jews declines in the late colonial nineteenth century when George Eliot inscribed religion into the “secular” discourse of national citizenship.Since the Israeli state is outside of the range of his argument, we leave the Jewish Question with George Eliot’s philo-Semitism in Daniel Deronda, where the only hope for European Jews is to become a nation and to occupy the Palestinian territory. Mufti compares the concerns of early Zionism and Pakistani nationalism side by side in chapter 2. Pakistani issues dominate chapters 3 to 5. In chapter 2, he launches the comparison with the parallel between Hebrew’s development as a national language to identify [End Page 62] Jews secularly and culturally, not just religiously, and Urdu’s transition from a vernacular language to a national language with the secular goal of creating a Pakistani culture freed from Hindi’s erstwhile predominance. When he depicts language choice as mimetic of specific cultural trends, Mufti indicates the shape of... (shrink)

Resistance strategies in severely repressive, violent contexts such as genocide are multifaceted, and it is important to understand what distinguishes people who choose collective resistance (e.g., uprisings, partisan groups) or individual resistance strategies (e.g., escaping, hiding). This chapter discusses a content analysis of survivor testimonies from the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive that examined this question, based on a matched comparison of 170 Holocaust survivors involved in collective or individual resistance. Our findings suggest the importance of social and contextual influences (...) and experiences before and during the genocide—for instance, political family socialization and prior political participation and ideology, resistance role models, the type of imprisonment, direct exposure to mass killings and traumatic family losses, and family responsibilities. Overall, we suggest broadening the scope of resistance in research on severely repressive and violent contexts, and going beyond psychological processes to analyze specific circumstances that shape how people resist. (shrink)

Following directly upon an account of the author's personal experiences as a young soldier in Gaza during the course of the first intifada in 1987, this essay is an attempt to “cash in” rabbinic statements that present the entire Torah as a path to peace. The essay suggests that the genre of rabbinic debate—rather than the specific content of rabbinic statements—can be understood as peaceful. The study of halakhic literature, which is generally understood either as designed to clarify and quantify (...) explicit legal demands or as a setting for pluralistic and progressive legal debate, is reevaluated with the purpose of limiting the potential of religious law to justify acts of violence. This reevaluation is founded upon an implicit critique of the “liberal” strategies that have sought to control the dangerous potential of religious law. The author proposes an irenic understanding of the halakha built upon partial and limited evaluations of the law's truth-claims. It argues that rabbinic debating generates multiple understandings for every detail of the law that entangle and conceal any ultimate sense of the law from view. The result is a legal system that is modest about its conclusions—and content to implement them partially—hypocritically. The religious value of such a system is that the truth claims of the law are thus modeled upon—and duplicate—the paradoxical opaqueness of prophetic revelation. Ultimately, this essay argues that this conception of the halakha is inherently tentative and hence peaceful. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:716 BOOK REVIEWS phies for each section (20 in all); (2) the summaries of major conclusions at the end of many chapters; (2) the explanations of how one body of texts (or its traditions) has been re-read (i.e., re-worked) by later texts; and (4) how one body of texts (e.g., the Psalms), provides for understanding a certain perspective other parts of the Old Testament (e.g., the Pentateuch). Some shortcomings (...) are evident. He relies heavily on the prophets for guiding insights, while law, priesthood, temple, and blessing play minor roles. Is this really faithful to the canonical shape of the Old Testament in its pre-Christian witness~ I find particularly inadequate the treatment of purity laws (p. 86) and priestly roles (pp. 150-53), and suspect the author needs to apply a hermeneutics of suspicion to his own Protestant presuppositions! In a similar way, the decalogue gets extended attention because Childs sees its theology as relevant to modern questions of violence, war, etc.; but he never seriously wrestles with those counter-passages whose theology encourages a divine warrior or a conquest motif. A similar problem arises when he ends the book with the theme of "Life under Promise." This is a judicious choice for the summarizing theme of the Old Testament and includes treatment of judgment versus salvation,.eschatology, messianic hope, the promise of the land, and eternal life. But it lacks any reference to liturgy and temple as symbols of hope, the book of the law, or the commandments of Torah, and no mention at all of the " blessing " theology of P that informs the whole Old Testament from Genesis 1 onwards. Clearly Childs has begun an important project, but much more clarity and balance is still needed in his continuing work during the years ahead. Washington Theological Union Silver Spring, Maryland LAWRENCE BOADT, C.S.P. Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence in Medieval Philosophy: Islamic, Jewish and Christian Perspectives. Edited by TAMAR RUDAVSKY. Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1985. Pp. ix + 299. $54 (cloth). Since this book originated from revised papers and commentaries presented at a conference (held at the Ohio State University on March 3 and 4, 1982.), it is not surprising to find that the completed edition displays wide variety both in its subject matter and in the quality of the chapters. The chapters reflect the quality of papers very often presented at conferences -some are excellent, others are not. In addition, some chapters deal BOOK REVIEWS 717 with problems and solutions which help significantly to advance medieval scholarship, while the problems and solutions raised in other chapters do. not add much to medieval research; indeed, some chapters seem to present arguments lacking both in plausibility and in an understanding of the dominant spirit of medieval thought. The book is divided into three specific parts which deal with Islamic, Jewish, and Christian authors respectively, and the chapters in each part are arranged in historical order. There is also an introduction and an extensive bibliography. In chapter 1, Calvin Normore gives a helpful, but tediously written, introduction and overview of the logical and epistemological problems which were involved in medieval discussions of divine omniscience and omnipotence. Chapter 2 focuses upon Boethius's account of the nature of contingency, and adopts a view which i;e:fl.ects a misunderstanding both of Boethius and of the theological spirit of medieval thought in general. Ignoring sage comments from Richard Sorabji (see p. 49, footnote 68), Norman Kretzmann argues that for Boethius free human choice is the source of all contingency. How the Christian, Boethius, could so badly confuse human choice with divine choice, Kretzmann fails to explain. Chapters 3-6 constitute Part Two of the text and contain some of the most scholarly research in the book. In chapters 3 and 4, Josef Van Ess, rightly noting the juridical foundations of Mu'tazilite thought, examines wrongdoing and divine omnipotence in the fragmentary work of Abu Ishaq An-Nazzam. His discussion is particularly helpful in its treatment of the Islamic understanding of God as not physei agathos, but good merely by doing what is good. This understanding is a necessary element for any sound grasp... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:WORKING WARFARE AND ITS RESTRICTIONS IN THE JEWiSH TRADITION Reuven Kimelman Brandeis University The test case for any political theory of checks and balances is war. It also tests the outer limits of the ethical deployment of power. I. Types of Wars The Jewish ethics of war focuses on two issues: its legitimation and its conduct. The Talmud classifies wars according to their source oflegitimation. Biblically mandated (...) wars are termed mandatory (milhemet mitzvah or milhemet hovah). Wars undertaken at the discretion of the Sanhédrin are termed discretionary (milhemet reshut). There are three types of mandatory wars: Joshua's war of conquest againstthe seven Canaanite nations, the war againstAmaleq, anddefensive wars against an already launched attack. Discretionary wars are usually expansionary efforts undertaken to enhance the political prestige of the government or to secure economic gain. The first type of mandatory war is only of historical interest as the Canaanite nations lost their national identity already in ancient times. This ruling, which appears repeatedly in rabbinic literature, is part ofa tendency to blunt the impact of the seven-nations policy. The Bible points out that these policies were not implemented even during the zenith of ancient Israel's power (Kings 9:20; 2 Chr 8:7-9; see also Judges 1:21-33, Ps 106:34). Indeed, an ancient Midrash explicitly excludes the possibility of transferring the seven-nations ruling to other non-Jewish residents of the Land ofIsrael. Maimonides is just as explicit in emphasizing that all trace 44Reuven Kimmelman of them has vanished. By limiting the jurisdiction of the seven-nations ruling to the conditions ofancient Canaan it was effectively removed from the postbiblical ethical agendaand vitiated as aprecedent forcontemporary practice. The second category ofmandatory war, against Amaleq, has also been rendered operationally defunct by comparing them with the Canaanites, or by postponing the battle to the immediate premessianic struggle, or by viewing them as a metaphor for genocidal evil. The two remaining categories, reactive defensive wars (which are classified as mandatory) and expansionary wars (which are classified as discretionary) remain intact. So, for example, King David's response to the Philistine attackaredesignated mandatory, whereashis wars "to expandthe border of Israel" are designated discretionary. Intermediate wars such as preventive, anticipatory, or preemptive defy so neat a classification. Not only are the classifications debated in the Talmud, but commentators disagree on the categorization of the differing positions in the Talmud. The major clash occurs between the eleventh century Franco-German scholar Rashi and the thirteenth century Franco-Provencal scholar Meiri. According to Rashi, the majority position considers preemptive action to be discretionary whereas the minority position expounded by Rabbi Judah considers it to be mandatory. According to Meiri, a preemptive strike, against an enemy who it is feared might attack or who is already known to be preparing for war is deemed mandatory by the majority ofthe rabbis, but discretionaryby Rabbi Judah. Accordingly, Rabbi Judah defines a counterattack as mandatory only in response to an already launched attack. A similar reading of Maimonides also limits the mandatory classification to a defensive war launched in response to an attack. With these distinctions between mandatory and discretionary wars in mind, we should be able to investigate the Jewish concerns with the problematics ofwarby focusing on preemptive strikes, declarations ofwar, ethics of warfare, and draftability. II. Preemptive Strikes as Self-Defense Not only Machiavellians view the security and survival ofthe state as nonnegotiable. National self-defense is as much amoral right as is personal self-preservation. Whereas it is clear that offensive war cannot be subsumed under the inalienable right of self-defense, the moral status of pre-emptive attacks is not as clear. Is the moral category of self-defense Working Warfare and Its Restrictions in the Jewish Tradition 45 limited to an already launched attack? The majority talmudic position, according to Rashi, and that of Rabbi Judah, according to Meiri, would answer in the affirmative. Their position is seconded by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which states: "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherentright ofindividual ofcollective self-defense ifan armed attack occurs against a member." The minority position of Rabbi Judah, according to Rashi, and the... (shrink)

Irven Michael Resnick - Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 257-258 Book Review Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen, editors. Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 380. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $24.95. This volume, a collection of conference papers presented at Notre Dame in 1996, draws attention to the (...) twelfth-century renaissance for the evolution of medieval Jewish-Christian relations. Rather than treating the anti-Jewish violence of the first Crusade as a decisive break leading directly to Jewish isolation and, finally, expulsion from medieval Christendom, the editors have selected papers that seek "to integrate the Jewish and Jewish-Christian stories into a larger European story" focusing.. (shrink)

Shaul Magid's Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (2021) has the potential to urge American and Israeli Jews to “own” Meir Kahane and hold him up as a mirror reflecting the toxic and tragic dimensions of modern Jewish history. Such a look in the mirror can only happen once Jews see Palestinian suffering as central to the building of the state of Israel and also how they are complicit and implicated in (...) such suffering. (shrink)

This chapter has recourse to affect theory and nonrepresentational theory to measure the affective impact of synoptic violences (not least, crucifixion) as events that act directly on readers and hearers, engendering sensations and feelings that resist facile labeling. Christianity, indeed, is a world religion that orbits around a singularly violent event—Jesus’s terminal torture—that, in its enduring effects no less than its narrative impact, is an intensely affective event. Do the Synoptics attempt to convert the unrepresentable viscerality of that originary event (...) into torture-erasing patterns of theological meaning? To different degrees is the answer proposed. The chapter then turns its affective lens on the Fourth Gospel. Powerful, plot-propelling emotions course through the Johannine narrative. Not least, racialized violence flows through and out of it. Hate rips through it (that ascribed to “the Jews”) but also a love (enjoined on believers) that is tightly knotted with hate. The intricacy of that intimate entanglement, and how it turned the Fourth Gospel into a singularly lethal instrument of anti-Jewish violence, emerges when affect theorist Sara Ahmed’s profound ruminations on hate and love are used to extend Adele Reinhartz’s influential analyses of (anti-)Judaism in John as it relates to antisemitism. (shrink)