Non­fic­tion

Jews and Power

  • Review
By – November 15, 2011
Jew­ish legal and polit­i­cal thought devel­oped in con­di­tions of exile where, until 1948, Jews had nei­ther a state of their own nor an unchal­lenged cit­i­zen­ship in any oth­er. In this remark­able and high­ly read­able book, Wisse pro­vides a new way of think­ing about the Jew­ish rela­tion­ship to pow­er. She dis­putes the idea that Jews in the Dias­po­ra exist­ed in a polit­i­cal vac­u­um. The absence of full sov­er­eign­ty nev­er meant that Jews lacked polit­i­cal instincts, insti­tu­tions, or lead­ers. Rather, Jew­ish polit­i­cal tra­di­tions were ground­ed in their covenan­tal rela­tion­ship with God and a body of legal inter­pre­ta­tion that teased out the rec­i­p­ro­cal oblig­a­tions of the ruler and the ruled. For much of Jew­ish his­to­ry, the rab­bis taught that the fate of the Jews depend­ed not on their abil­i­ty to wield polit­i­cal pow­er, but rather on their abil­i­ty to sat­is­fy God of their upright­ness. They linked the nation’s poten­cy to its moral strength. There is a great deal to learn in this book about the Jew­ish expe­ri­ence of sus­tain­ing a nation­al iden­ti­ty and a sys­tem of law, eco­nom­ics, and author­i­ty with­out ter­ri­to­ry, sov­er­eign­ty, cit­i­zen­ship, or most of the time, real polit­i­cal pow­er. Their atyp­i­cal polit­i­cal pat­terns, devel­oped as adjust­ments to the Dias­po­ra, equipped Jews to live as cit­i­zens and as polit­i­cal actors with some degree of ini­tia­tive and influ­ence.

Medieval and ear­ly mod­ern com­mu­nal life, although always seg­re­gat­ed from the non-Jew­ish major­i­ty, still afford­ed Jews expe­ri­ence in self-gov­ern­ment and asso­ci­a­tion. It pre­pared them for demo­c­ra­t­ic respon­si­bil­i­ty— for being as con­cerned for oth­ers as they are for their own. In the Kahal, the semi­au­tonomous Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in exile, Jews were respon­si­ble for all aspects of their well­be­ing. Wisse posits that Jew­ish cre­ativ­i­ty expressed itself in these polit­i­cal accom­mo­da­tions to the Dias­po­ra as much as in the areas of reli­gion, phi­los­o­phy, folk­ways, lan­guage, and cul­ture. Jews inter­act­ed with oth­er peo­ples and rulers and impact­ed his­to­ry. She also shows how the pol­i­tics of Jews stim­u­lat­ed the pol­i­tics of anti-Jews. They were, of course, not deserv­ing of the aggres­sion lev­eled against them but were, nev­er­the­less, involved in a com­pli­cat­ed web of depen­dence and influ­ence. The insights offered in this bril­liant analy­sis pro­vide a con­text for the chal­lenges cur­rent­ly fac­ing the State of Israel and the Jew­ish peo­ple. Jews and Pow­er is cer­tain­ly a book for our times— coura­geous, hon­est, and cogent.
Michael N. Dobkows­ki is a pro­fes­sor of reli­gious stud­ies at Hobart and William Smith Col­leges. He is co-edi­tor of Geno­cide and the Mod­ern Age and On the Edge of Scarci­ty (Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty Press); author of The Tar­nished Dream: The Basis of Amer­i­can Anti-Semi­tism; and co-author of The Nuclear Predicament.

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