Power & Powerlessness in Jewish History

by David Biale

Overview

WINNER OF THE 1987 JWB NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR HISTORY

In this radical reinterpretation of Jewish history, David Biale tackles the myth of Jewish political passivity between the fall of an independent Jewish Commonwealth in 70 C.E. and the rebirth of the state of Israel in 1948. He argues that Jews throughout history demonstrated a savvy understanding of political life; they were neither as powerless as the memory of the Holocaust years would suggest nor as powerful as the as the contemporary state of Israel would imply.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780805208412
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/10/1986
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

DAVID BIALE is the Koret Associate Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He won the JWB National Jewish Book Award in 1980 for his previous book, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History.

Read an Excerpt

I
 
Sovereignty and Imperialism in Antiquity
 
At the end of his great history of the Jewish revolt against Rome of 66-70 C.E., Josephus Flavius wrote:
 
So fell Jerusalem in the second year of Vespasian’s reign..., captured five times before and now for the second time laid utterly waste.... From King David, the first Jew to reign over it, to the destruction by Titus was 1,179 years. But neither its long history, nor its vast wealth, nor its people dispersed through the whole world, nor the unparalleled renown of its worship sufficed to avert its ruin.
 
Thus, according to one view of Jewish history, ended the glorious age of Jewish sovereignty, not to be regained until the Zionist movement reestablished the state of Israel in 1948. The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. is commonly considered to demarcate the fundamental political watershed in Jewish history: the end of political independence and the beginning of the powerlessness of exile. The rabbis, who became the sole leaders of the nation in the wake of the revolt against Rome, instituted radical changes in the nature of Judaism. They not only constructed a religion without Temple sacrifices, but they are said to have abdicated all interest in politics and power in favor of a solely spiritual existence. It was this apolitical Judaism that became the Judaism of the Middle Ages, but the memory of the age of political power was preserved in messianism, the hope for the restoration of the golden age “when the Temple still stood.”
 
This view of the ancient period and the role of the rabbis, so widely accepted in Jewish consciousness, is more romantic than historical. The golden age of Jewish power in antiquity is largely a myth based on exceptions instead of the norm: the political status of the Jews throughout most of antiquity was not full sovereignty but a partial and tenuous independence in an imperial world. For at least two centuries after the destruction of the Temple, the Jews in both the Land of Israel and the Diaspora were not powerless at all but in fact enjoyed forms of self-government similar in many ways to those of the Second Temple period. Rather than an abrupt shift from power to powerlessness, Jewish power in the early rabbinical period, and especially in the century after the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-35 C.E.), was, if anything, greater than in most of the preceding ages.
 
The destruction of the Temple dictated a religious revolution for the Jews, but its political meaning was more complex. It brought about a change in leadership from priests to rabbis, but the nature of Jewish power, both internally and in relation to the outside world, remained fundamentally the same. The rabbis built a much more durable political system than had any of the earlier leaders, whether tribal elders, kings, or priests, who were only partially successful in confronting an imperial world and in maintaining some partial semblance of Jewish sovereignty. Yet these earlier attempts, both in their successes and their failures, prepared the ground for the work of the rabbis, which in turn laid the foundations of Jewish life in the Middle Ages.

Table of Contents

Preface ix
Introduction: The Crisis of Jewish Ideology 3

I. Sovereignty and Imperialism in Antiquity 10
II. The Political Theory of the Diaspora 34
III. Corporate Power in the Middle Ages 58
IV. Absolutism·and Enlightenment 87
V. Between Haskalah and Holocaust 118
VI. Israel and the Meaning of Modern Sovereignty 145
VII. American Jews and Contemporary DiasporaPower 177

Epilogue: The Political Legacy of Jewish History 206
Notes 211
Index 2238

Editorial Reviews

"The most important point of David Biale's valuable study is that Jewish political history extends across the centuries of the Diaspora; it is a continuous history, not one cut off at the fall of the Second Jewish Commonwealth. Biale is especially good at evoking the internal life of those autonomous or semi-autonomous communities within which the political sensibility of contemporary Jews first took shape."
--Michael Walzer

"A relevant and studious book that should interest readers of Jewish history or anyone interested in Israel's place in today's world.
--Booklist

"His succinct, thoroughly researched, insightful arguments . . . are sure to spark controversy."
--Publisher's Weekly

Biale's work demonstrates the best of contemporary Jewish scholarship. Historically informed and critically based, it is a brave work attacking a metahistory of the Jewish people and unmasking propagandists and those who would mystify rather than write truth."
--Jewish Exponent

From the Publisher