D
r. Reuven Firestone’s newly published
Holy War
in Judaism: The Fall and Rise of a Controversial
Idea
is the first book to consider how the concept
of ‘’holy war’’ disappeared from Jewish thought for
almost 2000 years, only to reemerge with renewed
vigor in modern times.
Holy war is, by definition, sacred. And the most obvious
association of sanctity is with the divinity, however
defined or understood. When war is authorized by
God it is holy. That is the bottom line with holy war –
it is authorized by God.
But how does one know the divine will? Divine
communication has been acknowledged by humanity
through signs, oracles, priests, prophets, and revelation,
and all of these media have authorized holy war at
one time or another. As religions become established,
institutionalized, and standardized, however, fresh
communication between God and humanity becomes
limited, revelation becomes controlled through canon-
ization into scripture, and prophecy is severely restricted or ended
altogether. With hardly an exception, it is only the record of previous divine
revelation in the form of scriptural text that continues to represent the actual
direct, public, and authoritative public communication from God.
We know what we know about God’s will and design through our attempts to
decipher and make sense of the record of God’s revelation in scripture. Religious
leadership is always engaged in this process because it is charged to help its
followers understand what God expects of them. Religious leaders thus translate,
illuminate, and elucidate the demands of God to the community of believers.
But the processes of interpretation are anything but simple. This book attempts
to examine and make sense of the interpretive history of the notion of holy war
in post-biblical Judaism. We shall
observe that holy war is a common
theme in the Hebrew Bible.
Divinely legitimized through the
authority of biblical scripture and
its interpretation, holy war then
became a historical reality for the
Jews of antiquity. Among at least
some of the Jewish groups of the
late Second Temple period, Jews
engaged in what is defined here
as holy war.
According to early Judaism, God
on certain occasions not only
authorized but also commanded
war, and three major Jewish wars
were waged as holy wars during
this period: the Maccabean revolt
against the Seleucid Greeks, the
Great Revolt against Rome, and
the Bar Kokhba Rebellion in the
2
nd century. The first succeeded in repelling a powerful
repressive foreign regime and establishing religious
and national independence, but the failures of the
second and third resulted in such overwhelming
destruction that they threatened to destroy Judaism
and the Jewish people itself.
For the survival of Jews and Judaism, the Jewish
leadership that became dominant during the rabbinic
period (from about 70 to about 600 CE) engaged in
certain strategies to prevent the dangerous wild-card
of holy war to be easily played. We shall observe how
the rabbis of the Talmud responded to the repeated
catastrophic failures of military campaigns that were
considered holy wars by their protagonists. They
agreed that holy war was a genuine and perhaps even
eternal divinely authorized institution, but they also
made it virtually impossible for holy war to be an
operative
category in Judaism.
It remained dormant for centuries, but even in its
dormancy it continued to evolve... Holy war thus remained academic, an
institution that could be studied but with the assumption that it would not
be applied – until the coming of the messiah…
The book examines the struggle to make sense of the need to wage war in
the period of Jewish statehood. It observes how after the Holocaust and
establishment of the State of Israel, but especially after the 1967 War, divinely
authorized war was explored in religious Zionist discourse. During this period
the notion and language of religious war also passed from the yeshivas and
journals of Orthodox Jewry into the larger Israeli public discourse… This study of
the history of holy war’s suppression and subsequent revival in Judaism ends,
therefore, with the mid-1980s. Although the discussions and disagreements
over messianism, the possibly
transcendent meaning of the
State of Israel, and divinely
authorized war continue
unabated in contemporary
Jewish discourse, the revival of
Jewish holy war has occurred
for at least a significant seg-
ment of the Jewish world.
This book begins in the dark
corridors of antiquity. It ends
with the blinding explosion of
the “Jewish Underground” in
the early to mid-1980s. Expres-
sions of violence perpetrated
by Jews who believe their acts
to be divinely sanctioned have
continued since then, including
even the assassination of the
Prime Minister of the State of
Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995.
The Chronicle
Fall 2012
Page 15
Holy War in Judaism:
The Fall and Rise of a Controversial Idea
Rabbi Reuven Firestone ‘82, Ph.D.,
Professor of Medieval Jewish Studies, HUC-JIR/Jack H. Skirball Campus/Los Angeles
“
From the death camps to the war of life: A Holocaust survivor takes up arms
in defense of the new Jewish State.” Photograph from
The Palmach Archives:
Documentary Photographs of Israel’s War of Independence.
Collection of Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion
