ABSTRACT
Readers with a background in Religious Studies or allied humanistic disciplines may be quite familiar with academic resources which are useful in undermining the more obvious bias introduced by generalized polemics about what is Western and what, by contrast, is Eastern, or primitive. Thus, critical historical accounts which focus on the instability of Jewish attitudes to waging war and making peace, instead of seeking clear and stable Jewish norms across the millennia, have much to offer. According to a critical philosophical or post-Marxist perspective, the notion of tradition is so patently invented, so reliant on selective historical and textual readings, as to barely obscure the real socio-economic drivers of either
an apparently religious fundamentalism or of a more comfortable liberalism. Defenders of a distinctive Jewish politics, writing as ‘insiders’ to the tradition they describe, commonly respond that, precisely because traditions by their nature change, they can be reconceived without losing their ‘traditional’ or culturally ‘resonant’ quality or force. In the early twentieth century, Nietzschean influences on a range of Jewish intellectuals – from the most militarist to the most pacifist ends of the spectrum – helped to make sense of this as a basis for the ‘revaluation’ or ‘renewal’ of Jewish political attitudes. We will revisit two such writers below, the statesman Menachem Begin, speaking from a ‘hawkish’ perspective on defence affairs, and the communitarian Martin Buber, writing from a near-pacifist position. Both argued that an essentially Jewish approach to international politics is invigorated by the ability to accommodate change. Even if this is granted, the diversity of contexts in which Jews have lived in modern times, from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe and the Americas, from South Africa to the former Soviet Bloc, make it difficult to arrive at any generalizations about common cultural or social influences which might make for a coherent contemporary Jewish school of thought with respect to questions of war and peace-making. Judging by the literature, this troubles some writers in the field less than it does others.
