Primrose Road

In Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse divides her exploration of Jews' relationship to power into three interconnected time periods: first, the Biblical era through the European Renaissance; then, the Enlightenment, which brings about liberal democracies that permit Jews to become citizens but unintentionally lead to the rise of pogroms; and finally, the founding of Israel and Israel's development as a military power in the face of Arab challenges to the country's sovereignty. I thought that she offered a number of interesting arguments that complicated the Judaism/Jewish ethnicity/power triangle in Parts 1 and 2; unfortunately, she did not seem to do enough to complicate this relationship in Part 3.

Early on, Wisse notes that Jews' relationship to political power as laid out by the Bible has never been entirely uncomplicated, especially in comparison to the other Abrahamic religions. Writing that "Christian countries may have fought in the name of God, but they did not contemplate fighting by the rules of their savior" (15), she explains why there is no such thing as 'ethnic' Christianity, while the Jews, whose beliefs required them to always follow Torah law to the letter, seemed to constitute their own country-less nation regardless of where they lived. For the Islamic people, there was a stronger perceived relationship between political power and religion because the prophet Muhammad was clearly portrayed as a warrior, religious leader, and political leader who organized his people on both the battlefield and in the city. Moses, meanwhile, was a prophet who gave the people Israel a set of laws but was not involved in actively enforcing them.

Wisse does complicate the present-day issue of Israel-Palestine relations, finding that the Jews mistakenly expected that possessing liberal democratic sovereignty would effectively mean the end of anti-Semitism. She references the mid-twentieth-century Jewish fantasy embodied in the character of Reschid Bey in Theodor Herzl's Altneuland; the character, an "Arab created in the image of a Jew" (165), is grateful that the Jews rescued the Arabs from a life of poverty. What actually happens in the decades after the founding of the state of Israel is that because of the Arab resentment that utopians like Herzl should have predicted, the Jewish state's political power must instead be supplanted by its military power.

Unfortunately, Wisse doesn't do enough (in my view) to critique this form of military power, constructing her argument so that it would seem that militarism was the only way for Israel to go. She's seemingly not bothered by Golda Meir's statement to Anwar Sadat: "We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours" (156); I thought that the extremely disconcerting implications behind this statement would have been worth further exploration.

All in all, Jews and Power offers a well-written political history of the Jewish people, with some interesting insights into the ways in which the advent of liberal democracy led to both new freedoms and new forms of anti-Semitism. Ultimately, however, it does not do enough to question all forms of violence (especially that of the 'eye for an eye' variety) and to suggest that there might be a yet-to-be-discovered "middle ground" in terms of Israeli politics.