“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
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
