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Power & Powerlessness in Jewish History

By David Biale

By David Biale

By David Biale

By David Biale

Best Seller
Paperback $16.00

Nov 10, 1986 | ISBN 9780805208412

Ebook $11.99

Dec 22, 2010 | ISBN 9780307772534

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    Power & Powerlessness in Jewish History by David Biale
    Paperback $16.00
    Nov 10, 1986 | ISBN 9780805208412

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    • Paperback $16.00

      Nov 10, 1986 | ISBN 9780805208412

      Also available from:

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      Dec 22, 2010 | ISBN 9780307772534

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    About Power & Powerlessness in Jewish History

    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.

    About Power & Powerlessness in Jewish History

    To shed light on the tensions he observed between Jewish perceptions of power versus political realitieswhich “are often the cause of misguided political decisions,” like Israel’s Lebanese WarBiale analyzes Jewish history from the point of view of politics and power.

    The author of Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History here challenges the conventions of what he terms the Jewish “mythical past”: the anachronistic interpretation that the Diaspora, which occurred between the fall of an independent Jewish commonwealth in A.D. 70 and the rebirth of the State of Israel in 1948, was politically impotent, and, conversely, that the First and Second Temple periods were eras of full Jewish national sovereignty.

    Read An Excerpt

    Read An Excerpt

    About David Biale

    David Biale is the Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, and Eros and the Jews. He is also… More about David Biale

    About David Biale

    David Biale is the Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, and Eros and the Jews. He is also… More about David Biale

    Product Details

    Category: Middle Eastern World History | World Politics

    Paperback | $16.00
    Published by Schocken
    Nov 10, 1986 | 256 Pages | 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 | ISBN 9780805208412

    Category: Middle Eastern World History | World Politics

    Ebook | $11.99
    Published by Schocken
    Dec 22, 2010 | 256 Pages | ISBN 9780307772534

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    Praise

    “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

    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

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