Tsachi Slater (University of Pennsylvania) will present "Jewish Theologies of War and Peace in the Early Twentieth Century" at the Moral Theology Colloquium on November 9th at 4:00pm.Â
Abstract
The so-called Jewish return to history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries generated sustained reflections on the theological meaning of political events and the political meaning of theology. With this, a series of old questions was pressed with new urgency: What is the relationship between Jewish peoplehood and sovereign power? What has Judaism to say about international violence? And what becomes of a religious tradition when it is bound up with a national cause?
This talk traces three distinct responses to these questions: Abraham Isaac Kook, who saw the future Jewish state as the fulfillment of ancient messianic hopes; Aharon Shmuel Tamares, who condemned the moral failures of modern nationalism and demanded political recognition of a Jewish exilic model; and Avraham Chein, who warned against nationalist rhetoric and articulated a vision of a pacifist Jewish polity.
The lecture argues that already at this early stage, the religious-national fusion was understood as a force of considerable potency. While all three were conscious of nationalism’s pitfalls, Kook nevertheless embraced the national project as the apex of Jewish religiosity, whereas Tamares and Chein warned against the recruitment of religious language to animate politics and mobilize societies toward the altars of war. Mapping the common ground and divergences among these thinkers illuminates distinct perspectives on the intersection of religious and national languages, and reveals how the specter of European nationalism and international violence continues to haunt modern Judaism. At a moment when such questions have lost none of their urgency, this lecture recovers early and searching reflections on what is at stake when the sacred and the political converge.