The Ethics of Warfare in the Jewish Tradition

Abstract

I am not going to tell you this evening how Jews (or anyone else) should think about the war in Iraq, or about the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, or about different incidents in the “war” on terrorism, or about the 2006 Lebanon war or the 2009 war in Gaza. This is not a political talk. I want to look back on the treatment of war, and more particularly, the ethics of war, in the Jewish tradition. How does war figure in the Bible, the Talmud, in Jewish law (halakha), in scholarly commentaries and rabbinic responsa? And with regard to this material, I am going to adopt a typically Jewish approach (that is, a critical approach): I will begin by discussing the deficiencies and omissions of the Jewish account of the ethics of warfare. I will say something later on about the strengths of this account. But the deficiencies are important, especially so from a Zionist perspective (which is my own perspective), because they have an important cause: namely, the centuries of statelessness. Now that there is a Jewish state, legal scholars and philosophers need to look carefully and critically at exilic understandings of politics. In most of the world, after all, political theory in general, and ideas about war in particular, are a reflection of decisions made and policies adopted by sovereign states. And for almost 2000 years, the Jews were without sovereignty. There were, of course, autonomous or semi-autonomous Jewish communities in the diaspora, and these communities provided a political space for power-seeking (even if there wasn’t much power to seek), and for decision-making, and for debates about what decisions to make and who should make them—so there is a long tradition of Jewish political and legal argument. But the Jews had no “high” politics, no politics of war and peace, from the time of Bar Kokhba (135 C.E.) to the time of Ben-Gurion (1948). The incompleteness of Jewish thought about war derives from this central historical fact. I will need a point of comparison for my analysis of what the rabbis produced, and I am going to use Catholic just war theory for that purpose—since for most of our Philosophia (2012) 40:633–641 DOI 10.1007/s11406-012-9390-5