Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

A Question of “Ambiguity”?
Robert Eisen’s The Peace and Violence of Judaism:
From the Bible to Modern Zionism
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
x + 265 pp. $29.95.
Steven Leonard Jacobs*
As one who has written on “Judaism and Human Rights” (Forsythe,
Encyclopedia of Human Rights, 2009), “Judaism, Jews, and Violence”
(Ross, Religion and Violence II: 405-414, 2010), and “Zionism and Violence”
(Ross, Religion and Violence III: 814-818, 2010), I eagerly welcome
Robert Eisen’s The Peace and Violence of Judaism: From the Bible to
Modern Zionism. Difficult and uncomfortable as such negative and potentially
explosive topics as violence in a religious tradition tend to be, they
help contribute to further rounding out a fuller and more complete and complex
understanding of the evolving nature of the totality of the Jewish and
other religious traditions. Thus, they provide the reader an equally compelling
“look-see” into both the historical context of much of the Jewish story
(a point Eisen consistently raises throughout the text), as well as the vastness
of much of its literature.
Indeed, the very vastness of this literature (Bible, Talmud, Midrash,
Kabbalah, Codes, Responsa) leads to the conclusion of its “ambiguity”
(Eisen’s term), as he notes in the Preface: “In every major period in Jewish
history, from the Bible to the modern period, one can find Jewish texts that
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