ABSTRACT
Measured by the long gauge of Jewish history, the intimacy of contemporary relationships between Israelis and their army is entirely novel. For many centuries, the nation now almost totally mobilized for war possessed no martial traditions at all. True, the Old Testament’s record of the Children of Israel, beginning with the book of Exodus and ending with the last chapters of Chronicles, leaves no doubt that Judaism’s earliest and most influential teachings were formulated and transmitted against a backcloth of almost incessant military activity. According to the narratives preserved in the Apocrypha, and especially in the books of Maccabees, Jubilees and Judith, warfare played a similarly crucial role in the formation of ancient Jewry’s national identity during the period of the second commonwealth (516 BCE-70 CE). But the threads of continuity seemed to have been severed with Rome’s obliteration of the last vestiges of Judea’s independence in 70 CE and her even more savage suppression of the rebellion that erupted in the province six decades later. David Biale (1986) has pointed out that, even thereafter, Jews were not entirely powerless. Nevertheless, with exile and political subjugation becoming increasingly dominant motifs of their history, they undoubtedly became non-bellicose. Throughout pre-modern times, the standard Jewish responses to persecution and assault were flight or martyrdom, not resistance or revolt. In effect: ‘Jews developed an aversion to bloodshed . . . war belonged either to their mythical past or to their messianic future, but not to their present’ (Luz 1987: 53).
