ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews what politics has meant in Judaism and Jewish history, with an eye toward identifying the ways in which Jews have understood themselves politically. It considers how the constitutive elements of Jewish politics have evolved over the longue duree. Even though we possess many different kinds of sources, certain foundational political ideas about the structure of Jewish authority, justice, and law are intimately tied to Jewish theology and present in the biblical texts. As Daniel Elazar and Stuart Cohen have pointed out, the numerous concepts of Jewish politics, such as expressions of covenant, obligation, commonwealth, authority that were first mentioned in the Bible have remained remarkably consistent in their literal meanings over millennia. Since the composition of the Babylonian Talmud, the dictum that "the law of the kingdom is law" has served to facilitate the adaptations and compromises necessary to maintain the obligations of the Torah where Jews lived without holding the reins of power.
