Judaism and violence
"[8][9] Notwithstanding the inherent friction associated with the various Jewish religious movements in the state of Israel all vying for official recognition, in 1997 Avi Shafran of the Agudath Israel of America pushed back on assertions made by Ismar Schorsch that the State's elevation of Rabbinic Judaism as the sole arbiter over personal status issues would inevitably lead to violence.
[14] The Second Temple period experienced a surge in militarism and violence which was aimed at curbing the encroachment of Greco-Roman and Hellenistic Jewish influences in Judea.
Groups such as the Maccabees[15] the Zealots, the Sicarii at the Siege of Masada,[16] and later the Bar Kochba revolt, all derived their power from the biblical narrative of Hebrew conquest and hegemony over the Land of Israel, sometimes garnering support of the rabbis,[17] and at other times their ambivalence.
Deriving inspiration from the writings of Ahad Ha'am, its members sought to prod the nascent Zionist movement into a direction of peaceful coexistence with the Arabs in Palestine in a bi-national state.
[19] These ideas eventually fell out of favor as Zionist militias employing violence began to emerge as a response to the 1921 Jaffa riots and the subsequent Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
[27] Maurice Sartre has written of the "policy of forced Judaization adopted by Hyrcanos, Aristobulus I and Jannaeus", who offered "the conquered peoples a choice between expulsion or conversion".
[28] William Horbury has written that "The evidence is best explained by postulating that an existing small Jewish population in Lower Galilee was massively expanded by the forced conversion in c. 104 BCE of their Gentile neighbours in the north.
[34][35] Pasachoff and Littman point to the reinterpretation of the lex talionis as an example of the ability of Pharisaic Judaism to "adapt to changing social and intellectual ideas.
[43] In practice, where medieval Jewish courts had the power to pass and execute death sentences, they continued to do so for particularly grave offenses, although not necessarily the ones defined by the law.
[43] Although it was recognized that the use of capital punishment in the post-Second Temple era went beyond the biblical warrant, the Rabbis who supported it believed that it could be justified by other considerations of Jewish law.
[44][45] Whether Jewish communities ever practiced capital punishment according to rabbinical law and whether the Rabbis of the Talmudic era ever supported its use even in theory has been a subject of historical and ideological debate.
[46] The 12th-century Jewish legal scholar Maimonides stated that "It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.
[65] In the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the motives for acts of violence which have been committed against Palestinians by Religious Jews in the West Bank are complex and varied according to Weisburg.
[70][71][72][73] Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Mandate Palestine, stated that the Jewish people's settlement of the land should only proceed by peaceful means.
[74] Critics claim that Gush Emunim and followers of Tzvi Yehuda Kook advocate violence based on Judaism's religious precepts.
[87][89] According to Haaretz, in July 2010, Yitzhak Shapira who heads Dorshei Yihudcha yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, was arrested by Israeli police based on suspicion that he had written a book that encourages Jews to kill non-Jews.
While the book has been endorsed by radical Zionist leaders including Dov Lior[66] and Yaakov Yosef,[92] it has been widely condemned by mainstream secular and religious Jews.
[66] Rabbi Hayim David HaLevi stated that in modern times no one matches the biblical definition of an idolater, and therefore ruled that Jews in Israel have a moral responsibility to treat all citizens with the highest standards of humanity.
In France, the Alliance Israélite Universelle "rejected all forms of violence, regardless of author or victim" but "indignantly protested against the barbarous treatment inflicted on an entire innocent population.
"[114] Bruce Feiler writes of ancient history that "Jews and Christians who smugly console themselves that Islam is the only violent religion are willfully ignoring their past.
I think of the problematic section in the Mattot [Numbers 31] which contains the commandment to exact revenge against the Midianites by slaying every male and every female old enough to engage in sexual intercourse....
To accept the commandment to do the same to "the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Peruzzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites" seems to me to make permissible the Holocaust, the attempted genocide of the Jewish people.
