War and Peace in Jewish Tradition

Yigal Levin is a senior lecturer at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and at the Department of Israel¿s Heritage at the Ariel University Center of Samaria, Israel.

This book explores the concepts of war and peace throughout the history of Judaism, from biblical times to the present. Combining three branches of learning, contributors from Israel and the USA open new vistas of investigation for the future as well as an awareness of the past.

Introduction Part 1: War and Peace in the Bible 1. The Freeing of Captives in the Ancient Near East and in the Bible 2. "Set Bread and Water before Them" (2 Kings 6:22): Elishäs Order to Treat the Enemy with Mercy and its Implications 3. The Wars of Joshua: Weaning Away from the Divine 4. "He Teaches My Hands to War": The Semiotics of Ritual Hand Gestures in Ancient Israelite Warfare 5. "Human, All Too Human": Royal Name-Making in Wartime 6. Civil War in the Bible: An Unsolved Problem 7. Internecine Wars in Biblical Israel Part 2: Theoretical Aspects of War in Rabbinic Thought 8. War and Aesthetics in Jewish Law 9. The Morality of War in Rabbinic Literature: The Call for Peace and the Limitation of the Siege 10. Peace, Secularism and Religion 11. Moral Considerations Relating to Criticism of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Rabbinic Literature and the Just War Theory 12. The Law of Obligatory War and Israeli Reality Part 3: War and Peace in Jewish Thought and Practice 13. "A Victory of the Slavs Means a Deathblow to Democracy": The Onset of World War I and the Images of the Warring Sides among Jewish Immigrants in New York, 1914-1915 14. Ben Gurion and the Onset of War 15. The Journey After: Of One who Saw the Horrors of War: A Study of Orpaz's The Voyage of Daniel Part 4: Israel, War, Ethics and the Media 16. War, Religion and Israel¿s Foreign Press Corps 17. The New York Times¿ Coverage of the Gaza War: An Apologia 18. Media Ethics in Times of War