Judaism, in its traditional expressions, which are contained in the Torah and
Talmud, knows the concept of holy war, which it characterizes in a special way: as a war
of destruction under God’s oath – herem. But even the passages of the Pentateuch enable
to perceive that the ‘heremic’ holy war is not understood statically but goes through a development: from the genocidal war against the idolatrous peoples in the example of Numbers 21:2-
3, to a war with certain limitations in Deuteronomy 20. A special twist is offered by the
prophetic texts, which place the concept of herem as a mirror for the moral collapse of biblical
Israel (Jeremiah 25:8-14). The Rabbinic Judaism of the Mishnah and Talmud, on the basis
of the aforementioned biblical texts, then abandons the military use of the term herem and
understands it in the sense of spiritual discipline, which concerns the exclusion of ungodly
elements from the community. In addition, Talmud introduces a typology that is roughly divided into commanded and optional war. The majority opinion of the rabbis limits the
commanded or obligatory war to Joshua’s war. An additional rabbinic restriction is the
so-called Three Oaths, in which Jews promise not to forcibly establish an independent political entity. The reason for this kind of ‘enclosure’ is also in the catastrophic failures of the
Jewish-Roman wars. The tradition is reinterpreted by Moses Maimonides, who interprets
the commanded war more and more in the context of spiritual struggle and renewal of the
Jewish faith. He does see war as a potential means of defending the Jewish nation, but never
in the sense of conversion or expansion. Based on these traditional understandings, we can
postulate that Judaism does not allow so-called holy war and therefore avoids militant violence justified by divine command.
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