This analysis holds that the resumption of Jewish sovereignty inverted the political challenges of the diaspora by saddling the Jews with the problems of government instead of the liabilities of statelessness. Hence, Hartman believes that the “compelling moral vision” of the Jews, so long shaped by lack of power, is now being tested by the “compromises that a full political life requires.”¹⁵

Much can be said, then, for the project of studying Jewish politics in the diaspora, an intellectual endeavor that has helped transform the way Jews look at their own political heritage. At the same time, however, this project has not yet come to terms with the way Jews actually practiced politics during the many centuries of exile, much less with how radically their political behavior contrasted with the patterns of other peoples. It is not enough to think of the Jews as the “other” in someone else’s scheme of governance without considering how they got to be the “other” in the first place. Since going into exile was clearly a consequence of losing successive wars to the Romans, the Jews continued to be regarded as having been politically acted upon rather than as acting politically on their own behalf. But within the constraints of living abroad, they actively tried to further their own political ends. Once the premise of the diaspora was established, namely, that Jewish communities would be centered for an indefinite period outside the land of Israel, Jews had to develop a viable strategy for survival, which meant consolidating their own forms of power and influence. In that pursuit, the Jews never did “conceal their moral failures by blaming others.” Their problem was rather that they blamed themselves, without examining the political consequences of the strategies they had adopted.

In this essay I intend to explore the political strategies that Jews developed through their centuries of exile—strategies that often resulted in remarkable successes as well as persecutions and expulsions—and also the way they interpreted their political behavior in solipsistic rather than dialectic political terms. I suggest that Jewish survival was preserved not through the grace of relatively benign host countries, but through the Jewish community’s ability to fulfill local professional and economic needs. This, in turn, created a new kind of interdependency between unequal political entities which, because they relied on different, if not opposite, sources of power, cultivated correspondingly different ideas of victory and defeat. In trying to find a temporary alternative to national sovereignty, the Jews introduced a new political model that had extraordinary consequences for their own religious and moral development, and for the thinking and the behavior of those among whom they lived. These consequences extended well beyond the creation of Israel. Though the Zionist movement established an independent government in a Jewish homeland, the State of Israel could not instantly expunge the political patterns developed through so many centuries, or the way those patterns affected international affairs. To this day, the legacy of Jewish politics in the diaspora continues to haunt the decisionmaking of Jewish leaders in their own sovereign state.

Jewish politics in the diaspora can best be understood as one of the world’s boldest political experiments—an experiment as novel as the idea of monotheism itself. This experiment began in earnest after the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 C.E., taking many Jews off to the European continent and forcing others to perpetuate their way of life as a resident people in other lands. Though Jewish communal life resumed in the land of Israel following the last rebellion of 135 C.E. and continued until the Arab conquest of the seventh century, the majority of Jews clustered in centers outside the land of Israel, and considered themselves to be living in temporary exile. Jews did not self-consciously design their political strategy of prolonged national life outside the land of Israel, nor—until modern times—did they develop an ideology committed to stateless existence. Yet to live abroad meant to thrive as a nation without three staples of nationhood: Land, a central government and a means of self-defense. Life abroad required the development of new institutions of self-government, as well as arrangements with those who allowed Jewish settlement in their lands. The biblical record of the Babylonian exile, particularly the books of the Hebrew prophets, suggested that it was possible to lose sovereignty for several generations and then return to the homeland to take up an independent national existence. But precisely because the prophets riveted their attention on returning to the land, they did not provide the political blueprints for deferred national autonomy. Diaspora Jewry had to remain perpetually alert and adaptable in trying to maintain itself in exile. This experiment in deferred sovereignty involved an ever-increasing percentage of the Jewish people until the end of the nineteenth century, when Zionism began to reverse the trend.

The legends surrounding the historical figure of Yohanan ben Zakai illustrate the two main foundations of deferred autonomy in exile. Ben Zakai was opposed to the revolt against Rome, and like Jeremiah in the days of Nebuchadnezzar or Isaiah in the days of Tillegath-Pilneser III of Assyria, he counseled peace with the conqueror as the only salvation for the nation. Smuggled out of Jerusalem in a coffin, ben Zakai is said to have won over Vespasian, the commander of the siege that brought about the downfall of Jerusalem, by predicting that he would soon be elected emperor. This legend suggests, first and foremost, that Jews had to impress and negotiate favorable conditions with foreign authority in order to prosper under its domination. The second, internal, pillar of the program is ben Zakai’s request, “Give me Yavneh and its sages”: Jews were to study their national law as a way of perpetuating their own civilization, and of ensuring their moral and institutional independence. Internal Jewish politics would require the establishment of independent legislative authority, while external politics—the Jewish equivalent of foreign affairs—would require securing the protection of gentile rulers.

In keeping with this model, the Jews of the diaspora were not nomads.¹⁶ Nomadic peoples move cyclically or periodically, following the food supply or fulfilling the functions of tinkers and traders. Jews manifested the very opposite tendency, sinking roots and establishing their institutions wherever they were allowed to do so. They negotiated their relationship with those in power, usually through the payment of taxes, trying to work out the most favorable conditions for permanent residence. Jews became so proprietary about the places they settled that they invented their own founding myths for their native cities and countries. According to medieval legends, the city of Grenada was founded after the destruction of the First Temple of Jerusalem, and received its name from the Hebrew ger nad (“wandering stranger”) in recognition of its Jewish origins.¹⁷ Jews said that Poland (poyln or polin) got its name when the Jews arrived in the land, and their leader said, “‘Here rest for the night’ (po lin), and this means that we shall rest here until we are all gathered into the land of Israel.”¹⁸ Recent nostalgic documentaries about the southern United States show the names of Jewish storekeepers etched into the buildings and sidewalks of towns they obviously intended to inhabit for generations. Nomadic tribes do not build for permanence. Jews made it clear that they came to stay.

The diaspora experiment in deferred national sovereignty worked through what we will tentatively call the tactics of adaptation, which meant accommodating to local political rule and to prevailing socioeconomic conditions in order to perpetuate the unique Jewish religious civilization. While Jewish historians have traditionally emphasized the religious, cultural and social elements of Jewish autonomy, I will concentrate on the modes of adaptation in order to isolate the political strategies that are generally underrepresented in the Jewish story. Look up the synonyms for adaptation or accommodation and you will see the genius of the Jewish people at work: Elastic, flexible, pliable and supple, they tried to master the art of proving themselves useful. Under some conditions this meant money-lending, tax farming, minting and banking. Elsewhere it meant craftsmanship: They became shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, glaziers, all the trades that are turned into metaphors in the Yom Kippur prayer ki hinei kahomer b’yad hayotzer (“Like Material in the Hands of the Craftsman”). Salo Baron has shown how Jews tried to compensate for their political weakness with economic strength, even turning dispersion itself into an asset by developing international trade routes. Werner Sombart, in his writing on economic history, thought he had found an explanation for capitalism when he ascribed the modern economic development of Europe to the Sephardi Jews who had fled the Inquisition:

It is indeed surprising that the parallelism has not before been observed between Jewish wanderings and settlement on the one hand, and the economic vicissitudes of the different peoples and states on the other. Israel passes over Europe like the sun: At its coming new life bursts forth; at its going all falls into decay.…¹⁹