How statelessness shaped Jewish ethics of self-defence

What lesson remains for a people that spent centuries facing declared danger, with protection granted or withheld by others?

Anticipatory self-defence in Jewish political thought begins there. It cannot be settled by repeating the language of restraint, nor by invoking Jewish suffering as sufficient to resolve every dilemma. The starting point is Jewish statelessness, a long political condition in which Jews preserved historical memory but lacked sovereign power.

A stateless people reads threat differently from a secure majority. Jews did not possess the luxury of assuming that the magistrate would protect them, that institutions would hold, or that rhetoric of extermination should be treated as overheated speech. Experience taught harsher lessons. Menace often gathered gradually through exclusion, sermon, social permission, decree, and the loosening of restraints. By the time danger became undeniable, the choices had narrowed. A........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)