1. Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl (Schocken Books, 1952), 216–17. Though Zborowski and Herzog draw heavily on fictionalized accounts by such authors as Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Mocher Sforim, and I. L. Peretz, this picture of shtetl politics is confirmed by other sources.

2. David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (Schocken Books, 1986), 6; Biale cites Baron’s views (from “Ghetto and Emancipation,” Menorah Journal 14 [June 1928]: 515–26), 211, fn. 4.

3. In the words of the Mishnah (Talmud), “Do not become intimate with the ruling power” (Pirkei Avot 1:10).

4. Biale, Power and Powerlessness, 6.

5. M. Silberfarb, The Kehillah Work, Its Potentialities and Prospects (in Yiddish) (1911), quoted in A. L. Patkin, The Origins of the Russian-Jewish Labour Movement (F. W. Cheshire, 1947), 246; see also Dan V. Segre, A Crisis of Identity: Israel and Zionism (Oxford University Press, 1980), 58–59; and Mitchell Cohen, Zion and State: Nation, Class and the Shaping of Modern Israel (Basil Blackwell, 1987), 47–48.

6. A 1939 report of the Royal Institute of International Affairs noted that “special historical circumstances caused the Jewish people to assume, at an exceptionally early date, some of the characteristics which have since been associated most closely with the modern concept of a ‘nation’ ”; quoted by Baruch Kimmerling, “Between the Primordial and Civil Definitions of the Collective Identity: Eretz Yisrael or the State of Israel?” in Comparative Social Dynamics: Essays in Honor of Shmuel Eisenstadt, ed. M. Lissak, E. Cohen, and U. Almagor (Westview Press, 1984), 263. Boas Evron, in Jewish State or Israeli Nation? (Indiana University Press, 1995), argues that a true Jewish “nation” developed only in late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, which is in any event the focus of the analysis here.

7. Daniel J. Elazar and Stuart Cohen, The Jewish Polity: Jewish Political Organization from Biblical Times to the Present (Indiana University Press, 1985), 7–8; see also Daniel J. Elazar, ed., Kinship and Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition and Its Contemporary Uses (University Press of America, 1983) and Daniel Elazar, Israel: Building a New Society (Indiana University Press, 1986). For development of a normative Jewish political theory from classical sources, see Martin Sicker, The Judaic State: A Study in Rabbinic Political Thought (Praeger, 1988), and Sicker, What Judaism Says about Politics: The Political Theology of the Torah (Jason Aronson, 1994).

8. Daniel Elazar has developed this theme most extensively; see, for example, Elazar, Kinship and Consent, 10–11; the importance of the covenantal relationship is also stressed by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Jewish Civilization: The Jewish Historical Experience in a Comparative Perspective (State University of New York Press, 1992).

9. Salo W. Baron, The Jewish Community, vol. 1 (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1942), 73; see also M. Cohen, Zion and State, 46–47; Elazar, Kinship and Consent, 31.

10. Elazar, Kinship and Consent, 23–27, 36–37.

11. The general picture of Jewish governance in the Middle Ages is based on Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages (Greenwood Press, 1972); Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (Oxford University Press, 1961); and Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (Schocken Books, 1971).

12. Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, esp. 33–34, 49.

13. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 81–82; Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics (Oxford University Press, 1989), 26. Lederhendler notes that “in the Polish Commonwealth Jewish communities struggled, survived, and flourished under those conditions for the greater part of five hundred years . . .”(154).

14. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 122–27.

15. Katz, Emancipation and Assimilation: Studies in Modern Jewish History (Gregg International Publishers, 1972); Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (Harvard University Press, 1973).

16. While this analysis focuses on Eastern European political traditions, Jewish experiences everywhere had in common certain patterns derived from the fact of minority status. This included, in most cases, a remarkable degree of communal autonomy within the existing political framework, whatever it might be. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, each ethnoreligious group had considerable selfgovernment in religious, legal, social, and economic affairs, and as elsewhere Jews did not have to deal with the collective rights of other groups within the Jewish context. Otherwise there were significant differences between the European and non-European traditions, of course; non-European immigrants to Palestine and Israel were likely to be more fully identified with their traditions than their European counterparts, who were in some senses engaged in a “revolt” against age-old patterns of Jewish life.

17. Mead, “Foreword,” in Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 16.

18. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets (Macmillan, 1976), 99–100.

19. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 227, 248–49.

20. Isaac Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia, 1844–1917 (Posner and Sons, 1981), 10; Baron, Russian Jew, 101–2.

21. Patkin, Origins, 246; see also Levitats, Jewish Community in Russia, 56–57, 61; and Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 214–15.

22. Vladimir Medem, Otliki Bunda, no. 1, quoted in Patkin, Origins, 245.

23. Lederhendler, Road to Modern Jewish Politics, 14, 36–37, 46–47, 82–83, 154–57; Yosef Salmon, “The Emergence of a Jewish Nationalist Consciousness in Europe during the 1860s and 1870s,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 16 (Spring/Fall 1991): 107–32; Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation? 56–57.

24. Avineri, “The Historical Roots of Israeli Democracy,” Second Annual Guest Lecture, Kaplan Center for Jewish Studies and Research, University of Cape Town, March 31, 1985; see also Avineri, “Israel as a Democratic State” (in Hebrew), Skira Hodshit (May 1973): 25–37.

25. Jay Y. Gonen, A Psychohistory of Zionism (Mason/Charter, 1975), 32.

26. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 27.

27. Oz, “The Discreet Charm of Zionism,” in Oz, Under This Blazing Light (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 107–8; Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation? 36; Charles S. Liebman and Steven M. Cohen, Two Worlds of Judaism: The Israeli and American Experiences (Yale University Press, 1990), 13, refer to this sense of solidarity as “quasifamilial sentiment.”

28. Kimmerling, “Between the Primordial and Civil Definitions”; Liebman, “Conceptions of ‘State of Israel’ in Israeli Society” (in Hebrew), Medina, Mimshal, V’yahasim Benle’umiim [State, Government, and International Relations], no. 30 (Winter 1989): 51–60.

29. Lederhendler, Road to Modern Jewish Politics, 66; see also Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 52; and Baron, Russian Jew, 103–4.

30. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 98.

31. Lederhendler, Road to Modern Jewish Politics, 12–13. In Lederhendler’s analysis, the collapse of this monopoly (and the increased resort to outside authorities by those other than the “official” leaders) was one of the hallmarks in the breakdown of the classic kahal.

32. Eisenstadt, The Transformation of Israeli Society (Westview Press, 1985), 46. See also Segre, Crisis of Identity, 77–78; Elazar, Kinship and Consent, esp. 6; and Rabbi Natan Zvi Friedman, “Guidelines of Democracy and Jewish Law” (in Hebrew), Tehumin, 4 (1982–1983): 255–58.

33. Benyamin Neuberger, “Does Israel Have a Liberal-Democratic Tradition?” Jewish Political Studies Review 2, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall 1990): 90; the case for a specifically Jewish theory of the state, particularistic and essentially theocratic, is made by Sol Roth, Halakha and Politics: The Jewish Idea of a State (Ktav and Yeshiva University Press, 1988).

34. Bernard Susser, “Jewish Political Theory,” in Public Life in Israel and the Diaspora, ed. Sam N. Lehman-Wilzig and Bernard Susser, vol. 1 of Comparative Jewish Politics (Bar-Ilan University Press, 1981), 19.

35. Eisenstadt, Transformation of Israeli Society, 45–46.

36. Baron, Russian Jew, 105; see also Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 98–101.

37. Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 161.

38. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 83, 170–71; Levitats, Jewish Community in Russia, 202–3; Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 219–20.

39. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 87–88, 106–10; Elazar, Kinship and Consent, 39. While this description applies to Eastern Europe, Jewish communities in the Islamic world also had democratic and competitive elements in their internal governance; see S. D. Goitein, “Political Conflict and the Use of Power in the World of the Geniza,” in Kinship and Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition and Its Contemporary Uses, ed. Daniel Elazar (University Press of America, 1983), 169–81.

40. Haim H. Cohn, Human Rights in Jewish Law (Ktav, 1984), 17–19 and passim. A more cautious view toward the inference of human rights from legal duties is presented by Aaron Kirschenbaum, in a review of R. Konvitz, ed., Judaism and Human Rights (W. W. Norton, 1972), in Israel Yearbook on Human Rights 2 (1972): 357–64. On the safeguards in judicial procedures, see Kirschenbaum, “Human Rights Revisited,” Israel Yearbook on Human Rights 6 (1976): 228–38; Kirschenbaum also points out (232) that in a day and age when torture was routine in most legal systems, it was “virtually unheard of” in Jewish courts.

41. Lederhendler, Road to Modern Jewish Politics, 82–83, 112–13, 132–33. According to Steven Zipperstein, the Haskala “offered a haven for Jews caught between an inaccessible, larger cultural world and an unacceptable, Jewish one”; Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (University of California Press, 1993), 12.

42. Levitats, Jewish Community in Russian, 70–71, see also 204–5; Baron, Russian Jew, 100.

43. Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 214; Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 93–94, 116–17.

44. Avineri, “Historical Roots of Israeli Democracy,” 8.

45. Lehman-Wilzig, “ ‘Am K’shei Oref’: Oppositionism in the Jewish Heritage,” Judaism 40 (Winter 1991): 16–38; see also Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 298; and Segre, “The Jewish Political Tradition as a Vehicle for Jewish Auto-Emancipation,” in Kinship and Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition and Its Contemporary Uses, ed. Daniel J. Elazar (University Press of America, 1983) 300–301.

46. Eisenstadt, Jewish Civilization, 75.

47. Sprinzak, Every Man Whatsoever Is Right in His Own Eyes—Illegalism in Israeli Society (in Hebrew) (Sifriat Po’alim, 1986), 28–29: Sprinzak, “Illegalism in Israeli Political Culture: Theoretical and Historical Footnotes to the Pollard Affair and the Shin Beth Cover Up,” in Israel after Begin, ed. Gregory S. Mahler (State University of New York Press, 1990), 55–57; Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 52; Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 232–33.

48. This theme has been developed most notably by Yehezkel Dror, especially in To Build a State (in Hebrew) (Akademon, 1989).

49. Elazar, Israel: Building a New Society, 3; Yonathan Shapiro, Democracy in Israel (in Hebrew)(Masada, 1977), 29.

50. Baron, Russian Jew, 106–7; Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 194, 202–3.

51. Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 196.

52. Roth, Halakha and Politics, 124–25; Cohn, Human Rights, 164–66. Traditional interpretations accepted Christians and Muslims as observers of the seven Noahide laws; see Kirschenbaum, “Human Rights Revisited,” 229–31.

53. Gittin, 60a; Avoda Zara, 26a.

54. Cohn, Human Rights, 164–66; Maimonides, Yad, Hilchot Melakhim, 1:4–5; Roth, Halakha and Politics, 134.

55. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 36; see also Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 54.