 2017 - 2018 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 1031-3791-01 | Jewish Political Thought: Exile, Territory, Community, Redemption | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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University credit hours: 3.0
Course description
This course is an introduction to the field of Jewish political thought. Jews have a distinctive political history: for the majority of Jewish history, Jews have not been a sovereign nation. As a result of this history of statelessness, Jewish thinkers have approached political questions in ways that differ from the mainstream of Western political theory. In this course, we will survey the different genres in which Jewish thinkers have addressed political questions, and we will explore what these thinkers have to say about power, authority, law, obligation, community, and national sovereignty. We will devote particular attention to the modern period: What political options are available to Jews in modernity? How have modern Jews recast traditional debates about exile, sovereignty, and territory? Texts will range from the traditional (Bible, rabbinics, halachah), to the philosophical (Spinoza), and the ideological (Zionism and its Jewish critics).