Herem חרֵֶם and the Concept of Holy War in Traditional Judaism

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.