No Masters But God: Portraits of Anarcho-Judaism - Paperback

by Hayyim Rothman (Author)

A study in the writings of a transnational constellation of rabbis, scholars, activists, and theologians active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores how, through the lense of biblical, rabbinic, and kabbalistic literature, they developed themes of anti-authoritarianism, antinomianism, nationalism, and pacifism.

Back Jacket

The forgotten legacy of religious Jewish anarchism, and the adventures and ideas of its key figures, finally comes to light in this book.

Set in the decades surrounding both world wars, No masters but God identifies a loosely connected group of rabbis and traditionalist thinkers who explicitly appealed to anarchist ideas in articulating the meaning of the Torah, traditional practice, Jewish life and the mission of modern Jewry. Filled with archival discoveries and first translations from Yiddish and Hebrew, the book explores anarcho-Judaism in all its variety through the works of Yaakov Meir Zalkind, Yitshak Nahman Steinberg, Yehuda Leyb Don-Yahiya, Avraham Yehudah Hen, Natan Hofshi, Shmuel Alexandrov, Yehudah Ashlag and Shmuel Tamaret.

With this ground-breaking account, Hayyim Rothman traces a complicated story about the modern entanglement of religion and anarchism, pacifism and Zionism, prophetic anti-authoritarianism and mystical antinomianism.

Author Biography

Hayyim Rothman is a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at Bar Ilan University, Israel