Oh, so you call it “crap,” and that’s it?

I had no idea you were such an authority on halakha and how it has related over the millennia to the issue of the individual versus the state – which is the subject we were discussing here.

Until 1948 there had been no Jewish state or state religion for about 2 millennia. For two thousand years the Jews lived in Christian and Muslim communities that had official state religions for the most part (other than the US, which was somewhat of an exception in having no official state religion and in prohibiting one), and the Jews in those countries abided by the secular laws of those countries as well as having their own religious courts for other matters, and their own religious practices. And most Christian (European) countries not only did not have an establishment clause, but they had state religions despite Christ’s words about rendering under Caesar, etc., and in fact many European countries still have official state religions.

“In this paper, I had a far more limited goal in mind: to deconstruct a certain picture of halakha, which dominates the field. “

What crap.

It is always nice to read a monograph that has no clear thesis or demonstration, but rather suggestions and assertions and a little proof texting to back them up. And which then informs us that the working assumptions and the explicitly delineated principles accepted by insiders and outsiders alike, by practitioners and authorities within and by antagonists and neutrals without alike, for some 28 and more centuries was all wrong. The people did not actually believe what they claimed to believe … because the author was able to discover an overlooked inconsistency (or a failure to knit-up every concept) between some authority here and that working rule there.

Good program. Yeah, and see we never really had a federal instead of a consolidated system of government either because John Jay said …

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavian_dynasty#/media/File:The_Triumph_of_Titus_Alma_Tadema.jpg

Which uprising or tribe of conquerors did the Roman’s defeat whose warriors were not fighting under the notion that their tribe’s leader was chosen by a god or gods to conquer the Romans? What nation did not meld political, religious and martial rule under one, cohesive umbrella with god or gods at the pinnacle, directing the whole thing? The Jews were unique (I think) at the time for being monotheists, but aside from that what was different?

Regarding Judaism, your Oxford Academic link reinforces my point about the uniqueness of Christianity in this regard and states, “With the establishment of the state of Israel, and, especially, with the introduction of a new utopian Jewish religious national element into Israeli society in the 1970s, the question whether there are “authentic” warrants for separating religion and state crystallized.”

I think modern Israel has done a good job of governing secularly and agree it is not a theocracy.

In the link you cite; “The Arch of Titus (Italian: Arco di Tito; Latin: Arcus Titi) is a 1st-century AD honorific arch,[1] located on the Via Sacra, Rome, just to the south-east of the Roman Forum.

It was constructed in c. 81 AD by the Emperor Domitian shortly after the death of his older brother Titus to commemorate Titus’s official deification or consecratio and the victory of Titus together with their father, Vespasian, over the Jewish rebellion in Judaea.” [my emphasis]

It seems to me that in one respect the Jews of Judea stood apart from every other troublesome Roman possession. Their faith declared Rome’s faith illegitimate. That they couldn’t coexist because the faith of the Israelites declared that they and they alone possessed the one true faith. That was a direct, cultural/religious challenge to Rome.

I don’t think that the Arch of Titus can be disconnected with its formal deification of Titus. In effect, the Romans were saying to the Jews and any other faith… our God(s) are greater than your god. And that Rome putting down the Jewish rebellion and destroying Jerusalem proved that to be the case. So the two are connected and the Arch of Titus symbolizes that connection.

We can’t know but if that was the case, then in that category, Judea’s Jewish faith was of great importance to Rome’s Emperors.

Wendy’s comment on Rome’s view of Judea mirrors my opinion. It was a big empire. There were often uprisings or sparks of uprisings throughout Rome’s borders, especially in recently conquered territories. Judea and the goings on there during the Roman Empire are of great importance to Jews and Christians, but I doubt it was of much concern to the folks governing back home. Once Christians traveled to Rome and started practicing their faith there they became a nuisance that Emperors addressed first hand, but aside from that the Romans seemed to post low level functionaries there and augment troop numbers when the locals got restless.

I don’t recall the Jews threatening the Roman Empire outside of their own (the Jew’s) borders. As Wendy wrote, it was the other ethnic groups with aspirations of Empire, like the Romans (Persia, Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Gauls and other Barbarians), that kept Romans awake at night.

Do Jews dispute that Abraham had a child with his slave, Hagar, resulting in a son, Ismail?

I don’t mean that defensively. I simply do not know. I know that’s the claim in Islam. I thought it was also accepted across all three Abrahamic faiths.

I think Sebastian Junger in “War” wrote about something very much like la vie tragique and la vie triviale. He thought it explained much of the PTSD problem in some sufferers, not the “flashback” or hypervigilance aspects so much, but the difficulty of re-adjusting to civilian life and maintaining emotional connections, after the intense bonding experience of catastrophe.