290 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
because “Israel,” a name that applies to the confederation of tribes only when it comes together
to perform a task for YHVH, is more like the Iroquois League than the Germany of the kaiser.
1 42. On Muslim political theology, see Aziz al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sa-
cred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Polities (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001); cf. Wael B. Hallaq,
The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012).
1 43. Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European
Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Premodern literature on
kingship is rich with accounts of the king’s duties to his people and to principles of justice.
Theopolitics would see such literature primarily within the sphere defined by political theol-
ogy. Hence the fierce reaction against Machiavelli’s perceived corruption of mirror-for-princ-
es literature, and against the Ottoman leadership when it appeared to abandon the classical
Islamic Circle of Justice for European liberalism. Cf. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of
Modern Political Thought, Vols. 1–2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 128–138;
Elizabeth F. Thompson, Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the
Middle East (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 17–19, 30–36; Wael B. Hallaq,
An Introduction to Islamic Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 72–75. Only
with the modern period, symbolized by the French Revolution, does the delineation of kingly
duties serve as a rationale for critique from a standpoint conceived as outside the political-
theological order. As Michael Walzer has noted, kings were killed for centuries, without this
ever amounting to an attack on the arcana imperii; Walzer, Regicide and Revolution: Speeches
at the Trial of Louis XVI, trans. Marian Rothstein (New York: Columbia University Press,
1992), 5.
1 44. Gustav Landauer, Revolution, in Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader, ed.
and trans. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010), 138.
1 45. Steven Kepnes, Jewish Liturgical Reasoning (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007), 9.
1 46. Seeing “theopolitics” as a category central to Buber’s political thinking should not ob-
scure the fact that a certain form of Zionism was the major expression of this thinking.
1 47. James Horrox, A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement (Oakland, CA:
AK Press, 2009), 88.
1 48. Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 154.
1 49. Horrox, A Living Revolution, 90.
1 50. Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins, 209.
1 51. Ze’ev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making
of the Jewish State, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
1 52. Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1992), 62.
1 53. Shalom Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism: The Radical Circle in Brith Shalom,
1925–1933 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 424.
1 54. This question is separate from the fate of the movement’s Marxists, who prioritized
communism over nationalism.
1 55. Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 2012), 36.
1 56. Butler’s more recent work on Buber seeks to avoid such despair, arguing that “the politi-
cal task is precisely to forfeit neither self-determination nor cohabitation.” Butler, “Versions
of Binationalism in Said and Buber,” in Conflicting Humanities, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Paul
Gilroy (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 204. Or as Juliano Mer-Khamis put it, “There