When I started working through Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes Judenthum for the companion guide, which required cataloguing the sources, double-checking the sources, and organizing the material into what became Entdecktes Judenthum For Dummies, I kept running into a category of material that did not fit neatly into the companion book I wanted to make. Eisenmenger documents a ton in his work, to put it mildly. He handled Talmudic cosmology, eschatology, the legal rulings governing Jewish interaction with Gentiles, the theology of election, and so on. But threaded through all of it, appearing again and again in ways I could not ignore, was a coherent theology of bloodshed, warfare, and violence rooted in the actual doctrinal commitments of Rabbinic Judaism.
I set it all aside. Every citation, tractate reference, Midrashic passage, and every Rabbinic ruling was put into a file, and I kept a running tally of it all to save for later. That’s what you do when you are sitting in a gold mine of information (I do not mean that the way Doug Wilson meant it when extolling the excellencies of the Talmud at TPUSA) and you notice a second vein running parallel to the first. I wanted to come back to it when I had time, and I’ve had some time.
War Cult is that second vein.
WHAT THE BOOK IS
War Cult: The Role of Bloodshed and Warfare in Post-Temple Judaism and the Israeli State is a short book. It is not an exhaustive academic treatment, and it does not pretend to be. It is a focused, documented argument with a single thesis: modern Israel’s relationship to warfare is not primarily a product of geopolitics or foreign policy, but the outworking of a theology. It’s a theology most Western Christians and secular Westerners have never encountered because they don’t know what Rabbinic Judaism actually teaches, and because no one in “respectable media” or evangelical leadership has any incentive to tell them. It might get in the way of their $7K payments.
When you watch the news, the Iran conflict is being narrated to you as a regional security problem. That framing is not entirely wrong in every particular, but it is radically incomplete. What it does not account for is the theological urgency with which certain Israeli leaders and their American evangelical allies approach the reason for Iran’s destruction. When you understand what Rabbinic Judaism teaches about the nations, about the Gentiles in the messianic age, about the wars that must precede the coming of the Messiah, the war makes sense. It is not geopolitical. It is eschatological.
That is what this book is about.
WHAT IS IN IT
The book opens with a primer on the post-Temple theological shift, the move from the sacrificial cult of the Jerusalem Temple to the Rabbinic system built to replace it, and what that shift did to Judaism’s understanding of blood, violence, and warfare. The Temple’s destruction in 70 A.D. did not end Judaism’s relationship with bloodshed. It redirected it. The rabbis built a theological framework that preserved the logic of “sacred violence” while the means of its expression lay dormant, awaiting the restoration of national sovereignty.
It also documents the Talmudic and Midrashic material on warfare and the nations directly. This is Eisenmenger’s documentary work coming to fruition on a focused question. What do the texts actually say? There are rulings on when Gentile blood may be shed and under what circumstances. There is eschatological literature detailing the fate of the nations in the messianic age. There is the Gog and Magog framework as understood within Rabbinic interpretation, which helps make sense of contemporary geopolitics. The citations are all there, and the sources are all named.
The booklet also turns to history, the founding of the Israeli state, and the degree to which Rabbinic theological commitments, not merely Herzl’s secular Zionism, shaped its self-understanding from the beginning. The relationship between the secular Zionists who built the state’s institutions and the religious establishment that provided its spiritual legitimacy is more tangled than either side will admit. By the time you reach the 1967 war and the theological explosion that followed their capture of the Temple Mount, it’s clear that this was not secular nationalism, but religion.
We will also look at the contemporary application in Iran. The framing of the current conflict inside Israeli religious nationalist circles as a divinely mandated war. We’ll look at the American evangelical infrastructure that provides diplomatic cover and financial support without knowing, or without caring, what theology it is underwriting. And the question every Christian watching this unfold should be asking, “Are you funding a theological war you do not understand, on behalf of a theology you would reject if you knew it?”
The book closes with a short chapter on the Christian response. If this is what Rabbinic Judaism teaches, and if the Israeli state is to some meaningful degree acting out of those commitments, what does that demand of Christians who name Jesus as Lord and who are called to be peacemakers, truth-tellers, and students of the Word?
Take a look at the Table of Contents below.
FOR PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS
War Cult will be released on March 26, exclusively for I2I premium subscribers, as a direct expression of gratitude for your patronage. You made the Entdecktes Judenthum project possible, and the companion guide. So I want you to have this, too
If you are not yet a premium subscriber, it is not too late. Subscribe, and you will receive the full book on release day.
For Founders-level patrons specifically, the release comes with a complete bonus package: the full study notes and source material compiled during the research process, an extended bibliography with links organized for further independent study, the rough draft material including sections that were cut from the final book for length, and extended passages from the Eisenmenger source material that supported the argument but exceeded the scope of what the book needed. If you have worked through For Dummies and want to delve deeper into primary sources, this package is for you.
WHY NOW
There is a war happening. American evangelical Christians are being asked, by their pastors, by television preachers, and by their political representatives, to support that war spiritually, financially, and politically. Most of them have no idea what theological system is driving the party they are being asked to join.
It turns out, the most effective influence operations do not suppress information with jackboots. They suppress it by ensuring that the people most likely to object don’t know the truth about it. You can’t evaluate what you’ve never been shown. The entire superstructure of Christian Zionist theology depends on American evangelicals never sitting down with Eisenmenger, never reading the Talmudic passages, never asking what the Rabbinic messianic age actually looks like for the Gentile nations and why the state built in that tradition has the infatuation for ceaseless warfare that it does.
War Cult is the short, documented, readable answer to that problem. I won’t ask you to agree with every conclusion, but I’ll ask you to read the sources, look at the evidence, and think for yourself, which is, as it turns out, exactly what they have been hoping you don’t do.
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