As the Roman legions advanced on Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago, the city they were preparing to conquer was already at war with itself.
The Jews inside the walls were killing one another, and rival factions fought for control of the city as an imperial army approached from the outside. The struggle became so destructive that the defenders ended up weakening the society they were ostensibly trying to save.
“We weren’t taught this in Sunday school,” author Amotz Asa-El told the Magazine. “But it’s so vividly told by Flavius Josephus, and the details are so obvious, and no one disputes them.”
For Asa-El, that episode is more than one particularly tragic chapter in Jewish history. It is part of a pattern that runs through The Jewish March of Folly, his new, sweeping attempt to reconsider how Jews understand the political disasters that shaped their history, and what those disasters might teach an Israel once again wrestling with deep internal division.
The book takes its title and intellectual starting point from historian Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, in which political folly requires more than a decision that looks disastrous in hindsight. A credible alternative must have existed at the time and been rejected.
Asa-El applies that test to Jewish history and reaches a challenging conclusion. The familiar explanations for Jewish catastrophe, he argues, have allowed generations to devote too little attention to the choices made by Jewish political leaders themselves.
“There are generally two” conventional explanations, he said. The first is theological: calamity as divine punishment. The second is what he calls the Zionist “Sunday school narrative,” in which “bad things happened to the Jews because of the Gentiles.”
What happened before the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Romans came along?
The Assyrians, Babylonians, and Romans unquestionably destroyed Jewish states, expelled populations, and devastated the country. Asa-El’s argument concerns what happened beforehand.
“We had political leaders in all of those events,” he said, “and I accuse them of having repeatedly, generation after generation, taken completely misguided policies with fateful results.”
At the heart of his case are 12 civil wars that he identifies across roughly 12 centuries of ancient Jewish history, beginning in the Book of Judges and ending around the Roman destruction of Judea. They are familiar individually to historians and readers of biblical history, he states, yet rarely assembled into a single political story.
Seen together, he believes they transform the way the period should be understood.
“I say that there is a recurring theme of civil war in ancient Jewish history,” he said. “During that span of roughly 12 centuries, I found 12 civil wars – in other words, an average of one civil war every three or four generations.”
That is also why The Jewish March of Folly is arranged thematically rather than as a conventional chronological history. Asa-El wanted to understand what repeatedly produced these conflicts, what political ideas lay beneath them, and what their cumulative consequences were.
Surprisingly, his trail leads back to Moses.
Asa-El sees in the Pentateuch the construction of an extraordinarily innovative political system: suspicious of concentrated authority, hostile to the divinity claimed by monarchs elsewhere in the ancient world, and built instead around a loose federation of tribes possessing considerable autonomy.
Moses, in Asa-El’s reading, was far ahead of later political thinkers in rejecting the assumption that a strong centralized monarchy was the natural basis of government. The ideal was noble, but its vulnerability was the power it left in tribal identity.
“He wanted a tribal confederation whereby every tribe actually had a form of tribal sovereignty,” Asa-El told the Magazine.
The danger becomes brutally visible in Judges, when the crime committed against the concubine at Gibeah leads the tribes of Israel into war against Benjamin and nearly to that tribe’s annihilation.
Asa-El opens the book by placing that story alongside the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York. The comparison is deliberately unsettling. Both begin with horrific violence against a woman; their political consequences are radically different.
Genovese’s murder became a debate about communal responsibility and the alleged failure of bystanders to intervene. Gibeah becomes the spark for a civil war.
“It triggers civil war, and the civil war pits one tribe against all the rest of Israel,” Asa-El said. “It nearly results in the total annihilation and genocide of [the tribe of] Benjamin. According to the Bible’s own express description, it’s not my interpretation. It’s explicit.”
Another episode surprised even Asa-El while he was researching the book.
The familiar story of Samson presents the Israelite strongman battling the Philistines. Reading Judges closely, Asa-El became fascinated by Judah’s response. Samson belonged to Dan, whose territory stood between the coastal Philistines and the Judean highlands. Rather than help their fellow Israelites withstand Philistine pressure, the men of Judah handed Samson over to the enemy.
“They didn’t care about helping Dan cope with the daily harassment that he was evidently experiencing by the Philistines,” he said. When Samson fought back, “they took the Philistine side.”
Dan was ultimately displaced from its original territory and migrated north. Asa-El sees an extraordinary example of tribal self-interest overwhelming national solidarity: one Israelite group concerned primarily with keeping danger beyond its own border while another faced the consequences.
The greatest demographic catastrophe in this history came with the destruction of the northern Kingdom of Israel by Assyria and the disappearance of the Ten Tribes. Asa-El deliberately calls the event a “forgotten Holocaust,” while carefully distinguishing it from the unique ideology and methods of Nazi extermination. His use of the term is demographic.
The Nazi Holocaust murdered roughly one-third of the Jewish people. The Assyrian destruction, he argues, removed a far greater proportion of ancient Israel from history, leaving the much smaller Kingdom of Judah behind.
Even the phrase “Ten Lost Tribes,” he suggests, softened Jewish memory of what happened. “Lost” allowed generations to imagine intact Israelite peoples surviving somewhere beyond the known world, waiting to be rediscovered. Asa-El considers that romantic hope is historically implausible.
The deeper question is why catastrophes of this scale were remembered in ways that obscured political responsibility.
Asa-El does not believe the rabbis consciously gathered after the destruction and conspired to sanitize the national story. He sees something more psychologically understandable: trauma followed by denial.
“They couldn’t face up to the historical lessons,” he said, particularly the possibility that the Temple had been destroyed following “stupid political conduct and recklessness.”
The theological explanation offered an alternative: “Because of our sins, we were exiled from our land.”
“I dispute that,” Asa-El said. “It wasn’t because of our sins. It was because of our mistakes – and not our mistakes, but our leaders’ mistakes. Mistakes that we must not repeat.”
Nowhere is the existence of an alternative clearer for him than in the revolt against Rome.
Jewish Prince Agrippa II's failed warning against confronting Rome
Before the rebellion, the Jewish Prince Agrippa II warned Jerusalem against confronting an empire whose military power vastly exceeded Judea’s. Asa-El describes Agrippa standing before Jerusalemites and methodically explaining the scale of Roman power, its armies, its navy, and the peoples it had already subdued as far away as Britain.
The warning failed.
“They were warned,” Asa-El said. “But these people were messianically fueled. Reality no longer interested them.”
The contemporary parallels in the Hebrew bestseller’s English edition are impossible to miss. The original Hebrew edition predated the judicial reform protests of 2023 and Oct. 7. By the time Asa-El returned to the material for English readers, the historical argument had acquired an immediacy he had never intended when he began writing.
He views the judicial overhaul as a particular example.
“The problem was that the broad task was constitutional. Constitutions, by definition, are meant to reflect the broad consensus and to foster it.”
Instead, he argues, the overhaul attempted to use a parliamentary majority to impose fundamental changes over the objections of a large minority.
“This was designed to do the exact opposite,” he said. “It was designed to impose the narrow majority on the broad minority.”
His criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu goes further back. Asa-El contrasts Netanyahu with earlier Israeli leaders whose overriding political project, however imperfectly achieved, involved creating common ground among disparate Jewish communities.
David Ben-Gurion spoke of mizug galuyot, the merging of exiles. Asa-El argues that Netanyahu, influenced in part by the political strategy of American consultant Arthur Finkelstein, recognized Israel’s divisions as something that could instead be politically exploited.
He points to Netanyahu’s famous 1990s appearance with Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, during which Netanyahu said the Left had “forgotten what it means to be Jewish,” as an early example of the deliberate use of a national cleavage for electoral gain.
“This was inflammatory,” Asa-El said. “That was generalizing and manipulative. This was the active search after a national cleavage in order to benefit from it.”
Oct. 7 gave Asa-El’s historical argument an even darker resonance.
The book identifies several occasions on which internal Jewish conflict was followed by foreign attack. After Solomon’s kingdom split into Israel and Judah, Egypt – until recently an ally of Solomon – invaded. When Rome approached Jerusalem, Jews were already fighting within the walls.
Asa-El does not reduce Oct. 7 to Israel’s domestic political crisis, nor absolve the enemy that carried out the attack, but his warning concerns what adversaries perceive when a society publicly tears itself apart.
The lesson also informs his view of the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) refusal to serve in the IDF. He compares it less with ancient theological disputes than with the separatism of tribes that declined to participate in the wars of their fellow Israelites.
In the Song of Deborah, tribes are admonished for staying away while others fought.
“That was the haredi attitude,” Asa-El said: “This war is not ours.”
He considers claims about Torah study secondary to the underlying tribal instinct. “This is our tribe, and this is what we care about; the nation we don’t care about,” he said of the mentality he sees behind the refusal.
His warning extends to elements of Israel’s far Right, where he believes religious certainty can replace sober assessment of geopolitical power. Ancient texts, he argues, cannot simply serve as instruction manuals for the strategic realities of the modern international system.
Yet The Jewish March of Folly is ultimately more than an indictment.
Israel’s history, Asa-El stresses, also supplies the counterexamples.
In 1967, with the country facing armies on several fronts, the Labor-led government and its political opponents, including Menachem Begin, formed a national unity government. In the economic emergency of the 1980s, Likud and Labor worked together as inflation approached catastrophic levels.
Later, Yitzhak Shamir chose to cooperate with Labor despite the parliamentary possibility of a narrower right-wing government, while Israel prepared for the enormous challenge of immigration from the collapsing Soviet Union.
The leaders did not cease disagreeing. Asa-El sees that as precisely the point. National unity did not require ideological uniformity.
“They only let their differences go that deep, but not any deeper,” he said. “So this nation does know how to unite, at least in its Israeli version. We need to revert to those precedents, to that kind of Israel, from today’s kind of Israel, and that is what this book is about.”
The argument includes Diaspora Jewry as well.
Asa-El is sharply critical of Israeli political leaders who treat millions of liberal American Jews as politically inconvenient or somehow less significant than Christian supporters of Israel. Political disagreement with Israeli governments, he argues, cannot become grounds for exclusion from the Jewish collective.
“There is no disowning of one Jew, of the rest, or of any number of other Jews,” he said.
Those Jews may want different borders for Israel, a different relationship with the Palestinians, or a different Israeli government. “But they’re openly Jewish, and they’re openly pro-Israel. How can you disown them?”
For Diaspora Jews who increasingly struggle to identify with the Israel they see, his advice is equally emphatic: “Struggle, don’t give up, we’ll change it.”
Asa-El was raised by Holocaust survivors from interwar Czechoslovakia. His father, deeply conscious of Jewish history, repeatedly warned him as a child about the danger of Jewish schism. Violent civil war was only its most extreme form; the divisions between hassidim and Lithuanians, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, rich and poor could also corrode a small nation from within.
“These are divisions that other nations can afford,” his father told him. “We can’t.”
“These were the kind of things I heard around Friday night table conversations,” Asa-El recalled.
The memory offers perhaps the clearest key to The Jewish March of Folly. Beneath its archaeology, biblical politics, Roman history, and modern Israeli argument lies a childhood lesson that Asa-El has spent a book attempting to prove.