Expanding the Study of the Jewish Foreign Policy Tradition: The Jewish Experience and the Twentieth Century

This paper will seek to expand the study of the Jewish Foreign Policy Tradition through an

analysis of the impact of the Jewish experience on 20th century political realism in the

discipline of international relations. The paper will focus on the background, messages and

impact of two central thinkers —Hans J. Morgenthau and John Herz who were both German

Jewish émigrés to the U.S. following the rise of Nazism in Germany.

The Jewish Foreign Policy Tradition, a sub-area of study emanating from the Jewish Political

Tradition pioneered by Daniel J. Elazar, has sought to identify the contours of specifically

Jewish approaches to foreign policy from the time of the Bible, the period of Jewish exile

and most recently as an input into Israeli foreign policy and those of NGO World Jewish

Organizations. The current research will seek to expand this effort by identifying a Jewish

input into classical realism which has been a central paradigm in the discipline of

international relations.

We believe that this effort is promising as a disproportionate number of seminal figures in

international relations were German Jewish refugees to the U.S. with Morgenthau and Herz

being prominent examples. Indeed research undertaken to date indicates that while not

formally observant both of these theorists were deeply affected by the experience of anti-

Semitism and its message of evil, while at the same time being influenced by the liberal and

humanistic strands of Jewish values which they seemed to have transmitted into the field of

international relations.