War Cult: The Role of Bloodshed and Warfare in Post-Temple Judaism and the Israeli State

War Cult documents what Rabbinic Judaism actually teaches about Gentile life, sacred violence, and the role of warfare in messianic redemption, and traces how those teachings have shaped the military culture and political theology of the modern Israeli state. Drawing on Johann Andreas Eisenmenger's exhaustive documentation of Talmudic and Kabbalistic primary sources, the book argues that Israel's relationship to warfare is not primarily a product of geopolitical calculation but of doctrine, liturgy, and a two-thousand-year-old theology of blood that was never abandoned, only redirected. From the soul-origin cosmology of the Zohar to the battlefield rulings of contemporary IDF rabbis, War Cult shows that the most serious participants in the current regional conflict understand its stakes in terms that Western observers, and most American evangelicals, have never been given the tools to recognize.

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