Nearly a decade ago, a Christian friend told me something that has stayed with me ever since.

After converting to Christianity, he apologized to me for all the terrible things Christians had historically done to Jews. I thanked him, but I told him two things.

First, he personally had done nothing to me. He was not morally responsible for actions committed centuries before he was born.

Second, I told him something that surprised him: Christians were in power. People abuse power. If Jews had possessed similar levels of political and civilizational power for long enough, Jews would also have been capable of terrible things.

At the time, I believed this instinctively, but I did not yet fully understand it. I was still missing a major piece of Jewish history.

I had not yet seriously studied the Hasmonean dynasty.

Like many Jews, I first encountered the Hasmoneans primarily through the heroic story: resistance against oppression, Jewish self-determination, survival, and liberation. But later, as I learned more, I discovered another side of the story. The Hasmonean state eventually devolved into many of the same temptations and excesses that have afflicted sovereign powers throughout history: dynastic corruption, territorial expansion, sectarian conflict, coercion, and abuses of power.

This realization changed something in me.

It was not that Jews were uniquely evil. It was the opposite. Jews were not uniquely exempt from the normal corruptions of power.

Diaspora Jewish life did not make Jews morally pure. But many forms of political abuse require sovereignty. Conquest requires armies. Occupation requires territorial control. Coercive rule requires........

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