At the end of “Jews and Power,” Ruth Wisse writes, “I feel I have been writing this book all my life.” It is a measure of her achievement that, in a book with 184 pages of text, she has produced a work of breath and depth, synthesizing and extending themes she has explored throughout her career.

The immediate genesis of her book is the essay she published in 2001 in Azure, “The Brilliant Failure of Jewish Foreign Policy.” That essay considered the political strategies Jews had developed to survive during centuries of exile, after the Romans destroyed their state. She explained how those strategies continued in Jewish consciousness even after the reestablishment of Israel, making it the first state “to arm its declared enemy with the expectation of gaining security.”

She ended her essay observing that Zionism was the beginning, not the end, of a new political process for Jews, born out of the lessons from their two “brilliant” failures — the destruction of their sovereignty by the Romans, and of their Diaspora political experiment by the Germans. Jews needed to learn the lessons of political power in having a state, while preserving the lessons of political morality developed in the centuries when they were stateless.

In “Jews and Power,” Ms. Wisse proceeds from the premise that loss of sovereignty was the defining political event in Jewish history, and the recollection of the Holy Land became a central part of Jewish culture. Year after year, often day after day, Jewish prayers and customs emphasized the remembrance of Jerusalem at the pain of losing one’s right hand, seeking God’s blessing to rebuild Jerusalem “quickly in our time,” expressing the hope in every Passover Seder for “next year in Jerusalem,” comforting mourners as part of the “mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”

Jewish creativity in the Diaspora expressed itself not only in religion, philosophy, and culture, but in political thought as well. Ms. Wisse calls the Jewish Diaspora “one of history’s boldest political experiments,” particularly impressive given the magnitude of its defeat. Josephus cited 1.1 million Jewish dead at the hands of the Romans, with many of the survivors taken to Europe as slaves. But if Jews were to survive as a nation, it would be without three of the basic requirements: land, a central governing body, and a means of self-defense. That Jews as a group did not simply evaporate into history was a function of new political strategies, born of powerlessness, that were necessary to survive.

One of the strategies was to convert Judaism to a pure religion and Jews to a purely spiritual nation — that saw itself better able to seek spiritual redemption by being freed from the burdens of a state. A second and related approach was to define the Jews’ defeat not as a result of greater power of their enemies but of God’s dissatisfaction. Their prophets taught their political fate depended on convincing God of their moral worth. Ascribing their current status and ultimate fate to God, Jews achieved an independence from the temporal powers over them.

Thus Jews were not exhorted to take up arms in their own defense, much less to proselytize or conduct holy wars, but rather to dream of beating swords into plowshares. The central religious event was the Exodus — the divine intervention on their behalf while fleeing overwhelming power. Jews fashioned themselves as a spiritual nation dependent upon God, rather than a temporal power, with a return to the land always “next year.”

But there is at work almost a reverse Lord Acton principle: powerlessness also corrupts. At some point, pride in survival without power can turn into a mistaken veneration of political weakness as a Jewish ideal. But survival depends on the wise and practical — and moral — use of power.

Ironically, after Jews were emancipated, their political position actually worsened, as demagogic political leaders found Jews an easy target to explain away the problems of modernity. Assaults on Jews were easy, since they lacked the power to retaliate. Jews were thus blamed for being revolutionaries and capitalists, for trying to assimilate and for holding themselves apart, for lacking culture and for adhering to their culture. Anti-Semitism developed without an internal coherence, but nevertheless became, in Ms. Wisse’s words, an “amazingly effective tactic against liberalizing modern trends” and the “ideology of the twentieth century that came closest to fully achieving its goal.”

At the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, the return to Zion — Zionism — became the response to the failing political experiment of the Diaspora. The Dreyfus case, following the Russian pogroms, became the Jewish September 11, 2001 — the attack that could not be ignored and that galvanized a new consciousness — eventually expressed in “Hatikvah,” the Jewish national anthem, as “The hope of 2,000 years/to be a free people in our land.”

But with the re-establishment of Israel, Jews — once damned for their lack of power — were now accused of becoming too strong. Jews accepted a two-state solution in 1937 and again in 1947 and several times since, but their reestablished state, formally recognized by the United Nations, became the target of a war now in its 60th year.

Once again Jews, in the form of Israel, became the target of an incoherent but potent opposition — blamed for creating refugees that resulted from a war declared upon them, and blamed for an occupation that resulted from Arab aggression, as if the occupation were the obstacle to peace, when war had come from the unoccupied land.

Israel had become a nation not unlike the Jews of the Diaspora — precluded from fully exercising rights as other nations did, and dependent on the protection of friendly powers. Israel now struggles with the problem of combining morality with the recognition that survival depends on the use of power, not a retreat from it. Israel is in the midst of developing a new Jewish political strategy, while finding itself on the front line of a war against the democratic world.

Ms. Wisse’s prior book was “The Modern Jewish Canon,” a study of the essential works of Jewish writing. “Jews and Power” not only belongs in the next edition, but — even more importantly — can play a role in the survival of the people that produced those works. It is essential reading.

Mr. Richman, a lawyer, issues the Web log Jewish Current Issues.