Of course, not all of Christendom saw things in this way. In Holland, England, and elsewhere, the need to justify political and philosophical rebellion against the claims of the Catholic Church to universal sovereignty led Protestant thinkers back to the study of Hebrew and Aramaic, and to attempt to find the true will of God in the sources of Judaism.⁹ In 1574, the famous Swiss Hebraist Cornelius Bertram published De Politia Judaeorum (“The Jewish State”), a treatise that sought an understanding of the best regime through the study of the Hebrew Bible, Talmud, the books of the Maccabees, and Maimonides. Thus began a period of 150 years during which the Hebrew Bible and later Jewish tradition became the focus of intense scrutiny in the search for political wisdom that could be of assistance in laying the foundations of a new political order in Protestant Europe.¹⁰ During this period, which lasted well into the 1700s, Bertram’s book was followed by dozens of additional such works, including the Dutch political theorist Petrus Cunaeus’ influential work, The Hebrew Republic (1617),which made reference to the Talmud, Midrash Rabba, Maimonides, Abraham Ibn Ezra, Moses ben Ezra, David Kimche, Joseph Karo, Abraham ben David, and others in an effort to expound republican government according to Jewish political thought.¹¹ Parts of this work were translated into English in time to become a handbook for republican revolutionaries in the period of Cromwell.

Perhaps no people in Europe approached this work of neo-Hebraic political thought with greater alacrity than the English. As Professor Hastings has shown,¹² the English people possessed a long tradition of identification with the biblical Hebrews, which extended back at least as far as the year 730 C.E., when Bede compared the English to the Jews in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. In Tudor England, fighting to maintain its independence against Catholic Spain, this sentiment was captured in John Lyly’s famous declaration of England as a “New Israel.” Nor was this sentiment lost on political thought. The political philosophy of English theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, and John Locke includes extensive interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. Hobbeswas learned in Hebrew, and his magnum opus Leviathan devotes over three hundred pages to the political teachings of Scripture.¹³ Locke knew Hebrew as well, and the first of his Two Treatises on Government is devoted to biblical interpretation.¹⁴

Among neo-Hebraic political thinkers, the most significant was undoubtedly the great statesman and political philosopher John Selden, whose work sought to establish the political philosophy of a sovereign and independent England on the basis of God’s law as reflected in the tradition of the rabbis. His 1635 treatise on the law of the sea, Mare Clausum—one of the founding texts of international law—argued for the concept of national sovereignty on both land and sea on the basis of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. (The work of Grotius, Selden’s great Dutch rival, was also informed by that philosopher’s knowledge of Hebrew, as well as of biblical and rabbinic sources.) Selden’s treatise on The Jewish Law of Marriage and Divorce (1646) was significant in accelerating the adjustment of English family law away from Catholic teaching and towards a system much more in keeping with Jewish principles. But his masterworks were two monumental treatises on the foundations of political philosophy: The Law of Nature and of the Gentiles According to the Learning of the Jews (1640), whose entire 840-page text is devoted to an exposition of natural law in light of the talmudic laws of Noah, which the rabbinic tradition held to be binding on all the nations of the world; and On the Assemblies and Legal Authorities of the Ancient Hebrews (1650-1655), which devotes 1,130 pages to the study of the rabbinic Sanhedrin as a model parliament. In his work, Selden turns to the Talmud, Midrash, Tosefta, Maimonides, Nahmanides, Judah Halevi, Abraham Halevi, Ibn Ezra, R. David Kimche, Gersonides, Rabbeinu Nissim, Joseph Karo, Simon Luzatto, Tzemah David, Onkelos, Targum Jonathan, Zohar, and many others.

In Selden’s day, The Law of Nature and of the Gentiles According to the Learning of the Jews was understood by many to be the most significant English work of political philosophy of its time. Hobbes’ Leviathan,published eleven years after Selden’s great work, was written in its shadow and reflects its influence; and as Professor Tuck has argued, there is reason to believe that Selden’s ideas continued to dominate political discourse in England for a generation.¹⁵ Moreover, it was reprinted time and again in London, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, and elsewhere in Europe. Despite its extensive citations in the original Hebrew and Aramaic, it remained in print for nearly a century after it was first published.

Yet the history of political philosophy was not gentle with John Selden for his interest in Jewish studies. Leibniz thought that Selden had wasted his extraordinary talents.¹⁶ And as the Enlightenment progressed, it has seemed as though the assessment of history would be the same. The French philosophes had little patience for religion of any kind, and certainly not for Judaism; and in Germany, where philosophy paid careful lip service to Christianity, thinkers such as Kant and Hegel made sure to leave little room for Judaism. To them, individuals such as Selden who were profoundly influenced by Jewish teaching were an embarrassment. Ultimately, it was this view of history that prevailed in the English-speaking world as well.

We saw earlier how the historiography of the German academy is reflected in Professor Sabine’s history, which faithfully follows Kant and Hegel in writing the Hebrew Bible out of the ancient history of political ideas, depicting Christianity almost as though it sprang fully formed from the thought of ancient Greece. But we now know that the history of Jewish influence on the West did not end in antiquity. It continued at least until the time of John Locke and the founding of the modern republic. How do writers such as Sabine cope with this problem? Here is the way Sabine chooses to portray the work of John Selden:

Remarkably, Selden’s overwhelming reliance on the Bible and rabbinic sources in constructing his political philosophy is as if it did not exist. And the same thing takes place when one goes on to study other better-known thinkers. The typical university course studies only the first half of Hobbes’ Leviathan,because the second half is about the Bible; these same courses study only the second half of Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, because the first half is about the Bible. Indeed, the biblical discussions are considered so irrelevant that many paperback editions of these books simply omit them altogether, and the students never even know they were there. (This is true, by the way, of the Hebrew editions of both Hobbes and Locke used to teach political thought in Israeli universities. Almost all of the material in these books that draws on Jewish sources was simply not included in the translation.)¹⁸

Once again, the Jewish influence is simply erased, this time from the history of the founding of the modern state. No wonder, then, that Jewish and Christian students can so easily reach the conclusion that religion had no part in the establishment of the modern political order.

In defense of the universities, I should say that most of the history I have been discussing is not well known. Many of the most important texts, including those of Cornelius Bertram, Carlo Sigonio, Johannes Althusius, Petrus Cunaeus, John Selden, and many others, were written in Latin. Almost none have been translated, placing them outside the reach of all but a few specialists. Someday soon, I hope we will have all of these remarkable sources available to us. Only then will we be able to begin in earnest the work of reviewing the historiography we have inherited from the early years of the German academy. Only then will it be possible to provide well-founded answers to the question: What, in fact, was the contribution of Judaism to the thought and public life of the modern Western state?  

For now, therefore, we can draw only the most preliminary conclusions with respect to the subject before us. These preliminary conclusions, however, are not insignificant. On the basis of what we already know, it is possible to say with a certain degree of confidence that the three premises I mentioned at the beginning need to be seriously re-evaluated. That is, on the basis of what we now know, it is unclear that the architects of the modern state designed it as a non-religious or even an anti-religious state, whose public life was to be purged entirely of religious influence; it is unclear that these architects were themselves ardent secularizers, who found no place for religious tradition in public life; and it is unclear that the Bible and other Jewish sources were ruled out of bounds in early modernity and played no role in the establishment of the modern state. Indeed, once the whole story has been told, it may turn out that the Jewish tradition did help to build this city. If so, it may be the case that pronouncements on politics whose source is in our religious tradition are anything but an illegitimate intrusion.