Rediscovering John Selden

Reviewed by Steven Grosby

Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden
by Jason P. Rosenblatt
Oxford University Press, 2006, 314 pages

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There are, tragically, too many reasons to justify the conclusion that the Christian attitude toward Jews and Judaism during the Middle Ages—especially after the fourth Lateran Council of 1215—was one of unremitting hostility, including persecutions, expulsions, forced conversions, scapegoating, and death. Less known, however, is the dramatic increase in Christian interest in Jewish and rabbinic writings that took place during the same period. From as early as the twelfth century, it is clear that Rashi’s commentary was being studied by Christian scholars. As early as the thirteenth century, Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed was translated into Latin, and by the fifteenth, into Spanish. By the end of that century, with the establishment of the Soncino Press in northern Italy, Christian interest in Jewish writings had become something akin to an explosion. To be sure, this enthusiastic display of interest among Christians should not necessarily be interpreted as an expression of Judeophilia, or even tolerance: Often Christian investigation into the Talmud and rabbinic commentaries was undertaken solely for the purpose of marshaling additional polemics against Judaism. Nonetheless, scholarly examination by Christians of Jewish texts—particularly if buttressed by an occasionally impressive knowledge of Hebrew—sometimes led to the challenging of previous Christian understandings of Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, including the locus classicus of the putative foreshadowing of Jesus in Isaiah 52-53 and 7:14. Clearly, a more tolerant, even sympathetic appreciation of Judaism was also emerging during the Middle Ages, a good example of which is the sixteenth-century Catholic Jean Bodin’s Colloquium of the Seven About Secrets of the Sublime.

During these four to five centuries, the more important among numerous Christian scholars who had devoted themselves to the study of Jewish writings were, in addition to Bodin: Hugo Grotius (who used Maimonides’ discussion of the Noahide laws in the Mishneh Tora to establish a minimal set of universal moral laws); Petrus Cunaeus (author of The Hebrew Republic, recently published in English translation by Shalem Press) in Leiden; the two Buxtorfs, father (editor of a Hebrew-Aramaic Lexicon and the Bomberg Bible with rabbinic commentary) and son (translator of Judah Halevi’s Kuzari into Latin), in Basel; Edward Pococke in Oxford; John Lightfoot in Cambridge; and Willem Surenhuis (responsible for the translation of the entire Mishna into Latin) in Amsterdam. In fact, Christian interest in rabbinic writings during this period was found throughout the European continent. In his evaluation of this “Christian Hebraism” in The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes, Frank Manuel was right to conclude that the Hebraic, or “third” culture, which alongside the Greek and the Latin was once an ornament of the trilingual gentleman-scholar, deserves a more prominent place in the history of Western thought than has been accorded to it.

Towering above even such impressive Christian Hebraists as the two Buxtorfs was surely the English lawyer John Selden (1584-1654). We are indebted to Jason Rosenblatt and Oxford University Press for bringing renewed and wider attention to the remarkable Selden through the publication of this learned book, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi. With Selden, as Rosenblatt has correctly observed, we have a scholar who “in his coolly analytical historical approach to the laws and institutions of the Jews, eschews dogma. Selden wants neither to convert nor refute the rabbis, whom he calls ‘Magistri,’ and Christology is absent from his scholarship…. In the midst of an age of prejudice, John Selden transmitted an uncommonly generous view of Judaism.”

Just how remarkable a Hebraist the prolific Selden was will be obvious from the titles of his later works. His earlier books (The Duel; The Laws of Pre-Christian Britain and Early Common Law; History of Tithes; and Of the Dominion and Ownership of the Sea—the last of which was a response to Grotius) do not, for the most part, rely upon rabbinic writings. Even so, as early as 1617 Selden had written a historical, philological study of the gods condemned in the Hebrew Bible, The Fabulous Gods, in which he displayed familiarity with the works of Philo, Josephus, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and, of course, Maimonides. This work, characterized by Rosenblatt as “a pioneering study of cultural anthropology and comparative religion,” is a noteworthy example of scholarship for its own sake, as would be the case for many of Selden’s later works. After all, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake requires a recognition of, and fidelity to, freedom of thought. Throughout his life, Selden affirmed his commitment to such a liberty, such as when he ran afoul of King Charles I for opposing the king’s decision to prevent the publication of certain books in England-a decision representing, in Selden’s words, “a great invasion on the liberty of the subject”—and when he argued for the right of Catholics to public worship, even though he had always been sharply critical of Roman Catholicism.

As a member of Parliament who opposed Charles I’s claim to collect taxes without its approval, Selden was arrested and briefly imprisoned in 1629. His study of the Talmud during this imprisonment served as the preparation for his important Hebraic works. Between 1631 and his death in 1654, Selden wrote six works of profound and wide-ranging Hebraic scholarship. The first of these works, published in 1631, was a detailed study of the Jewish laws of inheritance, On Inheritance, According to the Hebrew Law, in the Case of Good Death. The second work, published five years later, was On the Succession of the Hebrew Priesthood, which dealt with the succession of the priesthood. Finally, in 1640, he published his important work on the seven Noahide precepts as a kind of natural law, On the Natural and Gentile Law in Comparison with Hebrew Teachings, about which more below. Next, in 1644, was a study of rabbinic methods of chronological calculation, On the Civil Year, which was followed two years later by The Hebrew Wife, an examination of the Jewish laws of marriage and divorce with a long digression on the views of the Karaites. The sixth work, On the Councils, consisting of three volumes, dealt with Jewish assemblies, above all the Sanhedrin.

Such impressive historical works, all of which required vast philological expertise, could only have been written out of a humanistic fascination with the past. Rosenblatt gives us a good indication of the extent of this fascination when we learn that Selden’s library contained 8,000 volumes. However, Rosenblatt makes clear that the political disputes of Selden’s time likely had a bearing on his choice of subjects, as well. His work on the Jewish laws of inheritance, for example, was probably directed against the clerical power of his time, as was his work on Jewish laws of marriage and divorce, the intention of which was surely to reform English law. Indeed, as Selden maintained, “marriage is nothing but a civil contract”; so, too, should inheritance, believed Selden, be governed by the laws of contract, thereby freeing it from ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Rosenblatt also makes clear the influence of Selden’s scholarship on numerous individuals, such as James Harrington, Thomas Hobbes, and especially John Milton.

Perhaps the most political of Selden’s works is his last, On the Councils, the first volume of which appeared in 1650, one year after the execution of Charles I. In this work, as Rosenblatt remarks, Selden “sees the Sanhedrin as the model of a parliament that represents the laity, protecting it from clerical oppression by maintaining the supremacy of civil power, but also from an unrestrained monarchy.” As Selden put the matter in his posthumously published Table Talk, “there is no such thing as spiritual jurisdiction; all is civil….” Thus, only the Sanhedrin had the authority to excommunicate. Furthermore, the king not only had no seat in the Sanhedrin, he could also be tried by it (here Selden points to Josephus’ account of the trial of Herod). Surely Selden had the tumultuous events in England from 1640-1649 in mind when writing On the Councils. But even in this work, we find a Selden deeply immersed in the historical details of philological and legal clarification, including over the sentencing of Jesus. Given Selden’s elliptical style, in which his conclusions are sometimes left unstated, it is likely significant that, in On the Councils, he offers detailed arguments for why the Sanhedrin might have given up the right to judge capital cases several years before the crucifixion.

The main subject of Rosenblatt’s Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi is “the cultural influence of rabbinic and especially talmudic scholarship on some early modern British poets and intellectuals as mediated principally by Selden.” Rosenblatt, a professor of seventeenth-century English literature, and particularly Milton, accordingly devotes the first half of the book to an examination of the unappreciated place of biblical and rabbinic scholarship in the thematic development of the literature of that time. The first chapter begins with an appropriate re-casting of the conflict in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet between Prince Hamlet and Claudius through the lens of a choice of biblical laws: Leviticus 18:16, “Do not uncover the nakedness of your brother’s wife,” which would render Claudius’ marriage to Gertrude illegitimate; or Deuteronomy 25:5, the rule of Levirate marriage, which would sanction Claudius’ and Gertrude’s union and nullify Hamlet’s claim to the throne. Rosenblatt rightly reminds us that this “apparent conflict between Leviticus and Deuteronomy” had arisen earlier in the dispute over Henry VIII’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn. Such a re-casting is most interesting, as is Rosenblatt’s discussion of the influence of Selden’s Hebraic scholarship on Ben Jonson’s Epicoene: Or, the Silent Woman. Rosenblatt continues in chapter three by discussing the influence of Selden’s The Fabulous Gods on Milton’s naming of the pagan gods in Paradise Lost; and in chapter four he describes Selden’s influence on Milton’s Samson Agoniste. Consequently, a reader who picks up this work hoping to find an explication of Selden’s contribution to the theory of natural law and the history and character of the Sanhedrin must be patient, as the discussion of these matters does not appear until the last half of the book.

On the subject of natural law, Selden was no rationalist; he rejected the idea of innate rational principles that are intuitively obvious. For Selden, all law, as law, had to be positive—that is, pronounced by the sovereign, however understood, with the expectation that, if violated, punishment would ensue. Thus, his understanding of natural law differed from that of Grotius, who drew a distinction between the reasonable law of nature and (divine) positive law, and also from that of the Cambridge Platonist, Nathaniel Culverwel, discussed by Rosenblatt in chapter nine. Selden attempted to surmount the problem of a natural law that must be positive, yet also universal, by identifying it as those laws, enumerated in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 56a-b), which were stipulated by God in the covenant with Noah (Genesis 9). The reality of those laws, for Selden, consists in the fact that they were and had to be historical; thus, their violation results in punishment by the civil order, for example, the Sanhedrin.

It seems to me that the argument that the law of nature can be known only in its historical expression is key for Selden; he was historical, but no historicist. In its historical expression, the Noahide law of nature exists as a part of a more extensive, developing national law code. For the Israelites, the addition of the Decalogue and other laws; for England, as a part of the common law, which, in Rosenblatt’s summary of Selden’s view, can be understood “as a limited law of nature” and “from which there is no appeal.” Just as the Sanhedrin was understood by Selden to be legally supreme, so, too, was Parliament for England.

As noted earlier, Manuel argued that the “third culture,” the Hebraic, deserves a more prominent place in the history of Western thought. He was right to do so. It would, nevertheless, be mistaken to view that place as merely a concern of intellectual history. There is more to be said about Hebraic culture and its influence.

Rosenblatt observes that "most Christians of the early modern period contrasted the 'Hebrew Myth' (Hebraica veritas) of the Bible with the rabbinical fables of the Talmud," thereby denigrating Jewish tradition. "Selden, however, throughout his writing contrasted the severity of the literal text of the Hebrew Bible with the humaness of rabbinic interpretation of the text and of rabbinical law," thereby elevating Jewish tradition. It may be that Rosenblatt is right about this; but here, too, there is more to be said.

The real question is whether the Christian Hebraism of the early modern period represents a noteworthy, but secondary, current in the history of Western thought, or rather a conceptual development of broader, more profound significance in the organization of human affairs. We can propose several answers to this question.

First, the attention paid by the Christian Hebraists to the non-biblical, rabbinic Noahide laws—the seven stipulations of the humane, universalistic biblical covenant between God and Noah that were understood by the rabbis to be incumbent upon all of humanity—was in the service of fostering a conception of a natural law, variously understood. Such a natural law, if acknowledged, could act to restrain often violent religious sectarianism by asserting, for example, the prohibition against wanton murder and the command to establish a legal system, which would make possible a relatively stable, civil political order under the rule of law. The question is whether or not such a civil, political order and the toleration it assumes presuppose the framework of a national tradition. It appears that Selden thought they did, even though doing so gives rise to a conceptually paradoxical combination: A humane universalism borne by and refracted through the history of a particular nation.

Second, this difficult paradoxical combination is, in fact, characteristic of the Hebraic tradition. This fact is expressed succinctly in, for example, Exodus 19:5-6 and Deuteronomy 10:14-15. Once this paradoxical combination is recognized for what it is, we can understand its particular appeal during the period from the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries: It offered a means of legitimating the consolidation of national states within doctrinally universal Christendom. A fine balance was sought, one that would: (i) Legitimate the freedom of the nation to determine its own affairs; (ii) establish a legal basis for toleration and civil peace within a religiously diverse nation; and (iii) provide considerations by which to judge relations between nations. Such was the burden of the Christian appropriation of the rabbinic Noahide laws and the Hebraic tradition.

An indication of this Hebraic tradition can be seen in Selden’s understanding of natural law as a law that is natural, yet historical; universal, yet posited and borne by a particular nation. Such an understanding opens up the complicated task of bridging the gap between timeless universal and historical convention. As Rosenblatt observes, it allowed Selden to balance “a belief in a divine, universal law of minimal obligation with a commitment to an evolving native English common law….” Thus, the national law, insofar as it conforms to such Noahide precepts as establishing judges and legal authorities in every district, is inviolable. However, at the same time, national variations are recognized as legitimate; they are to be free “from coercion by external authorities enforcing uniformity.” We can get an idea of the practical effect of what Selden meant by natural law from his discussion of contracts in Table Talk: “Keep your contracts, so far a divine goes, but how to make our contracts is left to ourselves.”

Steven Grosby is Contributing Editor of Azure. He is the author of Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2005), and Biblical Ideas of Nationality: Ancient and Modern (Eisenbrans, 2002).