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The Jewish Origins of the Western Disobedience TraditionBy Yoram HazonyCivil disobedience did not, as we are taught, begin with Socrates and Antigone, but with a Hebrew Bible that rejected the supremacy of human law. In urging that every man address the meaning of Scripture himself, Luther must certainly have believed that the true meaning of the Bible would be evident to anyone who would only look into it for himself. But the most dramatic effect of this idea was not the discovery of one true church, so much as the creation of a cascade of Protestant streams—Congregationalist, Quaker, Baptist—devoted to the doctrinal autonomy of the Christian congregation.113 Some, such as the Quakers, went as far as even insisting that church doctrines be set not by the clergy at all, but by the laity—thereby allowing every individual to have a say in the contents of the “official” doctrine of his church on the basis of his own personal understanding of Scripture. The conscience of the individual now became the highest authority in the Church, and papist disobedience theory was transformed into the theory of individual disobedience to injustice.
Nowhere in the world were the effects of this new freedom of conscience more in evidence than in the new American colonies, founded as they were by the various heterodox Christian sects as places of refuge from the various European autocracies. In Massachusetts, the Puritans and Congregationalists established a “New Jerusalem” built on the theory of popular sovereignty—as effected by an actual social compact into which the colony’s members entered voluntarily114—imparting to that colony a quality of radical ferment which ultimately gave birth to the American Revolution, and which has characterized it ever since. Pennsylvania, too, was founded by the Quakers, making it the home not only of the “City of Brotherly Love,” but of the revolution as well. One of the American rebellion’s earliest and most influential exponents was the Quaker Thomas Paine, who determined after the “massacre at Lexington” in April 1775 that Britain’s rule could no longer be considered anything but a tyranny, and drew the relevant conclusions. Paine’s pamphlets became the best known and most influential of calls for the dissolution of America’s ties with the British state, forcefully transmitting disobedience ideas consciously based upon those of the Hebrew Bible. Written in Philadelphia in January 1776—six months before the declaration of American independence—Paine’s most famous pamphlet, Common Sense, begins by reviewing the stories of the biblical Gideon and Samuel in order to demonstrate that the English king’s claim to unlimited obedience was precisely that tyranny against which the ancient Jewish prophets had warned.115 The pamphlet continues:
For Paine, the issue at stake in the American Revolution was not merely the particular injustice which had been committed by Britain, but the entire idea of unconditional submission to the will of the state—an absolutist approach to state law which necessarily entails acquiescence in injustice.
But while Paine and his compatriots fought and won the American Revolution in the name of constitutionally limited government, they continued to believe that disobedience to state law was a reasonable recourse only against tyranny. For if a government were just on the whole, and only in error on some subjects, fear of anarchy still dictated that even “bad law” should be obeyed so long as open discourse continued to permit legitimate efforts to change it.117 It was not until the struggle against slavery in America decades later that the case for individual disobedience to injustice under all regimes was finally made in a manner which was fully consonant with the teachings of the Hebrew Bible. In this as in the rebellion against Britain, Massachusetts was at the forefront of the fight, its Congregationalist churches producing stiff-necked advocates of disobedience such as Henry David Thoreau, best known for his 1848 lecture, “On the Relation of the Individual to the State,” a published version of which was posthumously renamed “Civil Disobedience.” In it, Thoreau declared slaveholding America to be an unjust regime which must be brought down, and called on citizens to begin their disobedience by withholding taxes from the state, as he himself had done: “I do not hesitate to say,” he wrote, “that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side...” 118
But perhaps more important, and certainly more moving, was an essay Thoreau wrote in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War which was to end slavery in America and destroy much of the American South. In “The Last Days of John Brown,” Thoreau wrote of a Connecticut farmer named John Brown, who had for three years been staging cross-border raids into Southern states with the aim of “stealing” slaves, in direct violation of the law, and setting them free—operations which Thoreau and his circle of friends had supported with funds and other assistance.119 Brown’s final raid in 1859, on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, resulted in a siege by state troops, and Brown’s trial, which ended in his being sentenced to death by the state of Virginia. In his essay, published as a eulogy in the wake of Brown’s execution, Thoreau declared that the litmus test for whether one had grasped the real meaning of the Bible was whether one had sided with John Brown’s cause:
Looking back with some detachment, a hundred years and more after the passion and grief of Thoreau’s eulogy,it is possible to understand that he was right: Brown’s mission was the test that divided those Americans who understood the message of “old religion” and the Hebrew Bible from those who did not. For a mere nine months before the outbreak of the horrors of the Civil War, in which a million people would die, how could anyone who was familiar with it have mistaken the horrible relevance of the prophet Jeremiah’s call for the Jews to release their slaves, lest the injustice in their midst bring the slaughter of war upon them?121 Indeed, in Thoreau’s recognition that Brown “had the Bible in his life and in his acts,” and that the authority with which these acts had been undertaken was that of “revelation ... superior to our laws,”122 and that the people of America in order to be truly Christian must also recognize them as such—in all these he was articulating no less a demand than that Christianity and the West once and for all reject the cruelty of their Roman heritage of unlimited submission to the laws of the state, and embrace the cries for resistance to injustice in this world which had been the “old religion,” the demand of the Jewish prophets.123
Perhaps no man was as responsible for the fact that the “old religion” of disobedience is today accepted and taught throughout the United States, and for that matter, throughout the West, as the Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., the architect of the disobedience movement that spearheaded the struggle for civil rights for American blacks in the 1960s—a century after Thoreau. While slavery as an institution had long been dead in the United States, King found that race laws, which set aside segregated places of education and employment for blacks throughout the South, continued to make a life of dignity impossible for the descendants of American slaves. For King, as for Thoreau before him, there was no question but that the resistance against such unjust laws was above all the heritage that the Bible had bequeathed to America:
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