What, then, does the seventeenth century offer us in reading the classic Jewish sources? I have suggested here three principles: The importance of the rule of law within fixed borders; a non-Roman republicanism based on the idea of mutual responsibility and a higher moral calling, which finds expression in social laws; and finally, the model of the federal republic. This last principle is needed not only because Europe is establishing itself as a federal republic before our eyes, but because in some sense modern Israel itself is, whether we like it or not, a federal republic of sorts. With good reason do the twelve tribes serve as a metaphor to describe our breathtaking cultural, social, and intellectual diversity. I therefore suggest that we listen to those republicans, Cunaeus and Harrington, and take note of what they found in the Bible: At the feet of the Ark of the Covenant they discovered a polis. In that ancient theocracy they found a decentralized state rich in local customs and in strong-willed leaders. The seventeenth-century republicans needed those Jews of old, who dared criticize even God’s own plans. They needed them because those Israelites were different from the pagans of Greece and Rome, whose potent lusts were free from any such divine burden, and different from the pious early Christians, whose theology required suppression of individual desires and unquestioning obedience to God. The ancient Hebrews­—whose faith and historical self-understanding are filled with the memory of individual political volition and rebellious political personalities—must have offered something indispensable to the early creators of modern European republicanism.

My point here is not to glory in whatever Jewish chromosomes may be found in the genome of Western political thought. It is, rather, to consider and reconsider which parts of these sources, and of the inspiration they offered to European theorists of liberty, might be of value to us today. For example, ought we not reconsider the seemingly simplistic dichotomy between Judaism and modern liberalism? Between the seemingly competing claims that modern Israel ought to be “Jewish” and “liberal-democratic”? Perhaps liberalism is closer to home than many of us think. Perhaps it is not merely the abhorred Hellenism of the ancient purists. Indeed, it may well have some of its strongest roots in the books of Exodus, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, in the Talmud and in Maimonides: Tangible roots, though tightly coiled around the other, non-Hebraic sources of Western ideas of liberty. The Bible, of course, does not suffice to keep us safe from the mischief wrought by our fellow men or by rulers; but, as I attempted to show, it added some indispensable drops to the early modern republican cauldron.

Perhaps the Bible’s greatest gift to its politically minded readers was the awareness of the importance of individual personalities within political history, of the perfectly singular mind of a warrior-judge like Gideon, of a leader like Deborah, of a political dissident like Nathan, of a killer like Yael the Kenite, of a social reformer like Amos, or simply of an all-too-human figure like Saul. The Bible, anticipating Machiavelli, heralded the arrival in Western history of the political actor—the thinking and acting individual who wrestles with political virtue and political vice, who has a will to power and yet practices self-restraint, who brings all the grandeur and pettiness and restlessness of the human personality into the theater of political life. This was part of the Bible’s charm for the republicans, but not necessarily for the liberals. The latter—from Hume and Kant to Berlin and Rawls—sought to free the great modern state from all dependence on the idiosyncrasies of the individuals acting within it—of any particular leader, or any particular citizen.

Whoever feels today that this gamble on the part of post-Enlightenment liberalism did not pay off, that legal mechanisms are not always enough, that institutions and laws and even rights are at times insufficient, is invited to return to the great laboratory of the seventeenth century. For it is from there, if we look again to the ancient Hebrew republic for inspiration, that we may yet restore the questions of human nature, communal responsibility, and the deliberate actions of the individual into the heart of our own political discourse.

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Fania Oz-Salzberger is a Senior Lecturer in the School of History at the University of Haifa. This essay is an expanded version of the Zalman C. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Jewish Political Thought, sponsored by the ShalemCenter, which she delivered in Jerusalem on January 10, 2002.

 

 

Notes

I wish to thank Shlomo Avineri, Joseph Dan, Ofir Haivry, Menachem Kellner, Menachem Lorberbaum, Daniel Polisar, Aviezer Ravitzky, Eli Salzberger, Miriam Yardeni, A.B. Yehoshua, and Joseph Ziegler, as well as the participants in the works-in-progress seminar at the Shalem Center and several members of the audience at the annual Zalman C. Bernstein Memorial Lecture, for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. Thanks to Lea Campos Boralevi for making available to me unpublished material, and to Gabi Guarino and Julia Bershadsky-Lebovich for assistance in the translation of material from Italian. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Yoram Hazony for his deep interest.

1.­ “But before pronouncing what Christian morality is or is not, it would be desirable to decide what is meant by Christian morality. If it means the morality of the New Testament, I wonder that any one who derives his knowledge of this from the book itself, can suppose that it was announced, or intended, as a complete doctrine of morals…. To extract from it a body of ethical doctrine, has never been possible without eking it out from the Old Testament, that is, from a system elaborate indeed, but in many respects barbarous, and intended only for a barbarous people.” J.S. Mill, On Liberty (1859), ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1995), pp. 49-50.

2.­ A similar attitude can be seen in the majority of general surveys of the liberal tradition, such as John Gray, Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986).

3.­ The collection Liberalism and Its Critics, edited by Michael Sandel, a central work on the polemic between advocates of classical liberalism and its critics, does not contain a single reference to the Jewish sources, neither from the side of the “liberals” such as Isaiah Berlin, nor from that of liberalism’s “critics,” such as Hannah Arendt and Michael Walzer. It is particularly interesting to compare Walzer, who parallel to his critique of liberalism developed a profound discussion of Jewish political thought (and at a later stage integrated the two), with such Catholic critics of liberalism as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Already in the 1970s, these thinkers openly articulated the political relevance to be found, in their view, in Catholic moral philosophy: See Michael J. Sandel, ed., Liberalism and Its Critics (New York: New York University, 1984).

4.­ It is interesting to note that even adamant political “moderns,” thinkers who claimed that the modern era had political insights that departed from the entire range of possibilities offered by the tradition of the ancient world and hence required novel theoretical structures, still found interest in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and even in the early Goths and Saxons. The Hebrew sources were abandoned by the Enlightenment long before a similar fate was meted out to these other historical models.

5.­ Cf. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969), pp. 3-53; Iain Hampsher-Monk, “The History of Political Thought and the Political History of Thought,” in Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk, eds., The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2001), pp. 159-174.

6.­ Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572-1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1993), pp. xi-xii.

7.­ Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1998), pp. 117-119.

8.­ Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), in Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford, 1969), pp. 118-172.

9.­ Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, part 1.

10.­ J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton, 1975); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. i, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1978), chs. 4, 6; for political theory anchored in the history of political thought, see Phillip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).

11.­ See, for example, Leibniz, who makes a parody of Bossuet’s presumptuous derivation of a French “right of conquest” in Europe from the rule (autoritas) that Moses took from God and borrowed from the Egyptians, a right which also applied to the conquest of Canaan and the rule of the Hebrews over the Canaanites. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Mars Christianissimus (The Most Christian War-God)” (1683), in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Political Writings of Leibniz, ed. and trans. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1972), p. 126.

12.­ Notwithstanding the sharp differences between them, Bossuet and “Brutus,” each in his own way, raised the political use of the Bible to a high art. Both saw in the relation of the people to their king a covenant on the part of God (though they disagreed regarding the possibility of annulling it), and both found in I Samuel 8, which depicts the anointing of Saul, the historical centerpiece of their political outlook. Both moved within the monarchical paradigm, which is outside the ken of our present discussion. Cf. Stephanus Junius Brutus, the Celt (pseudonym attributed to Hubert Languet), Vindiciae contra Tyrannos: Or, Concerning the Legitimate Power of a Prince Over the People, and of the People Over a Prince (1579), ed. and trans. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1994). On the New Testament as a unique source within the model of natural law, see George Garnett, “Introduction,” in Junius Brutus, Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, pp. xxx-xxxi. Bossuet, who was active some hundred years later, was dubbed a “Judaizing Calvinist” by the historian of political thought Judith Shklar. While Sparta, Athens, and Rome served as models of equivalent value to that of ancient Israel in Bossuet’s well-known Universal History (1681), he nevertheless declared in his most political book, published posthumously, that the Israelite case was peerless. Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Politics Drawn From the Very Words of Holy Scripture (1707), ed. and trans. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1990). Concerning the uniqueness of the Israelite model, see Patrick Riley, “Introduction,” in Bossuet, Politics, pp. xix-xx (the quote from Shklar is given in Riley, “Introduction,” p. xi).

13.­ Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Penguin, 1993).

14.­ On the thought of the politiques in France and in the Netherlands, and on the attitude to Jews within the paradigm of religious toleration, see Miriam Yardeni, Huguenots and Jews (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 1998) [Hebrew]; on Spinoza and Locke, see Jonathan Irvine Israel, Locke, Spinoza, and the Philosophical Debate Concerning Toleration in the Early Enlightenment (c. 1670-1750) (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlands Akademie van Westenschappen, 1999).

15.­ At the same time, Leibniz considered Selden to have, at least to some degree, wasted his talent. Cf. Leibniz, “Opinions on the Principles of Pufendorf” )1706(, in Leibniz, Political Writings, p. 66.

16.­ Selden, De jure naturali & Gentium juxta Disciplinam Ebraeorum (“The Law of Nature and the Nations According to the Hebrews”) (London, 1640).

17.­ Selden’s Law of Nature provided a detailed discussion of the Noahide laws and of their elaborations in the talmudic tractate of Sanhedrin.

18.­ John Selden, A History of Tithes (London, 1618).

19.­ Selden, Uxor Hebraica (London, 1646).

20.­ Selden devoted his encyclopedic work, De Synedriis & Praefecturis Juridicis Veterum Ebraeorum (“On the Sanhedrins and the Judiciary Posts of the Ancient Hebrews”) (1750-1753), to the Sanhedrin as a legislative, interpretive, and judicial body, and as a precedent for nonclerical systems of law in later political societies.

21.­ On the centrality of Selden in the natural-law tradition, and on his claim that the seven Noahide laws were a historical revelation of natural law while the Ten Commandments are Hebraic civil law in every respect, see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1979), ch. 4.

22.­ A delicious twist awaits us down the road from Selden, via the nineteenth-century Continental legal philosophers, and all the way to modern discussions of the rule of law and separation of powers. Ancient Israel was, for Selden, the incarnation of a principle that has recently generated public debate in modern Israel: Supreme Court President Aharon Barak’s controversial claim that “everything is justiciable,” the idea that the law and its interpreters reign supreme in the context of separation of powers within modern democracy.

23.­ The revolutionary onus remains with Selden and Hobbes, as creative readers of the Hebrew sources. My point here, as later, is not to celebrate the early modern rapture that biblical Israel inspired in Christian political philosophers, but to trace the impact of the Israelite model, as these thinkers understood it, on early modern republican thought.

24.­ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1651), book iii, ch. 35.

25.­ Menachem Lorberbaum, “The Return of the Leviathan: On Hobbes’ Political Theory,” in the journal Tarbut Demokratit, forthcoming.

26.­ Abraham Berkowitz, “John Selden and the Biblical Origins of the Modern International Political System,” Jewish Political Studies Review 6:1-2 (Spring 1993), pp. 27-47. This reading of Selden is supported by Richard Tuck’s suggestion that Selden contributed to the natural-law tradition a new emphasis on the contractual nature of the formation of territorial boundaries in particular, and the importance of the contract in natural law generally. Selden identified a complex, natural-law-based contractual approach to boundaries and property as early as the days of the patriarchs and certainly in the period of Israelite settlement. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 87-88. It should be further noted that the same sophisticated biblical conceptualization of territory and property, the very jus obligatuum that distances a person from the property of the other, also sets limits on the enrichment of the individual at the expense of others, and establishes the matrix of social obligation that the Bible inspired in natural-law jurists up to and including Locke.

27.­ This initiative began by an order of James I, but the book was published during the reign of his heir. In terms of his own political stance, Selden was a moderate monarchist. As a member of the Long Parliament, he demanded that Charles I honor the rights of members of parliament in the name of the English political tradition, not out of revolutionary considerations. Selden was subsequently praised by Edmund Burke for demanding that “the rights of Englishmen,” rather than abstract, universal human rights, be honored by the sovereign. Burke found in Selden one of the “profoundly learned men” of his day. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 118.

28.­ Hugo Grotius, Mare Liberum (1609), translated by R. Magoffin as The Freedom of the Sea (New York: Oxford, 1916).

29.­ John Selden, Of the Dominion and Ownership of the Sea (Mare Clausum) (commenced in 1618, published in 1635), trans. Marchamont Nedham (1652); Berkowitz, “Selden and the Biblical Origins.”

30.­ Bodin, too, was a political Hebraist. Without going into his Hebraism at great length, I will make do with two observations. First, Bodin, as opposed to Selden, employed the ancient Israelite model (in addition to the Greek) specifically in order to demonstrate that “civil society,” understood as a federation of tribal unions, was a transitional phase between the family and the sovereign state. The people of Israel sustained a community with laws but without a king, until it felt the need to establish a monarchy and anoint a king. Second, Bodin uses the incident of the murder of the Egyptian by Moses in order to demonstrate his claim that a “foueraigne prince” is allowed to come to the aid of the subjects of a tyrant when “the gate of justice being shut against them” (as they themselves, according to Bodin, are not allowed to rebel against their oppressor), and even to kill the tyrant. Regarding Moses’ act, notes Bodin, “none is more honorable or glorious.” Jean Bodin, The Six Books of the Commonweal, facsimile reprint of the English translation of 1606, ed. Kenneth Douglas McRae (Cambridge: Harvard, 1962), esp. book iii, ch. 7, and book ii, ch. 5. According to Bodin, Solomon was an absolute ruler, whose high priests and coterie of advisers were in effect magistrates who owed him absolute obedience, “as it was like in all monarchies”; thus, after the end of its “civil society” phase, there was no unique theocratic element in the Israelite monarchy. Bodin, Six Books, book iii, ch. 6.

31.­ On Hobbes’ contribution to the discussion of universal rights in the generations that followed him, see Tuck, Natural Rights Theories. As for Bodin, it is interesting to note that Pierre Bayle used Bodin’s depiction of Moses in order to ground his claim that Bodin was not a benighted absolutist, but a brilliant early theoretician of liberty, who attempted to combat religious oppression and persecution in an age of wars of religion, especially papist persecution, which made use of the doctrine of sovereignty. See Pierre Bayle, “An Historical and Critical Dictionary,” in Pierre Bayle, Political Writings, ed. Sally L. Jenkinson (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2000), pp. 26-27.

32.­ Numbers 15:16.

33.­ The pinnacle of this dialogue, the acid test in which its intellectual victory and human defeat were sealed, was the case of Baruch Spinoza, the tragic crosser of boundaries and the great bearer of Jewish-Christian “otherness.”

34.­ Grotius was more pragmatic than John Selden, when he proposed seeing in the “Hebrew republic” a practical model for the establishment of the young Dutch republic. But Grotius’ work on this subject, Republica Emendanda (“The Republic Reformed”), was not published until a century after his death.

35.­ I make use here of the new bilingual edition edited by Lea Campos Boralevi, who brings the Latin source alongside the English translation (by Clement Barksdale) of 1653: Petrus Cunaeus, The Commonwealth of the Hebrews (1617/1653), intr. Lea Campos Boralevi (Florence: Centro Editoriale Toscano, 1996). [Note: page-number references for Cunaeus reflect the facing Latin/English pagination.]

36.­ Cunaeus, Commonwealth, p. 4/5.

37.­ Michael Walzer, Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge: Harvard, 1965).

38.­ My analysis of Cunaeus is indebted to Lea Campos Boralevi’s Introduction to her edition of Commonwealth.

39.­ On the Sanhedrin as a senate, see Cunaeus, Commonwealth, pp. 58/59, 142/143, and elsewhere. The motifs of Selden are repeated in the introduction to Cunaeus’ book: The seven Noahide laws, Moses as legislating directly from God (and in writing, for the first time in history), the divine source of the ancient Israelite rule of law, and the centrality of legislation in the life and existence of every republic. Cunaeus, Commonwealth, pp. 30/31-44/45.

40.­ Cunaeus, Commonwealth, p. 60/61. Cunaeus quotes at length, in this context, from Leviticus 25, emphasizing the mechanism of invigorating and renewing the division of land and of agrarian justice by means of the sabbatical and jubilee years, as well as the prevention of poverty and harmful urbanization by means of the laws governing treatment of the stranger and the widow, the first fruits, and tithes—in contrast to the centralization of land ownership, degeneration, and ethical corruption in ancient Rome. Cunaeus, Commonwealth, ch. 3.

41.­ The connection between moral economy and political liberty will be further discussed below, with reference to John Locke.

42.­ Cunaeus, Commonwealth, pp. 6/7-10/11, but compare with the author’s discussion of the centrality of Jerusalem according to the Talmud and the identification of its fall with that of the Jewish commonwealth (Cunaeus’ term for the era of the Second Temple) in ch. 7.

43.­ See primarily Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, pp. 72-74. The idea of the concordia, which Grotius attributed to prestate human society as a whole, in the sense of its being a basic model of the state of nature based upon “natural rights,” was applied by Cunaeus to the description of the multilayered federal government of ancient Israel at its peak. It should be noted that Selden draws upon a different strand in the tradition of natural law, according to which the prestate situation was one of complete freedom and therefore does not involve natural rights; while Hobbes denied the natural state of the Grotian concordia. Compare Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, chs. 4-6; and Cunaeus, Commonwealth, pp. 8/9-12/13.

44.­ Nedham translated Selden’s Mare Clausum into English in 1652.

45.­ A comprehensive discussion of the commonwealth of the Hebrews appears within an overt polemic against the royalist reading of the Bible: James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1992); Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (1698), ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1990). The latter is a polemic work directed against Robert Filmer’s utopia, Patriarcha, which is a central text of seventeenth-century Hebraic monarchism.

46.­ On Harrington, the most prominent of the republican thinkers drawing on Hebraic sources, see primarily J.G.A. Pocock, “Historical Introduction,” in J.G.A. Pocock, ed., The Political Works of James Harrington (New York: Cambridge, 1977); Blaire Worden, “James Harrington and the Commonwealth of Oceana, 1656,” in David Wootton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society 1649-1776 (Stanford: Stanford, 1994), pp. 82-110.

47.­ Josephus, Contra Apion II.165, discussed “the republic of the Hebrews” as a “theocracy,” thus pioneering the political conceptualization of the biblical state in Greco-Roman terms.

48.­ Exodus 19:6.

49.­ The inclusion of the priests among rank-and-file magistrates—in this case subject to the king—already appears in Bodin, Six Books, book iii, ch. 6, p. 360.

50.­ Sidney, Discourses, ch. 2, section 9, especially pp. 62f. Moses, according to Sidney, established a “mixed rule,” based on several limited governmental powers (pp. 288-289), including the Sanhedrin (p. 127).

51.­ The English republicans shared Cunaeus’ emphasis on biblical agrarian law as a basis for the just division of property—an important condition for the vibrancy of the republic and for sustaining the federal principle. Alongside Leviticus 25 they also cite in this context Joshua 13-19.

52.­ According to Harrington, the superiority of Israel over Greece and Rome was due to the divine source of its laws, and its tradition of “ancient prudence.” See Harrington, Oceana, pp. 25, 39-40.

53.­ This point is repeatedly illustrated by citing Moses in Deuteronomy 4:5, Gideon in Judges 8:23, the full text of I Samuel 8, especially v. 7, and Hosea 13:10-11. Cf., for example, John Milton, A Defense of the People of England (1658), in John Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis, trans. Claire Gruzelier (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1991), p. 102 and passim; Algernon Sidney, Court Maxims, ed. Hans W. Blom, et al. (New York: Cambridge, 1996), pp. 42-43 and passim. Sidney, whose Discourses was published after the Restoration, insisted that the kings of Israel were only crowned with the agreement and permission of the Sanhedrin, which also retained the right of opposition to a tyrannical king; this point was supported by Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities IV.8. Sidney, Discourses, pp. 289, 328-329, and passim.

54.­ Sidney expounded on I Samuel 8: “Samuel did not describe to the Israelites the glory of a free monarchy; but the evils the people should suffer, that he might divert them from desiring a king.” Sidney, Discourses, p. 336.

55.­ Selden’s legal emphasis thus took up an explicitly republican dimension. Compare Sidney: “The kings of Israel and Judah were under a law not safely to be transgressed.” Sidney, Discourses, p. 344.

56.­ John Pocock’s seminal study of the revolutionary English republicans as the conveyors of the “Machiavellian moment” to early modern European and American political discourse underrates, in my view, the political Hebraism of “English Machiavellism,” most notably Harrington’s. Cf. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, chs. 10-11.

57.­ On the “theocentrism” of Locke’s political theory, see first and foremost John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the “Two Treatises of Government” (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1969). Locke was educated as a Puritan, though his mature political thought steered away from Puritan extremism. In his later years he wrote interpretations of Scripture, conversed with Isaac Newton on the secrets of biblical chronology, and died in 1704 while the mistress of the house was reading to him from Psalms. See Mark Goldie, “Introduction,” in John Locke, Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1997), pp. xiv-xv.

58.­ It was understood thus by C.B. Macpherson in his well-known book, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). Some of the more significant reassessments that have appeared recently are mentioned in subsequent footnotes.

59.­ Locke dedicated the first of his treatises on government to this subject: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690), ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1996). His refutation of the hypothesis of lineal inheritance, making extensive use of the Bible, appears on pp. 218-236.

60.­ Judges 11:27. Jephthah went as far as confronting the Ammonites with legalistic arguments regarding the right of the Israelites to their land.

61.­ The story of Jephthah is a crucial biblical reference. It was repeatedly cited by Locke (and similarly by Grotius and Pierre Jurieu). See Locke, Two Treatises, First Treatise, section 163, p. 260; Second Treatise, section 109, p. 340, and section 176, p. 376; but see primarily Second Treatise, section 21, p. 282, and the editor’s comment on that page.

62.­ Locke, Two Treatises, Second Treatise, section 89, p. 325.

63.­ Locke, Two Treatises, Second Treatise, section 101, p. 334.

64.­ This liberty is based entirely upon obedience to the laws given at Sinai. It was abandoned, as Locke pointed out, both by the Pharisees, who were haughty enough to think that they “sat on Moses’ chair” (Matthew 23:2), and by Jesus, founder of “Christian liberty,” whose essential purpose was “not to submit to legal injunctions.” Locke, “First Tract on Government” (1660), in Locke, Political Essays, pp. 26-27. 

65.­ Locke, Political Essays, p. 51. If the Holy Scriptures had been a complete constitution for all human concerns, argued Locke, then any new civil legislation would be considered blasphemy. See his “Second Tract on Government” (ca. 1662), in Locke, Political Essays, p. 72.

66.­ “And the Eternal was with him; wherever he went forth he prospered; and he rebelled against the king of Assyria and would not serve him.” II Kings 18:7. Locke highlighted the biblical use of the verb “rebel,” indicating explicit divine sanction for political rebellion. Locke, Two Treatises, Second Treatise, section 196, p. 396.

67.­ In his “First Treatise,” Locke argues that neither Genesis 1:28 nor any other source makes any reference to “Adam’s monarchy or private dominion, but quite the contrary.… To conclude, this text is so far from proving Adam sole proprietor, that on the contrary, it is a confirmation of the original community of all things amongst the sons of men, which appearing from this donation of God, as well as other places of Scripture; the sovereignty of Adam, built upon his private dominion, must fall, not having any foundation to support it.” Locke, Two Treatises, First Treatise, section 40, p. 169 (emphases in original). Cf. Peter Laslett, “Introduction,” in Two Treatises, p. 101.

68.­ On Locke’s concept of property, see Tuck, Natural Rights Theories; James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1980); Dunn, Political Thought.

69.­ Tully, who thinks that Locke employs the principle of “positive community,” is in disagreement on this point with Tuck and Dunn (as well as Hont and Ignatieff, below), who attribute to Locke the model of “negative community.”

70.­ Locke’s approach was republican in its essence: Property is the basis of civic involvement, which in turn is the basis of liberty. Hence, the property confiscated by Charles II and James II deprived their opponents, among them radical Puritans of Locke’s own milieu, of their civic standing. Despite the fact that Locke’s mature political model was a limited monarchic one, some important republican elements may be discerned in his thought. He found elements of a federal republic in England, with its decentralized government, strong local rule, and lively civic participation. In these political qualities Locke found a mixture of good Christianity with Roman republicanism. The primary sources for the study of morals, according to his work “Concerning Reading,” were Cicero’s De Officiis and the New Testament. See Goldie, “Introduction,” p. xxvi.

71.­ Was it possible, Locke asked in this context, that God’s words in matters of property might contradict natural law? Was the Exodus from Egypt, carrying off Egyptian goods, at the command of the Lord—here Locke directs his readers towards Exodus 12:35—tantamount to a violation of the natural property rights of the Egyptians to retain their Hebrew slaves? He answered in the negative, for God may transfer property from one to another without violating the natural right of the previous owners, because all property is given to us as a “loan” from God. See Locke, “Essays on the Law of Nature VII” (ca. 1663-1664), in Locke, Political Essays, p. 126.

72.­ Locke, Two Treatises, Second Treatise, section 36, pp. 292-293, and the editor’s note to this paragraph on p. 292. Locke’s famous statement, “In the beginning, the world was America” (Two Treatises, Second Treatise, section 49, p. 301), runs parallel to the biblical model: Genesis documents the transition from the age of communal property to the stage in which people (Cain and Abraham, for example) held a small and limited amount of private property. The biblical model appears in Locke’s two treatises both independently and in close conjunction with the pre-state model of America. Compare First Treatise, section 130, p. 237, and the editor’s note on that same page; First Treatise, section 136, p. 240; Second Treatise, section 38, p. 295.

73.­ Several pivotal aspects of early modern natural jurisprudence remain beyond the present discussion, notably the distinction between “perfect right” and “imperfect right,” as well as the dispute between Filmer and Locke over the kind of consent involved in the original division of property. Locke took pains to emphasize, with the aid of the Bible, that the state of nature was an era of great abundance, and hence universal agreement was not required when some individuals began to appropriate land.

74.­ Locke, Two Treatises, First Treatise, section 42, p. 170. In the editor’s view, Locke had Luke 11:41 in mind at this point. The tradition of moral economy described above points no less reasonably, in my opinion, to the social legislation of the Pentateuch.

75.­ Justice, writes Leibniz, is “the charity of the wise.” Moreover, “Neither Moses, nor Jesus, nor the Apostles nor the ancient Christians, regulated justice otherwise than according with charity (caritas).” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Elementa Juris Naturalis (“Principles of Natural Law”), Acad. Ed. VI, p. 481, quoted by Patrick Riley, “Introduction,” in Leibniz, Political Writings, p. 3; and compare Locke himself in Two Treatises, First Treatise, section 42, p. 170.

76.­ Karl Marx duly identified this element in the Bible, but his dialectical method proscribed any form of a “second Israel” or, in secular terms, any practical revisiting of a bygone historical model. Marxism aside, the most probable heir of the republican-Christian “moral economy” is twentieth-century social democracy, though this body of thought developed largely in isolation from historical-theological inspirations.

77.­ Michael Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1995). 

78.­ Adam Smith offered a new solution to the problem that had engaged natural-law theorists since Thomas Aquinas: How to reconcile absolute right of property with the moral imperative (which Smith did not deny) to feed the hungry. In modern economics, Smith claimed, a balance is created among capital, labor, and basic life necessities which will satisfy the demands of natural justice without imposing any limitation upon private property, or any moral imperative upon the wealthy (who are likely, in any event, to feel voluntary compassion). See Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, “Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations: An Introductory Essay,” in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1983), pp. 1-41.

79.­ Hont and Ignatieff, “Needs and Justice,” pp. 42-43. See also John Dunn, “From Applied Theology to Social Analysis: The Break Between John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth and Virtue, pp. 119-135.

80.­ The Scots debated this idea among themselves. Representing the republican position within the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Ferguson wrote of three special cases in which “democratic government” allowed the redistribution of property in order to advance liberty and social justice: Ancient Israel (at the time of the judges), Sparta, and Crete. However, Ferguson saw these polities as exceptions that proved the rule: “Some having thought, that the unequal distribution of wealth is unjust, required a new division of property, as the foundation of freedom [in later editions: ‘of public justice’]. This scheme is suited to democratical government… New settlements, like that of the people of Israel, and singular establishments, like those of Sparta and Crete, have furnished examples of its actual execution; but in most other states, even the democratical spirit could attain no more than to prolong the struggle for Agrarian laws.”  Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1995), p. 151.

81.­ According to Dunn, “It is hard for us even today to grasp the profundity of this caesura in the history of liberalism.” These words refer to the Scottish Enlightenment’s departure from Locke’s position, resulting in the innovative claim that justice, property, rights, and obligations are no longer based upon piety, but upon human and societal “knowledge” alone. Dunn, “From Applied Theology,” p. 121.

82.­ Knud Haakonssen, “Introduction,” in David Hume, Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1994), p. xxiv.

83.­ Rousseau writes: “Call any state a republic which is governed by laws, under whatever form of administration it may be; for then only does the public interest (res publica) predominate.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right, trans. Henry J. Tozer (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895), book 2, ch. 6, p. 132. The Bible provided seventeenth-century jurists with an important basis for asserting the subjugation of the monarch to law and justice, which is best illustrated in the cases of Saul and David. The biblical reference was dropped, however, by most later British and American theorists of the “rule of law,” and similarly by German rechtsstaat theorists.

84.­ Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace” (1795), in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings, trans. H.B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge, 1997), pp. 112-113.

85. Spinoza, whose biblical education was probably as thorough as Locke’s, helped accelerate the rejection of Hebraist republicanism in favor of modern liberalism.  Spinoza undermined the position of the Bible as a contemporary political text not only through his philological-skeptical approach to the ancient text, but primarily because he deployed the Jewish sources in support of democratic individualism rather than republicanism.  By doing so, he helped to establish the mainstream Enlightenment view of contemporary Jews as subjects of tolerance but not as the heirs of viable political texts; as individuals deserving universal rights, but not as the offspring of the ancient republican Hebrews.  See Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale, 1997); Israel, Locke, Spinoza, and the Philosophical Debate.

86.­ In the new context of political economy, the twelve tribes were an ancient society on the verge of transition from the stage of nomadic shepherding to that of agriculture. The early Hebrews, said Montesquieu, were certainly not a merchant people. Consequently, their history bears no lessons for modern Europeans. The source for Montesquieu’s statement, alongside I Kings 9 and II Chronicles 8, is Josephus Flavius’ Contra Apion. For example, the maritime trade in the Red Sea during the reign of Solomon was a temporary result of the conquest of Eilot and Etzion-Gever from the Edomites, and died away with the loss of these seaports. Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1995), book xxi, ch. 6, p. 359.

Nor does the Jewish contribution to the modernization of the European financial market provide any inspiration for modern political economy. Medieval Jews merely were forced into the base and degraded practice of usury. Montesquieu was among the first to realize that this forced degradation of the Jews led to the creation of financial tools requisite to modern trade, through the invention of letters of credit. By doing so the Jews served as catalysts of the first order in the process of modernization, namely, “How commerce in Europe penetrated barbarism.” Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, book xxi, ch. 20, pp. 387-390. Compare his analysis of the failure of Russia as a trading nation in the context of the expulsion of the Jews by the Czarina Elizabeth in Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, book xxii, ch. 14, pp. 416-417. This analysis leaves the Jews as unintended agents of modernity, but without a philosophical voice.

Nor was the Old Testament a source of political inspiration. The laws of Moses, says Montesquieu, were “very wise” in the religious-historical context—in creating, say, a haven for unintentional killers—but there is no substantive connection between them and natural law. In fact, the Jewish codex at times openly contradicts natural law. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, book xxv, ch. 3, p. 482. Montesquieu did not hesitate to condemn the Jewish people for being “dull-witted” in allegedly abstaining from self-defense on the Sabbath day. Precisely in such cases, Montesquieu reproachfully notes, the commandments of religion must yield to natural law. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, book xxvi, ch. 7, p. 501.

87.­ The French Enlightenment presented a broad spectrum of attitudes towards ancient and contemporary Jews, ranging from the open hostility (coupled with an almost obsessive fascination) of Voltaire, to the lukewarm historicist references of Rousseau, to the universal generalizations typical of French Revolution writings. See Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York: Columbia, 1968); Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge, forthcoming). The complexity of Voltaire’s attitude towards the Jews is beyond our present scope. One point, however, can be briefly made: While Voltaire shared the political anticlericalism of Hobbes and Harrington, he did not follow their view of the Hebrew commonwealth as a wise incorporation of the priesthood into temporal politics. Instead, Voltaire saw ancient Israel as the very embodiment of foul theocracy and supra-political clericalism.

The Scottish thinkers, as I have mentioned, generally found little time for the Jews and even less for their literature. David Hume commented on the Jews’ “national” tendency toward dishonesty in his essay “Of National Characters.” In a footnote Hume adds that minority groups which have fallen victim to prejudices, and therefore no longer have a good name to defend, “become careless of their behavior except among themselves.” Hume, “Of National Characters,” in Hume, Political Essays, p. 84.

88.­ One of Hume’s footnotes can serve to illustrate his disdain for the niceties of seventeenth-century students of the Hebrew commonwealth, who labored to incorporate the priests within the temporal institutions of that commonwealth. The priests, quipped Hume, are always the enemies of freedom, and freedom is the enemy of their political power. Hume brought the Hasmonean state as an example of the oppressive cooperation between princes with tyrannical ambitions and the clerical establishment. Hume’s source is, typically, Tacitus’ History. Hume, “Of the Parties of Great Britain,” in Hume, Political Essays, p. 41.

89.­ Kant went to the trouble of demonstrating that the early Israelites’ exultations of joy after winning military victories were opposed to both natural and divine justice and, in his phrase, to “the moral conception of a father of mankind.” Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” p. 105 n. The idea of an antiwar “covenant,” presented by Kant as a partial, temporary alternative to the universal republic which he envisioned, is in no way based on the biblical covenant between the people and their God. The contractual tradition, as exemplified by Rousseau and Kant, had abandoned its biblical inspiration.

Elsewhere Kant states half-jokingly, insofar as he is capable of joking, that the Israelite prophets’ visions of destruction were in essence self-fulfilling prophecies, since “as the leaders of the people, they imposed upon their code so many legalistic (and thus also civil) stipulations until their state became unable to exist by itself, particularly in relation to other states. And thus, the priests’ prophecies of wrath in a natural way fell upon deaf ears, because those same priests themselves stubbornly adhered to their faith in the impossible constitution they had themselves established, and therefore they were able to anticipate the consequences with unmistakable certainty.” Immanuel Kant, “The Contest of the Faculties,” in Reiss, Kant’s Political Writings, p. 177. The confusion between priest and prophet exemplifies the carelessness, if not contempt, with which Kant made his infrequent use of biblical sources. Kant did not bother here, or in other places, to demonstrate any mastery of the texts. His primary purpose was to mock the political leaders of his time, who shared the biblical inclination towards unreasonable legislation and policy.

90.­ Among the Enlightenment thinkers there were some who accepted the Roman model, and others who developed an explicitly modern model—for example, on the basis of an idealization of the English form of government. Particularly significant is Montesquieu’s use of the English parliamentary monarchy. See Montesquieu’s comment about Harrington’s Oceana, whose author “sought this liberty only after misunderstanding it, and… he built Chalcedon with the coast of Byzantium before his eyes.” Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, book xi, ch. 6, p. 166.

91.­ Hume, “Of Public Credit,” in Hume, Political Essays, p. 166.

92.­ Compare Adam Smith’s curt discussion of the Protestant interest in Hebrew studies, whose status in the university nevertheless remained secondary, “the Hebrew language having no connection with classical learning, and except the Holy Scriptures, being the language of not a single book in any esteem.” Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 1937), pp. 722-723.

One should take note of an important nuance, however. In England, the analogy drawn between the English and the early Hebrews, underpinning the idea of England as the “second Israel,” continued to flourish. This analogy, as Linda Colley suggests, nurtured the new national identity that the British forged for themselves during the course of the eighteenth century. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale, 1992). But the cultural uses of ancient Israel, ranging from Handel’s oratorios Judas Maccabeus and Israel in Egypt to William Blake’s Jerusalem, and up to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, were no longer linked to a political application. Early Israel now provided images for a nation divinely blessed, and it conferred a certain erotic mark upon the Jews appearing in nineteenth-century novels, but it was no longer a constitutional or legal model. English cultural Hebraism outlived political Hebraism by well over a century.

93.­ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan der Weise (1779). Montesquieu, for his part, included in Spirit of the Laws an interesting scene between a Jew and a Spanish inquisitor, which is one of the French Enlightenment’s best exercises in “hearing the voice of the other.” Like Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice, Montesquieu is deeply ambivalent about his Jewish protagonist. Yet the Jew’s soliloquy concludes with a resounding warning to the inquisitor: “If someone in the future ever dares to say that the people of Europe had a police in the century in which we live, you will be cited to prove that they were barbarians.” Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, book xxv, ch. 14, p. 492.

94.­ I would not like to underestimate the effectiveness of Mendelssohn’s political philosophy within the context of the German Enlightenment. Cf. David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California, 1996). As a political thinker, however, Mendelssohn belongs not to the republican tradition but to the legalistic tradition whose roots lie in natural law. In German political philosophy this was part of a state-centered approach that did not found civil freedom on active civic participation.

95.­ Compare Kant’s brief but incisive comment that the Jews and their writings entered the arena of known history and came within the scope of an “educated public” only with the translation of the Septuagint, which brought the Bible into the world of Ptolemaic learning. The sole matrix of true scholarship is thus the Greco-Roman one. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Reiss, Kant’s Political Writings, p. 52 n.

96.­ Isaiah Berlin’s interest in modern Jewish nationalism, which he discussed through the persons of Moses Hess and Chaim Weizmann, did not draw upon premodern Jewish sources. The synthesis proposed by Berlin between enlightened nationalism and established liberalism was based—and that only in part—upon Jewish experience in the modern period. For his part, Jacob Talmon emphasized the Jewish sources of socialism and of nationalism, and even of early messianic Protestantism—but not the similar sources of republican and early liberal thought. Compare Talmon, “Prophets and Ideology: The Jewish Presence in History,” in the collection of his writings, J.L. Talmon, The Riddle of the Present and the Cunning of History, ed. David Ohana (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2000), pp. 13-26, especially pp. 17-18. [Hebrew]

97.­ Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton, 1993); Michael Walzer, The Jewish Political Tradition (New Haven: Yale, 2000); Amitai Etzioni, Rights and the Common Good: The Communitarian Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995).

98.­ Pocock, Machiavellian Moment; Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism; Pettit, Republicanism; Martin Thom, Republics, Nations, and Tribes: The AncientCity and the Modern World (London: Verso, 1995). The latter work, bringing the account of early modern republicanism to the turn of the eighteenth century, demonstrates the scarcity—to the point of disappearance—of the formerly prominent Hebraic sources of this tradition.

99.­ Famous objections regarding the rightness of God’s judgments were made by Abraham in Genesis 18:23-25 (“shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?”), and also by Abimelech in Genesis 20:4-5.