Seeking the Hebrew Roots of Democracy
2010Review of The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought By Eric Nelson
It has long been axiomatic in the West that progress entails secularization, that becoming modern means becoming less religious. We arrived at where we are today—self-government, the rule of law—only after transcending our ancient, mystical-spiritual selves and acquiring science and reason. It was reason, which Socrates and Plato first planted in the Western consciousness and which finally triumphed in the form of the modern republic more than 2,000 years later, that liberated man from his backwardness.
Or so we’ve been told. Eric Nelson’s The Hebrew Republic argues that it was Judaism—or, more precisely, interest in rabbinic texts like the Talmud and Midrash—that prompted 17th-century thinkers like Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and John Milton to argue for a more representative government defined by its commitment to fairness and minority rights. The spread of Christian Hebraism, from Leiden, Leipzig, Basel, and Tübingen to Oxford and Cambridge, spawned a wave of “republican exclusivism,” a belief that republican government was not one of several morally defensible forms of government but the only morally defensible form of government and the only political organization that comported with God’s will. Eventually, Nelson writes, this commitment to republicanism would sharpen and inspire, acquiring a political will that would eventually crystallize in the form of revolution, first in America and then in France. All this happened because of a handful of wise, long-dead Jewish men and their latter-day adherents.
Christian Hebraism was hardly a 17th-century innovation. Nelson points out that exegetes at the Abbey of St. Victor, in 12th-century Paris, went back to Rashi to try to make sense of the Hebrew Bible. Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed was translated into Latin in the 13th century.
But it was the Protestant Reformation that thrust the rabbinic debates on the meaning of God’s law (which began in the second century C.E.) into the center of Christian life. Prior to the Reformation, ancient and medieval Hebrew texts were mostly interesting to Christian thinkers in so far as they could be used to fortify Church authority and convert Jews. Beginning in the first half of the 16th century, however, those texts were used less to combat Judaism than to understand it—and, by extension, the Old Testament and the New Testament. This was of the utmost importance to the likes of Luther and Calvin, who, in rejecting the dogma of the Catholic Church, had insisted on the Christian’s right and ob- ligation to access God directly. But communicating with God implied an understanding of the divine will, an understanding that had hitherto been provided by Rome. The rabbinic texts offered a substitute of sorts, a window into the earliest underpinnings of the Christian spirit.
Foraging through these texts, 17th-century politicalphilosophers cobbled together what they called the respublica Hebraeorum. The Hebrew republic, as anyone familiar with the story of the Israelites must know, was not, in fact, a republic but a kingdom. It was a place that God was said to have willed, a biblical template, and even though it didn’t resemble fifth-century Athens in any day-to-day sense, as Plato’s imaginary Republic did, it was believed to point the way toward self-government. At the heart of this template was a dual commitment—to “redistributive justice” and to religious plurality.
This led the Dutch scholar Peter Cunaeus in his 1617 De republica Hebraeorum to link the ancient Hebrew land laws with those of the Romans and ultimately to conclude that the redistribution of resources was divinely sanctioned. “This he does with no fanfare at all, as if it were the most natural and obvious analogy one could possibly draw,” Nelson says of Cunaeus, who relied on Maimonides’ reading of the Bible to make his case. “But he was the very first to draw it, and in doing so he knew full well that he was forcing a dramatic reconsideration of the republican inheritance.”
Implicit in Nelson’s characterization of the Hebrew republic and its core principles is that while it lacks many of the external features of the modern republic, it anticipates those things. A redistributive state dedicated to “social justice” and respect for all peoples may have been codified—institutionalized—only in the modern era, but its political-philosophical antecedents are to be found in the Holy Land of the ancient. And had it not been for those antecedents and the unearthing of them in the 17th century, Nelson is arguing, modernity would not be what it is.
Therein lies the difficulty with this book. It may be the case, as Nelson says, that the Hebrew republic of the Israelites embodies certain values that modern republics also value. But those values are merely necessary, not sufficient, for a modern republic. To argue that the Hebrew republic is a proto-republic, a nascent democracy sheathed in ancient garb, is to imply that all the necessary values of the modern republic were established or outlined in the Hebrew republic—or, at the very least, that none of the Hebrew republic’s firmly entrenched values undermined those yet-to-be-developed values that are of such importance to the modern republic.
This is a problematic notion. There is in fact at least one value that is critical to the modern republic that is at odds with the values of the Hebrew republic: liberalism. Today we regard free thought and expression as each individual’s natural right. Certainly this was not the case prior to Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Descartes, and the many writers, painters, sculptors, and sundry geniuses who, during the two centuries separating the Middle Ages from modernity, carved out of a magical ether the category of the personal. Support for individualism was not, to put it mildly, a feature of the Hebrew republic.
That 17th-century thinkers found divine support for republicanism in the Israelite kingdom, as opposed to any other religious polity, is understandable since the notion of individual responsibility toward God and the community is part of its foundation, and since the rabbinical discussions in the Talmud by definition reflect a world-historical respect for minority views. But this does not mean that the Davidic kingdom was not a kingdom. It was, and it was concerned not only with defending itself against external threats and providing for law and order at home but also with making men better. This additional responsibility imbued the kingdom with the power to limit all kinds of speech and thought. The modern democratic republic, by contrast, is not organized around the idea of improving the souls of the governed and therefore makes little, if any, effort to limit speech or thought in the name of morality.
What’s odd about all this is that the Hebrew republic of today should have alerted Nelson to the flaws in his argument. Israel, after all, reflects much of the tension between a religious kingdom and a democracy. The existing Jewish state has never been a Jewish kingdom, let alone a theocracy, but it has always had to pull off a balancing act between competing values. It has always had to be both a Jewish home, in which the parochial and religious sensibilities of the Jewish people are respected, and a modern republic, a place that respects individual rights. This duality has given rise to numerous fissures within the Jewish community and beyond. Issues that other modern republics do not face or have the leisure of sometimes side-stepping—military exemptions, political participation—must be dealt with head-on in Israel. All these questions underscore the chasm separating past and present rather than the continuity Nelson seeks to demonstrate in his bold, fascinating, but often unsatisfactory book.
