Jewish Political Theory Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The ways in which the Jewish people have thought and written about politics, divine authority and human power, and the dispensing of justice have been shaped by their unique historical experience. Over the course of two and a half thousand years, Jews have lived under a remarkable variety of political forms and practices, including loose tribal federation, monarchy and regional power, imperial client state, diasporic semiautonomous communities, voluntary religious associations, and modern democratic nation-states, and have struggled against as many.

Unlike the classical Western traditions, Jewish political theory is not primarily located in philosophical treatises, nor is it controlled by the fundamental category of the state and the question of how to construct the best regime. Jewish political discourse has tended to be occasional and situational, emerging from and attempting to deal with immediate political circumstances, always with reference to the Jewish religion. Because the political as such has rarely received systematic or independent theoretical treatment in Judaism, and because the Jews have endured a long period of statelessness and dispersion, some have questioned whether such a Jewish political tradition exists. Nevertheless, a sophisticated and nuanced intellectual engagement with the practical and theoretical problems of politics can be found in texts throughout Jewish history—embedded in the narratives, poetry, and laws of the Hebrew Bible; the discussions in the Talmud and other rabbinic literature; communal enactments, law codes, and responsa; biblical commentaries; and philosophical writings. In the seventeenth century, Christian political thinkers such as Petrus Cunaeus, James Harrington, and John Selden looked to the Bible and rabbinic writings to reconstruct the political history of the Jews as a model of a godly commonwealth. Recent interest in this tradition has yielded a number of important scholarly projects. There is growing recognition, moreover, of the extent to which these sources have had an impact on the development of political theory in the West, evidenced by recent establishment of the Hebraic Political Studies journal.

Peoplehood, Revelation, And Law

The Jewish political tradition is marked by its national, religious, and legal character, and the concepts that form the conceptual basis of this tradition—Jewish peoplehood, its covenant with God, and the law (Torah)—have remained constant up until the modern age. Jewish political discourse develops with reference to divine revelation, beginning the covenantal relationship with God, based on the acceptance of the sovereignty of God and His Torah. The Jews are therefore bound by special duties and obligations of the Torah, which aim at molding the people into “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6). The Torah may be seen as a religious political constitution of the Jewish community. Under the leadership of the rabbinic sages, the dominion of the law came to comprehend all aspects of human life: worship, personal status and family life, agriculture and commerce, civil and criminal matters, and social organization. This halakhah served to maintain the semiautonomous Jewish communities through the centuries of exile.

The political questions that these communities faced, practical and theoretical, were deliberated with reference to the divine law. Such discussions revolved around matters of immediate concern, such as the organization of the community, the form and extent of authority, taxation, communal welfare, judicial practice, and resort to coercive power. The issue of the legitimacy of and obligations to “foreign” political authority was dealt with under religious law as well, based on the Talmudic dictum of dina de-malkhuta dina (“the law of the kingdom is the law”).

Jewish thinkers also engaged in speculative issues, such as the nature of the covenant between God and Israel, the revelation of the Torah, the meaning of exile, the messianic expectations for the restoration of the Jewish state, war, and relations with non-Jewish populations.

Medieval Jewish Political Thought

In the medieval period, due to the growing authority of Islamic philosophy, a more theoretical interest in the political meaning of Judaism emerged, seen in such treatises as Saadia Gaon’s Book of Beliefs and Opinions, Judah Halevi’s Kuzari, and Joseph Albo’s Book of Principles. The most significant political theory was developed by twelfth-century philosopher and legal codifier Moses Maimonides. In The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides depicted the divine law (Torah) as the constitution of the ideal city and Moses as its prophet legislator. In The Book on Kings and Their Wars, the final treatise of his monumental codification of rabbinic law, Mishneh Torah, Maimonides detailed the character of Jewish kingship and the deeds of the messianic king. Even in these works, political concerns are fully integrated into the broader questions of Jewish belief and practice. Because Judaism did not make a distinction between the realm of politics and earthly life and the realm of religion and spiritual life, Jewish political discourse had no need to engage with the theoretical problem of the relationship between the sacerdotium and the regnum that directs so much Christian political thought in the West.

Modern Jewish Political Thought

Jewish political thought underwent significant modifications in the modern period. The centralization of authority and bureaucratization of political life, and the influence of liberal and Enlightenment political ideas, shifted the social and political situation of the Jewish communities in western and central Europe.The possibility of emancipation—the granting of civil and political rights—made the unity of legal, religious, and the national elements, which had characterized traditional Jewish political theory, difficult to maintain. Already in 1670, Jewish excommunicate Benedict (né Baruch) Spinoza had, in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, suggested the outlines of the Jewish predicament. Following Maimonides, Spinoza argued that the Jewish law was the constitution of the Israelite state, but he maintained that once this state had ceased to exist, the law itself was rendered obsolete. Spinoza’s critique of Judaism as an anachronistic political phenomenon significantly influenced Enlightenment critiques of Judaism as a “political” religion.

The dominant trend of Jewish political thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could be regarded as liberal. Jews advocating emancipation advanced new understandings of the tradition to defend the suitability of Judaism and facilitate the Jews’ entrance and adaptation into the modern world. This motive is clear in the initial attempt at a modern presentation of Judaism: Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, or, On Religious Power and Judaism (1783). Mendelssohn formulated a social contract theory that would secure the toleration of different religious societies and developed a conception of Judaism compatible with natural religion and the contractual state, which would permit Jews admittance into the civil society. Though the law had originally served both political and religious functions, after the destruction of the Israelite state, the law became purely religious. Modern Judaism would be reconfigured as a purely voluntary religious association, the performance of the law serving to secure knowledge of metaphysical religious truths, the community losing its power of coercion.

Subsequent liberal Jewish thinkers took a far more radical stance regarding the enduring authority of the law. Influenced by German idealist philosophy and historical critical research, thinkers such as Hermann Cohen, Abraham Geiger, and Ludwig Philippson rejected the centrality of the law and focused on the prophetic-ethical and universalist elements of the religious tradition. The liberals also denied the national character of Judaism and radically reinterpreted the messianic idea from the hope for the reestablishment of a Jewish state to that of a universal messianic age, in which the ethical teachings of Judaism would be manifest in all the nations. This would be promoted through the mission of Israel, in which the teaching of Judaism would indirectly become embodied in social institutions and in the constitutional state.

By the early twentieth century, this liberal theology increasingly came under assault by a post liberal, “existentialist” brand of religious thought and Zionism, whose proponents reasserted the centrality of the Jewish “nation” and its distinctive political destiny. The theological ferment of the early twentieth century produced diverse theological-political positions, notably the retrieval of a biblical anarchotheocratic tradition by Martin Buber, the apolitical interpretation of Judaism of Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, and the development of a mystical redemptive Zionism in the work of Rabbi Abraham I. Kook.

With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Jewish political thinkers were faced with a novel situation: a Jewish state that was not principally governed by Jewish law (though family law is an important exception). They have had to engage—and are still engaging—with the fresh problems of state sovereignty, the relationship of religious to secular political authority, the meaning of the enduring diaspora, and the connection of the halakhah to the coercive arm of the state.

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