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Theocracy, Liberalism, and Modern Judaism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2009
Abstract
The paper examines the efforts of several Jewish thinkers to cope with the discrepancy between the inherently theocratic principles of their religion and the modern, liberal ideas with which they wished to bring Judaism into harmony. It focuses first on Moses Mendelssohn's attempt at the end of the eighteenth century to provide a rationale for the dissolution of Judaism's coercive, collectivist dimension and to render the Jewish religion fully compatible, in practice, with liberalism. The next major focus is the recent work of David Novak, who has sought in different ways to show how one can proceed from traditional Jewish premises to the endorsement of nonliberal political arrangements that nonetheless preserve the best of liberalism's achievements. The final focus is on the Israeli religious thinker Isaiah Leibowitz's widely celebrated but in principle merely provisional relinquishment of the theocratic idea.
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References
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4 See Walzer, Michael, Lorberbaum, Menachem, and Zohar, Noam. J., eds., The Jewish Political Tradition, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 190, for the text from “Against Apion.” See also Clifford Orwin's commentary on this passage on the following page: “The very term ‘theocracy’ (Greek theokratia), which Josephus either devised himself or borrowed from an unknown source (2:165), represents an attempt to subsume the Jewish tradition under a non-Jewish category.”
5 See Hershman, Abraham, trans., “The Code of Maimonides,” The Book of Judges, book 14, Yale Judaica Series, vol. 3, The Code of Maimonides, Book XIV, The Book of Judges, trans. Hershman, Abraham (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949)Google Scholar.
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11 Mendelssohn, Moses, Gesammelte Schriften Jubiläumsausgabe (Berlin and Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1972)Google Scholar, 8:18.
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24 Ibid., 232, note to 130, ll. 24–27.
25 Yovel, Yirmiyahu, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, 198, n. 11. Yovel proceeds to argue that Mendelssohn's words on this subject in Jerusalem “were intended for the non-Jewish world and are filled with apologetic imprecision.”
26 See Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, 517. See also my article “Kant's View of Mendelssohn,” in Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism, ed. Alfred Ivry, Allan Arkush, and Elliot Wolfson (London: Harwood Press, 1998), 413–22, where I attempt to show the double-edged character of Kant's praise.
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30 Ibid., 133.
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35 Ibid., 30.
36 Ibid., 133.
37 I have done so in my article “Conservative Political Theology and the Freedom of Religion,” Polity 37 (January 2005): 82–107.
38 Novak, Covenantal Rights, 131–32.
39 Ibid., 204–205.
40 Ibid., 206.
41 Ibid., 209.
42 Ibid., 217.
43 Ibid., 158.
44 Ibid., 94.
45 The “linchpin” of his argument, by his own account, is the well-known Talmudic principle of “the law of the kingdom is the law,” or, as he quite aptly updates it, “the law of the state is law” (The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005], 120). Novak presents an extensive and learned account of the origins and development of this principle, stretching from ancient Babylonia to late medieval Spain. In diverse locales, he explains, it supplied the justification for a kind of social contract between the Jews and their hosts. It recognized a sphere in which Gentile law is authoritative provided “a legitimate authorization of limited secularity for Jews” (121), while it also authorized the Jews' maintenance of “a legitimate secondary autonomy” within a given non-Jewish state (123). All in all, this principle justifies the participation of the Jews, as a covenanted community, in a larger, secular polity based on a social contract drawn up between themselves and other religious communities. It also provides, in turn, an example that these gentile communities can emulate in their efforts to understand their own relationship to the state in which they live.
Yet Novak does not really need the principle of “the law of the state is law” in order to explain how a Jewish community ought best to live within the context of a mostly non-Jewish state. Such a notion would already follow from his conception of religious communities as having ontological and historical priority over any secular states to which they need, nevertheless, to accommodate themselves. And it is really his argument to this effect, not his recourse to Talmudic precedent, that constitutes the core of The Jewish Social Contract.
46 Ibid., The Jewish Social Contract, 19.
47 Ibid., 198–99.
48 Ibid., 24.
49 Ibid., 25.
50 Ibid., 199.
51 Ibid., 178.
52 Ibid., 183.
53 Ibid., 187. I have expressed my views on these matters in my book Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 167–292.
54 For a fuller treatment of Novak's The Jewish Social Contract, see my review essay, “Drawing up The Jewish Social Contract,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 255–71.
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57 See Zvi Zameret, “Judaism in Israel: Ben-Gurion's Private Beliefs and Public Policy,” Israel Studies 4, no. 2 (1999): 64–89.
58 For a wide-ranging and reasonably current discussion of these matters, see David, Joseph E., ed., The State of Israel: Between Judaism and Democracy: A Compendium of Interviews and Articles (Jerusalem: Ahva Cooperative Printing Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
59 I cannot refrain, however, from making special mention of the Palestinian-born American rabbi Hayyim Hirschensohn, a religious Zionist thinker who spent the last three decades of his life (1904–1935) in New Jersey. Deeply impressed by what he encountered in America, he developed a Jewish political teaching that stressed the strengths of democracy and highlighted its full compatibility with traditional Judaism. But he remained cognizant of the profound differences between Western democracy and the kind of democracy, entwined with Jewish law, that he wished to see take shape in the future Jewish state. He never really reconciled, however, the tension between the constraints of Jewish law and the right to religious freedom. See Zohar, David, Mehuyavut Yehudit be-olam moderni: HaRav Hayyim Hirschensohn veyachaso el ha-moderna (Ramat Gan: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2003)Google Scholar, especially 186–89.
60 Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 176Google Scholar.
61 Ibid., 177.
62 Goldman, Eliezer, “Yeshayahu Leibowitz: Beyn Hagut Datit Le-vikoret Hevratit,” in Yahadut Pnim va-Hutz, ed. Sagi, Avi, Schwartz, Dudi, and Stern, Yedidiah (Jerusalem: Magnes Press: 1999), 300Google Scholar.
63 Ibid., 176. Compare with the original in Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Yahadut, Am Yehudi, u-Medinat Yisrael (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1975), 157.
64 Ibid., 154.
65 I have not dealt here at all with the exceptions to this rule, the men on the theocratic fringes of the contemporary Israeli right, who, like Kahane, have nothing but contempt for liberal democracy. On this subject see Inbari, Motti, Fundamentalism Yehudi ve-har ha-bayit (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2008)Google Scholar.