A new book by Eric Nelson (”The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought”) explores the phenomenon of political Hebraism:
When John Milton sought in 1649 to justify the creation of an English Republic, he used the opinions in the Midrash to formulate what Nelson calls republican exclusivism, the notion that only kingless government is legitimate. Taken up and developed by other writers, including Algernon Sidney and James Harrington, republican exclusivism based on Jewish sources became a cornerstone of anti-monarchic polemic in the seventeenth century and enjoyed a brief but important revival in the era of the American Revolution.
This is a book that you absolutely have to read, says Shalem Center’s Yoram Hazony:
The retrieval of the story of the “Biblical Century” is a project that has been the work of dozens of scholars in recent years. One of the reasons my previous letters have alluded to a new opening to Judaism and to the Jewish sources at the universities is precisely the rapidly increasing excitement surrounding this project of reconstructing the story of the 17th century in light of the Jewish sources, which can now be felt among historians, philosophers, political theorists and Bible scholars around the world. It’s still a relatively small movement. But there’s no doubt that the study of early modern Hebraism is also gaining ground quickly in academia, and has the potential to transform the story of the West as we’ve known it.
John Selden’s monumental book De Iure Naturali Et Gentium: Juxta Disciplinam Ebraeorum (1640), an outstanding work of political hebraism, can be downloaded here.
Further readings:
- Lloyd Jones, Gareth (1983): The Discovery of Hebrew under Tudor England. Manchester.
- Nelson, Eric (2010). The Hebrew Republic: Jewish sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought. Cambridge, Mass.
- Schochet, Gordon/ Fania Oz-Salzberger/ Meirav Jones, eds. (2008): Political Hebraism. Judaic Sources in Early Modern Political Thought. Jerusalem, New York.
- Sutcliffe, Adam (2004): Judaism and Enlightenment. Cambridge.
