The Hebrew Republic : Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought

This book by Eric Nelson, Professor of Government at Harvard University, is a significant contribution to the current debate on the use of Jewish sources in early modern political thought, particularly in the republican currents of the 17th century. According to Nelson, while Renaissance humanists concentrated on the pagan inheritance of Greek and Roman antiquity, “in the seventeenth century, in the full fervor of the Reformation, ...political theology reentered the mainstream of European intellectual life. The Protestant summons to return to the Biblical text brought with it incessant appeals to God’s constitutional preferences as embodied in Scripture.... During this period, Christians began to regard the Hebrew Bible as a political constitution, designed by God himself for the children of Israel. They also came to see the full array of newly available rabbinical texts as authoritative guides to the institutions and practices of this perfect republic” (pp. 2-3). Nelson thus examines the origins of some central ideas of modern political thought, generated “not as a by-product of advancing secularization, but rather out of the deeply theologized context of the Biblical century” (p. 3). In fact, in the 16th and 17th centuries the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and several rabbinic writings were printed and made available in their original language to Christian scholars. Moreover, Hebrew masterpieces such as the Zohar, the Targums, numerous Midrashic commentaries, several Talmudic treatises, and the works of Maimonides and other major Jewish thinkers were translated into Latin. The Hebrew revival hence contributed to transforming “European literature and criticism, medicine and science, theology and ecclesiology, and philosophy and law” (p. 16). However, Nelson’s book “is concerned with one aspect of the phenomenon in particular: its intersection with political thought” (p. 16).