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THE JEWISH SOCIAL CONTRACT NEW FORUM BOOKS Robert P THE JEWISH SOCIAL CONTRACT NEW FORUM BOOKS Robert P. George, Series Editor A list of titles in the series appears at the back of the book THE JEWISH SOCIAL CONTRACT AN ESSAY IN POLITICAL THEOLOGY David Novak PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 2005 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Novak, David, 1941– The Jewish social contract: an essay in political theology / David Novak. p. cm.—(New forum books) Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Formulating the Jewish social contract—The covenant— The covenant reaffirmed—The law of the state—Kingship and secu- larity—Modern secularity—The social contract and Jewish-Christian relations—The Jewish social contract in secular public policy. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12210-6 (cl : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-691-12210-5 (cl : alk. paper) 1. Judaism and state. 2. Social contract—Religious aspects—Judaism. 3. Judaism and politics. 4. Democracy—Religious aspects—Judaism. 5. Covenants—Religious aspects—Judaism. 6. Secularism—Political aspects. I. Title II. Series. BM538.S7.N68 2005 296.3′82—dc22 2005048695 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Printed on acid-free paper.∞ pup.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10987654321 To S. E., J. D., E. F., A. F., and A. T. “From my friends I have learned more...” —Babylonian Talmud: Taanit 7a This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Abbreviations ix Preface xi Chapter One Formulating the Jewish Social Contract 1 The Democratic Contract 1 The Political Value of the Social Contract 7 A Contract between Minorities 10 Community and Society 12 Claims for Cultural Autonomy 21 Chapter Two The Covenant 30 Covenant and Social Contract 30 The Noahide Covenant 34 Divine Interest in the Covenant 36 Interhuman Covenants 40 The Covenant between God and Israel 47 Covenants between Jews 53 Covenants between Jews and Gentiles 56 Contracts: Social and Private 59 Chapter Three The Covenant Reaffirmed 65 Covenantal Necessity 65 The Voluntary Covenant 70 Covenantal Autonomy 77 Some Social Contracts within Judaism 81 Chapter Four The Law of the State 91 Political Subordination 91 The Law of the Gentiles 100 Palestine and Babylonia 103 Samuel’s Principle 114 Secularity and Secularism 120 viii CONTENTS Chapter Five Kingship and Secularity 124 Royal Law 124 Royal Justice 132 Ibn Adret’s Halakhic Answer 142 Gerondi’s Theological Answer 147 Abravanel’s Philosophical Answer 150 Chapter Six Modern Secularity 157 The Dawn of Modernity 157 Baruch Spinoza: Covenant as Social Contract 158 Moses Mendelssohn: Judaism as a Religious Denomination 164 Religious Pluralism in a Secular State 169 Traditional Judaism Continued in the Secular State 173 Mendelssohn’s Problematic Legacy for Judaism 178 Chapter Seven The Social Contract and Jewish-Christian Relations 188 The New Jewish-Christian Situation 188 Political Theology 195 Beyond Liberalism and Conservatism 201 The Question of Trust 205 Jews, Christians, Atheists, and Secularists 212 Chapter Eight The Jewish Social Contract in Secular Public Policy 218 Jews, Judaism, and Public Policy 218 Criteria for Jewish Public Policy 223 Jewish Suspicions of General Morality 229 The Unavoidability of General Morality 230 The Political Argument for the Social Contract 235 Jewish Self-Interest and Political Alliances 237 Bibliography 239 Index 251 Abbreviations B. Babylonian Talmud (Bavli) M. Mishnah MT Mishneh Torah (Maimonides) R. Rabbi or Rav T. Tosefta Tos. Tosafot Y. Palestinian Talmud (Yerushalmi) This page intentionally left blank Preface This book has been written as a particular reply to a more general ques- tion. The more general question is: How can anyone participate actively and intelligently in a democratic polity in good faith? But none of us is merely “anyone.” Each of us comes to actively and intelligently partici- pate in his or her democratic polity out of some prior particular identity. To paraphrase the title of Thomas Nagel’s well-known 1986 book, there is no view from nowhere. So the question is more accurately formulated as: How can I participate in my democratic polity in good faith? This question is more likely to be asked by citizens in democratic polities like the United States and Canada that can literally date their founding in an agreement among immigrants coming from somewhere else, both histori- cally and ontologically (that is, one’s identity in the cosmos itself). And each citizen, either at the time of his or her naturalization or at the time he or she reaches adulthood, explicitly or implicitly returns to the found- ing of the polity itself, an event to which no one comes as a blank slate. All of us are immigrants with much cultural baggage. A major assumption of this book is that this founding and refounding of a democratic polity is best conceptualized through the idea of the social contract. But surely, a contract of any kind cannot be cogently initiated and maintained except by persons who know wherefrom they originally come to the contract and for what purpose beyond the contract itself they have come to it and remain within it. In this book I argue that a demo- cratic polity is neither one’s original nor ultimate destination in the world, and that those who think it is, originally or ultimately, inevitably come to deprive their democratic polity of the very limitations that essen- tially make it the democracy it is meant to be. The fallacy of originality is what “nativists” or racists usually entertain in their democratic politics; the fallacy of ultimacy is what utopians or “idealists” (in the pejorative sense of the term) usually entertain in their democratic politics. Hence no one is merely an “American” or a “Canadian,” even members of aborigi- nal peoples who have to discover their identity in a historical and ontolog- ical reality prior to the polity set up by those who have conquered them. So aboriginal peoples, too, have to regard themselves as immigrants in the political if not the geographic sense (although archaeological investi- gation is showing more and more that even they were once immigrants from elsewhere). In that sense we are all not only immigrants but minori- ties as well. xii PREFACE It is important to note that the question with which this book deals is not one that a democratic polity itself normally asks or should ask of its citizens. Normally all the polity asks is that its citizens freely subject them- selves to the authority of its laws. As such, any violation of these laws is taken to be a violation of an authoritative system of government every citizen has taken upon him- or herself autonomously. A democracy, as Plato noted, does not hold its citizens prisoners (Crito, 51D). Only when it is suspected that a person’s prior religious or cultural commitments might conflict with the laws of the polity is a more specific commitment to the legal system of the polity called for (think of the more scrupulous investiga- tion of would-be citizens who come from cultures that practice polygamy, for example). So instead, the particular question is not one that is officially asked by the government, but one that is asked by citizens in the broader arena known as civil society, where citizens ought to be continually debat- ing just what the character of their polity is to be. Here the question is both personal and political. It is personal in the sense of being a question of: Why am I here? It is political in the sense of being a question of: What should we be doing as a society? If there is too much disparity between the answers to these questions, then the individual has to be concerned with whether he or she truly belongs here, and one’s fellow citizens have to be concerned whether he or she is only using the society for special interests that are inimical to the common good of their society. Books that deal with the normative quest for ideas make greater claims upon their readers than do books that only offer information about facts. Therefore, it seems, an author of a book like this one ought to identify himself, not in the sense of providing an autobiography (though there is a bit of that in chapter 8), but simply to state the basic question of the book in the first person. Claims by anonymous persons can be ignored in a way that claims of situated questioners cannot in truly public discourse. (Even God had to identify himself to the Israelites before Moses could cogently make God’s claims upon them, as we see in Exodus 3:13–15.) In this way his readers can either identify with the questioner, or they can see close analogies (understood as more than one’s partisan or profes- sional affiliations within any polity) that they can appropriate in dealing with their own personal-political situation, or they can even see the au- thor’s situation as one that threatens their own. For this last group of readers, this book presents a point of view they need to know more about if only to intelligently oppose it. As such, along the lines of this demarca- tion, I am writing for Jewish readers who might identify with my question, for Christian (and perhaps Muslim) readers who might see themselves asking a similar question, and for atheistic readers who might regard the question itself as too threatening to be ignored. This book, then, addresses PREFACE xiii diverse readers who are members of democratic polities, and even readers who do not live in a democratic polity but would like to.
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