Julie E. Cooper Democracy and Theocracy in Jewish Political Thought: from Baruch Spinoza to Michael Walzer [DO NOT Cite Or Circulate!!]

Julie E. Cooper Democracy and Theocracy in Jewish Political Thought: From Baruch Spinoza to Michael Walzer [DO NOT cite or circulate!!] In recent years, theocracy has come to the fore as a live question for political and theoretical debate. To their surprise and, in most cases, chagrin, contemporary democratic theorists are now confronted with professed theocrats, to whose arguments for divine jurisdiction they must respond. In most critical conversations, democracy and theocracy are considered mutually exclusive. Debates about the prospects for Islamic democracy pit critics who dismiss Islam as inherently theocratic against defenders who argue that Islamic thought contains resources for indigenous forms of democracy. Scholars who alert readers to the persistent challenge of political theology often take their bearings from Carl Schmitt, whose insistence on absolutes is cast as a theocratic rejoinder to liberal democracy. At a moment when scholars are increasingly determined to refashion secularism – to accommodate a broader spectrum of religious practice and commitment – theocracy remains beyond the pale of scholarly consideration, dismissed as a grave threat to democracy. The relationship of theocracy to democracy is also a central preoccupation of an emerging scholarly field – the study of Jewish political thought. The publication, in 2000, of the first installment of The Jewish Political Tradition (a projected four volume anthology) arguably marks the debut of Jewish political thought as an academic field.1 1 Other major works in the field include the Hebraic Political Studies journal (2005- 2009); Novak 2000, 2005; and Biale, 1986. Although his work has been overshadowed 2 Edited by Michael Walzer and colleagues from the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, these volumes pair primary texts (from the Bible, midrash, rabbinics, medieval philosophy, and modern political theory) with contemporary commentary. In their selection of primary texts, the editors reconstruct “the political arguments that have gone on for more than three millennia” of Jewish history, and in their inclusion of critical commentary, they invite contemporary readers “to join the arguments that have characterized the tradition and to carry them forward” (Walzer 2000, xiv, xxiv). Documenting a continuous and contentious tradition of Jewish political argument, these volumes seek to establish the canon for a new scholarly field. As set by Walzer and his colleagues, the field’s research agenda includes the demonstration that theocracy does not exhaust Jewish political discourse. With their selections from rabbinic texts, the editors seek to rebut charges that “the Jewish religion and the existence” of a democratic state “are antithetical to each other by their very essence” (Weiler 1988, xiii). On the editors’ interpretation, the Jewish political tradition is not inherently theocratic. Indeed, the editors uncover sources to support the contention that a state can be authentically Jewish, even if it is not ruled by Jewish law (halachah).2 Showcasing Jewish thinkers who embrace “the secularization of politics, affirming human, as opposed to divine, political agency,” the field’s architects provide ammunition by the volumes that Walzer has edited, Daniel Elazar was the first contemporary scholar to introduce the concept of a Jewish political tradition. See Elazar, 1997. 2 Israeli law incorporates elements from halachah, granting the state rabbinate jurisdiction over matters of personal status (marriage, divorce, burial, conversion) for the state’s Jewish citizens. 3 against those who would expand halachah’s jurisdiction in the state of Israel (Lorberbaum 2000, 2; see also 14, 151, 156). That theocracy is an undemocratic regime – a regime best combatted with alternative Jewish sources, which are fortunately copious – is an animating conviction of the project that Walzer and his colleagues have undertaken. Yet Walzer and his colleagues do not only task scholars of Jewish political thought with rebutting claims that Judaism is inherently theocratic and, consequently, inimical to democracy. As critics of theocracy, Walzer and his colleagues must also discredit the argument – counter-intuitive for most contemporary readers – that theocracy is a radically democratic, egalitarian regime. The campaign against theocracy takes a distinctive form for scholars of Jewish political thought. In addition to defending democracy against clerical rule, they must resist what Walzer identifies as a characteristically Jewish temptation: the temptation to embrace theocracy as an antidote to all forms of hierarchy and coercion. For participants in The Jewish Political Tradition project, exposing the “anarchist” tendencies of theocracy’s democratic defenders is as urgent as disarming democracy’s theocratic critics (see Walzer 2000, 128-132). The controversy surrounding theocracy has long taken this form in traditions of modern Jewish thought. As we will see, Baruch Spinoza is the first Jewish thinker to argue that theocracy is both a Jewish political signature and a democratic regime.3 3 In the twentieth century, the equation of democracy and theocracy is most closely associated with Martin Buber, who credits the ancient Israelites with “the rejection of political forms of rulership which impair a person’s immediate relation to God” (Buber 1990, 25). Buber is an express target of Walzer, Lorberbaum, and their colleagues in The Jewish Political Tradition and related works. An engagement with Buber’s admiring 4 Spinoza is also the first modern political theorist to endorse democracy, whose integrity he defends against the incursions of clerical rule. Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise is a canonical source for the worry that independent clerical authority subverts democracy, as well as for the hope that establishing a direct political relationship with God exempts one from hierarchy and subordination. Using a narrative about Jewish political history to articulate a theory of state sovereignty, Spinoza vacillates between appreciation for the Hebrews’ idiosyncratic political achievements and dismay at their legacy for modern Jewish politics. In this essay, I return to Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise in an effort to understand why the critique of theocracy takes this distinctive form in Jewish traditions, and what is at stake in making theocracy’s repudiation a central tenet of the study of Jewish political thought. I return to Spinoza because he establishes the conceptual framework that Walzer and his colleagues inhabit, a framework in which state sovereignty provides the default configuration for political community. Writing as a proponent of absolute sovereignty at the moment of the state’s ascendance, Spinoza understood that the nation-state system would require radical transformations in the Jews’ political posture, and that Jewish political claims would challenge norms of state sovereignty. In a framework that makes sovereignty the defining horizon of the political, rabbinic Judaism’s bonds of obligation do not register as political. To join the ranks of portrait of the biblical theocracy as a voluntary community, free from hierarchy and coercion, is beyond the scope of this essay. Here, I do the ground clearing work necessary to establish Buber’s thought as a alternative trajectory for the study of Jewish political thought. 5 the political, Jews must either embrace the nation-state system – through individual citizenship in democratic republics or the establishment of a Jewish state – or they must resist norms of state sovereignty. In the story that Spinoza tells about Jewish political history, relaxing the strictures of unified sovereignty is precisely what theocracy allows. When Spinoza makes theocracy the vehicle for this relaxation, he traces Jewish ambivalence regarding sovereignty to foundational theological convictions. Even before the destruction of the second temple, in 70 C.E., consigned the Jews to statelessness and dispersion, Spinoza argues, they exhibited idiosyncratic attitudes toward political institutions that Spinoza hopes to make standard. As Spinoza reveals, sovereignty’s status as the defining horizon of the political is what is really at stake in Jewish debates about theocracy. In the framework that Spinoza establishes, the critique of theocracy serves not only to keep ambitious clerics in place, but also to counter Jewish resistance to norms of state sovereignty. Against interpretations that reduce Spinoza’s motives for relating Hebrew political history to Erastian convictions, I contend that, with the introduction of theocracy as a distinctive regime type, Spinoza exposes the tension between Jewish political aspirations and norms of absolute sovereignty. To account for Hebraic political success, in biblical times, Spinoza must concede that theocratic communities can persist in the absence of an absolute sovereign. Indeed, Spinoza expresses qualified admiration for a regime (theocracy) in which theological delusions support an imperfect sovereign. Yet Spinoza ultimately recoils from the flexible attitude toward sovereignty required to account for Hebraic political success, because this attitude also accounts for what Spinoza considers rabbinic Judaism’s abject political failure (specifically, its insistence 6 that legal obligation outlasts and transcends state borders). As Spinoza stages the Jews’ encounter with the state, in the Theologico-Political Treatise, the confrontation ends with the induction of the Jews into the state system, rather

Load more