The Hebrew Republic in Sixteenth-Century Political Debate: the Struggle for Jurisdiction
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chapter 9 The Hebrew Republic in Sixteenth-Century Political Debate: The Struggle for Jurisdiction Guido Bartolucci “Moses was a leader; a labor leader; a leader of revolt; and a great one. And he was loyal to the people.”1 With these words the American journalist Lincoln Steffens began his political description of the episode of Exodus as a model for the Communist Revolution in Russia, in his book Moses in Red. The Revolt of Israel as a Typical Revolution published in 1926. For the first time in the twenti- eth century, the ancient history of the sons of Israel was used politically: after 1917, according to Steffens, all the old books and works had to be read under a new light, a red one, the colour of revolution. In his work Steffens reinterprets the story of the Hebrews in the desert and the events of their leader as an important revolutionary moment, in which each step of the story of Exodus’ has a correspondence with what had happened in Russia.2 Steffens’ book has played a key role in the development of political interpretation of the Bible in the twentieth century, laying the foundation for the work of recent authors such as Michael Walzer and Aaron Wildavsky. Yet the idea that the political institutions of the Jews could be interpreted according to political categories and absorbed into classical political thought was far from new. Scholarly interest in Hebrew political institutions seems to have originated in the second part of the sixteenth century, but thus far there is little clarity about the cultural background to this phenomenon and its further develop- ment.3 In the interpretation of Frank Manuel, “before the seventeenth century 1 Lincoln Steffens, Moses in Red. The Revolt of Israel as a Typical Revolution (Philadelphia, 1926), 51. 2 For an interpretation of Steffens’ work see Melanie J. Wright, Moses in America. The Cultural Uses of Biblical Narrative, (Oxford, 2003), 13–42. For the influence of his book see Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York, 1985); Aaron Wildavsky, Moses as a Political Leader (Jerusalem and New York, 2005). 3 The recent scholarship includes François Laplanche, “L’érudition chrétienne aux xvie et xviie siècles et l’État des Hébreux,” in Groupe de Recherches Spinoziste, L’Écriture Sainte au temps de Spinoza e dans le système spinoziste (Paris, 1992), 133–147; C.R. Ligota, “Histoire à fondement théologique: la République des Hébreux,” in L’Écriture Sainte, 149–167; Bernard Roussel, “Connaissance et interprétation du Judaisme antique: des biblistes chrétien de la © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/978900435�387_0�� <UN> The Hebrew Republic in Sixteenth-Century Political Debate 215 there was great reluctance to turn the narrative parts of the Old Testament into a consecutive secular story or to analyze the institutions of the patriarchal age, the period of Moses’ rule or the kingships of the first and second Common- wealths, as if they were states with histories similar to those of other nations.”4 Manuel argues that the conceptual instrumentation that authors subsequent- ly applied to the history of the Hebrews was based on the dominant interpre- tations of Greek and Roman history. In the seventeenth century, this develop- ment resulted in the eventual transformation of the narrative sections of the Old Testament into a story of secular and historical continuity, in which Jewish political structures followed a course similar to that of Greece and Rome. In this context, many scholars assume that the first treatises on the Hebrew Republic, in particular De politia iudaica by Corneille Bertram (1574), De seconde moitié du xvie siècle,” in La république des lettres et l’histoire du Judaisme antique, xvie–xviiie siècles, ed. Chantal Grell and François Laplanche (Paris, 1992), 21–50; Petrus Cu- naeus, De republica Hebraeorum, ed. Lea Campos Boralevi, (Florence, 1996), i-lv; Lea Cam- pos Boralevi, “Per una storia della Respublica Hebraeorum come modello politico,” in Dalle “repubbliche elzeviriane” alle ideologie del ‘900, ed. Vittor Ivo Comparato and Eluggero Pii (Florence, 1997), 17–33; Vittorio Conti, Consociatio Civitatum: Le repubbliche nei testi elzeviri- ani (1625–1649), (Florence, 1997); Jonathan Ziskind, “Cornelius Bertram and Carlo Sigonio: Christian Hebraism’s first Political Scientists,” in Journal of Ecumenical Studies 37 (2000): 381–400; Lea Campos Boralevi and Diego Quaglioni, ed., Politeia Biblica, in Il Pensiero Po- litico 35, 3 (2002); Y. Deutsch, “‘A View of the Jewish Religion.’ Conceptions of Jewish Practice and Ritual in Early Modern Europe,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 3 (2001): 273–295; Fania Oz-Satzberger, “The Jewish Roots of Western Freedom,” Azure. Ideas for the Jewish Nation, 13 (2002): 88–132; Lea Campos Boralevi, “Classical Foundation Myths of European Republican- ism: The Jewish Commonwealth,” in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 2002), 1: 247–261; Kalman Neuman, “Political Hebraism and the Early Modern ‘Respublica Hebraeorum’: On Defining the Field,” Hebraic Political Studies 1.1 (2005): 57–70; Guido Bartolucci, La repubblica ebraica di Carlo Sigonio. Modelli politici dell’età moderna (Florence, 2007); Guido Bartolucci, “Carlo Sigonio and the Respublica Hebraeorum: A Re-evaluation,” Hebraic Political Studies 3 (2008): 19–59; Gordon Schochet, Fania Oz-Salzberger and Meirav Jones, eds., Political Hebraism. Judaic Sources in Early Modern Political Thought (Jerusalem and New York, 2008); Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Re- public. Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought, (Cambridge, ma, 2010). Along with this literature the debate on the existence of a Jewish political thought, interpreted through the categories of the classical tradition must be taken into account. On this issue Michael Walzer’s works are fundamental: Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow. Poli- tics in the Hebrew Bible (New Haven and London, 2012); Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorber- baum and Noam J. Zohar, eds., The Jewish Political Tradition, 2 vols. (New Haven and London, 2000–2003). For a different position see Daniel J. Elazar, ed., Kinship and Consent. The Jewish Political Tradition and its Contemporary Uses (New Brunswick and London, 1997). 4 Frank E. Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, 1992), 118. <UN>.