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Christian Images of the Jewish State Ofri Ilany Christian Images of the JewishState The Hebrew Republic as aPolitical Model in the German Protestant Enlightenment The past two decades have witnessed aburgeoning interest in political Hebra- ism, namely,Christian, and especiallyProtestant,scholarship on the political model of the Old Testament.¹ While Greek democracyand the Roman Republic have long been considered the main sources for modern political thought, recent research has highlighted the crucial role that “the Hebrew republic” playedin European thinking. This inquiry has awarded agreat deal of attention to philo- sophical and political writingsdealing with the alleged Hebrew constitution and state as they are portrayed in the Hebrew Bible. Thebulk of these studies have treated earlymodern Hebraist textsbyDutch, English, and American writers. In this article, Ipresent the Hebrew state as it appears in the works of several writers of the German Protestant Enlightenment,first and foremost among them the renownedBible scholarJohannDavid Michaelis (1717– 1791). In what follows, Iidentify the political themes and ideological contrasts in these descrip- tions of the Hebrew regime, afterwhich Idemonstrate their relation to the mid- to-lateeighteenth-century German-European political agenda. Writingsonthe Hebrew republic [respublica Hebraeorum]drew on an an- cient tradition, inaugurated with Josephus’sreferenceto“Moses’ politeia” al- readyinthe first century CE and continuingwith Renaissance and Baroque political philosophy. The rise of German Enlightenment historical criticism, however,refashioned the political portrait of the Hebrew state, imbuing it with additional hues. Unlikeearlier depictions, which tendedtoabstract the He- brew regime into apolitical-philosophicalmodel, Michaelis and his students foregrounded the historical dynamics of the Hebrew state’scoming-into-being, focusing on relations between regime, society,and culture. See, especially, Stephen G. Burnett,Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era(1500 –1660): Authors,Books, and the TransmissionofJewish Learning(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012); Alli- son Coudert and JeffreyS.Shoulson, eds., Hebraica Veritas?: Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in EarlyModern Europe (Philadelphia, PA:University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Christoph Bultmann and Lutz Danneberg, eds., Hebraistik – Hermeneutik – Homiletik: Die “Phi- lologia Sacra” im frühneuzeitlichen Bibelstudium (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2011). OpenAccess. ©2020 Aue-Ben-David et al., published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution 4.0 International. https:// doi.org/10.1515/9783110664713-009 120 Ofri Ilany Hebraism and the Protestant Tradition Manyforms of collective identity that developed in the Christian world took in- spiration from the Hebrew model – apolitical phenomenon that Hans Kohn has termed Hebraic nationalism.² Adrian Hastingshas suggested that the Bible, by supplying an earlyand influential model of the divinechosenness of aparticular people, was “amirror allowing the imagination and creation of Christian na- tions.”³ Politicaluse of the Old Testament was expressed as earlyasthe Middle Ages in Ethiopia,Byzantium and the Frankish kingdoms, among manyother re- gions. It was in Protestant Christianity, however,that the biblical idea of divine chosenness became especiallydominant. Martin Luther’s(1483 – 1546)relation to political ideas in the Bible contained several fundamental features that influenced the development of later German Hebraism. Unlikecontemporary humanists such as Erasmus (ca. 1466–1536), Lu- ther granted real significance to the Old Testament,particularlythe Psalms and the Prophets, as well as – albeit to alesser extent – the Mosaic law.⁴ Luther also went further than Catholic theologians in ridding Christianity of the element of the “law,” as embodied in Moses, in favorof“revelation,” as embodied in Jesus. Diverging from radical reformers who soughttoreinstateMosaic law, Luther in- sisted thatthese laws pertain to the Jews alone, unless they accord with natural law. ForLuther,Jewish lawhad no religious or political validity:while Christian rulers should govern “accordingtoMoses’ example,” they certainlywerenot be- holden to it. Accordingly, Luther left no real space for political Hebraism, the political use of the idea of the Hebrew state. In his view,the kingdom of the Jews had been supplantedbyJesus’ universal kingdom of heaven, and the prophetic promise of areturn to Zion had likewise lost its earthlyvalidity.Luther reinterpreted al- legoricallyand in relation to the Christian gospel geographical terms found in Psalmsand the Prophets such as ‘Zion.’ The Jews, then,weremistaken in their desire to reinstate theirkingdom of old rather than to aspire to the new kingdom Jesus gave to the world.⁵ Nevertheless, during Luther’slifetime and Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: AStudyinits Origins and Background (New York, NY: Macmillan,1944), 41– 7. Adrian Hastings,The Construction of Nationhood:Ethnicity,Religion, and Nationalism (Cam- bridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 18. See, for example, Siegfried Raeder, “The Exegetical and Hermeneutical Work of Martin Lu- ther,” in Hebrew Bible /Old Testament: The History of ItsInterpretation – fromthe Renaissance to the Enlightenment,ed. Magne Saebø (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht,2008): 363–406. Ibid., 391. Christian Images of the JewishState 121 even more so after his death, German Protestant preachers began attributingbib- lical significations to local events as well as interpreting the Bible through con- temporary political entities. PoliticalTheoryand the Hebrew Model As previouslymentioned, discussions of the “Hebrew republic” wererooted in an ancient tradition that goes back to Josephus’sreference to “Moses’ politeia” in his Against Apion.⁶ Beginning in the Renaissance,and especiallyfollowing the Reformation, some of Europe’smost influential political thinkers,including the seventeenth-century philosophersThomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Baruch Spi- noza (1632–1677), and John Locke(1632–1704), discussed the Hebrew regime. Several jurists even devoted whole bookstosingingits praises. Both Hugo Gro- tius (1583–1645), in his De republica emendada (1599) and Petrus Cunaeus (1586–1638), in his De Republica Hebraeorum (1617)promotedwhat they termed “the Hebrew theocracy” as an ideallytemperate regime: not democratic, oli- garchical, or monarchical.⁷ The historian Frank Manuelhas claimedthat the corpus of Hebrew republic literatureinthe seventeenth century was marked by asecularizationofthe discourse on the Hebrew constitution. According to Manuel, duringthe Renais- sance and the Baroque period, forms of humanist readingthat had originated in Greek and Roman Classical Antiquity percolated into arealm previouslyre- served for theologians. He further argued that,since the Renaissance,scholars have turned the Old Testament into aconsecutive secular story.The political vo- cabulary of Aristotle’s Politics,inthis line of thinking, was the seedbed for con- ceptualizations of the Hebrews’ political history.⁸ Recent research, however,has undermined Manuel’ssecularization model. Eric Nelson, for example, has claim- ed that,quitetothe contrary,seventeenth-century Protestant-European political Josephus,Against Apion, trans. John Barclay(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 263; Hubert Cancik, “Theokratie und Priesterherrschaft:Die mosaische Verfassung bei Flavius Josephus, c. Apionem 2, 157–98,” in Religionstheorie und Politische Theologie, ed. JacobTaubes, vol. 3: Theokratie (Munich and Paderborn: Fink, 1987): 65– 77. See Guido Bartolucci, “The InfluenceofCarlo Sigonio’s ‘De Republica Hebraeorum’ on Hugo Grotius’‘De Republica Emendanda,’” Hebraic Political Studies 2(2007): 193–210. Frank E. Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism throughChristian Eyes (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 192),118–120. And see also Kalman Neuman, “Political Hebraism and the Early Modern ‘Respublica Hebraeorum’:OnDefiningthe Field,” Hebraic Political Studies 1(2005): 57–70. 122 Ofri Ilany discourse underwent aprocess of sacralization and theologization.⁹ In Nelson’s view,the Reformation’sreligious zeal brought theologyinto the mainstream of political thought.Accordingly, the Bible became increasingly important as an au- thoritative sourceofthe divine constitution. ForNelson, the biblical model of the Hebrew republic influenced several key aspects of seventeenth-century political theory,not least among them the loss of the legitimacy of the monarchic regime and the promotion of the idea of agrarian reform for the redistribution of wealth.¹⁰ Nelson went so far as to suggest that seventeenth-century political thinkers celebrated the Hebrew regime’stheocratic aspect.¹¹ It seems to me that readingsofthe Hebrew Bible facilitated the development of the modern political vocabulary.Political conceptslike ‘republicanism,’‘the- ocracy,’‘monarchy,’ and ‘agrarian reform’ shaped the interpretationofbiblical history and, in turn, wereshaped by it.AsAnthonySmith argues, the transition from religious to modern national self-identification wastortuous but continu- ous, with biblical images resonatinginthe self-perceptions of modern nationalist movements.¹² The Debateon“Hebrew Theocracy” The term “theocracy,” one of the most controversialwords in earlymodern po- litical theory,has been tied to the discussion of the Hebrew republic ever since it was coined by Josephus. AccordingtoJosephus, rather than choosing to confer governance on asingle ruler,asinmonarchy,
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