The Review of Politics 71 (2009), 637 658. # University of Notre Dame doi:10.

1017/S0034670509990726

Theocracy, Liberalism, and Modern Judaism

Allan Arkush
Abstract: The paper examines the efforts of several Jewish thinkers to cope with the discrepancy between the inherently theocratic principles of their religion and the modern, liberal ideas with which they wished to bring Judaism into harmony. It focuses rst on Moses Mendelssohns attempt at the end of the eighteenth century to provide a rationale for the dissolution of Judaisms coercive, collectivist dimension and to render the Jewish religion fully compatible, in practice, with liberalism. The next major focus is the recent work of David Novak, who has sought in different ways to show how one can proceed from traditional Jewish premises to the endorsement of nonliberal political arrangements that nonetheless preserve the best of liberalisms achievements. The nal focus is on the Israeli religious thinker Isaiah Leibowitzs widely celebrated but in principle merely provisional relinquishment of the theocratic idea.

Sometime in the late 1980s, the newscaster Mike Wallace interviewed Rabbi Meir Kahane on 60 Minutes. Kahane was then still well known in the United States for his leadership of the militant Jewish Defense League, but at the time this program was broadcast, he was living in Israel, where he had launched a new, extremist political movement.1 A central plank of his Kach Party was the call for the expulsion of all of Israels Arab citizens. He even wrote a book in defense of this idea, which bore the title They Must Go!2 When he interviewed Kahane, Mike Wallace challenged him to explain and defend this position. Kahane did so uninchingly. Wallaces response to his ethnocentric arguments and proposals was to exclaim, But Rabbi Kahane, thats not democratic! Kahane immediately retorted, his voice oozing with condescension, Mr. Wallace, Judaism is not Thomas Jefferson. These words must have rung false in the ears of Mike Wallace and most other American Jews who heard them, but Kahane was making a valid point.3 The values we most commonly associate with the name Thomas Jefferson are not

See Robert Friedman, The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir KahaneFrom FBI Informant to Knesset Member (Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, 1990). 2 Meir Kahane, They Must Go! (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1981). 3 For an account of the origins of the outlook Kahane was rejecting, see Jonathan D. Sarna, The Cult of Synthesis in American Jewish Culture, Jewish Social Studies 5 (Fall/Winter 1998): 5279.

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in all respects the same as the values of biblical and rabbinical Judaism. To put it very briey, Thomas Jefferson stands for religious freedom; traditional Judaism does not. Jefferson was a proponent of the separation of church and state; traditional Judaism gives rise to no such idea. This does not mean, of course, that Judaism is Meir Kahane. There is very little warrant in Jewish tradition for his extreme xenophobia, and there are plenty of texts that militate against it. Still, Kahanes general odiousness does not vitiate the accuracy of his insight. Thomas Jefferson and traditional Judaism are poles apart. Far from being in essential harmony with liberal democracy, traditional Judaism is inherently theocratic. Indeed, the term theocracy itself stems from the pen of a Jewish writer, the historian Josephus, who used it to describe the regime prevailing in ancient Israel, where, in his words, all sovereignty and all authority were in the hands of God.4 From the days of Josephus to modern times, the Jews lacked a state of their own, and their theocracy was, therefore, more theoretical than real. It existed mostly in blueprints the most elaborate of which are found in Maimonides legal compilation, the Mishneh Torah.5 Nevertheless, throughout the ages when the Jews did not live in a polity governed in accordance with what they took to be Gods laws, they never ceased to pray for its reestablishment. Maimonides himself explained in his Guide for the Perplexed how these laws surpassed all others and were uniquely suited to advance people along the road to human perfection.6 Less philosophically minded Jews attributed other virtues to them. But they were all united in their longing for history to end with the restoration of Israel to its former condition. The rst Jewish thinker to abandon any such hopes was Baruch or Benedict Spinoza, who lived in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century. In his Theological-Political Treatise, he expressed qualied approval for the ancient Jewish theocracy as a regime appropriate for a rather low-level populace, but he also considered it to be altogether defunct, along with the rest of Judaism. In the same book, he expressed strong support for the idea of religious freedom and set forth one of the earliest arguments in favor of liberal democracy.7
4

See Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, and Noam. J. Zohar, eds., The Jewish Political Tradition, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 190, for the text from Against Apion. See also Clifford Orwins commentary on this passage on the following page: The very term theocracy (Greek theokratia), which Josephus either devised himself or borrowed from an unknown source (2:165), represents an attempt to subsume the Jewish tradition under a non-Jewish category. 5 See Abraham Hershman, trans., The Code of Maimonides, The Book of Judges, book 14, Yale Judaica Series, vol. 3, The Code of Maimonides, Book XIV, The Book of Judges, trans. Abraham Hershman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949). 6 See Howard Kreisel, Maimonides Political Thought: Studies in Ethics, Law, and the Human Ideal (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). 7 See Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

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The rst Jewish thinker who consigned theocracy to the past and, like Spinoza, endorsed the freedom of religion but without repudiating the Jewish religion was a man who lived a century after Spinoza: Moses Mendelssohn. In this essay, I would like to take a close look at Mendelssohns method of achieving his goal of reconciling Judaism with liberalism. After doing so, I will focus on the ways in which other modern Jewish thinkers in the Diaspora followed more or less in his footsteps and then continued further along the same path, afrming liberalism much more unequivocally than he had. I will also consider at some length a contemporary Jewish thinker, David Novak, who is much more ambivalent toward liberalism than Mendelssohn was and who has struggled unsuccessfully to devise an alternative to it on the basis of Jewish theocratic premises, one that would still preserve some of liberalisms key virtues. I will then consider some other, more traditional Jews, living in Israel, for whom the theocratic ideal remains alive, if not necessarily a guide to immediate action. I hope that my review of these matters will shed some light on the impact of liberalism on at least one religion. Since Moses Mendelssohn is a man who may need an introduction, I will say a few words about him. The product of a traditional Jewish environment and education, the teen-age Mendelssohn (a name he was only later to select for himself) left the small town of Dessau for Berlin in the 1740s solely in order to continue his Talmudic studies. He soon began to supplement them, however, with the study of ancient and modern European languages and literatures, mathematics, and philosophy. By the 1750s, he was composing his own philosophical works, and by the 1760s, his writings on metaphysics and his Phaedon, a Leibniz-Wolfan reworking of Platos dialogue on the immortality of the soul, had garnered him a European-wide reputation as the German Socrates.8 In his works in German during the earlier stages of his philosophical career, Mendelssohn sought to steer clear of issues directly related to Judaism, although he could not completely escape the task of defending his religion against Gentiles who wished to convert him. When challenged by the Swiss scientist and theologian J. C. Lavater to explain publicly why he was not convinced of the truth of Christianity, Mendelssohn sought to evade the question by contrasting Judaisms reasonable ecumenicism with Christianitys irrational exclusivism. His response to Lavater ended with this statement:

I have the good fortune of having for a friend many an excellent man who is not of my faith. We sincerely love each other, though we suspect that in matters of religion we hold totally different opinions. I enjoy the pleasure of their company, which benets and delights me. Never did my heart secretly whisper to me: What a pity that such a lovely soul is lost! One On Mendelssohns life see Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University: University of Alabama Press, 1973).
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who believes that there is no salvation outside his church is bound to heave a sigh like this very often.

As Alexander Altmann has observed, the contrast between his liberalism and Lavaters pietism could not have been more strikingly expressed.9 As Altmann has also observed, Mendelssohns conduct on this occasion no doubt inuenced his friend G. E. Lessings depiction of a supremely tolerant Jew in the famous play he wrote a few years later, Nathan the Wise.10 Not long after the publication of this play, in 1782, Mendelssohn went beyond issuing pleas for tolerance and became the rst Jew to argue publicly in favor of the right to liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state. He took issue with the proposal made only recently by his friend Christian Wilhelm von Dohm that Jewish communities be enabled to maintain a certain measure of internal autonomy, including the right of excommunication. Elucidating his reasons for opposing the practice of excommunication altogether, Mendelssohn briey set forth some of his own basic ideas about the proper scope of ecclesiastical power. I know of no rights, he wrote, over persons and things that are connected to doctrinal opinions and rest upon them, rights that men acquire when they agree with certain statements and lose when they cannot consent to them or will not do so. In general, Mendelssohn went on to say, true divine religion assumes no authority over ideas and opinions, gives and makes no claim to earthly goods, no rights of usufruct, possession and property. It knows no other power than the power to win and convince through reason and to render happy through conviction. It has need of neither arms nor a nger, but consists of pure spirit and heart.11 Genuine religion, by denition, involves no coercion. Nor, said Mendelssohn, could any human institutions ever possess the legitimate authority to make peoples rights dependent upon their convictions. In the state of nature, individuals have an absolute right to their own ideas and opinions, one that they do not lose with the signing of the social contract and their entrance into civil society. Mendelssohn, therefore, saw no way in which any society could ever acquire the power to connect civic privileges with religious convictions.12 Mendelssohn met with unexpected opposition from a man who agreed with him in principle, a certain August Friedrich Cranz, who published anonymously a pamphlet entitled The Search for Light and Right.In common sense, wrote Cranz, religion without conviction is not possible at all; and every forced religious act is no longer such. The observance of divine
Ibid., 220. Ibid., 298 99. 11 Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften Jubilaumsausgabe (Berlin and Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1972), 8:18. 12 Ibid., 1920.
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commandments from fear of the punishment attached to them is slavery, which according to puried concepts can never be pleasing to God. Yet, he insisted, Moses connects coercion and positive punishment with the nonobservance of duties related to the worship of God. His statutory ecclesiastical law decrees the punishment of stoning and death for the Sabbath-breaker, the blasphemer of the divine name, and others who depart from his laws.13 Mendelssohns espousal of liberal principles was, according to Cranz, incompatible with loyalty to Judaism, for armed ecclesiastical law still remains the rmest groundwork of the Jewish polity. He consequently considered himself entitled to pose a sharp question to Mendelssohn. How can you remain an adherent of the faith of your fathers and shake the entire structure by removing the cornerstones, when you contest the ecclesiastical law that has been given through Moses and purports to be founded on divine revelation?14 Cranz anticipated and ruled out in advance one possible response to this query. He warned Mendelssohn not to attempt to solve the problem by claiming that the old Jewish theocracy was no longer relevant since it had for so long been defunct. He acknowledged that the regime introduced by Moses
could be carried into practice only so long as the Jews had an empire of their own; so long as their Pontiffs were princes, or such sovereign heads of the people, as created princes, and governed them. But cease it must, as did the sacrices, upon the Jews having lost territory and power, and, depending on foreign laws, found their jurisdiction circumscribed by very narrow limits. Still, that circumscription is merely the consequence of external and altered political relations, whereby the value of laws and privileges, consigned to quiescence, cannot be diminished. The ecclesiastical law is still there, although it may not be allowed to be put into execution. Your lawgiver, Moses, is still the drover, with the cudgel, who leads his people with a rod of iron, and would be sharp after anyone who had the least opinion of his own, and dared to express it by word or deed.15

In this manner Cranz declared that he would not be content with a response that merely obviated in practice the apparent contradiction between Mendelssohns liberal principles and his ancestral religion. He wanted to know how Mendelssohn thought he could do this in principle. Mendelssohn was fully aware of the true importance of Cranzs challenge. It cut him, he said, to the heart, and he wrote his principal work on the Jewish religion, Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism, mainly to respond to it.16
Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 92. 14 Ibid., 93. 15 Ibid., 92. 16 Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism, ed. Alexander Altmann and trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983), 8485.
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This seminal work of modern Jewish thought will concern us only to the extent that it contains a response to Cranz. We will, therefore, skip over the many pages of ruminations about the nature of revelation, idolatry, ritual, and other subjects that separate Mendelssohns partial restatement of Cranzs challenge (which does not include the warning quoted above) and his ultimate answer to it. Although Cranz had not utilized the term theocracy, Mendelssohn went out of his way to eschew it, preferring to call the Israelites original constitution, by its proper name, the Mosaic constitution.17 In this constitution, Mendelssohn wrote, state and religion were not conjoined, but one; not connected, but identical. Since God was Israels Lawgiver and Regent of the nation,
civil matters acquired a sacred and religious aspect, and every civil service was at the same time a true service of God. The community was a community of God; its affairs were Gods; the public taxes were Gods; and everything down to the least police measure was part of the divine service.18

This general situation had implications with regard to crimes as well. Every sacrilege against the authority of God, as the lawgiver of the nation, was a crime against the Majesty, and therefore a crime of state. Under Israels constitution, such offenses as blasphemy and Sabbath desecration (to which Cranz had made specic reference) could and, indeed, had to be punished civilly, not as erroneous opinion, not as unbelief, but as misdeeds, as sacrilegious crimes aimed at abolishing or weakening the authority of the lawgiver and thereby undermining the state itself.19 Mendelssohn then stressed how mild these inevitable punishments actually were. Even the perpetrators of capital crimes like blasphemy and desecration of the Sabbath were treated with great leniency. As a consequence, executions must have been exceedingly rare. Indeed, as the rabbis say, any court competent to deal with capital offenses and concerned for its good name must see to it that in a period of seventy years not more than one person is sentenced to death. Immediately after this sentence, Mendelssohn abruptly announced that he had effectively refuted his adversaries. This clearly shows how little one must be acquainted with the Mosaic law and the constitution of Judaism to believe that according to them ecclesiastical right and ecclesiastical power are authorized or that temporal punishments are to be inicted for unbelief or erring belief. The Searcher for Light and Right was wrong to believe that he had abolished Judaism by his rational arguments against ecclesiastical right and ecclesiastical power.20
17 18

Ibid., Ibid., 19 Ibid., 20 Ibid.,

131. 128. 129. 130.

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But had Mendelssohn really succeeded so completely in reconciling the truth of revelation with the truth of reason or did he merely assert that he had done so? In distinguishing between the ancient Israelite constitution and an ecclesiastical law armed with power, Mendelssohn seems to have been suggesting that, as Eliezer Schweid has put it, the fusion of state and religion is possible and justied only when God himself is the sovereign power in the state.But as Schweid himself has correctly observed, this is a forced and inadequate solution of the problem.21 It in no way alters the fact that under the arrangements prevailing in ancient Israel, whatever they are called, religious offenses were subject to punishment in a manner completely inconsistent with Mendelssohns principles. It was of no essential importance, either, that these punishments were rarely inicted. As Mendelssohn himself knew, this answer could only soften but not eliminate the criticism to which he was responding.22 Punishment, however infrequent and mild, was still punishment. Despite his condent pose and deant pronouncements, Mendelssohn himself seems to have recognized the insufciency of his initial response to Cranz. For after recapitulating his main points one more time, he introduces an additional consideration:
Moreover, as the rabbis expressly state, with the destruction of the Temple, all corporal and capital punishments and, indeed, even monetary nes, insofar as they are only national, have ceased to be legal. Perfectly in accordance with my principles, and inexplicable without them! The civil bonds of the nation were dissolved; religious offenses were no longer crimes against the state; and the religion, as religion, knows of no punishment, no other penalty than the one the remorseful sinner voluntarily imposes on himself.23

While this may seem, at rst glance, to be something of an afterthought, it is clearly much more than that. It is only here that Mendelssohn actually exclaims that he has reconciled Judaism with his own principles and thereby accomplished what he set out to do. There are, however, two major reasons why even those who are pleased by what he says should not join Mendelssohn in this cry of victory. For these utterances are, rst of all, based on faulty history. As Alexander Altmann rather delicately put it, Mendelssohns assertion that punitive measures by Jewish courts ceased after the loss of political independence does not fully correspond to the facts.24 In actuality, as Yirmiyahu Yovel has stated, even in the Diaspora
Jewish religion was not voluntary in the sense in which modern political theories use this term. It contained an element of coercion, of legal sanction, banning the rebel and subjecting the members of the congregation
21 22

Eliezer Schweid, Ha-Yehudi ha-Boded veha-Yahadut (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1974), 173. Isaac Heinemann, Taammei ha-Mitzvot be-Sifrut Yisrael, pt. 2 (Jerusalem, 1956), 19. 23 Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, 130. 24 Ibid., 232, note to 130, ll. 2427.

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to rabbinical authority. This was usually done by decree of the Christian authorities. It was a kind of tolerance, or privilege, which the Jewish congregation enjoyed, but within the community it imposed the authority of a religious law and a semi-theocratic government of the kind which Mendelssohn opposed.25

More important, however, than the historical inaccuracy of Mendelssohns argument is its theoretical inadequacy. For even if it had been true that postexilic Judaism had entirely abandoned all forms of religious coercion, this would not have changed the fact that what Mendelssohn called the old, original Judaism had indeed condoned the use of force to compel Jews to obey religious law. As we have seen, this was a matter of the utmost importance to Cranz. Even if the ecclesiastical statutory law of Judaism, as he put it, was no longer being enforced, it is still there; that is, it is present in the Bible and ready to be reinstituted. To explain how the existence at any time of such a state of affairs could be reconciled with his rational, liberal principles was precisely the task that Cranz had set for Mendelssohn. How could a God who never wished for coerced obedience to His will have revealed the laws of Moses, which called for such behavior? How could He ever have laid the basis for a state that deprived its inhabitants of their inalienable right to religious freedom? These are the questions that Mendelssohn sought to dodge. When he rested his case, at the end of his book, on the fact that the Mosaic constitution had become defunct, he resorted to the very strategy that Cranz had warned him (in a passage that is not quoted, we will once again observe, in Jerusalem) not to deploy. Why, then, did he think that it would work? He seems to have hoped that his readers would have been thoroughly distracted by all of the other weighty matters discussed in Jerusalem and would not notice his failure to develop an adequate response to the challenge that had provoked him to write the book in the rst place. For all of its theoretical weakness, however, Mendelssohns argument met with a certain amount of approval. Immanuel Kant, for instance, wrote to him shortly after Jerusalem appeared, commending him for having known how to reconcile your religion with such a degree of freedom of conscience as one would not have imagined it to be capable of, and as no other religion can boast of.26 Arch-traditionalist Jewish leaders, on the other hand, ignored Jerusalem, which was written in a language that they could not read and in
25 Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 198, n. 11. Yovel proceeds to argue that Mendelssohns words on this subject in Jerusalem were intended for the non-Jewish world and are lled with apologetic imprecision. 26 See Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, 517. See also my article Kants View of Mendelssohn, in Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism, ed. Alfred Ivry, Allan Arkush, and Elliot Wolfson (London: Harwood Press, 1998), 41322, where I attempt to show the double-edged character of Kants praise.

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an idiom that they could not understand. But for those who wished to have such a thing, Mendelssohn had succeeded in providing a rationale for the dissolution of what we might call Judaisms coercive, collectivist dimension. He had transformed the Jewish religion into something purely voluntary. Mendelssohn was the rst Jewish thinker to declare it to be entirely up to the individual Jew, and not his rabbi or his communal leaders, to determine whether he would fulll his duty to live in accordance with its demands. He thus showed, for the rst time, how one could render the Jewish religion basically compatible with liberalism. Judaism could become Thomas Jeffersonat the time when Jefferson himself was still a rather young man. In the course of the nineteenth century, Jerusalem became a popular book in certain places, particularly in Thomas Jeffersons country. Already in 1838, when there were fewer than 50,000 Jews in the United States, the rst leader of American Orthodox Jewry, Isaac Leeser, translated it into English and touted its ideas.27 But neither in Europe nor in the United States did Mendelssohns work supply the main foundation for the reconciliation of Judaism with liberalism. What rendered Mendelssohns solution unsatisfactory, in the long run, was not its theoretical inadequacy, which was scarcely noted at all, but its purely provisional character. While consigning theocracy to the past, Mendelssohn by no means delegitimated it. Although he quoted approvingly the Talmudic passage prohibiting the Jews even to think of a premessianic return to Palestine, he never expressed any doubts about the Jews ultimate deliverance.28 In Jerusalem he explicitly reafrmed that the Mosaic constitutionmight some day be put back into effect.29 And he continued to maintain that Jews were duty bound to live in accordance with the law of the Torah, even if they had absolutely no right to force their fellow Jews to do so. He acknowledged that this would be difcult, but called upon the Jews of his own day to bear the burden as best as they could.30 For steadily increasing numbers of Jews living in Western Europe and the United States in the century after Mendelssohns death, messianic hopes and ritual laws seemed both retrograde and inconsistent with full integration into the liberal society to which they were quite eager (or in some countries happy) to belong. In response to contemporary philosophy, on the one hand, and a great deal of pressure to modify or eliminate these apparently unpatriotic and exclusivist aspects of their religion, on the other, they developed Reform Judaism. Among the leaders of this new tendency, there was

See Lance J. Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996). 28 On the history of the usage of this passage, see Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 211 34. 29 Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, 131. 30 Ibid., 133.

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a general agreement that the Pentateuch was not literally true in all respects and that the Law of Moses was absolutely binding. The Reformers emphatically rejected the idea of theocracy. To quote from one of their more celebrated statements, the Pittsburgh Platform of the American Conference of Reform Rabbis (1885):
We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacricial worship under the administration of the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.

These rabbis replaced the old messianic vision with a new one:
We recognize in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect the approach of the realization of Israels great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice and peace among all men.

The Jews task, as the new era drew near, was not to adhere as much as possible to their ancient law, as Mendelssohn had recommended, but to
accept as binding only the moral laws and maintain only such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives, but reject all such as are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization.31

What we see here is not merely an awkward and inconsistent adjustment to liberalism but the wholehearted absorption of its spirit. The Reformers do not just put theocracy aside; they reject it altogether in favor of the better, more liberal society that is already present in many countries and on the horizon in others. In the one hundred and twenty years that have passed since the publication of the Pittsburgh Platform, Reform Judaism has changed a great deal. Among other things, it has reconciled itself to the return of the Jews to their ancestral land, and it has grown much more appreciative of Jewish ritual (if not of Jewish law). But it is, if anything, more hostile than ever before to the idea of theocracy. It is strongly opposed to what it sees as the vestiges of it in the United States and equally determined to strengthen western liberalism against the theocratic forces present on the Israeli scene (which we will discuss in the second part of this essay). Reform is the only major movement in American Judaism to break decisively with the idea of theocracy and to incorporate liberalism into its fundamental creed. The leaders of the other main movements, Orthodox and even, in some cases, Conservative Judaism, remain in principle at least as attached to the old-fashioned Jewish messianism as Mendelssohn appears to have been and just as concerned with the preservation of Jewish law (although they understand it quite differently from each other). At the same time, they have emulated Mendelssohn in their support for liberty of
31

Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, 46869.

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conscience. What they have not done is to attempt to explain systematically, as Mendelssohn did, the relationship between their adherence to an inherently theocratic religion and their acceptance of the tenets of liberalism. The neglect of this task is not hard to explain. As Yoel Finkelman has recently observed, in America
The Jews have been among the greatest supporters of the complete separation between religion and state, particularly since it has enabled them to guarantee their legal rights and their civic freedoms. They have not relished the idea of challenging the constitutional status quo, and therefore Jewish thinkers have not hastened to occupy themselves in a systematic manner with political thought or with constitutional structures.32

In view of the general dearth of such thinking, it is of the utmost interest when a traditional rabbi and scholar like David Novak (who served for a time as a professor at the school founded by Thomas Jefferson, the University of Virginia) publishes books entitled Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory and The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology. These books, the most elaborate attempts in a long time to grapple with the issues with which we are here concerned, deserve carefulbut separate consideration. Like August Friedrich Cranz, Novak is highly cognizant of the tension between Jewish tradition and the modern notion of rights.33 And like most modern Jews, he is highly appreciative of the benets liberalism has brought to his people. Only in the world forged by liberal theories, he writes in Covenantal Rights, have Jews been able to survive, let alone ourish, politically, economicallyand even religiously.Nevertheless, while Novak is quite grateful for all of this, it does not automatically convince him that since liberalism is good for the Jews it is also true. It is not even, in his opinion, unqualiedly good for the Jews (as such). Under its auspices, the needs of Jews as individual citizens have been seen as taking complete precedence over the needs of the older Jewish communal tradition. Yet it is that tradition that makes Jews Jewish. Anything less than it seems to be a ticket to either instant or gradual assimilation, whether individual or collective.34 Rejecting modern rights-based political theories as not only subversive of Judaism but unfounded and ultimately self-destructive, Novak recommends in Covenantal Rights that we search through Jewish sources for a better basis for some of the salutary rights they have supplied. But how can what he
Yoel Finkelman, Religion and Public Life: Exile and State in the Thought of Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Mordecai Kaplan, in Dat u-Medinah Be-hagut ha-Yehudit Be-meah ha-esrim, ed. Aviezer Ravitzky (Israel Democracy Institute, Jerusalem 2005), 369. 33 David Novak, Covenantal Rights: A Study in Jewish Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27. 34 Ibid., 28.
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himself characterizes as the uniquely Jewish covenantal theocracyprovide better underpinnings for these rights than it is within the power of liberalism to supply?35 This is only possible if one approaches the question of rights in an entirely new way. It is necessary for Jews to retake rights talk from liberals, who have supposedly co-opted it,and to direct this talk back to earlier nonliberal ways of thinking, even when they agree with liberals about a number of individual rights and even about their precise content.36 I cannot take the time here to review in detail Novaks entire argument in Covenantal Rights.37 It is important to note, however, that it hinges on the following redenition of rights in covenantal terms:
The most important rights I exercise as a whole person before someone else are rooted in duties to others, which when we fulll them are good for us as well. The most basic right of a person, the right to life, is exercised because the community of which I am a participant claims that life for its own life and because God claims all lives are mine (Ezekiel 18:4). Ultimately, such a right is my claim upon others to let me fulll my duty to my community and to my god, that is, to answer their claims on me.38

Whether they are properly called rights or merely legitimized needs, these divinely bestowed entitlements enable the Jewish participants in the covenantal community to benet from the good conduct in which the other participants are commanded to engage and to be secure in many respects from abuse at their hands. Novak thus demonstrates that the covenantal community provides many of the same important benefactions as todays liberal polities and even some that they do not make generally available. But he still faces a stumbling block. Novak knows that concern for the rights of individual persons against society should be a major topic in any contemporary political theory. He acknowledges that liberal democracy has the merit of combining majority rule with the protection of individual rights, even when those rights are in conict with the interests and policies of the society, as long as they do not pose a clear and immediate danger to the society itself. This is an achievement he very much wants his Jewish political theory to replicate. Yet he knows how difcult it is to answer positively the question of whether there is any concept of individual rights against society at all in the classical sources of Jewish law and theology.39 He regretfully admits that there is no explicit source for individual rights against those of the community in
Ibid., 30. Ibid., 133. 37 I have done so in my article Conservative Political Theology and the Freedom of Religion, Polity 37 (January 2005): 82 107. 38 Novak, Covenantal Rights, 131 32. 39 Ibid., 204 205.
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the Pentateuch.40 Nor can he nd any such source elsewhere in the Bible. Fortunately, though, there seems to be a more adequate source for the concept of individual rights over against the power of the state in the Talmud.41 We can omit Novaks analysis of this particular source and acknowledge that his turn to the Jewish political tradition yields some support for the idea of individual rights against the state. But he does not show that this tradition can be as effective as liberal democracy in upholding individual rights. Novak praises liberal democracy for protecting those rights even when they are in conict with the interests and policies of the society, as long as they do not pose a clear and immediate danger to the society itself. He afrms his own, apparently Torah-based view that individuals have just claims upon society in those ordinary circumstances when societys survival is not at all threatened by the exercise of these personal rights.42 But he does not say enough about the scope of individuals just claims to reassure us that his system of Judaism would necessarily leave them in possession of broad personal rights against the state. He does not say anything that would guarantee, for instance, the perpetuation of peoples right to the freedom of religion. Far from reassuring liberals that he values this fundamental principle, Novak says things that can only cause them alarm. This is true even of some of his statements that appear to be designed to appeal to them. It is, then, our task, he writes,
and that of the political authorities to protect these human rights of ours which can be justied only when they do not conict with our prior social duties, duties that themselves are rationally correlated with our deeper need for community herself. Nevertheless, in order for individual rights to be able to truly limit communal duties by denying them any totalizing, collective pretensions, they must only not contradict any prior communal duties. They do not have to be justied as being for the sake of collective good, as many utilitarians would have it.43

If they had come from the pen of a thinker who singled out few social duties, these sentences might be thought to promise individuals a great deal of latitude for the exercise of their freedom. But Novak is anything but a thinker of this kind. The very extensive social duties of the members of the covenantal community include, among a host of other religious obligations, the duty to engage in public worship of God. This duty, as Novak puts it,
is concerned with the assertion of proper doctrine about God, which is addressed to the community itself as much as it is directed to God. On this level, worship can be seen as a specically covenantal claim
40 41

Ibid., Ibid., 42 Ibid., 43 Ibid.,

206. 209. 217. 158.

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God makes on the community which is that the community express the truth about God that has been revealed to them, most prominently in Scripture.44

Novaks argument in Covenantal Rights thus winds its way back to something uncomfortably close to theocracy, however much opposed to it he is in principle. This is not a spot to which Novak has remained xed, however. In The Jewish Social Contract, published ve years after Covenantal Rights, he does not reiterate the earlier books main argument. What we do nd is an even more emphatic rejection of modern social contract theory, both for its lack of any real history and ontology and for its essential inutility. This is followed by an attempt to ground the idea of religious freedom in the idea loosely tied to Jewish traditionof a social contract not among individuals but among the religious communities that constitute the true building blocks of a civil society.45 These communities, Novak maintains, are rarely if ever politically, economically, or intellectually, self-sufcient. They, therefore, need, if they wish to survive, to make alliances with others outside their own cultural domain, alliances in which no one party dominates the others, or one in which all the parties merge and create a new identity for themselves.46

Ibid., 94. The linchpin of his argument, by his own account, is the well-known Talmudic principle of the law of the kingdom is the law, or, as he quite aptly updates it, the law of the state is law (The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005], 120). Novak presents an extensive and learned account of the origins and development of this principle, stretching from ancient Babylonia to late medieval Spain. In diverse locales, he explains, it supplied the justication for a kind of social contract between the Jews and their hosts. It recognized a sphere in which Gentile law is authoritative provided a legitimate authorization of limited secularity for Jews (121), while it also authorized the Jews maintenance of a legitimate secondary autonomy within a given non-Jewish state (123). All in all, this principle justies the participation of the Jews, as a covenanted community, in a larger, secular polity based on a social contract drawn up between themselves and other religious communities. It also provides, in turn, an example that these gentile communities can emulate in their efforts to understand their own relationship to the state in which they live. Yet Novak does not really need the principle of the law of the state is law in order to explain how a Jewish community ought best to live within the context of a mostly non-Jewish state. Such a notion would already follow from his conception of religious communities as having ontological and historical priority over any secular states to which they need, nevertheless, to accommodate themselves. And it is really his argument to this effect, not his recourse to Talmudic precedent, that constitutes the core of The Jewish Social Contract. 46 Ibid., The Jewish Social Contract, 19.
45

44

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It is in all of these groups best interest, Novak explains, to work

for a political order where religious liberty is the most important right that civil society is obligated to uphold but also a political order where enhan cing the dignity of human life in its various forms is the raison detre of the society, especially the state created by that society. Indeed, the protection of religious liberty, which is the political right to respond to or turn away from the God who elects us, is the epitome of human dignity by which all other rights are grounded.47

Any individual member of a civil society, Novak subsequently maintains, is entitled to make the democratic claim to be able to convert to a religion of his or her choice.48 Religious liberty, he also afrms, entails the right of religious conversion for everyone.49 The state must, therefore, respect the prior human freedom of any of its participants to either accept or reject any historical revelation that purports to realize the relationship between God and humans in the world.50 Thus, without recanting his earlier rejection of liberal, individualistic, rights-based theories, Novak has found a pragmatic foundation for religious liberty. But it is a very shaky one. For the history of both Christianity and Islam provides ample evidence that religious communities do not need to cut compromises in order to survive and ourish. Throughout the centuries both religions have regularly enhanced their ability to do so through the exercise of the kind of hegemony that Novak deplores. To demonstrate this point, I will mention only the Reconquista and the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors and the ways in which these developments strengthened Catholicism in Spain (if not necessarily Spain itself). Things have changed, of course, since the fteenth century, and it is easy to see that in modern times it might indeed often be impractical and selfdefeating for any covenanted community to attempt to conquer a religiously divided society. But would this necessarily be the case everywhere? Arent there religiously homogeneous countries such as Poland or Tunisia where the members of the dominant religious group could exercise hegemony without making alliances with others outside their own cultural domain, alliances in which no one party dominates the others? To be sure, neither of these states constitutes the kind of multicultural society with which Novak is most concerned (nor does either one of them any longer contain a signicant number of Jews). But even with respect to societies of this type, Novaks derivation of the right to religious liberty is questionable. What if a number of religious communities chose jointly to exercise a condominium over the religiously diverse society in which they lived, not
47 48

Ibid., Ibid., 49 Ibid., 50 Ibid.,

198 99. 24. 25. 199.

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dominating each other but dominating lesser groups? What if they were to establish a kind of convivencia among themselves but at the same time outlaw any new religions, prohibit any of their own members from switching allegiances, and ban any public expressions of atheism? It is at least arguable that such an alliance would obviate the practical difculties to which Novak points and would strengthen religion more than it would weaken it. What if a narrower coalition were somewhere to be formed, one that consisted, say, exclusively of the Christian denominations constituting the vast majority of the people in a particular society (e.g., the United States) and demonstrated intolerance toward all non-Christian religions? It is at least arguable that such an alliance would circumvent the practical difculties on which Novak concentrates his attention and would benet Christianity in that specic locale. Even in modern, multicultural societies, the adherents of particular faiths may reasonably conclude, therefore, that the extension of religious freedom to the enemies of a particular religion or religion in general is not at all in their own best interest. Such considerations should make it clear that one cannot proceed automatically, as Novak does, from the premise that individual religious communities require religious liberty in order to ourish to the conclusion that such communities are bound to be advocates of untrammeled religious freedom. As we have seen, Moses Mendelssohns assertion of the priority of individual rights in his preface to Menasseh ben Israels Vindiciae judaeorum exposed him to the accusation that he was implicitly denying the validity of the Sinaitic covenant. How, asked one of his adversaries, could he insist upon the inalienable right to freedom of religion and at the same time afrm the truth and authority of a revealed law that required the severe punishment of religious offenses? Mendelssohns best answer to this challenge combined a reafrmation of the social contract theory on which his belief in religious freedom was based with a defense of the historicity of the events at Sinai, while consigning biblically endorsed theocratic arrangements to the remote past and, perhaps, the distant future. This does not satisfy Novak at all. In view of what he sees as Mendelssohns skewed priorities, he disapprovingly characterizes him as someone whose social contract theory fails to give the covenant primacy.51 He argues that his theory of Judaism is inadequate to the Jewish tradition in part because it renders it subordinate to a non-Jewish universe.52 At the end of the day, Novak concludes (correctly, in my opinion), Mendelssohn is a much better Enlightenment philosopher than he is a Jewish theologian.53 But Novak himself, it seems to me, has only been able to reconcile his

Ibid., 178. Ibid., 183. 53 Ibid., 187. I have expressed my views on these matters in my book Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 167292.
52

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Jewish loyalties with modern aspirations by smuggling a little more of the Enlightenment into his thinking than his covenant-based theology ought to allow. Moses Mendelssohn sought to make Judaism into Thomas Jefferson, by papering over the deep theoretical divide between a religion that reafrmed eternal divine sovereignty and a political theory based on inalienable human rights. Reform Judaism escaped from this difculty by reducing the scope of divine sovereignty to allow for the untrammeled exercise of human rights and identifying the messianic era with the triumph of liberalism. Orthodox Judaism and Conservative Judaism have been content to enjoy life in a society that guaranteed the Jews unprecedented freedom without reecting too much about the relationship between the foundations of the Jewish religion and the liberal principles on which contemporary society is based. Finally, David Novak, a traditional Jew situated somewhere between Orthodoxy and Conservatism, has struggled unsuccessfully to nd ways to justify the perpetuation of the benets of Jeffersonian liberalism without having to endorse what he sees as the fallacious and dangerous theory on which it is based. Starting from theocratic premises, he strives but fails repeatedly to show how they can serve as the foundation for a nonliberal society in which the right to religious freedom is nevertheless entirely secure.54 Up to this point, we have been concerned with the impact of liberalism upon Jewish thought in the European and North American world and especially the United States. We must turn now to an examination of the way in which this issue has played itself out in a very different setting, the sovereign Jewish State of Israel. Here Judaism encountered liberalism not as the dominant ideology of a non-Jewish society to which the Jews were endeavoring to accommodate themselves but as the outlook of the preponderant majority of the states Jews, whether or not they retained some allegiance to Judaism. Long before the establishment of the State of Israel, the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, articulated a stance toward liberalism that would be upheld by a long line of secular Zionists throughout the twentieth century. In 1896, in his seminal pamphlet The Jewish State, he inquired, Shall we end by having a theocracy? His answer was most emphatic:
No, indeed. Faith unites us; knowledge gives us freedom. We shall therefore prevent any theocratic tendencies from coming to the fore on the part of our priesthood. We shall keep our priests within the connes of their temples in the same way as we shall keep our professional army within the connes of their barracks. . . . Every man will be as free and undisturbed in his faith or his disbelief as he is in his nationality. And if it should For a fuller treatment of Novaks The Jewish Social Contract, see my review essay, Drawing up The Jewish Social Contract, Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 255 71.
54

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occur that men of other creeds and different nationalities come to live amongst us, we should accord them honorable protection and equality before the law. We have learnt toleration in Europe.55

Zionists of almost all stripes were in substantial agreement with Herzl on these matters, but the religious Zionists, members of the Mizrachi movement, saw things differently. They envisioned a future in which, as their slogan went, the land of Israel would be governed by the people of Israel in accordance with the Torah of Israel. Yet throughout the period of Zionist construction under the British Mandate, they collaborated with the secular majority essentially on Herzls terms and put their optimum program on the back burner. In 1948, however, as Israel was about to declare its independence, the religious Zionists had to grapple with fundamental questions that they had hitherto ignored. What is the character of a Jewish state based on the Torah?asked Isaac Halevi Herzog, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine. Is it a theocracy or a democracy?After reviewing Josephuss denition of a theocracy, he asked again, Does a Jewish state that recognizes the absolute authority of the Torah have to be a theocracy? The answer is absolutely yes. That meant paying a lot closer attention to what Maimonides and other premodern scholars had to say on the subject and guring out how their blueprints could be updated and utilized for the governance of a modern state. But there was a problem, Herzog acknowledged. The United Nations had stipulated that the Jewish state would have to take the shape of a liberal democracy. This would not really matter very much if the great and decisive majority of the Jews living in Palestine were loyal to the Torah the way all of their ancestors were until roughly fty years ago. We would then be able to say to the nations of the world, Give us back our land and well build on it a state based on the Torah. . . . Say whatever you want! Call it a theocracy! Look, heres Saudi Arabia! You all recognize it, and youre all running after it, on account of its oil, and theyve got a totally theocratic regime there.56 Since, however, the great majority of Jews in Palestine are not totally loyal and believing Jews, Herzog regretfully acknowledged, there is simply no hope of creating a theocracy here and now. The best that one can, therefore, hope to achieve for the present is a sort of blend of theocracy and democracy. This is the conclusion at which most of the leaders of religious Zionism soon arrived. Instead of pressing uselessly for the establishment of a theocratic Jewish state, they did what they could to import as much of the Law of Moses into the Israeli democracy as they possibly could. This was not
55 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (New York: American Zionist Emergency Council, 1946), 146. 56 I. Wahrhaftig, ed., Techukah leYisrael al pi Torah, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Mosad HaRav Kook, 1989), 2 3.

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too difcult. Despite the presence of some vehemently anticlerical gures in their ranks, the secular leaders of the new state, led by the ardently irreligious David Ben-Gurion, were ready to make deals. Both to maintain a national consensus and to sustain a broad coalition with religious parties, they agreed to such things as the prohibition of public transportation on the Sabbath, the provision of exclusively kosher food in all public institutions, and the assignment to religious courts of a wide array of personal status issues, including marriage.57 The whole issue of synagogue-state relations has, nevertheless, remained unsettled and has resulted in ceaseless conict in Israeli political life.58 Rather than investigate the specic bones of contention, however, I want to examine the long-term impact of the Israeli liberal context on the self-understanding of Orthodox Judaism within the state. Here, too, I will be selective. I will not look at all of the theological justications for tactical compromise with liberalism elaborated over the years by all sorts of traditional thinkers.59 I will conne myself to a consideration of the most prominent religious Zionist thinker to break with this strategy. The example of Yeshayahu Leibowitz illustrates just how far religious Zionism can move in the direction of Thomas Jefferson without making it all the way there. In the early 1950s, Leibowitz had been among the leaders of a small group of religious Zionists calling for an immediate and massive effort to update and revise Jewish law in preparation for the resurrection of a state based upon it. Before much time passed, however, he had concluded that such an endeavor was premature and became the most vociferous Orthodox advocate of the separation of synagogue and state in Israel. The demand for the separation of religion from the existing secular state, he argued in 1959,
derives from the vital religious need to prevent religion from becoming a political tool, a function of the governmental bureaucracy, which keeps
57 See Zvi Zameret, Judaism in Israel: Ben-Gurions Private Beliefs and Public Policy, Israel Studies 4, no. 2 (1999): 64 89. 58 For a wide-ranging and reasonably current discussion of these matters, see Joseph E. David, ed., The State of Israel: Between Judaism and Democracy: A Compendium of Interviews and Articles (Jerusalem: Ahva Cooperative Printing Press, 2003). 59 I cannot refrain, however, from making special mention of the Palestinian-born American rabbi Hayyim Hirschensohn, a religious Zionist thinker who spent the last three decades of his life (1904 1935) in New Jersey. Deeply impressed by what he encountered in America, he developed a Jewish political teaching that stressed the strengths of democracy and highlighted its full compatibility with traditional Judaism. But he remained cognizant of the profound differences between Western democracy and the kind of democracy, entwined with Jewish law, that he wished to see take shape in the future Jewish state. He never really reconciled, however, the tension between the constraints of Jewish law and the right to religious freedom. See David Zohar, Mehuyavut Yehudit be-olam moderni: HaRav Hayyim Hirschensohn veyachaso el ha-moderna (Ramat Gan: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2003), especially 186 89.

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religion and religious institutions not for religious reasons but as a concession to pressure groups in the interest of ephemeral power-considerations. Religion as an adjunct of secular authority is the antithesis of true religion. It hinders religious education of the community at large and constricts the religious inuence on its way of life. From a religious standpoint there is no greater abomination than an atheistic-clerical regime.60

Repelled by what he had seen in Israel over the previous decade, Leibowitz insisted that
the secular state and society should be stripped of their false religious veneer. Only then will it become possible to discern whether or not they have any message as a Jewish state and society. Likewise, the Jewish religion should be forced into taking its stand without the shield of an administrative status. Only then will its strength be revealed, and only thus will it become capable of exerting an educational force and inuencing the broader public.61

These and other similar statements turned Leibowitz into something of a renegade in religious Zionist circles and at the same time made him a hero of the anticlerical left. Many people on both sides seem to have failed to notice the merely provisional character of his separationism. But as Eliezer Goldman has observed, in calling for the separation of religion and state Leibowitz intended to defend what he saw as the interest of religion and not individual rights or the liberal character of the state.62 Leibowitz was in fact not an advocate of the separation of religion and state pure and simple but of the separation of religion from the existing secular state (the italics are not mine but Leibowitzs, although they were, as we have just seen, omitted from this phrase by the Harvard University Press translator of this essay).63 Even as he called for disentangling state and religion, he continued to maintain that it is necessary to confront the secular state and society with the image of a religious society and state, that is of a state in which Torah is the sovereign authority. Leibowitz looked forward to the time when Judaism would have recovered from its abominable association with the secular state of Israel and successfully persuaded the bulk of its population of the desirability of a state in which the Torah was fully sovereign. A better regime could then be brought into existence.
60 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 176. 61 Ibid., 177. 62 Eliezer Goldman, Yeshayahu Leibowitz: Beyn Hagut Datit Le-vikoret Hevratit, in Yahadut Pnim va-Hutz, ed. Avi Sagi, Dudi Schwartz, and Yedidiah Stern (Jerusalem: Magnes Press: 1999), 300. 63 Ibid., 176. Compare with the original in Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Yahadut, Am Yehudi, u-Medinat Yisrael (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1975), 157.

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On closer examination, then, the seemingly Jeffersonian Leibowitz looks more like a theocrat biding his time, waiting for a sea change in popular attitudes. But it would be a mistake to leap to any such conclusion. Leibowitz clearly states that the idea of a state according to the Torah has never been put into effect in Israel and can in fact never be put into effect, since the Torah is divine and the stateevery state!is an institution for the satisfaction of human needs and interests. The state governed according to the Torah has never existed, not in the historical past, not in the present, and not in any future that the human eye is capable of foreseeing. Yet it is the ultimate purpose and goal that religious Jews have to aim to achieve and are obligated to struggle for, in an unending battle.At the very least, it is something that will go on for generations.64 Leibowitz can be seen, then, as the practitioner of a quasi-Jeffersonian strategy in the short run, or rather, in the long run, and a theocrat in the very, very long run. As mistaken as he was about everything else, Meir Kahane was right about one thing: Judaism is not Thomas Jefferson. That is, it wasnt Thomas Jefferson, not until fairly recently, when the architects of Jewish modernity started to refashion it, or at least to tailor it better to suit the world shaped by the thought of Thomas Jefferson and his peers. Their efforts have been the subject of this paper. In focusing exclusively on them, we have overlooked a camp within modern Jewry that has taken a different tack, not simply defending itself against modernity but barricading itself from it. Ultra-Orthodox Jews in the United States, Israel, and a few other places have sought to maintain entirely separate communities, as culturally isolated as possible from the outside world. They have taken advantage of the freedoms made available to them by regimes they regard as both benecent and dissolute in order to live in their own Torah-observant enclaves. While they have not entirely succeeded in eluding the impact of modernity, they have managed to function well enough without ever having to grapple with liberal ideas. They do not worry at all about reconciling Judaism and Thomas Jefferson on a theoretical level. The Jews with whom we have concerned ourselves here, who have undertaken such a task, have done so in a variety of ways. Moses Mendelssohns rather slippery answer to this issue may have been theoretically inadequate, but it did represent one possible way of turning ones back on theocracy and privatizing the Jewish religion. While there were others who followed him down this path, the leaders of Reform Jewry preferred a different method of escaping theocratic principles: unqualied renunciation. Still others have preferred to have their cake and eat it too, that is, they have surrendered to modern liberalism without ever coming to terms with the tension between their political philosophy and their essentially unreformed ancestral religion. Then there is a thinker like David Novak, who eschews liberal principles but
64

Ibid., 154.

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admires central liberal practices and struggles unsuccessfully to come up with a way to integrate support for them into his covenant-based thinking. Religious Zionists have for the most part remained, in principle, unreconstructed theocrats in a movement dominated by secularists. But from the time of the establishment of the Jewish state onward, they have had to recognize the impossibility, under existing circumstances, of creating a polity governed in accordance with the Law of the Torah. Most of them have resigned themselves to this state of affairs and accustomed themselves to living as a minority in a mixed regime, a liberal democracy with certain theocratic features.65 The most implacable critic of this arrangement, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, called for the separation of synagogue and state in a way that might lead one to mistake him for a disciple of Thomas Jefferson. But even he did not relinquish the idea of a Torah-state; he simply postponed its establishment to the far-off time when it would win the support of the large majority of the Jews in the Land of Israel not through force but through persuasion. All of this indicates how right Kahane really was. Judaism is not Thomas Jefferson. It can, of course, be remodeled into Thomas Jefferson and has been by Moses Mendelssohn and innumerable non-Orthodox thinkers in recent centuries. And even some of the more traditional Jewish thinkers who have rejected any attempt to do so have made notable efforts to carve out a place for unreformed Judaism in what is still, however ambivalent they may be about it, Thomas Jeffersons world. Such efforts will no doubt be repeated in as yet unpredictable ways for as long as that world endures and remains the abode of a religion that has been on the scene since long before its birth. In the Diaspora, where Jews are everywhere a minority and those for whom theocracy remains a live issue, a tiny minority within a minority, these efforts are not likely to amount to anything more than academic exercises. In the Jewish State of Israel, however, where the theocratic idea still retains some vitality, they may yet have a signicant impact on political life.

65 I have not dealt here at all with the exceptions to this rule, the men on the theocratic fringes of the contemporary Israeli right, who, like Kahane, have nothing but contempt for liberal democracy. On this subject see Motti Inbari, Fundamentalism Yehudi ve-har ha-bayit (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2008).