Politics and the limits of law : secularizing the political in medieval Jewish though

POLITICS AND THE LIMITS OF LAW

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Nostalgia Jewishness is a lullaby for old men

gumming soaked white bread.

. , modernist Yiddish poet

CONTRAVERSIONS

JEWS AND OTHER DIFFERENCES

DANIEL BOYARIN,

CHANA KRONFELD, AND

NAOMI SEIDMAN, EDITORS

The task of “The Science of Judaism”

is to give Judaism a decent burial.

 ,

founder of nineteenth-century

philological Jewish Studies

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POLITICS AND THE LIMITS OF LAW

secularizing the political

in medieval jewish thought

MENACHEM LORBERBAUM

Stanford University Press • Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©  by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University

Printed in the United States of America

on acid free, archival-quality paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lorberbaum, Menachem

Politics and the limits of law : secularizing the political

in medieval Jewish thought / Menachem Lorberbaum.

p. cm. — (Contraversions)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

 --- (alk. paper)

. Judaism and politics—History—To .

. Maimonides, Moses, ‒—Contributions

in political science. . Nissim ben Reuben Gerondi,

?‒—Contributions in political science.

I. Title. II. Contraversions (Stanford, Calif.)

.  

.''—dc 

Original printing 

Last figure below indicates year of this printing:

        

Typeset by James P. Brommer in /. Minion

and Copperplate

     has benefited from the generosity of many indi￾viduals and institutions, and I would like to express my gratitude for the

friendship and encouragement I have received.

David Hartman created the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, a

spiritual community where the ideas I have written about could freely be ex￾plored and discussed. I thank him for his nurture and support and for show￾ing me that honesty is the condition for commitment. Moshe Halbertal and

Noam Zohar, my colleagues at the Shalom Hartman Institute, have always

been there for me, reading my work and never tiring of my formulations and

reformulations.

Most of this book was written at the School of Social Science of the Insti￾tute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where I was privileged to have Michael

Walzer as a teacher and a friend. His guidance and tutelage have been inspir￾ing. This book is one of the fruits of our collaborative efforts to revitalize the

tradition of Jewish political thought. No atmosphere could be as conducive

to this work as that of the Institute for Advanced Study.

An earlier version of this work was submitted as a Ph.D. dissertation to the

Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My thesis adviser, Aviezer Ravitzky, has been

a constant source of encouragement in its maturing into a book. Gerald Blid￾stein, Yaron Ezrahi, Warren Zev Harvey, Allan Silver, and Israel Tashma read

early versions of this work; their insights and comments were most helpful.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

vii

The Department of Jewish Philosophy at Tel-Aviv University provided a

superb scholarly framework within which to develop my ideas. I am grateful

to my colleagues for their support. Parts of this work were presented at semi￾nars and colloquiums, and I have benefited from the comments of Sara Klein￾Braslavy, Shlomo Biderman, and Yael Tamir. The late Jacob Levinger and the

late Gershon Weiler actively participated in those encounters. The work on

this book was completed while on sabbatical from Tel-Aviv University.

The Koret Jewish Studies Publications Program generously subsidized the

publication of this book. My editor, Nessa Olshansky-Ashtar, has worked

tirelessly to make this a better book. Philosopher, critic, and editor, she has

been the best reader an author could hope for.

Finally, I wish to thank Daniel Boyarin, editor of the Contraversions se￾ries; Helen Tartar of Stanford University Press; and my copyeditor, Robert

Burchfield, for their dedicated work.

viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ix

 xi

INTRODUCTION: DIVINE LAW AND SECULAR

POLITICS 1

The Polity, 3; Biblical and Talmudic Background, 6;

Synopsis, 13

PART 1: MAIMONIDES

1 THE NATURAL FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICS 17

“Man Is Political by Nature,” 18; Modern Interpretations, 24;

Polity and Society, 25; Medieval Interpretations, 28;

Naturalizing Divine Law, 30

2 THE INSUFFICIENCY OF LAW 35

Maimonides on Law, 35; From Law to Politics, 41

3 THE CODE ON THE PRIORITY OF POLITICS 43

Monarchy—A King Must Be Appointed and Honored, 44;

The King and the Sanhedrin, 47; The King’s Right to

Command, 51; The King’s Right to Punish, 55; Royal

Law, 61; Consent, 65; The Maimonidean Monarchy—

Instrumental or Natural?, 67

CONTENTS

4 CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS AND MESSIANIC

RESOLUTION 70

The Maimonidean Polity, 70; Politics and Religion, 72;

Tension, 75; The Messianic Polity, 77; The Utopian

Vision, 83; The Messianic Age and the Utopian Vision, 87;

Conclusion, 89

PART 2: GERONDI

5 THE KAHAL AS A POLITY 93

The History of Public Law, 95; Communal Authority, 100;

Nahmanides, 106; Solomon ibn Adret (Rashba), 112;

Conclusion, 122

6 THE AUTONOMY OF POLITICS 124

Politics, 127; The Structure of the Polity, 134; Divine Law, 138;

Impasse, 143

CONCLUSION: SECULARIZING POLITICS 151

Turning to Modernity, 156

 163

 193

  209

  213

x CONTENTS

  is often neglected by students of political theory. Yet

some of the questions that engage them are precisely those that engaged the

medieval philosophers—for example, the relationship between religion and

state. Medieval philosophers’ attempts to understand religion and the polity

can provide new perspectives on the viability of an accommodation be￾tween revelation and legislation, the holy and the profane, the divine and

the temporal.

The separation of religion and state has long been a central theme in

Western political history and thought. Since the Enlightenment, this separa￾tion has served to uphold the individual citizen’s freedom of conscience. In

medieval political thought, the doctrine of the separation of religion and

state played a different role. On the one hand, it served to maintain the in￾tegrity of religious law—whether canon law, Islamic law, or Jewish law—vis￾à-vis the monarch; on the other, it upheld the autonomy of the monarch and

the autonomy of human political agency against theocratic claims of divine

sovereignty and clerical authority.

This book explores the emergence and elaboration of the fundamental

political concepts of medieval Jewish thought, primarily concepts related to

political agency, political life as a distinct domain of human activity, and

constitutional politics. I will analyze the two basic institutions of the Jewish

polity as the thinkers in question envisioned it: monarchy and the law.

PREFACE

xi

The very notion of Jewish political thought may seem paradoxical. The

Jews were exiled from their country upon the failure of the Great Rebellion

( ): what politically relevant wisdom can be culled from the thought of

a people in exile whose sovereign power has been suspended? There is, how￾ever, no need to assume that political insight is essentially linked to the exer￾cise of sovereignty, for the exercise of sovereignty does not exhaust the range

of politically meaningful activity. Further, the question displays a misreading

of medieval Jewish life. Jewish communities in the Middle Ages both enjoyed

a wide degree of political autonomy and, as I hope to show, understood

themselves through a political discourse they shared with contemporary

Christians and Muslims.

The medieval Jewish conception of politics grew out of the fertile en￾counter of a religious tradition emphasizing the role of law with two very

different influences: Greek philosophy as appropriated by Islamic philoso￾phers and the reality of life in communities situated within Christian and

Muslim empires. Scholars and philosophers who found themselves at this

cultural crossroads reformulated the meaning of divine law and its relation

to human political life.

Medieval Jewish thinkers assumed, of course, the existence of a revealed

law. They saw themselves as expositors of revealed truths rather than cre￾ators of new ones. Much of their philosophical creativity was expressed in

exegetical commentary on the revealed law, that is, the Bible and the Tal￾mud, whose legitimation they in turn sought. Attention to such interpreta￾tion is thus fundamental to penetrating their thought.

I hope to show that there is unquestionably a tradition of Jewish political

discourse, a tradition based on the canonical sources of Jewish law but in￾corporating elements from the Greek philosophical tradition as well. Al￾though the classics of Jewish political thought were formulated more than

half a millennium ago, there is much in the corpus of Jewish political writ￾ing that remains vital today and has a great deal to contribute to the ongo￾ing constitutional debate on church/state relations and to the theory, in￾creasingly relevant, of theocratic societies.

xii PREFACE

POLITICS AND THE LIMITS OF LAW

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