The first striking thing about Eric Nelson's The Hebrew Republic is its learning. The book treats its topics at a rare level of scholarly depth. This includes languages and cultures: Jewish and Christian (Catholic and Protestant); Hebrew, Latin, English, French, Italian, and German, as these writings concern Hebraist discourses in relation to the political thought emerging in the early modern period. Political philosophy itself is a further stratum of scholarship. Nelson's book is centered only in the early modern period, but extends back from it to Roman, Greek, and Hebrew law; and forward into contemporary discourses of republicanism, social contract theory, communitarianism, both as political topics and in relation to religious questions and concerns.

The second striking thing about The Hebrew Republic is the argument that emerges from its scholarly base. The book directly and forcefully challenges what has been the dominant account in political theory: that republicanism emerged out of secularizing movements, with religion either marginal or opposed to its development. Instead, Nelson argues that religion was both source and heart of central republican concepts emerging in seventeenth century thought. Moreover, it is specifically Hebrew writings — Scripture and Rabbinic commentaries on it, the Talmud, and other Jewish thinkers — that provided core impulses and ideas leading to new thinking on republicanism in early modern political theory.

These Hebraic ideas had been made available through the Hebrew Revival, that is, the renewed interest in and translation of Hebrew writings due primarily to what Nelson describes as “the Protestant summons to return to the Biblical text.” This included, he argues, seeing Scripture as “a political constitution designed by God himself for the children of Israel,” a viewpoint that in turn “transformed political thought” in republican directions (2–3). The Hebrew Revival has in fact been a lively topic of study in recent years; as has its impact on political thinking, especially in the American context. The Puritan identification with the Hebrew Commonwealth and its many implications has, for example, been discussed in detail and depth by Sacvan Bercovitch. The political radicalism of Milton's writings, too, has been recognized as grounded in religion. Nelson, however, assembles a richly detailed web of seventeenth-century European discussions that cite newly-translated and circulated Hebrew sources and interpret them in republican ways. He specifically focuses on three core topics in three chapters: the Bible as a basis for the critique of kingship and the privileging of republicanism; the question of the distribution of land suitable to republicanism; and religious toleration.

The second topic on land distribution is particularly original and striking. Discourses concerning land redistribution, Nelson shows, were defined through a tradition of Roman agrarian law, which strongly opposed any redistribution and favored private property holdings. In opposition to this Roman tradition, radical reactions called for the abolition of private property altogether. But the Jewish discussions of land and property reallocations in the Bible, in the Sabbatical laws that called for remission of debt every seventh sabbatical year, and the still more radical notion of the Jubilee, which called for the redistribution of land every seventh seven years, opened models of redistribution beyond the either/or of private vs. public ownership. Nelson pointedly notes that the division between “justice” and “charity” does not exist in the Hebrew cultural lexicon, where “Tzedeka” means both (65). And there is a direct connection between land distribution and the distribution of power. Citing Harrington, who wrote, if “the whole people be landlords, it is a commonwealth” (79), Nelson shows that a republican politics of distributive justice finds its origins in the Hebrew traditions of land allocation and maintaining balance among properties.

As to republicanism itself, Nelson shows in the book's first chapter how its emergence as an “exclusivism, the claim that republics are the only legitimate regimes” (23) was derived from new readings and attitudes toward the Hebrew state grounded in Hebrew commentaries on Scripture. Key proof-texts here are the divine displeasure when the Israelites asked Samuel to appoint a king over them (I Samuel 8:7); exegetically interpreted in comparison with Deuteronomy 17, where the powers of the king are both granted and limited. Theocracy, a term introduced by Josephus, became theorized as the sovereignty of God alone, which in turn took on a republican interpretation through Talmudic arguments against “worshipping kings in whom ‘there is no help’ rather than the true, heavenly king … [as] tantamount to idolatry” (37).

This question of theocracy becomes central to the book's third chapter as well, on religious toleration. Here again Nelson contests the dominant account that “toleration depends upon, and emerged out of, a process of secularization” (88). Instead, Nelson shows how it was under Erastian thought of republican theocracy that toleration first emerged in European discourses. The Erastian argument that the state ought to have jurisdiction over ecclesiastical affairs — as against separation of church and state as two jurisdictions, with each having, for example, its own court system — Nelson shows to have both implied and affirmed religious toleration. Tracing a line of argument through the century, Nelson tracks the Hebraist references out of which toleration arguments were born: that the Biblical state was ruled not by priests, but by civil authorities, whose main religious boundaries were established to keep civil peace and harmony, not to force either inward conscience or outward conformity. The result, dramatic in its historical context of religious war, is Grotius' call that “one may not make war on non-Christian peoples as a punishment for their denial of Christ” and that it is illicit to punish Christians “because they are doubtful or erroneous as to some points” (107). Amen.

These Hebraist models, proof-texts, and arguments are, Nelson shows, not minor or marginal, but at the very center of emerging thought among the century's major political theorists, from Grotius to Hobbes to Harrington to Locke. Civil liberty becomes linked to liberty of conscience; “the existence of a power capable of compelling the conscience beyond what is necessary for civic peace is incompatible with republican government” (121). Moreover, the “Hebraist Erastians defended toleration out of the deeply held religious conviction that God himself established the practice in his perfect commonwealth” (128). At the end, Nelson concedes that this Hebraist resource lost much of its energy and authority in the next century in Europe (although in fact, it continued to flourish in America, where arguments from theocracy as the sovereignty of God were seen to imply no other king beside him; and all people equal before and politically responsible to God alone). The Hebrew Republic importantly traces the texts and discussions that brought Hebrew thinking directly into the heart of European political republicanism, in its own cross between biblical commentary and political theory.