According to the prevailing narrative, the history of western political thought has been the history of secularization. What began as a break with religious authority in the wake of the Reformation and the decentralization of church governance evolved into the political and philosophical interventions by Hobbes, Spinoza, and the writers of the European Enlightenment that, in turn, gave rise to the modern liberal state and the bright line meant to separate it from organized religious interests and influences. Many of the most contentious contemporary political issues we currently face according to this standard narrative—ranging from domestic social matters like marriage and reproductive rights to international conflicts arising from the confrontation between the west and Islam in its fundamentalist expressions—owe their intensity to this removal of religion from the sphere of acceptable public political discourse. Especially in the United States, where the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment have produced the seemingly bedrock principle of the separation of church and state, this separation has defined an increasingly wide array of government policies and practices. And while there has arisen an increasingly vocal minority calling for a reexamination of what such a separation does and does not prohibit or allow, there are very few who would question the basic premise underlying such a separation, i.e., that matters of religious faith and practice ought to remain outside the domain of political policy.

In his provocative book, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought, Eric Nelson, Professor of Government at Harvard University, proposes a fascinating counter-narrative. Drawing on important new research in early modern intellectual history, Nelson argues that increased access to, and interest in, Hebraic and Jewish writings generated by Renaissance humanism, the Protestant Reformation, and Rome's counter-reforms, encouraged a reexamination of the proper relationship between religious principles and political practices. Rather than a gradual receding of religious and biblical influence on political thought, however, Nelson suggests that it is possible to discern something like an intensification of such influence. Whereas in pre-modern western Europe there developed a largely pragmatic cooperation between Church and various state authorities (which were almost exclusively structured as forms of monarchy and non-representative government), according to Nelson, with the advent of new forms of biblical and Hebraic scholarship, European philosophers and theologians developed far more extensive, highly theorized arguments for specific reforms to governmental structures and policies. In particular, Nelson addresses three features of this Hebraic revival.

First, he suggests that in the seventeenth century authors advocating republican reforms began to support their claims for the exclusive legitimacy of republican constitutions by arguing that monarchy was illicit and against God's will. This position became possible after the Reformation because of the discovery and dissemination of a tradition of rabbinic biblical exegesis that rendered the Israelite request for monarchy depicted in I Samuel as idolatrous. Nelson introduces a passage from BT Sanhedrin 20b as the first example of an extended rabbinic discussion on the sinfulness of monarchy, going on to suggest that it was in the writings of “talmudical commonwealthsmen” who became aware of this and other rabbinic texts, including the poet and polemicist John Milton, that monarchy came to be equated with idolatry. Another of Nelson's examples, John Harrington's description of the dispute over monarchy, both during his own time and in rabbinical literature, is very convincing evidence of the claims in this chapter, showing how closely changing early modern attitudes track and are shaped by encounters with rabbinic texts. Nelson concludes by suggesting that contrary to commonly expressed accounts, it is Hobbes, not Milton, who is the throwback on the issue of monarchy, holding onto a “constitutional pluralism” characteristic of Renaissance humanists and different from the increasingly polarized views espoused by Milton and his antagonists.

In his second chapter, Nelson notes the sudden emergence in this period of arguments for redistributive agrarian laws and policies, and links these new arguments to the circulation of rabbinic commentaries on biblical land laws. Hostility toward agrarian redistribution was, as Nelson notes, a given among republican writers prior to the English Restoration. This opposition can readily be traced to the heavy influence of Roman law on such writers. By the time of the Restoration, however, such hostility was no longer de rigueur. It was the meditation on specifically Jewish agrarian practices—laws of the sabbatical year, the jubilee, and gleaning, among others—that convinced a new generation of republican writers to reexamine the antipathy toward redistribution they had inherited from their predecessors. Nelson traces the origins of this development in the work of the Dutch scholar of Jewish texts, Petrus Cunaeus (Peter van der Kun). Cunaeus's readings in the work of Maimonides, according to Nelson, led him to make the pivotal decision to describe the biblical division of lands among the tribes as lex agraria. This terminological shift had the particular effect of rendering all agrarian laws as biblically sanctioned, indeed, biblically mandated. This chapter is especially interesting for how it describes the dynamic history of intellectual and political thought and the encounters and conflicts between Hebraic and Classical writers, delineating particularly intriguing differences among Roman notions of iustitia, Greek ideas about dike, and the Jewish value of ẓedakah, differences with more than theoretical implications. The final pages of this chapter, which offer a provocative revision of the relationship between post-Harringtonian redistributive republican political economy and Platonic theory of the ruling elite, are a bit abrupt and elliptical; they make rather extravagant claims about the identity of early socialism with the republican tradition but the story they tell is so truncated it's hard to be fully convinced.

Finally, and most strikingly, in his third chapter Nelson makes the case that the ethos of religious toleration, which has long been thought to depend upon the progress of secularization and the increasing separation of church and state, was actually nurtured by deeply felt religious convictions that prompted efforts to unify church and state. These efforts took their impetus from the writings of Thomas Erastus who, in turn, had drawn heavily on the work of the Hellenistic Jewish writer and historian, Titus Flavius Josephus. It is in Josephus's writing that early modern readers found the most influential depiction of God as a civil sovereign and Israel as a political entity, or politea. In light of this characterization, early modern political theorists concluded, somewhat unexpectedly, that the set of religious matters deemed worthy of civil legislation should shrink, rather than expand. It emerges from Nelson's analysis that as the inventor of the term theocracy, Josephus also—and perhaps paradoxically—laid the groundwork for the conclusion that all forms of sovereignty were civil rather than religious. It further followed from this conclusion that external religious rules fell within the jurisdiction of the civil authorities (whereas matters of conscience could not). This was the central insight of Thomas Erastus and the highly influential school of political thought, Erastianism, especially in England, that took its inspiration from his writings. Nelson concludes this final chapter by reinforcing his larger argument concerning the importance of Hebraic and Jewish influence on such developments in political thought. Yet another Dutch scholar, Hugo Grotius, figures prominently here. As a major participant in the Dutch Remonstrance controversy and a follower of the Arminian critique of orthodox Calvinism, Grotius argued forcefully for the central importance of individual conscience and the toleration of beliefs essential to the fostering of individual expressions of faith. Grotius drew upon the political formulation of the Hebrew Republic, as he and his fellow Erastians and Arminians understood it to be delineated in the Bible and rabbinic literature, to assert that any attempt to establish uniformity in creedal matters would create unnecessary dissension. It is in mid-seventeenth-century English political thought, in figures ranging from Hobbes to Harrington, that Nelson locates the nexus of Hebraism, Erastianism, and religious toleration.

Taking these three features of early modern political thought together, and noting how they each drew much of their argumentative strength from Jewish sources, Nelson concludes that the Hebrew revival changed what it was possible for Europeans to argue. “No longer regarding the Hebrew Bible as the Old Law—a shadowy intimation of truth, which had been rendered null and void by the New Dispensation,” Nelson writes, seventeenth-century writers “increasingly came to see it as a set of political laws that God himself had given to the Israelites as their civil sovereign” (16). It's an important argument, one that asks readers to revise—perhaps even reverse—a standard account of the history of modern political thought. And even if some of Nelson's claims may require further adjustments or refinements, the book is a superb example of what has now become visible to scholars thanks to the recovery of the importance of Hebrew and Jewish scholarship in early modernity. As Nelson's introduction ably demonstrates, research on early modern Christian Hebraism, which has flourished in the last several decades, is now demanding that many stories we have been telling about intellectual and cultural history must be rethought, stories that are not only about the primary consumers of newly available Hebrew and Jewish texts, but even more importantly about the writers and thinkers who were beneficiaries in some secondary or tertiary fashion to these materials and the arguments they made possible.