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.Footnote ¹ A central plank of his Kach Party was the call for the expulsion of all of Israel's Arab citizens. He even wrote a book in defense of this idea, which bore the title They Must Go! Footnote ²

When he interviewed Kahane, Mike Wallace challenged him to explain and defend this position. Kahane did so unflinchingly. Wallace's response to his ethnocentric arguments and proposals was to exclaim, “But Rabbi Kahane, that's 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.Footnote ³ The values we most commonly associate with the name Thomas Jefferson are not in all respects the same as the values of biblical and rabbinical Judaism. To put it very briefly, 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, Kahane's 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁵ Nevertheless, throughout the ages when the Jews did not live in a polity governed in accordance with what they took to be God's 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.Footnote 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 first 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 qualified 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.Footnote ⁷

The first 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 Mendelssohn's 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, affirming 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 liberalism's 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-Wolffian reworking of Plato's dialogue on the immortality of the soul, had garnered him a European-wide reputation as “the German Socrates.”Footnote 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 Judaism's reasonable ecumenicism with Christianity's irrational exclusivism. His response to Lavater ended with this statement:

As Alexander Altmann has observed, the “contrast between his liberalism and Lavater's pietism could not have been more strikingly expressed.”Footnote ⁹ As Altmann has also observed, Mendelssohn's conduct on this occasion no doubt influenced his friend G. E. Lessing's depiction of a supremely tolerant Jew in the famous play he wrote a few years later, Nathan the Wise. Footnote ¹⁰

Not long after the publication of this play, in 1782, Mendelssohn went beyond issuing pleas for tolerance and became the first 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 briefly 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 finger,” but consists of “pure spirit and heart.”Footnote ¹¹

Genuine religion, by definition, involves no coercion. Nor, said Mendelssohn, could any human institutions ever possess the legitimate authority to make people's 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.Footnote 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 commandments from fear of the punishment attached to them is slavery, which according to purified 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.”Footnote ¹³

Mendelssohn's espousal of liberal principles was, according to Cranz, incompatible with loyalty to Judaism, for “armed ecclesiastical law still remains the firmest 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?”Footnote 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

In this manner Cranz declared that he would not be content with a response that merely obviated in practice the apparent contradiction between Mendelssohn's 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 Cranz's 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.Footnote ¹⁶ 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 Mendelssohn's partial restatement of Cranz's 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.”Footnote ¹⁷ In this constitution, Mendelssohn wrote, “state and religion were not conjoined, but one; not connected, but identical.” Since God was Israel's Lawgiver and Regent of the nation,

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 Israel's constitution, such offenses as blasphemy and Sabbath desecration (to which Cranz had made specific 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.”Footnote 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 inflicted 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.”Footnote ²⁰

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 justified 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.Footnote 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 Mendelssohn's principles. It was of no essential importance, either, that these punishments were rarely inflicted. “As Mendelssohn himself knew, this answer could only soften but not eliminate the criticism” to which he was responding.Footnote ²² Punishment, however infrequent and mild, was still punishment.

Despite his confident pose and defiant pronouncements, Mendelssohn himself seems to have recognized the insufficiency of his initial response to Cranz. For after recapitulating his main points one more time, he introduces an additional consideration:

While this may seem, at first 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, first of all, based on faulty history. As Alexander Altmann rather delicately put it, “Mendelssohn's assertion that punitive measures by Jewish courts ceased after the loss of political independence does not fully correspond to the facts.”Footnote ²⁴ In actuality, as Yirmiyahu Yovel has stated, even in the Diaspora

More important, however, than the historical inaccuracy of Mendelssohn's 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 first place.

For all of its theoretical weakness, however, Mendelssohn's 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.”Footnote ²⁶ Arch-traditionalist Jewish leaders, on the other hand, ignored Jerusalem, which was written in a language that they could not read and in 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 Judaism's coercive, collectivist dimension. He had transformed the Jewish religion into something purely voluntary. Mendelssohn was the first 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 fulfill his duty to live in accordance with its demands. He thus showed, for the first time, how one could render the Jewish religion basically compatible with liberalism. Judaism could become “Thomas Jefferson”—at 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 Jefferson's country. Already in 1838, when there were fewer than 50,000 Jews in the United States, the first leader of American Orthodox Jewry, Isaac Leeser, translated it into English and touted its ideas.Footnote ²⁷ But neither in Europe nor in the United States did Mendelssohn's work supply the main foundation for the reconciliation of Judaism with liberalism. What rendered Mendelssohn's 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.Footnote ²⁸ In Jerusalem he explicitly reaffirmed that the “Mosaic constitution”might some day be put back into effect.Footnote 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 difficult, but called upon the Jews of his own day to bear the burden as best as they could.Footnote ³⁰

For steadily increasing numbers of Jews living in Western Europe and the United States in the century after Mendelssohn's 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 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):

These rabbis replaced the old messianic vision with a new one:

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

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 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

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 careful—but separate—consideration.

Like August Friedrich Cranz, Novak is highly cognizant of the tension between Jewish tradition and “the modern notion of rights.”Footnote ³³ And like most modern Jews, he is highly appreciative of the benefits 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 flourish, politically, economically—and 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, unqualifiedly 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.”Footnote 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 himself characterizes as “the uniquely Jewish covenantal theocracy”provide better underpinnings for these rights than it is within the power of liberalism to supply?Footnote 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.”Footnote ³⁶

I cannot take the time here to review in detail Novak's entire argument in Covenantal Rights.Footnote ³⁷ It is important to note, however, that it hinges on the following redefinition of rights in covenantal terms:

Whether they are properly called rights or merely legitimized needs, these divinely bestowed entitlements enable the Jewish participants in the covenantal community to benefit 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 today's 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 conflict 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 difficult 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.”Footnote ³⁹ He regretfully admits that there is “no explicit source for individual rights against those of the community in the Pentateuch.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Nor can he find 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.”Footnote ⁴¹

We can omit Novak's 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 conflict 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 affirms his own, apparently Torah-based view that “individuals have just claims upon society in those ordinary circumstances when society's survival is not at all threatened by the exercise of these personal rights.”Footnote 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 people's 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,

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,

Novak's 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 fixed, however. In The Jewish Social Contract, published five years after Covenantal Rights, he does not reiterate the earlier book's main argument. What we do find 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 tradition—of a social contract not among individuals but among the religious communities that constitute the true building blocks of a civil society.Footnote ⁴⁵ These communities, Novak maintains, “are rarely if ever politically, economically, or intellectually, self-sufficient.” 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.”Footnote ⁴⁶

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

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.”Footnote ⁴⁸ “Religious liberty,” he also affirms, “entails the right of religious conversion” for everyone.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 flourish. 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 fifteenth century, and it is easy to see that in modern times it might indeed often be impractical and self-defeating for any covenanted community to attempt to conquer a religiously divided society. But would this necessarily be the case everywhere? Aren't 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 significant number of Jews). But even with respect to societies of this type, Novak's 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 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 difficulties 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 difficulties on which Novak concentrates his attention and would benefit Christianity in that specific 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 flourish to the conclusion that such communities are bound to be advocates of untrammeled religious freedom.

As we have seen, Moses Mendelssohn's assertion of the priority of individual rights in his preface to Menasseh ben Israel's 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 affirm the truth and authority of a revealed law that required the severe punishment of religious offenses? Mendelssohn's best answer to this challenge combined a reaffirmation 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 Mendelssohn's skewed priorities, he disapprovingly characterizes him as someone whose “social contract theory” fails to “give the covenant primacy.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁵³ But Novak himself, it seems to me, has only been able to reconcile his 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 reaffirmed eternal divine sovereignty and a political theory based on inalienable human rights. Reform Judaism escaped from this difficulty 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 reflecting 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 find ways to justify the perpetuation of the benefits 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.Footnote 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 state's 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:

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 Herzl's 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 Josephus's definition 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 figuring 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 fifty years ago.” We would then be able “to say to the nations of the world, ‘Give us back our land and we’ll build on it a state based on the Torah. … Say whatever you want! Call it a theocracy! Look, here's Saudi Arabia! You all recognize it, and you're all running after it, on account of its oil, and they've got a totally theocratic regime there.’”Footnote 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 too difficult. Despite the presence of some vehemently anticlerical figures 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.Footnote ⁵⁷ The whole issue of synagogue-state relations has, nevertheless, remained unsettled and has resulted in ceaseless conflict in Israeli political life.Footnote ⁵⁸ Rather than investigate the specific 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 justifications for tactical compromise with liberalism elaborated over the years by all sorts of traditional thinkers.Footnote ⁵⁹ I will confine 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,

Repelled by what he had seen in Israel over the previous decade, Leibowitz insisted that

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.”Footnote 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 Leibowitz's, although they were, as we have just seen, omitted from this phrase by the Harvard University Press translator of this essay).Footnote 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.

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 state—every 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.Footnote 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 wasn't 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 beneficent 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 Mendelssohn's rather slippery answer to this issue may have been theoretically inadequate, but it did represent one possible way of turning one's 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: unqualified 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 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.Footnote 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 Jefferson's 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 significant impact on political life.