Once again the problem of religion or, more specifically, the theologico-political problem, is on the agenda. Until recently it was the orthodoxy that the rise of modernity was the product of a movement called secularization. On this account, secularization grew out of a response to the religious wars that devastated the European continent throughout the sixteenth century. Exhausted by years of theologically-inspired bloodshed, the statesmen and diplomats who negotiated the Peace of Westphalia agreed to abide by the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, granting the sovereign of each state the right to determine matters of religious practice and belief within his own territory. By agreeing to put religion under secular control and allowing for some degree of religious pluralism between, if not necessarily within, states, this was the first but decisive step whereby religion might eventually be removed altogether from the conduct of public life.

The problem with this account is that it is half-true at best. For Protestant theologians and historians like Hegel and Max Weber, the eventual triumph of religious toleration, the separation between the public and private spheres of intercourse, and the rise of a new political dispensation later known as liberalism was not the result of the exhaustion of religious fervor but was the direct consequence of the Protestant Reformation. For even more ambitious philosophers of history like Karl Löwith and Carl Schmitt the process of secularization itself was just a displaced form of theology. Ostensibly secular institutions like sovereignty, “the people,” and the state of exception became theology by other means. Far from representing a retreat from religion, modernity was coterminous with it.

Into this contentious debate, historian Eric Nelson has now thrown his hat. The provocative thesis of this short book—only 139 pages of text—is that modern politics and political thought grew out of a confrontation with the Hebrew Bible from which seventeenth-century writers took their ideas about the proper scope and limits of government. The “Hebrew Revival” was in fact a product of the Reformation's concern with a return to the text of Scripture alone (Sola scriptura) as the source of salvation. Rather than reading the Torah as the “old law,” it came to be seen by certain Christian Hebraists as a model of government—the respublica Hebraeorum—with Moses as its lawgiver-founder. “It may well be that we live in a ‘secular age,’” Nelson writes in one of his best sentences, “but if so, we nonetheless owe several of our most central political commitments to an age that was anything but” (5).

In the first chapter Nelson traces the transition from the doctrine of “constitutional pluralism” as endorsed by virtually all writers from Aristotle and Polybius onwards to the theory of “republican exclusivism.” The Biblical source of this theory was the debate over 1 Samuel 8 in which the Israelites, exhausted by the rule of the judges, appeal to Samuel for a king so that they might be “like other nations.” In a remarkable speech Samuel proceeds to outline all the evils of kingship after which God tells him to give the people what they want “for they have rejected me.” For “Talmudical Commonwealthmen” like John Milton, James Harrington, and Algernon Sidney, this effectively amounted to the view that monarchy is a form of idolatry, the substitution of the rule of a single man for the rule of God, and that the only legitimate form of government is republican (although nothing was said in the biblical account about the necessity for a republic).

In the second chapter Nelson considers the republican arguments favoring economic redistribution which he claims were based on the Hebrew agrarian laws outlined in Leviticus and a range of biblical commentators. The biblical arguments for debt relief, charity (tzedakah), and redistribution of land found their way into texts like Harrington's Oceana that set out to mimic the Hebrew model. The third and longest chapter deals with the Hebraic sources of toleration that Nelson argues, counter-intuitively, were derived from the account of theocracy in the writings of the Hellenized Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Rather than owing its origins to arguments for the separation of church and state, toleration has its true sources in the “Erastian” effort to unify them under a single civil sovereign much as in ancient Israel.

This book makes a number of bold and exciting claims. How reliable are they? To take but the tiniest example, in his first book, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (2004), Nelson argued that the redistributivist impulse in modernity arose from the Renaissance recovery of Greek, as opposed to Roman, texts. Harrington, a central figure in this story, was presented largely as a classical republican whose views on economic equality were shaped by a reading of Plato's Laws. Now Nelson argues with equal conviction that Harrington and modern republicanism were decisively influenced by the Israelite institution of the Jubilee Year and God's command to the Hebrews that “The land shall not be sold forever, for the land is mine.” Was Harrington a Platonist or a God-intoxicated Hebrew? Was the redistributivist impulse a return to Athens or derived from Jerusalem? Which story are we to believe, Nelson I or Nelson II? Can both be right? At the end of the chapter Nelson briefly notes that by the eighteenth century the biblical warrant for land redistribution had largely fallen out of favor with writers like Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Jefferson leaving instead only the “Platonizing” belief in the rule of experts. This brief admission seems dramatically to undermine the larger claims about the all-importance of the Hebrew revival for the growth of secularism.

The most controversial part of the book is likely to be Nelson's argument that toleration was the outcome not of “the Great Separation” between church and state, as Mark Lilla has recently called it, but from the Erastian effort to unify them. The longest discussion of this theme is devoted to Hobbes, but the account of Spinoza is the most revealing. Spinoza is presented as a “conventional” Erastian defender of civil over ecclesiastical authority, although Nelson's later admission that for Spinoza the God of the Bible “simply does not exist” seems to suggest that he was anything but conventional. Nelson dutifully repeats the standard view that Spinoza “follows” Hobbes in his major religious views, but does not explain why Hobbes himself reportedly said that Spinoza's works had cut through him “a bar's length” for “he durst not write so boldly.” Nelson recognizes the inadequacy of his own account when he acknowledges that Spinoza's “radical vision of the Hebrew Bible places him outside this [Erastian] tradition” (p. 133). So is he in or is he out? If out, why does he figure in the story at all? In what way is Spinoza part—or would he have wanted to be considered a part—of the Hebrew revival? These questions are left unanswered.

In fact Spinoza does derive his brief for toleration from Hebrew sources, but they have little to do with the Erastian controversy as presented here. In the Tractatus Theologico-politicus Spinoza presented Moses as a legislator and founder of a purely civil religion. Unlike Christianity that developed as a private sect outside the precincts of political power, the laws of ancient Judaism were tied to the prosperity and well-being of the commonwealth. Judaism developed as a religion of practice and ritual observance, not as a faith in the sense of a creedal religion. Due to the success of its early propagandists, notably Paul, Christianity turned into a quasi-philosophical sect with articles of belief necessary for membership and later on institutions of coercion empowered to enforce those beliefs. Spinoza's stunning conclusion was that it was Judaism and not Christianity that might serve as a model for toleration and a liberal society insofar as it was concerned to control only what we do while leaving us free to “think what we like and say what we think.”

The sources that Nelson uses to advance his thesis about the Hebrew origins of modernity are confined mainly to English and Dutch writers of the mid-seventeenth century. Just how influential were they? Nelson insinuates that there are important implications that follow from his claim, but he never gets around to saying what they are. In the brief “Epilogue” appended to the book he notes: “The European romance with Hebraica did not end suddenly in 1700” (p. 138). But it did end shortly thereafter. The short-lived experiment with philo-semitism gave way to the anti-semitism of Voltaire and the radical Enlightenment.

Ironically, not a word is said about the one place where the “romance” with Hebraica was most deeply-felt and long-lasting, namely, the North American colonies. America was established by those Puritan divines who believed they were on a biblically-inspired mission to establish a new Canaan, a new promised land, in the wilderness. These were the people who took with greatest seriousness the respublica Hebraeorum as a model for politics. Theirs was the language not of modern secularism but of the ancient jeremiad. To understand the full extent of the Hebrew legacy on modernity, however, one would have to turn from Nelson to Sacvan Bercovitch's classic study The Puritan Jeremiad (1978) or to Andrew Murphy's excellent new book Prodigal Nation (2009).