Julie E. Cooper Democracy and Theocracy in Jewish Political Thought: From Baruch Spinoza to Michael Walzer [DO NOT cite or circulate!!]

In recent years, theocracy has come to the fore as a live question for political and

theoretical debate. To their surprise and, in most cases, chagrin, contemporary democratic

theorists are now confronted with professed theocrats, to whose arguments for divine

jurisdiction they must respond. In most critical conversations, democracy and theocracy

are considered mutually exclusive. Debates about the prospects for Islamic democracy pit

critics who dismiss Islam as inherently theocratic against defenders who argue that

Islamic thought contains resources for indigenous forms of democracy. Scholars who

alert readers to the persistent challenge of political theology often take their bearings

from Carl Schmitt, whose insistence on absolutes is cast as a theocratic rejoinder to

liberal democracy. At a moment when scholars are increasingly determined to refashion

secularism – to accommodate a broader spectrum of religious practice and commitment –

theocracy remains beyond the pale of scholarly consideration, dismissed as a grave threat

to democracy.

The relationship of theocracy to democracy is also a central preoccupation of an

emerging scholarly field – the study of Jewish political thought. The publication, in 2000,

of the first installment of The Jewish Political Tradition (a projected four volume

anthology) arguably marks the debut of Jewish political thought as an academic field.1

1 Other major works in the field include the Hebraic Political Studies journal (2005-

2009); Novak 2000, 2005; and Biale, 1986. Although his work has been overshadowed

2

Edited by Michael Walzer and colleagues from the Shalom Hartman Institute in

Jerusalem, these volumes pair primary texts (from the Bible, midrash, rabbinics,

medieval philosophy, and modern political theory) with contemporary commentary. In

their selection of primary texts, the editors reconstruct “the political arguments that have

gone on for more than three millennia” of Jewish history, and in their inclusion of critical

commentary, they invite contemporary readers “to join the arguments that have

characterized the tradition and to carry them forward” (Walzer 2000, xiv, xxiv).

Documenting a continuous and contentious tradition of Jewish political argument, these

volumes seek to establish the canon for a new scholarly field.

As set by Walzer and his colleagues, the field’s research agenda includes the

demonstration that theocracy does not exhaust Jewish political discourse. With their

selections from rabbinic texts, the editors seek to rebut charges that “the Jewish religion

and the existence” of a democratic state “are antithetical to each other by their very

essence” (Weiler 1988, xiii). On the editors’ interpretation, the Jewish political tradition

is not inherently theocratic. Indeed, the editors uncover sources to support the contention

that a state can be authentically Jewish, even if it is not ruled by Jewish law (halachah).2

Showcasing Jewish thinkers who embrace “the secularization of politics, affirming

human, as opposed to divine, political agency,” the field’s architects provide ammunition

by the volumes that Walzer has edited, Daniel Elazar was the first contemporary scholar

to introduce the concept of a Jewish political tradition. See Elazar, 1997.

2 Israeli law incorporates elements from halachah, granting the state rabbinate

jurisdiction over matters of personal status (marriage, divorce, burial, conversion) for the

state’s Jewish citizens.

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against those who would expand halachah’s jurisdiction in the state of Israel

(Lorberbaum 2000, 2; see also 14, 151, 156). That theocracy is an undemocratic regime –

a regime best combatted with alternative Jewish sources, which are fortunately copious –

is an animating conviction of the project that Walzer and his colleagues have undertaken.

Yet Walzer and his colleagues do not only task scholars of Jewish political

thought with rebutting claims that Judaism is inherently theocratic and, consequently,

inimical to democracy. As critics of theocracy, Walzer and his colleagues must also

discredit the argument – counter-intuitive for most contemporary readers – that theocracy

is a radically democratic, egalitarian regime. The campaign against theocracy takes a

distinctive form for scholars of Jewish political thought. In addition to defending

democracy against clerical rule, they must resist what Walzer identifies as a

characteristically Jewish temptation: the temptation to embrace theocracy as an antidote

to all forms of hierarchy and coercion. For participants in The Jewish Political Tradition

project, exposing the “anarchist” tendencies of theocracy’s democratic defenders is as

urgent as disarming democracy’s theocratic critics (see Walzer 2000, 128-132).

The controversy surrounding theocracy has long taken this form in traditions of

modern Jewish thought. As we will see, Baruch Spinoza is the first Jewish thinker to

argue that theocracy is both a Jewish political signature and a democratic regime.3

3 In the twentieth century, the equation of democracy and theocracy is most closely

associated with Martin Buber, who credits the ancient Israelites with “the rejection of

political forms of rulership which impair a person’s immediate relation to God” (Buber

1990, 25). Buber is an express target of Walzer, Lorberbaum, and their colleagues in The

Jewish Political Tradition and related works. An engagement with Buber’s admiring

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Spinoza is also the first modern political theorist to endorse democracy, whose integrity

he defends against the incursions of clerical rule. Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise

is a canonical source for the worry that independent clerical authority subverts

democracy, as well as for the hope that establishing a direct political relationship with

God exempts one from hierarchy and subordination. Using a narrative about Jewish

political history to articulate a theory of state sovereignty, Spinoza vacillates between

appreciation for the Hebrews’ idiosyncratic political achievements and dismay at their

legacy for modern Jewish politics.

In this essay, I return to Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise in an effort to

understand why the critique of theocracy takes this distinctive form in Jewish traditions,

and what is at stake in making theocracy’s repudiation a central tenet of the study of

Jewish political thought. I return to Spinoza because he establishes the conceptual

framework that Walzer and his colleagues inhabit, a framework in which state

sovereignty provides the default configuration for political community. Writing as a

proponent of absolute sovereignty at the moment of the state’s ascendance, Spinoza

understood that the nation-state system would require radical transformations in the Jews’

political posture, and that Jewish political claims would challenge norms of state

sovereignty. In a framework that makes sovereignty the defining horizon of the political,

rabbinic Judaism’s bonds of obligation do not register as political. To join the ranks of

portrait of the biblical theocracy as a voluntary community, free from hierarchy and

coercion, is beyond the scope of this essay. Here, I do the ground clearing work necessary

to establish Buber’s thought as a alternative trajectory for the study of Jewish political

thought.

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the political, Jews must either embrace the nation-state system – through individual

citizenship in democratic republics or the establishment of a Jewish state – or they must

resist norms of state sovereignty. In the story that Spinoza tells about Jewish political

history, relaxing the strictures of unified sovereignty is precisely what theocracy allows.

When Spinoza makes theocracy the vehicle for this relaxation, he traces Jewish

ambivalence regarding sovereignty to foundational theological convictions. Even before

the destruction of the second temple, in 70 C.E., consigned the Jews to statelessness and

dispersion, Spinoza argues, they exhibited idiosyncratic attitudes toward political

institutions that Spinoza hopes to make standard. As Spinoza reveals, sovereignty’s status

as the defining horizon of the political is what is really at stake in Jewish debates about

theocracy. In the framework that Spinoza establishes, the critique of theocracy serves not

only to keep ambitious clerics in place, but also to counter Jewish resistance to norms of

state sovereignty.

Against interpretations that reduce Spinoza’s motives for relating Hebrew

political history to Erastian convictions, I contend that, with the introduction of theocracy

as a distinctive regime type, Spinoza exposes the tension between Jewish political

aspirations and norms of absolute sovereignty. To account for Hebraic political success,

in biblical times, Spinoza must concede that theocratic communities can persist in the

absence of an absolute sovereign. Indeed, Spinoza expresses qualified admiration for a

regime (theocracy) in which theological delusions support an imperfect sovereign. Yet

Spinoza ultimately recoils from the flexible attitude toward sovereignty required to

account for Hebraic political success, because this attitude also accounts for what

Spinoza considers rabbinic Judaism’s abject political failure (specifically, its insistence

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that legal obligation outlasts and transcends state borders). As Spinoza stages the Jews’

encounter with the state, in the Theologico-Political Treatise, the confrontation ends with

the induction of the Jews into the state system, rather than the latter system’s

abandonment or relaxation.

Although Walzer has done more than most to debunk the aspersions that Spinoza

cast against rabbinic Jews, he remains trapped within a Spinozist bind – reluctant to

pursue the challenge to norms of state sovereignty that, by his own admission, is

necessary to validate the existence of a Jewish political tradition. I trace the genealogy of

Jewish ambivalence toward theocracy in an effort to loosen the constraints it places on

the field of Jewish political thought. To deliver on the field’s promise of a more

expansive conception of the political, scholars of Jewish political thought must challenge

the conceptual framework that Spinoza introduces, in full awareness of what is lost when

we dismiss theocracy preemptively.

Recovering the Jewish Political Tradition: Implications for Sovereignty

In The Jewish Political Tradition, Michael Walzer and his colleagues summon the

field of Jewish political thought into existence by anticipating the reader’s skepticism

about the field’s condition of possibility. The editors’ inaugural gesture is to foreground

the improbability, for readers schooled in western traditions of political thought, of a

Jewish political tradition, given the Jews’ history of statelessness:

The association of politics with the state is pervasive in Western thought. Without

statehood, sovereignty, and coercive power, there doesn’t appear to be anything

like political agency, nor, therefore, any point to the standard political questions:

Who are the legitimate and authoritative agents? Where does their authority come

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from? Over what group of people does this authority extend? For what purpose,

subject to what limits, is it exercised? One can answer these questions with regard

to many different agents and groups, from ancient Assyrians to modern

Americans. One can answer them with regard to the Israelites of the biblical age

and again with regard to the citizens of the reestablished Israeli state. But with

regard to the Jews, so it is commonly believed, no answers are possible; the

questions don’t arise. After the great revolt against Rome was suppressed and the

Temple destroyed in 70 C.E., there was no Jewish state for almost two thousand

years; there were no sovereign agents, no coercive powers, no politics to think

about – hence, no political thought (Walzer 2000, xxi).

Here, Walzer invokes “the standard political questions” only to challenge the assumption

that they arise solely in nation-states. As Walzer and his colleagues proceed to

demonstrate, Jews living in dispersion, subject to non-Jewish rule, made political

decisions and engaged political-theoretical questions when negotiating the ins and outs of

communal life. Introduced in this way, the Jewish political tradition confronts scholars

with a pressing challenge – that of revisiting the relationship of politics to state

sovereignty. Before we can examine Jewish conceptions of authority and legitimacy in

any detail, we must debate whether sovereignty is a defining horizon of the political.

Indeed, on Walzer’s framing, the possibility of the former examination appears

contingent upon a negative or, at least, flexible answer to the latter question. If

“statehood, sovereignty, and coercive power” are, in fact, conditions of political agency,

then diasporic Jews would have no occasion to act or think politically.

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Thus, the editors begin The Jewish Political Tradition by making sovereignty

dispensable. That “politics is pervasive, with or without state sovereignty” is the editors’

animating conviction (Walzer 2000, xxi). When the editors cast their recovery project as

a vindication of politics in the absence of state sovereignty, they prepare a thoroughgoing

reorientation of modern political assumptions. The very act of recovering a Jewish

political tradition promises to expand our conceptual horizons, for it casts doubt on the

assertion, foundational for modern politics since Hobbes, that sovereignty is a sine qua

non of politics.

And, in many respects, the editors have charted an audacious research agenda for

this nascent field. From Spinoza onwards, scholars have depicted the destruction of the

second temple as the Jews’ exit from politics and from history. It is a commonplace of

Zionist historiography that diasporic Jews’ political stance was one of passivity – passive

submission to non-Jewish rulers combined with passive waiting for divine redemption.4

Although Walzer and his colleagues frame their project in Zionist terms – as a

contribution to the development of an indigenous political vocabulary tailored to the

requirements of Israeli democracy – their enthusiasm for rabbinic texts challenges Zionist

historiography (see Walzer 2000, xiv). The editors not only document rabbinic efforts to

exercise and justify communal authority, they also credit the rabbis with a sophisticated

political imagination. Without scanting the Bible’s authority for traditions of Jewish

thought, the editors judge the rabbinic corpus a more promising site for secular, pluralist

political thinking. Walzer champions the rabbis as paragons of political thinking who

developed a vigorous but sober deliberative culture. “As against the prophets, who waited

4 For Zionist historiography, see Piterberg 2008, 153-191.

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for the day of the Lord, they [the rabbis] affirmed the principle on which politics

necessarily rests: ‘it is not in heaven’” (Walzer 2012, 212). On Walzer’s narrative, Jewish

thinkers developed a more authentically political sensibility when living in dispersion,

subject to non-Jewish rule, than when they enjoyed political independence, in biblical

times. With this defense of rabbinic political acumen, Walzer and his colleagues present a

rebuttal to Zionist historiography that has the potential to inspire a more far-reaching

challenge to sovereignty’s hegemony as a modern political concept.

Yet even in their moments of greatest admiration for rabbinic political

achievement, Walzer and his colleagues appear reluctant to abandon state sovereignty as

the paradigm for political community. When, in the volume’s opening paragraph, Walzer

invokes “the standard political questions” only to detach them from the state, he risks

further entrenching their authority, as well as that of the institution with which they are

conventionally associated. If Jewish action and thought only count as “political” because

they mimic the action and thought that take place in sovereign states, then received

standards remain intact. This opening passage illustrates, in miniature, the dilemma

confronting the field that Walzer and his colleagues have pioneered. Does the

demonstration that politics takes place in venues other than the state require us to

generate a new set of political questions and concepts? Or must we invoke standard

questions and concepts to prove that diasporic Jewish communities were actually

political?

Although Walzer lauds rabbinic political achievements, he appears reluctant to

use the kahal – “the polis of exilic Jewry” and “one of the most compelling features of

the Jewish political tradition” – to challenge received standards for determining what

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counts as political (Walzer 2000, xxx). The kahal’s “achievement” lies, on Walzer’s

interpretation, in the maintenance of community under conditions inimical to political

flourishing. “The Jews did not choose, and never celebrated, the decentered politics of the

exile, but, within the limits set by their relative powerlessness, they made it work”

(Walzer 2000, xxx). One can endorse Walzer’s characterization of the kahal as a

successful accommodation to involuntary, suboptimal circumstances (i.e., powerlessness)

without concluding, as he does in recent work, that rabbinic politics are a pale

approximation of the real thing. On Walzer’s reading, the rabbis “avoided politics (or, we

might say, politics avoided them: they were denied the opportunities of sovereignty), but

they turned legal discussion into a kind of practical deliberation” (Walzer 2012, 212).

Precisely because he is impressed by the rabbis’ deliberative culture, Walzer is chagrined

that they were denied “the opportunities of sovereignty,” which would have enabled them

to practice “politics” in full. In these passages, Walzer vacillates between asserting the

political character of diasporic community and locating rabbinic efforts below the

threshold of what counts as genuinely political. His inaugural gesture notwithstanding,

Walzer appears unwilling or unable to abandon the state as the defining horizon of the

political.

Indeed, on closer inspection, Walzer’s recovery project looks less like a defense

of politics without sovereignty and more like a lament about sovereignty’s fragility in

Jewish traditions. In his work on the Hebrew Bible, Walzer exposes an alarming

indifference to sovereignty – and, by extension, to politics – at the heart of the tradition’s

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foundational texts.5 In The Jewish Political Tradition’s introductory passage, cited above,

Walzer’s imagined reader has no trouble answering the “standard political

questions….with regard to the Israelites of the biblical age.” Yet the argument of In

God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible, suggests that, for the biblical authors, the

answers to these questions are uncertain and highly problematic. Surveying biblical

attitudes toward politics, Walzer discerns widespread indifference and, occasionally,

active hostility. “In contrast to Greek philosophers, the biblical writers never attach great

value to politics as a way of life” (Walzer 2012, 125; see also xii). On Walzer’s

interpretation, biblical opposition to politics reflects its authors’ theocratic convictions:

The reason for this largely missing politics probably lies in the religious culture

itself, in the powerful idea of divine sovereignty. In a sense, every political regime

was potentially in competition with the rule of God. There can’t be fully

sovereign states, or a worked out theory of popular (or any other) sovereignty, so

long as God is an active sovereign. The people consent, but they do not rule. Only

when God is conceived to withdraw, to stand at some distance from the world of

nations, to give up his political interventions, is there room for human politics

(Walzer 2012, 202).

5 In what follows, I focus on works that Walzer has authored individually. Walzer and his

colleagues on The Jewish Political Tradition project do not speak in unison when it

comes to the vitality of political thinking in Jewish traditions. Walzer is arguably more

pessimistic than his colleagues about the resources the tradition affords for encouraging

political agency.

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Here, Walzer indicts “the powerful idea of divine sovereignty” as an impediment to the

enjoyment of political sovereignty. Although the Israelites had an independent state, the

state was not “fully sovereign” – or, more accurately, the biblical authors failed to

understand it as such – because theocratic ideology prevailed. And, in the absence of

fully sovereign states, Walzer concludes, there is no “room for human politics.” In this

passage, sovereignty remains the defining horizon of the political.

When Walzer laments the Israelites’ compromised sovereignty, he appears to

qualify his earlier affirmation of the pervasiveness of politics, “with or without state

sovereignty.” For the Walzer of In God’s Shadow, sovereignty (in its various meanings)

is of critical political importance. As Walzer states elsewhere, “sovereignty is a

permanent feature of political life” (Walzer 1983, 317). Indeed, in the absence of “full

sovereignty,” “human politics” remains elusive. In the story that Walzer tells about

Jewish history, the mere possession of a state does not guarantee thinking that is

“properly speaking, political,” but such thinking cannot reach fruition in the state’s

absence (Walzer 2012, xiv; see also 80). In both the biblical and rabbinic periods, Jews

lacked full sovereignty and, consequently, could not practice politics in full. (Of course,

the rabbis “avoided” politics through no fault of their own, while the biblical authors

squandered the opportunities of independent statehood.) As Walzer narrates Jewish

history, prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, the Jews were never “fully”

sovereign (with brief exceptions during the period of the kings). If one accepts Walzer’s

later diagnosis, the pressing task for Jewish thinkers is to shore up the foundations of

sovereignty in a tradition where theology and history have conspired to render the

concept fragile. When Walzer exposes sovereignty’s precariousness in Jewish traditions,

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he suggests a very different research agenda for the field of Jewish political thought.

Instead of exposing the mismatch between norms of sovereignty and Jewish political

experience, scholars would encourage Jewish political agency by putting sovereignty on

firmer foundations.

Walzer’s vacillation regarding whether sovereignty is permanent or dispensable is

a symptom of the challenges involved in establishing Jewish political thought as an

academic field. On Walzer’s framing, the question of sovereignty is “the central question

of Jewish political thought: Just how important is sovereignty, independence, and

authoritative direction? How important is it to have, like other nations, kings of one’s

own, who appoint judges and fight wars” (Walzer 2012, 124)? Having identified

sovereignty as the field’s central question, Walzer is caught in a bind. As Walzer

recognizes, to induct the Jews into the ranks of political nations, we must relax norms of

state sovereignty. If possession of sovereignty is the defining criterion of political agency,

then a Jewish political tradition is a contradiction in terms. At the same time, Walzer

worries that relaxing norms of sovereignty will yield politics that are dangerous (e.g.,

theocracy) or inadequate (e.g., the kahal). When Walzer identifies sovereignty as “a

permanent feature of political life,” however, he is led to the dismaying conclusion that

Jewish politics are largely “abnormal” (Walzer 2012, 68). Moreover, on the rare

occasions when Jewish politics are “normal,” they resemble the politics of “all other

nations,” with the result that their recovery appears less imperative, and less

consequential (I Samuel 8:5). As Walzer’s vacillation reveals, the pressing question for

the discipline is whether the study of Jewish political thought can displace the state as the

defining horizon of the political.

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This question is less a question about the personal ideological commitments (e.g.,

Zionism) of Walzer and his colleagues, than it is a question about the conceptual

framework with which they operate. Taking the pervasive “association of politics with

the state” as a point of departure, Walzer’s options prove unappealing: he can either

refuse prevailing standards, with the result that Jewish politics appear unintelligible to

western readers, or he can accept these standards, with the result that Jews must confess

their abnormality. As we will see, Walzer’s vacillation regarding the possibility and

desirability of a Jewish political tradition recalls that of Spinoza, the first modern theorist

of Jewish ancestry to make sovereignty a condition of political community. To

understand why sovereignty is such a vexed question for modern Jewish thinkers, we

must return to Spinoza’s history of the Hebrew theocracy. We must examine Spinoza’s

claim that theocracy is both a democratic regime and a Jewish signature because, for

Walzer as for Spinoza, theocracy is the biggest internal threat to the integrity of

sovereignty in Jewish traditions. While the deficiencies of rabbinic political thought

reflect contingent historical circumstances, the biblical abdication of politics results from

theological convictions. Returning to the Theologico-Political Treatise, we can see how,

in a framework that makes sovereignty the defining horizon of the political, the prospect

of democratic theocracy becomes the temptation that Jewish thinkers must resist to

qualify as “properly speaking, political.” For thinkers who resist this temptation (Walzer

included), what I call “Jewish politics” – traditions that affirm political solidarity while

denying that a Jewish polity must take the form of a nation-state – prove difficult to

conceive and defend.

Society and State in Ancient Israel

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Spinoza makes Hebraic political history a centerpiece of his political argument in

the Theologico-Political Treatise. Twentieth and twenty-first century scholars have

tended to read Spinoza’s history of the Hebrew state as an intervention into controversies,

in the Dutch Republic, about clerical jurisdiction. On this view, Spinoza exploits the

authority of the biblical example for Dutch Protestants, “appealing to and interpreting the

collective imagination of a people in order to exhort them to right conduct in society”

(Rosenthal 1997, 211; see also James 2012; Smith 1997; Schwartz 1985; Verbeek 1999).

The message that Spinoza hopes to convey by addressing Dutch Protestants in a biblical

idiom, according to these scholars, is an Erastian message of toleration. Spinoza “treats

the Hebrew constitution as an embodiment of the Erastian ideal,” even while he

decimates the bible’s authority as a revealed text (Nelson 2010, 130). For scholars who

classify Spinoza as a “Hebraist Erastian,” the Hebrew narrative illustrates the proper

relationship between civil and clerical authority (Nelson 2010, 130-131). Just as Moses

retained jurisdiction over all matters in the Hebrew state, so the Dutch sovereign should

remain the ultimate arbiter in matters of external religious practice. It is scarcely

surprising that scholars identify Spinoza’s Erastian convictions as a prime motivation for

his recapitulation of Hebrew history. This interpretation echoes Spinoza’s own statements

about the force of the Hebrew example. When, at the end of his historical narrative,

Spinoza enumerates the features of the Hebrew state “which are at least worthy of note,

and which it may perhaps be quite profitable to imitate,” he asserts the sovereign’s

jurisdiction over matters civil and religious (Spinoza 2001, 205). From the fact that

Moses held “the supreme sovereignty [summum imperandi],” with “sole authority to

enact and repeal laws in God’s name, to choose ministers of the sacred rites, to judge, to

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instruct, to punish – in short, to be an absolute ruler [absolute imperandi] in all matters,”

Spinoza concludes that civil sovereigns must retain jurisdiction over religious practice

while confining law’s reach to the realm of action (Spinoza 2001, 205). In these passages,

Spinoza endorses the Hebrew refusal of independent clerical authority as a template for

Dutch politics.

Without denying that Spinoza adduces the Hebrew example to interven in Dutch

debates, I resist the conclusion that Erastian convictions exhaust the example’s force. On

my reading, the Hebrew example also allows Spinoza to articulate implications of his

theory of sovereign power for Jewish community. When Spinoza upholds Mosaic

absolute rule as a template, he not only counters Calvinist claims for clerical autonomy

using texts that Calvinists revere – he also releases Jews from the yoke of halachic

obligation. To put it another way: Spinoza invokes the Hebrew example to declare the

end of what I call “Jewish politics” – traditions that retain a political conception of

Jewish peoplehood while denying that a Jewish polity must take the form of a nation-

state. In the Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza develops a theoretical framework in

which it is difficult to understand diasporic Jews’ communal and legal institutions as

“properly speaking, political.” In Spinoza’s view, one can only speak coherently about

Jewish politics with reference to the laws, institutions, and citizens of a Jewish state. In

the Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza relates the history of Hebraic politics, and he

envisions the possibility of what we now know as Israeli politics, the politics of a modern

Jewish commonwealth. Yet Spinoza denies that Jews living in dispersion legitimately

constitute a political community.

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Significantly, it is by evoking a distinctive Hebrew conception of the theologico-

political that Spinoza declares the end of Jewish politics, exhorting modern Jews to adopt

the institutional form of “all other nations.” According to Spinoza, the Hebrew state was

“a special kind of society and state [singularem societatem, & imperium],” distinguished

by the refusal to separate religion from politics (Spinoza 2001, 39). In the Hebrew state,

“civil law and religion – which we have shown to consist only in obedience to God –

were one and the same thing” (Spinoza 2001, 189). When Spinoza recapitulates the

exodus narrative, he traces the need for such arrangements to the Hebrews’ emotional and

political immaturity. “Inexperienced in such matters and exhausted by the wretched

conditions of slavery,” the emancipated Hebrews proved unprepared for democratic self-

rule (Spinoza 2001, 64). Under these circumstances, “government [imperium] had to

remain in the hands of one man,” and that man had to exude prophetic charisma (Spinoza

2001, 64). Religion is a critical tool of statecraft in nondemocratic regimes, as Moses

understood, because it masks the coercive nature of external rule. “This, then, was the

reason why Moses, by his divine power and authority introduced a state religion

[religionem in Rempublicam introduxit]: it was to make the people do their duty from

devotion rather than fear” (Spinoza 2001, 64; see also 199). The efficacy of Mosaic

legislation derived not only from the affects to which it appealed, but also from the way it

structured everyday life. As Spinoza explains in a notorious passage,

This, then, was the object of ceremonial observance, that men should never act of

their own volition but always at another’s behest, and that in their actions and

inward thoughts they should at all times acknowledge that they were not their

own masters but completely subordinate to another. From all these considerations

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it is quite indisputable that ceremonial observances contribute nothing to

blessedness, and that those specified in the Old Testament, and indeed the whole

Mosaic Law, were relevant only to the Hebrew state [imperium], and

consequently to no more than temporal prosperity (Spinoza 2001, 65).

Israelite religion cemented social bonds by making the most trivial aspects of mundane

existence occasions for affirming subjection. Moreover, these elaborate and

comprehensive ceremonies “were so adapted to the nature of their government [imperio]

that they could not be practised by the individual but involved the community [societate]

as a whole” (Spinoza 2001, 59). On Spinoza’s depiction, everyday life in the ancient

Hebrew state “was one long schooling in obedience,” with the result that heteronomy

seemed like freedom (Spinoza 2001, 199). Moses’ political savvy lay in his ability to

mobilize people who shared his unsophisticated view of God, exploiting belief to secure

obedience.

With the assertion of the identity of religious and civil law in the Hebrew state,

Spinoza prepares a (from his perspective) devastating critique of the rabbinic claim that

Jewish law remains binding in exile. In a system, like Spinoza’s, where “those who hold

the sovereign power have an overall right and…all law is dependent on their decision

alone,” the state is a necessary condition for political community (Spinoza 2001, 212).

On Spinoza’s reading, the Hebrew constitution exemplifies this inextricable relationship

between society and state sovereignty. When Spinoza describes the “special” features of

the Hebrew state, he uses “society” and “state” as synonyms. God chose the Hebrews for

the establishment of “a special kind of society and state [societatem, & imperium],” “with

respect to their social organization and their government [societatis, & imperii],” with the

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result that Moses “perceived a way by which the people of Israel could well be united

into a particular territory to form a political union [societatem] or state [imperium]”

(Spinoza 2001, 39, 40, 53). In this striking formulation, Spinoza conjoins two terms –

“society” and “state” – that, one could object, bear no necessary relation to one another

(see Clastres 1989). Yet for Spinoza, the state exhausts the possibilities for social

organization. Indeed, in their refusal to separate society from the state, the Hebrews

exemplify a general principle: “No society [societas] can subsist without government

[imperio] and coercion [vi]” (Spinoza 2001, 63). When Spinoza predicates societas on

imperium, he privileges the state as the sole institution that can support coercive law.

With the exception of universal divine law – the “rules for living a life” that aims at “our

supreme good and blessedness, to wit, the knowledge and love of God,” law does not

transcend state borders (Spinoza 2001, 50). Indeed, on Spinoza’s definition, human law is

“a prescribed rule of conduct whose sole aim is to safeguard life and the commonwealth

[rempublicam]” (Spinoza 2001, 49). In these passages, Spinoza provides a Hebraic

imprimatur for the “association of” law and, by extension, of “politics with the state.”

To Spinoza’s chagrin, the rabbis have forgotten this Hebraic maxim. Through the

medium of halachah, the rabbis have tried to maintain societas without imperium.

Against the rabbis, Spinoza contends that halachic obligation ceases with the demise of

the Hebrew state. The force of the claim that Jewish law (pointedly recast as “ceremony”)

“contributes nothing to blessedness” is not only to deprive Jewish law of philosophical

dignity, exposing its reliance on an infantile and infantilizing conception of God. The

assertion that ceremonial obligation derives solely from state law also supports Spinoza’s

heterodox conclusion that “since the fall of their independent state [imperium], Jews are

20

no more bound by the Mosaic law than they were before their political state came into

being” (Spinoza 2001, 62). If the laws of Sabbath observance aim solely to secure

political cohesion within a particular state, then they have no purpose after that state’s

demise. Jewish laws are “laws of a special kind [singulares leges]” not because they

remain binding for all eternity, but because they were adapted to the requirements of

political order in a given state (Spinoza 2001, 39). Spinoza’s scandalous contention is

that Jews, like himself, who are not citizens of a Jewish state, have no obligation to

observe Jewish law, which has been rendered obsolete. Once “scattered and stateless

[absque imperio],” Jews become isolated individuals with no political ties to one another

and no privileged status before God (Spinoza 2001, 45).

Having exposed the ostensible incoherence of Jewish society in the absence of a

Jewish state, Spinoza invites Jews to embrace the nation-state system. To return to the

ranks of the political, modern Jews have two options: Jewish individuals can become

citizens of democratic republics, or Jews can mobilize collectively to establish a Jewish

state. Spinoza entertains the second option in a much-remarked passage that provides

fodder for Zionist appropriations. Spinoza predicts that, like the Chinese, the Jews may

eventually regain their sovereign state: “Indeed, were it not that the fundamental

principles of their religion discourage manliness [effoeminarent], I would not hesitate to

believe that they will one day, given the opportunity – such is the mutability of human

affairs – establish once more their independent state [imperium], and that God will again

choose them” (Spinoza 2001, 46). When Spinoza entertains the prospect of a modern

Jewish state, he casts his embrace of the state as a necessary horizon for society as a

realization of the original Hebrew vision. If, as Spinoza suggests, the character of a

21

“commonwealth [imperium]” is “the only distinguishing mark between one nation

[Nationem] and another,” then establishing a state is the only coherent way to maintain

Jewish nationality (Spinoza 2001, 47). Ironically, it is by invoking the “special

constitution [singularis imperii]” of the Hebrew state that Spinoza discredits rabbinic

Jews’ “special” commitment to nationality in the absence of a state (Spinoza 2001, 38).

Jewish individuals have a second option within Spinoza’s statist frame. In the

absence of a movement for the establishment of a Jewish state, Jewish individuals can

abandon national pretensions and identify as citizens of their states of residence. In other

words, Jewish individuals can embrace the possibility for which Spinoza argues in the

Treatise itself – equal citizenship in a democratic republic that accommodates a wide

spectrum of opinion and belief. Scholars have argued that Spinoza advocates democracy,

in part, because it is good for the Jews – using a strong state to protect controversial

opinions from clerical censure (see Smith 1997, 19, 154, 204). In a democracy, Jewish

individuals are citizens like all others; their Jewishness is irrelevant or even invisible to

the state. Yet Spinoza’s democratic option also signals the end of Jewish politics, because

it encourages Jews to view themselves as isolated individuals, rather than members of a

subnational or transnational political collective. In a Spinozist democracy, individuals

may practice Judaism as a “religion,” but Jews no longer constitute a nation in the

political sense (see Batnitzky 2011).

If the Hebrew example allows Spinoza to articulate implications of the state

system for contemporary Jews, Jewish history poses challenges for that system’s

theoretical foundations. Although Spinoza dismisses rabbinic Judaism as an incoherent

anachronism, he recognizes that Jewish persistence could make sovereignty seem

22

dispensable. In a theory that predicates societas on imperium, the resilience of rabbinic

Judaism is an anomaly that must be explained. When Spinoza addresses the mystery of

the Jews’ “continued existence for so many years when scattered and stateless [absque

imperio],” he credits a self-perpetuating cycle of animosity with the preservation of

national identity (Spinoza 2001, 45). Unlike Hebrews exiled to Babylonia, who

“consigned to oblivion the laws of their native land as being obviously pointless,” the

Pharisees refused “to be assimilated to other nations” (Spinoza 2001, 62). Jewish refusal

to assimilate provokes external hatred, according to Spinoza, and external hatred serves

as the most powerful preservative of Jewish identity. “That they are preserved largely

through the hatred of other nations is demonstrated by historical fact,” Spinoza declares,

adducing the Spanish inquisition as evidence (Spinoza 2001, 45). (On Spinoza’s account,

forcibly converted Jews assimilated in Spain, where they were granted equal rights, while

they maintained a distinct identity in Portugal, where they were denied equal rights.) The

vehemence with which Spinoza pushes the persecution explanation betrays a deep-seated

anxiety about what alternative explanations for Jewish persistence might suggest about

the possibility of societas without imperium. Here, Spinoza betrays a realization that the

Hebrew example cuts both ways. Having invoked an episode from Jewish history to

defend absolute sovereignty, Spinoza must entertain challenges that Jewish history poses

to sovereignty’s hegemony as a political concept. If Spinoza deflects this challenge, in his

assault on rabbinic authority, with the persecution explanation, he cannot invoke anti-

semitism to explain away elements of Hebraic theology that threaten to compromise the

integrity of state sovereignty. When Spinoza identifies theocracy, to which we now turn,

23

as a Hebraic political signature, he must entertain the possibility that societies can thrive

with imperfect sovereignty.

The History of the Hebrew Theocracy

I have proposed that we read Spinoza’s history of the Hebrew theocracy as an

examination of modern Jews’ political predicaments in a world of nation-states. I divert

scholarly away attention from seventeenth-century Dutch politics less to make “the

Jewish question an essential ingredient of modern political thought” than to dispute the

assumption that the Hebrew narrative serves only to shore up the foundations of secular

authority (Smith 1997, xii). Granted, the Hebrew narrative makes the state a primary

locus of allegiance. But putting clerics in their place is not the only thing the narrative

does. If we read the Theologico-Political Treatise as a meditation on modern Jews’

confrontation with norms of state sovereignty, we encounter elements that complicate the

neat picture inherited from scholarship on Spinoza’s Erastianism. Foremost among these

complicating factors is the concept of theocracy as a distinct regime type. As we will see,

Spinoza introduces the concept of theocracy in chapter seventeen to capture unique

configurations of sovereignty in the ancient Hebrew state.6 Spinoza does not need the

notion of theocracy as a distinct regime type – let alone the characterization of theocracy

as tantamount to democracy – to defend the sovereign’s jurisdiction over “the outward

forms of religion” (Spinoza 2001, 212). If Spinoza’s sole aim, in relating Hebrew history,

6 The term “theocracy” first appears in Josephus 2004, II.165: “Our lawgiver was

attracted by none of these forms of polity [e.g. monarchy, oligarchy], but gave to his

constitution the form of what – if a forced expression be permitted – may be termed a

‘theocracy,’ placing all sovereignty and authority in the hands of God.”

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were to discredit independent clerical authority, he could achieve this goal by interpreting

the Sinai covenant as a direct transfer of rights to Moses (as he does in chapter five,

where the term “theocracy” does not appear). In short, Spinoza’s analysis of theocracy as

a regime type exceeds his agenda as a proponent of the sovereign’s jurisdiction over

religion. On my reading, the concept of theocracy helps Spinoza explain the more

perplexing aspects of Jewish political history. When Spinoza classes the Hebrew state as

a theocracy, he makes an idiosyncratic attitude toward state sovereignty a Jewish political

signature. Prior to the loss of their independent state, Hebrews subscribed to a theology of

divine sovereignty – a theology that inspired experimentation with constitutional design.

Expressing admiration for these theocratic regimes, Spinoza entertains the possibility of a

more relaxed approach state sovereignty, only to recoil from this possibility. As Spinoza

narrates Hebrew political history, theocracy emerges as the temptation that theorists must

resist in order to induct Jews into the nation-state system.

In the Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza tells the story of the founding of the

Hebrew state in two different passages. On Spinoza’s first rendition, in chapter five, the

Hebrews – released from obligation upon emancipation from Egyptian bondage – transfer

their rights directly to Moses, who exercises the full prerogatives of sovereignty. After

the exodus, the emancipated Hebrews were free “to sanction any new laws they pleased

or to establish new ordinances, to maintain a state [imperium] wherever they wished and

to occupy any lands they wished” (Spinoza 2001, 64). Given the Hebrews’ manifest

incapacity for “self-rule [sui juris],” however, the state’s “government [imperium] had to

remain in the hands of one man who would issue commands and enforce them on others”

(Spinoza 2001, 65, 64). This man was Moses, whose firm grip on the Israelite

25

imagination stemmed from his religious charisma. “Such sovereignty [imperium] Moses

easily succeeded in keeping in his hands, because he surpassed all others in divine power

which he convinced the people that he possessed” (Spinoza 2001, 64). On this rendition

of the Sinai covenant, Spinoza makes no mention of the Hebrews holding sovereignty

democratically, even if only for a moment. Indeed, Spinoza states that, “the task of

establishing a wise system of laws and of keeping the government in the hands of the

whole community [imperium penes sese collegialiter retinendum] was quite beyond

them” (Spinoza 2001, 64). For all intents and purposes, this narrative reads like a story

about the establishment of a standard-issue monarchy. It is no accident that Spinoza omits

the term “theocracy” in chapter five for, on the evidence of this passage, the Israelites do

not consider God their sovereign, although Moses invokes God’s name for purposes of

mystification and legitimation.

In chapter seventeen, by contrast, Spinoza introduces the term “theocracy” to

capture the unique aspirations and arrangements of the Hebrew state. If Spinoza’s first

narrative illustrates historical and affective conditions that preclude democratic self-rule,

his second narrative depicts the Sinai covenant as an unprecedented experiment, based on

theological conviction, at building community without human rule. When Spinoza relates

the exodus narrative in chapter seventeen, he explains that, at Moses’ prompting, the

emancipated Hebrews “resolved to transfer their right not to any mortal man but to God

alone” (Spinoza 2001, 189).7 Spinoza calls the resulting regime a “theocracy

7 Here, Spinoza echoes Hobbes. See Hobbes 1998, 191: “Then later when that people had

halted in the desert near Mount Sinai, and was not only wholly free but also totally

hostile to human subjection because of their recent experience of Egyptian slavery, it was

26

[Theocratia], its citizens being bound only by such law as was revealed by God”

(Spinoza 2001, 189). With this designation, Spinoza asserts the uniqueness of Hebrew

political arrangements. The covenantal community was a bona fide “kingdom of God,”

according to Spinoza, in the sense that “it was God alone…who held sovereignty

[imperium] over the Hebrews” (Spinoza 2001, 189). The Israelites really imagined and

experienced God as a political ruler. Moreover, this experience of direct divine

sovereignty precluded a distinction between “civil law” and “religion,” which “were one

and the same thing” in this polity (Spinoza 2001, 189).

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Spinoza’s regime typology, however, is the

equation of theocracy with democracy. Given the impossibility of establishing a direct

political relationship with God, Spinoza explains, “in reality the Hebrews retained their

sovereign right [jus imperii] completely” (Spinoza 2001, 190). Because God did not

actually rule over the Israelites, the Hebrew theocracy functioned as an egalitarian,

participatory democracy.

Since the Hebrews did not transfer their right to any other man, but, as in a

democracy [Democratia], they all surrendered their right on equal terms, crying

with one voice, ‘Whatever God shall speak, we shall do’ (no one being named as

mediator), it follows that this covenant left them all completely equal, and they all

had an equal right to consult God, to receive and interpret his laws; in short, they

proposed that they should all renew the old Agreement.” Hobbes does not, however,

introduce the notion that the Israelites unwittingly embrace democracy when they reject

human rule.

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all shared equally in the government of the state [imperii administrationem]

(Spinoza 2001, 190; see also 213-214).

Here, taking the idea of divine sovereignty seriously means forsaking human rule, and

forsaking human rule leaves citizens on an equal plane. Although based on a mistaken,

anthropomorphic conception of God, theocracy encourages political empowerment. In

principle, imagining God as a king can inspire democratic deliberation among parties

who understand themselves as God’s subjects.

In practice, however, direct divine rule is a fleeting experiment in Hebrew

political history. Glossing Exodus 20:15-18, Spinoza explains that, when the Hebrews

first “approached God on equal terms to hear what he wished to command,” they were

frightened by the pyrotechnics of the theophany and relinquished their right of equal and

direct access, appointing Moses as their intermediary (Spinoza 2001, 190). “By this they

clearly abrogated the first covenant, making an absolute transfer to Moses of their right to

consult God and to interpret his decrees” (Spinoza 2001, 190). As in the first rendition of

the Sinai covenant, once appointed as prophetic intermediary, Moses holds “the supreme

kingship [supremam majestatem]” and “the supreme sovereignty [supremi juris],”

exercising “complete control over the state [totam imperii administrationem]” (Spinoza

2001, 190). What began as a story about the constitution of an utterly unique regime –

direct divine rule – quickly becomes a story about the emergence of what looks like a

standard-issue monarchy. Given that the second rendition of the Sinai narrative ends up

in roughly the same place as the first – with Moses exercising the full prerogatives of

sovereignty – one could conclude that Spinoza’s democratic detour adds nothing to his

analysis of Jewish politics. On this reading, Spinoza’s second rendition of Sinai merely

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confirms the Hebrews’ immaturity. We know that the Hebrews are ill-suited for

democracy because their unwitting experiment in holding sovereignty in common failed.

On my reading, however, disdain for Israelite immaturity does not exhaust

Spinoza’s motives for classifying the primitive theocracy as a democracy. Entertaining

the prospect that theocracy is tantamount to democracy also allows Spinoza to diagnose

and critique the signature aspirations of Jewish politics. The Hebrews’ theocratic

experiment is animated by the conviction that establishing a political relationship with

God allows one to dispense with human rule. Theocracy approximates to a political

regime, because its subjects imagine God as a legislator and king. Yet unlike a standard

state, the primitive theocracy lacks human enforcement mechanisms. In the absence of

coercive institutions, the Hebrews would appear to be exempt from law, with the result

that, on Spinoza’s definition, their community is not a proper state – for a society only

becomes a state through the introduction of law (see James 2012, 272). Lacking

authority, institutions, and coercion, the primitive theocracy is more reminiscent of the

ideal philosophical community than it is of actually existing states. In the Ethics, Spinoza

heralds the prospect of a community of free men bound together solely by morality and

friendship.8 Coercion is superfluous among free men, Spinoza contends, because they are

moved by reason to establish lasting and empowering relationships. In other words,

rational men can sustain community without government.

Now if men were so constituted by nature as to desire nothing but what is

prescribed by true reason, society [societas] would stand in no need of any laws.

Nothing would be required but to teach men true moral doctrine, and they would

8 See Spinoza 1994, IVP71D, IVP37S1, IVP18S.

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then act to their true advantage of their own accord, wholeheartedly and freely.

But human nature is far differently constituted. All men do, indeed, seek their

own advantage, but by no means from the dictates of sound reason. For the most

part the objectives they seek and judge to be beneficial are determined only by

fleshly desire, and they are carried away by their emotions, which take no account

of the future or of other considerations. Hence no society [societas] can subsist

without government and coercion [imperio, & vi], and consequently without laws

to control and restrain men’s lusts and unbridled urges (Spinoza 2001, 63; see also

Spinoza 1994, IVP37S2).

In these passages, Spinoza holds out the prospect of society without the state as a lofty

aspiration. This aspiration proves unattainable beyond small philosophical circles,

however, given human passion. States – which use coercion to secure compliance with

reason’s dictates – are necessary because humans are not perfectly rational. The

Hebrews’ attempt at community without coercion proved short lived because, as their

fear at the theophany attests, they were not philosophers.

In no way incidental, the tale of the Hebrews’ experiment with direct divine rule

makes indifference to state institutions a Jewish political signature. What distinguishes

the Hebrews from other nations is the aspiration to establish a direct political relationship

with God. The Hebrews undertake this theocratic experiment from the conviction that

divine sovereignty entails “freedom from human rule [humani imperii libertas]” (Spinoza

2001, 198). As Spinoza narrates Jewish political history, the Jews sought to establish

political community without the normal state trappings even before the realities of exile

forced the rabbis to adopt the (from Spinoza’s perspective, incoherent) position that

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Jewish law remains binding in dispersion. With this second rendition of the Sinai

covenant, Spinoza challenges the Jewish belief that “freedom from human rule” is

available in or appropriate to a national (as opposed to a philosophical) community.9

The Flexibility of Theocracy

Spinoza’s challenge proves significant, for our purposes, because it demonstrates

his deep appreciation for the force of theocratic claims. Spinoza would not engage with

theocracy at length if he did not suspect that the figure of divine sovereignty could

provide a compelling alternative to norms of state sovereignty. If the Hebrews err in their

attempt to establish a society without human rule, they are not wrong to think that

theocracy affords possibilities for institutional design that other regimes preclude. We can

see as much if we examine Spinoza’s narrative of the subsequent stages of Hebrew

history. After Moses’ death, the theocratic regime assumes multiple forms, some of

which flout norms of unified sovereignty. As the Hebrew case reveals, the standard rules

of politics do not always apply when a community affirms divine rule. Yet the factors

that account for Hebrew theocracy’s resilience also give Spinoza pause, precisely because

they could conceivably license forms of community (such as rabbinic Judaism) that

transcend or subvert the state.

Spinoza’s narrative of the Hebrew theocracy unfolds in roughly four stages. In the

first and briefest stage, the Hebrews forsake human rule for divine sovereignty, and then

9 Significantly, Walzer’s verdict on the primitive theocracy, as described by Spinoza, is

more dismissive than Spinoza’s. See Walzer 2001, 10, where Walzer glosses “Spinoza’s

modernist reinterpretation of the Sinai covenant” as a biblically-inspired indictment of

anarchy: “The kingdom of God is something very close to anarchy (see Judg. 21:25).”

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forsake direct divine rule when confronted with the daunting reality of what their

misguided experiment entails. In the second stage, Moses exercises “all the functions of a

sovereign [omnia officia administrandi]” (Spinoza 2001, 191). At this point, the

theocracy appears to have “become simply a monarchy” (Spinoza 2001, 191). Yet this

appearance is deceptive. The Hebrew state remains a theocracy, on Spinoza’s definition,

because Moses neglects to appoint a successor who retains jurisdiction in all areas of

communal life. “Moses appointed no such successor, but left the state [imperium] to be so

governed by those who came after him that it could be called neither a democracy nor an

aristocracy nor a monarchy, but a theocracy” (Spinoza 2001, 191; see also 205). Thus, in

the regime’s third stage, Aaron and the Levites have the right to interpret God’s decrees,

while Joshua alone puts these decrees into execution. This division of labor and authority

renders the regime a theocracy, on Spinoza’s definition, because no human being enjoys

a sovereign’s complete prerogative. In the absence of a human ruler who exerts supreme

command in all areas of communal life, God remains the Hebrews’ sovereign, and Aaron

and Joshua are merely ministers. After Joshua’s death, the regime enters a fourth stage,

that of a tribal federation. During his lifetime, Joshua served as commander in chief of

the Hebrew army, leading all of the tribes into battle. No one assumed the role of

commander in chief after Joshua died, with the result that the tribes, who had divided the

conquered territory into discrete parcels, “must have been regarded as confederated states

[confoederatae] rather than as fellow citizens” (Spinoza 2001, 193). From this point

onward, each tribal captain assumes “the right to consult God through the high priest

about the affairs of his own tribe, to command his own military forces, to found and

fortify cities, to appoint judges in each city, to attack the enemies of his own particular

32

state [singularis imperii], in short, to carry out all the duties of war and peace” (Spinoza

2001, 193-194).10 The theocratic period of Hebrew history finally comes to an end with

the appointment of a human king, in the time of Samuel.11

10 For a detailed description of these federal constitutional arrangements and their

relationship to federal arrangements in Dutch history, see James 2012, 276-277.

11 Verbeek claims that, with the exception of the interval of Moses’ tenure, the theocracy

remains a democracy through all of its institutional permutations. On Verbeek’s reading,

Spinoza “points out that until the advent of the kings the people were actually sovereign

and that their transference of rights to God was ‘notional rather than practical’” (Verbeek

1999, 332-333). Similarly, James contends that, “as long as God continued to be the sole

legislator, sovereignty continued to reside with the people” (James 2012, 270; see also

274). This interpretation does not lack for textual support. When Spinoza summarizes the

regime’s strengths, he contends that, “as long as the people was sovereign [populus

regnum tenuit] there was only one civil war,” while “after the people, who were little

accustomed to kings, changed the original form of their state [imperii] to monarchy, there

was practically no end to civil wars” (Spinoza 2001, 207). Here, Spinoza suggests that

the theocracy remained democratic for the entirety of its duration. Given the practical

impossibility of transferring one’s rights to God, a state in which God is sovereign is

actually a state in which the sovereignty remains in the people’s hands, regardless of how

it is governed. Although I accept the force of this interpretation, I have chosen to reserve

the term “democracy” for theocracy’s first, and briefest, stage, for two reasons. First, with

the exception of the passage just cited, Spinoza only equates theocracy with democracy

when discussing the immediate aftermath of the Sinai covenant. Second, in the immediate

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The most striking thing about theocracy, on Spinoza’s depiction, is its

constitutional flexibility. In Spinoza’s account of Hebrew political history, the term

“theocracy” does not only signify the identity of civil and religious law – it also names a

regime that finds multiple institutional expressions. In the space of several pages, the

Hebrew theocracy has morphed from a participatory democracy, into a quasi-monarchy,

into a regime that divides authority between priests and military leaders and, finally, into

a tribal federation. Spinoza insists that, despite differences in their institutional

arrangements, these regimes are all theocratic, because God remains sovereign.

Moreover, after Moses’ death, the distinguishing feature of the Hebrews’ theocratic

regime appears to be imperfect or divided sovereignty – whose possibility Spinoza

emphatically denies elsewhere in the Theologico-Political Treatise. According to

Spinoza, sovereignty is absolute by definition: “Hence it follows that the sovereign power

[summam potestatem] is bound by no law, and all must obey it in all matters; for this is

what all must have covenanted tacitly or expressly when they transferred to it all their

powers of self-defence, that is, all their right” (Spinoza 2001, 177; see also 212, 215,

218). What makes the Hebrew state a theocracy is the absence of such a (human) power,

the fact that “the management of affairs was not entirely in the hands of one man, or one

council, or the people” (Spinoza 2001, 194). The identity of civil and religious law

notwithstanding, in its later phases, the theocracy gave military leaders the right to pose

aftermath of Sinai covenant, the community is governed democratically – all citizens

have an equal right to consult God. In subsequent phases of this regime, however, this

equality disappears. Although, by definition, the Hebrew theocracy lacks a human

sovereign, in its latter phases, it gains coercive institutions and hierarchy.

34

questions to God, while religious leaders alone could deliver and interpret God’s answers.

Priests remained the authorized interpreters of God’s word, but these words only assumed

the force of law when Joshua and the tribal leaders enforced them. “While the right to

interpret the laws and to promulgate God’s answers was vested in one man, the right and

power to govern the state in accordance with laws thus expounded and answers thus

made known was vested in another” (Spinoza 2001, 191). Given that Spinoza derives an

Erastian moral from Hebrew political history, one might expect him to condemn this

division of labor between captains and priests as a recipe for political instability. Yet, as

we will see, Spinoza appreciates the contribution this division makes to the regime’s

longevity. The history of the Hebrew theocracy suggests that, when allegiance to God is

the polity’s binding agent, a unitary human ruler is not required (see Verbeek 1999, 329-

330). Precisely because “religion was the only tie that bound them all together,” the

Hebrews were able to thrive under arrangements that deviate from Spinoza’s express

political norms (Spinoza 2001, 196).

For a proponent of undivided sovereignty, Spinoza offers surprisingly favorable

evaluations of theocratic arrangements that distribute authority among multiple locations.

Admittedly, Spinoza takes pains to remind readers that, in the state’s early stages, priestly

interpretations of God’s word only acquired the force of law through secular mediation.

When the state was stable, the priests “had no right to issue decrees, only the right to give

God’s answers when requested by the captains or the councils” (Spinoza 2001, 206). This

arrangement appears to place religious authority in a subordinate position, as Spinoza

advocates. Yet in the Hebrew state, priests were not docile functionaries. On Spinoza’s

interpretation, independent clerical authority placed significant constraints on secular

35

jurisdiction. For example, Spinoza hails the Levites’ authority to interpret law as a

salutary check on the propensity of those in power to “to cloak with a show of legality

whatever wrong they commit” (Spinoza 2001, 195). “Thus, if only in their own interests,

the captains had to take great care to govern entirely in accordance with laws laid down

and familiar to all, if they wished to enjoy the highest esteem of a people who would then

revere them as ministers of God’s kingdom and as God’s vice-regents” (Spinoza 2001,

195). In a similar vein, Spinoza identifies “the fear of the appearance of a new prophet”

as a powerful check on abuses by the tribal captains (Spinoza 2001, 196). The recognition

that an oppressed people would support prophetic upstarts restrains the captains’

oppressive tendencies. Moreover, when Spinoza identifies the constitutional flaw that

explains the regime’s eventual demise, he takes issue not with the fact of independent

priestly authority, but with the monopolization of that authority by the Levites, instead of

the firstborn of each tribe. On Spinoza’s diagnosis, “the cause of the destruction of the

state [imperii]” was the transfer, after the golden calf incident, of “the entire ministry of

religion” from the firstborn of each tribe to the Levites, which transfer bred seditious

resentment among the tribes, arrogance among the Levites, and, in the monarchic period,

competition between kings and clerics (Spinoza 2001, 200). Admittedly, the theocracy’s

strengths do not derive solely from the checks and balances that divided government

affords. The people’s unshakable obedience and martial zeal derive from the chauvinist

belief that “their kingdom was God’s kingdom and that they alone were God’s children,

while the other nations were God’s enemies for whom they felt an implacable hatred”

(Spinoza 2001, 197). Spinoza also credits the regime’s tenacity to policies that, in

principle, are independent of the Hebrews’ theocratic convictions, such as the ban on

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mercenaries and the security of private property rights. Yet theocratic checks and

balances play a significant role in Spinoza’s (qualified) enthusiasm for this regime. When

Spinoza enumerates the reasons for the Hebrew state’s persistence, he acknowledges the

power of the theocratic idea. Imagining God as a sovereign, the Hebrews turn

arrangements that would subvert a standard-issue polity into sources of strength.

In its suggestion that Jewish theology fosters idiosyncratic views about what is

required for a polity’s establishment and maintenance, Spinoza’s portrait of theocracy

informs his critique of Jewish politics. At the conclusion of his summary of Hebrew

history, Spinoza qualifies his praise for theocracy with the assertion that “it is not

possible to imitate it now,” because God no longer enters into political relationships, “nor

would it be advisable” for a modern commercial republic, because theocracy breeds

xenophobia (Spinoza 2001, 205). Read as an admonition to modern Jews, rather than

Dutch Protestants, this caution about theocracy’s impracticability encourages Jews to

accept the options available under the state system. Spinoza’s worry is not that

contemporary Jews will try to found an exact replica of the biblical state in the land of

Israel – they are too emasculated for such an endeavor – but that they will take theocratic

license too far. Embedded in Jewish theology is the notion that establishing a political

relationship with God allows one to dispense with, or at least bend the rules of, state

institutions. Just as the ancient Hebrews believed that divine sovereignty exempted them

from human rule, so rabbinic Jews consider themselves linked in bonds of legal

obligation – bonds that extend beneath and beyond state borders. This misapprehension

does not only reflect the Jews’ obstinate refusal to accept the political realities of

dispersion – it is also a modern expression of the theocratic principle that religious

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obligation transcends, and unites God’s subjects beyond, state borders. In other words, it

is an update or, from Spinoza’s perspective, a perversion, of theocracy’s tribal phase, in

which “religion was the only tie that bound them all together” (Spinoza 2001, 196). After

Joshua’s death, each tribe constituted a quasi-sovereign entity, conducting its own foreign

policy. Indeed, on Spinoza’s view, the members of one tribe only considered other

Hebrews compatriots in matters pertaining to religion. “With respect to God and religion

they must indeed have been regarded as fellow citizens, but in respect of the right of one

tribe as against another they were only members of a confederation” (Spinoza 2001, 193;

see also 195, 196). Admittedly, unlike diasporic Jews, the tribes inhabited a territory that

was both contiguous and sacred: “it alone was held to be holy ground, the rest of world

being unclean and profane” (Spinoza 2001, 197). Yet there is nothing in Spinoza’s

analysis that would preclude Jews from concluding that theocracy enables expansion of

the federal model beyond a fixed territory – for example, in the form of independent

kehillot. Just as the temple linked the Hebrew tribes, so the memory of the temple and the

hope for its restoration could link rabbinic Jews through ties of obligation (Spinoza 2001,

195). Jews have a theological legacy that leads them, not without reason, to think that

theocracy admits of more than one interpretation, and more than one institutional

arrangement.

As Spinoza understands, the problem with theocracy, for a proponent of absolute

sovereignty, is not that it closes off political possibilities, but that it is too flexible. The

Hebrews’ determination to appoint God as their ruler opens up a broader spectrum of

constitutional possibilities than an absolute human sovereign affords. Indeed, the

spectrum is dangerously broad, because the notion that God can ground political

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community, without the standard mediating institutions, opens the door to coercive law

beyond the bounds of a sovereign state. When Spinoza recounts the history of the

Hebrew state, he is impressed by the power of the theocratic idea to support alternative

modes of social organization. Yet Spinoza ultimately recoils from the idiosyncratic

dispositions that account for Hebraic political success, because they contribute to what he

considers Jewish political failure. Against the rabbis, Spinoza resists the idea that, if the

point of Judaism is to establish a political relationship with God, Jewish politics can

dispense with state institutions. Aware of the challenge that theocracy poses to norms of

state sovereignty, Spinoza seeks to harness the Hebraic legacy in ways that reconcile

Jews to the state system.

Conclusion

I have argued that the critique of theocracy assumes a central role in the emerging

discipline of Jewish political thought because it is a vehicle for negotiating the Jews’

fraught relationship to the state. In the tradition that Spinoza inaugurates, the critique of

theocracy serves not only to subordinate clerical authority to secular rule, but also to limit

the flexibility that God affords in constituting political community. Making ambivalence

about state institutions a foundational Jewish tenet, Spinoza articulates the predicament

that the nation-state system poses for modern Jews, and wrestles with the challenge that

Jewish political history poses to that system’s definition of politics. In the Theologico-

Political Treatise, exploiting the Hebrew example to reinforce norms of state sovereignty

proves more complicated than scholars have led us to believe. To use the Hebrew

example to reconcile Jews to the two options that, on his view, the state system affords,

Spinoza must entertain and discredit another interpretation to which the example is

39

susceptible. In the theocratic tradition whose power Spinoza acknowledges, the unity of

religion and politics makes absolute sovereignty less, rather than more, imperative.

Precisely because he appreciates the strengths of a regime that uses theological

conviction as a binding agent, Spinoza makes visible what is lost when the state’s

ascendance narrows the political options for modern Jews.

To a surprising extent, the founders of the discipline of Jewish political thought

remain caught in a similar bind when it comes to the state, and, like Spinoza, they

ultimately retreat from more radical possibilities that they themselves entertain. Spinoza

writes at a moment of the state’s consolidation, as a proponent of absolute sovereignty

and a critic of rabbinic Judaism. Walzer, by contrast, writes at a moment when scholars

have diagnosed the “waning” of state sovereignty, and he writes as a defender of rabbinic

political acumen (see Brown 2010). As Walzer recognizes, to rehabilitate rabbinic

politics, we must resist the pervasive “association of politics with the state.” Yet like

Spinoza, Walzer proves unable or unwilling to pursue the challenge to norms of state

sovereignty that, by his admission, the study of Jewish political thought requires. Indeed,

the repudiation of theocracy remains a key tenet of the field that Walzer has founded.

Although Walzer sets out to counter Spinoza’s aspersions against rabbinic Judaism, he

ends up repeating Spinoza’s theoretical moves, raising the specter of theocracy in ways

that make sovereignty a defining horizon of acceptable Jewish politics. At a moment

when the default categories of modern political thought are in flux, a political tradition

that has historically been defined by ambivalence toward the state remains unable to

displace the state as a defining horizon of the political.

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To imagine alternative trajectories for this nascent discipline, we must extricate

the field from the bind in which the Spinozist frame has placed Jewish thinkers, or at

least learn to negotiate this bind differently. Understanding why theocracy has become a

temptation to be resisted – and what is at stake when Jewish thinkers resist it, in the name

of politics – is a necessary prelude to reevaluating thinkers now dismissed as theocratic

and, consequently, “antipolitical.” Ironically, if we want to defend the tradition whose

modern viability Spinoza denied – traditions of Jewish (as opposed to Hebrew, Israeli, or

liberal) politics – we must emulate Spinoza, undertaking a careful study of what

theocracy means, and how it configures human agency. After a tumultuous period that

witnessed a proliferation of Jewish political movements and ideologies, we are arguably

back where Spinoza began, at a moment when Jews appear to have only two political

options: liberalism and Zionism. Jewish political discourse remains captive to an

interpretive frame that makes these options seem like the default, given modern Jewish

history. At this juncture, when what I have called “Jewish politics” remain almost

inconceivable, theocratic voices, such as Martin Buber’s, can help us envision an

alternative model of democratic rule, one that neither pits divine sovereignty against

human agency nor accepts the state as a sine qua non of political community. Rethinking

the relationship between democracy and theocracy is a prerequisite for moving the study

of Jewish political thought beyond the statist dilemma, and envisioning more flexible

models of obligation and allegiance.

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