Hebraism in Religion, History, and Politics


Book Description

This study offers an investigation into Hebraism as a category of cultural analysis within the history of Christendom. Its aim is to determine what Hebraism means or should mean when it is used.




Political Hebraism


Book Description

Between the 16th and 18th centuries, European political philosophy felt intimately at home with the Hebrew Bible, enjoyed some familiarity with later Jewish texts and exegeses, and accommodated a small number of Jews within its political discourse. The period was characterized by a search for Hebraica Veritas, a view of De Republica Hebraeorum as the idealized polity, and biblical and Jewish ideas permeating the political imagination through art, literature, and legal codes. This volume is comprised of papers from the first ever international conference on political Hebraism held in Jerusalem in August 2004 under the auspices of the Shalem Center. The topic of political Hebraism is broached here from a number of approaches, including historical, literary, philosophical, theological, critical, and sociopolitical.




John Locke's Political Philosophy and the Hebrew Bible


Book Description

John Locke, whose ideas helped give birth to the United States, predicated his political theory on the Hebrew Bible. Why?




Political Hebraism


Book Description




The Hebrew Republic


Book Description

According to a commonplace narrative, the rise of modern political thought in the West resulted from secularization—the exclusion of religious arguments from political discourse. But in this pathbreaking work, Eric Nelson argues that this familiar story is wrong. Instead, he contends, political thought in early-modern Europe became less, not more, secular with time, and it was the Christian encounter with Hebrew sources that provoked this radical transformation. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian scholars began to regard the Hebrew Bible as a political constitution designed by God for the children of Israel. Newly available rabbinic materials became authoritative guides to the institutions and practices of the perfect republic. This thinking resulted in a sweeping reorientation of political commitments. In the book’s central chapters, Nelson identifies three transformative claims introduced into European political theory by the Hebrew revival: the argument that republics are the only legitimate regimes; the idea that the state should coercively maintain an egalitarian distribution of property; and the belief that a godly republic would tolerate religious diversity. One major consequence of Nelson’s work is that the revolutionary politics of John Milton, James Harrington, and Thomas Hobbes appear in a brand-new light. Nelson demonstrates that central features of modern political thought emerged from an attempt to emulate a constitution designed by God. This paradox, a reminder that while we may live in a secular age, we owe our politics to an age of religious fervor, in turn illuminates fault lines in contemporary political discourse.




Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500-1660)


Book Description

The Reformation transformed Christian Hebraism from the pursuit of a few into an academic discipline. This book explains that transformation by focusing on how authors, printers, booksellers, and censors created a public discussion of Hebrew and Jewish texts.




Socrates and the Jews


Book Description

Taking on the question of how the glories of the classical world could be reconciled with the Bible, this book explains how Judaism played a vital role in defining modern philhellenism.




Theology, Politics, and Exegesis


Book Description

Modern biblical scholars often view the methods they employ as objective and neutral, tracing the history of modern biblical scholarship to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this volume, Jeffrey Morrow examines some earlier, lesser known roots of modern biblical scholarship. He explores biblical scholarship from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries and then discusses its new place in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century where such scholarship would flourish. Far from merely an objective and neutral method, such scholarship was never without philosophical, theological, and political underpinnings. Morrow concludes the volume with a look at the separation of biblical studies from theology, using the example of Catholic moral theology in the twentieth century.




New Essays on Zionism


Book Description

A selection of articles addressing those fundamental questions that define the agenda for the Jewish state in the 21st century. Among the authors one can find key figures in the Israeli public dialogue, such as Ruth Gavison, Yoram Hazony, Michael Oren, Amnom Rubinstein, and Natan Sharansky.




Jewish Politics in Spinoza's Amsterdam


Book Description

This book untangles a web of ideas about politics, religion, exile, and community that emerged at a key moment in Jewish history and left a lasting mark on Jewish ideas. In the shadow of their former member Baruch Spinoza’s notoriety, and amid the aftermath of the Sabbatian messianic movement, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam underwent a conceptual shift that led them to treat their self-governed diaspora community as a commonwealth. Preoccupied by the question of why and how Jews should rule themselves in the absence of a biblical or messianic sovereign state or king, they forged a creative synthesis of insights from early modern Christian politics and Jewish law and traditions to assess and argue over their formidable communal government. In so doing they shaped a proud new theopolitical self-understanding of their community as analogous to a Christian state. Through readings of rarely studied sermons, commentaries, polemics, administrative records, and architecture, Anne Albert shows that a concentrated period of public Jewish political discourse among the community’s leaders and thinkers led to the formation of a strong image of itself as a totalizing, state-like entity—an image that eventually came to define its portrayal by twentieth-century historians. Her study presents a new perspective on a Jewish population that has long fascinated readers, as well as new evidence of Jewish reactions to Spinoza and Sabbatianism, and analyses the first Jewish reckoning with modern western political concepts.