15 - A ‘Polis' in Jerusalem: The Jewish State

Summary

And because of all this we make a firm covenant, and write it, and our princes, our Levites, and our priests set their seal to it.

NEHEMIAH 9: 38

… they jointly chose Solon as arbitrator and Archon and entrusted the government to him … And he established a constitution and made other laws … They wrote up the laws of the Boards and set them in the Royal Colonnade, and all swore to observe them …

ARISTOTLE, Athenian Constitution, 5. 2, 7. I (trans. by H. Rackham)

THE DUAL POLITICAL HERITAGE

THE return of the Jews to history was also their return to the realm of politics and statesmanship, whether as participants in European politics in various countries or as a new emerging political entity in Palestine from 1882. The idea of a Jewish state could be nourished by the memories of Jewish independence and Jewish sovereignty in biblical and post-biblical times, or by the messianic prophecies, but no one seriously thought of a revival of a Jewish kingdom. Thus it was the European political experience which was the political school of the Zionist movement. When Jews of the late nineteenth century lost faith in absolute enlightened monarchies (or after monarchies gave way to other types of government), the liberaldemocratic paradigm of state that they adopted was closer to the political heritage of classical antiquity than to the Jewish political heritage. In that they followed the course taken by Western civilization.

Christian political tradition was based on biblical foundations. When the Carolingian emperors gave the law (a positive law) to the whole Christian people, writes Christopher Dawson, they did it ‘in the spirit of the kings and judges of the Old Testament’ and used the Book of Divine Law as their manual of government. As a result, a complete break was made with the Roman or barbarian past, and ‘Christendom enacted its own laws, which covered the whole field of social activity in Church and State … This was inspired neither by Germanic nor [by] Roman precedent.’ Later in the Middle Ages, theological and political thinking was influenced by Roman political theory (taken mainly from Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch's purported Institutio Traiani in John of Salisbury's Policraticus) and then by the political theories of Plato and Aristotle, but basically it was a theological theory.