The early seventeenth century witnessed the simultaneous rise of the economic fortunes of European Jewry and of Christian
scholarly interest in Jewish texts. Increasingly valued as facilitators of international trade by states and rulers guided
by mercantilist economics and
raison d’Etat pragmatism, Jews extended their geographical presence and deepened their commercial importance, particularly during the turmoil
of the Thirty Years’ War.
1 Christian Hebraism, meanwhile, having emerged as a facet of Renaissance humanism, and invigorated by the theological rivalries
of the post-Reformation era, reached its intellectual high-water mark in the second quarter of the seventeenth century.
2 In Jonathan Israel’s words, “philosemitic scholarship was … born at the same moment, and in the same context, as philosemitic
mercantilism.”
3What, though, was the relationship between these two phenomena? Or, to pose this question slightly differently, what were
the politics of seventeenth-century Christian intellectual engagement with Jews and their texts, and in what sense, and to
what extent, is it appropriate to consider this endeavor “philosemitic”? The expansion of Jewish settlement from the mid-sixteenth
to the mid-seventeenth century – around the North Sea, in Italy and central Europe, and, slightly later, in colonial settlements
around the Caribbean – was overwhelmingly driven by commercial
motives.
4 However, this expansion placed practical issues related to Jewish settlement on the intellectual agenda, and in these debates
economics, politics, and theology inescapably intertwined. The appreciation that a Jewish presence was commercially beneficial
to the states that welcomed them itself of course constituted a positive valuation of Jews, and it was an argument vigorously
promoted by several Jewish leaders: the first to do so in detail was the Venetian rabbi Simone Luzzatto in 1638.
5 Acceptance of Jews for economic
ragione di stato fed into a broader discussion concerning the civic utility and loyalty of Jews, and the appropriate terms on which they should
be tolerated.
6Scholarly discourse on Jewish themes often had little to do with actual Jews, past or present. In early seventeenth-century
England in particular, as Eliane Glaser has recently emphasized, Judaism often functioned as a highly versatile polemical
resource, widely but inconsistently invoked to score points in theological and factional disputes between Christians.
7 However, since the early Renaissance much Christian Hebraist scholarship had been deeply embedded within the humanist moral
and political concerns of liberty and virtue. Biblical figures were read by both Christian and Jewish Italian humanists as
exemplary and usable political models, associated not only with wisdom but also with these civic values.
8 The preservation of
libertà and
virtù was central to Renaissance republican thought – an intellectual current that emerged in close proximity to Hebraist scholarship.
The Hebrew Bible offers several political models, and in the Jewish interpretive tradition monarchy is usually taken to be
the governmental norm.
9 However, over the course of the early modern period Hebraism became increasingly closely associated with republican juristic
and political thought. This reached its peak in the seventeenth century, when, in both England and the Dutch Republic, Hebraic
texts and Judaic models
were widely used to defend and advance republican and quasi-republican arguments. It is in this republican tradition, I would
suggest, that the political core of early modern valorization of Judaism is to be found. This was indubitably a philosemitic
tradition, in which we find an intricate but unmistakable relationship between political biblicism and attitudes toward contemporary
Jews. Moreover, the tensions internal to early modern republican thought, in particular in relation to land, agriculture,
and commerce, were cast into particularly stark relief by the Jewish case.
A key focus of scholarly interest was the ancient Mosaic commonwealth, which served as a major political examplar, uniquely
offering a sacred model of republican government.
10 The study of the “Republic of the Hebrews” was a pan-European project in the early modern era, engaging Catholics as well
as Protestants: Carlo Sigonio’s
Respublica Hebraeorum, published in Bologna in 1582, was one of the most important early examples of the genre. However, identification with the
ancient Hebrews, and fascination with the divinely ordained governmental arrangements of the
respublica Hebraeorum, appealed most potently to reformed Protestants, themselves engaged in forging new – and, it was hoped, more godly – structures
of social and political organization.
11 In the Dutch Republic, where national analogies with the ancient Israelites were most vivid, the most powerful and popular
celebration of Mosaic republicanism was the
De republica Hebraeorum of Petrus Cunaeus, professor of law at the University of Leiden (1617).
In England also collective identification as a “second Israel” – in some sense an elect nation – had particular resonance.
The political significance of this identification was, however, rendered more complicated by the fact that, although civic
values associated with republicanism were powerfully established in Elizabethan and early Stuart England, the English polity,
unlike the Dutch, was not constituted as a republic during this period.
12 Early English
Hebraism was, indeed, sponsored by the royal court, and its most significant outcome was the publication of the King James
Bible (1611).
13 The Old Testament, as scholars such as Christopher Hill and William Lamont have shown, was an intensely political and contested
text in early seventeenth-century England, and Puritans and Anglicans identified with its Jewish protagonists in markedly
different ways.
14 Whereas high church traditionalists invoked Jewish precedents in support of their own position on theological and ceremonial
issues, their opponents used Jewish examples in a more explicitly political fashion. For critics of divine right theory and
of high church ceremonialism, the divinely ordained Mosaic republic, enshrined in Jewish law and explicated and evolved in
rabbinic literature, provided the most powerful basis for their claim that all government should be derived not from naked
authority but from collective consent to a just system of law, responsive and adaptive to changing needs and conditions.
15According to the influential though controversial thesis of J. G. A. Pocock’s “Machiavellian moment,” the central intellectual
thread of European republican thought in the early modern era runs from Machiavelli and his contemporaries in Renaissance
Florence, via James Harrington and others in mid-seventeenth-century England, through to the Jeffersonian republicanism of
the early United States. This tradition, which emphasized citizen involvement in public affairs as the key guarantor of the
fundamental but eternally precarious political good of individual and collective liberty, according to Pocock enshrined humanist
notions of civic virtue at the core of European republican values.
16 A loosely parallel lineage of Hebraic scholarship and identification is readily apparent, from the roots of this scholarly
endeavor in Renaissance Italy, via the politicized biblicism of seventeenth-century England, through to the covenantal language
of early America. Hebraism also, as we have already noted, permeated seventeenth-century Dutch political culture – a key chapter
in the history of republicanism, but nonetheless absent from Pocock’s intellectual genealogy, as several of his critics have
pointed out.
17 At the center of early modern
Hebraist scholarship was a theological aspiration to fortify Christian faith and quell religious conflict by establishing
accuracy and certainty in the interpretation of the Bible.
18 However, it was also a political project, and one closely intertwined with the history of republicanism.
It makes sense, indeed, to posit the existence of a “philosemitic moment” in Western republican thought, connecting a sequence
of early modern thinkers for whom, in distinct but related ways, republican ideals were articulated in Hebraic terms, through
identification with the ancient Jews and admiration for the Mosaic commonwealth. This philosemitic republican tradition –
like Pocock’s Machiavellian one – was inherently precarious, beset with a sense of vulnerability to the corrupting forces
of authoritarianism, faction, and commerce. It is in the unfolding of this republican anxiety that the parallelism between
the philosemitic and the Machiavellian “moments” is most illuminating. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Pocock
has emphasized, Anglo-American republicanism was strongly aligned with agrarian, “country” values, in opposition to the threats
believed to emanate from parliamentary centralization and, above all, from commerce.
19 Writers on the Mosaic commonwealth strongly associated this polity, as we shall see later, with agrarian virtue. However,
no ethnic group of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was more closely associated with commerce than the Jews. Ancient
myths and contemporary realities pulled in diametrically opposed directions. In the attempts of various thinkers to harmonize
these contrary perspectives on Jews, we witness the complex strains internal both to early modern European republican thought
and to the politics of philosemitism.
The detailed study of the Old Testament as a source of explicitly political inspiration and example emerged in the later sixteenth
century as a new genre in humanist scholarship. Machiavelli himself, in his political writings, paid close and admiring attention
to Moses, identifying him as the most venerable and one of the most outstanding lawgivers and possessors of
virtù.
20 Later writings were clearly indebted to Machiavelli, but the explication of the laws and institutions of what became known
as “The Republic of the Hebrews” – or, in England, the Mosaic or Jewish
“Commonwealth” – emerged only in the theologically competitive environment of the post-Reformation era. At least twelve major
texts were published in this genre between 1546 and 1710.
21It was in the early Dutch Republic that Hebraic politics most firmly took grip. Analogies between the Dutch Revolt and the
liberation of the Jews from their enslavement in Egypt appear ubiquitously in the visual and literary culture of the Dutch
Golden Age, as Simon Shama has vividly shown.
22 Deeply immersed in Protestant biblicism, and politically formed in struggle with the much mightier Catholic Spain, the Dutch
readily identified their young nation as a “New Israel,” blessed with divine protection and a special historical destiny.
This theological rhetoric was embraced across the political spectrum, but its significance was pointedly contested, particularly
during the bitter conflicts in the second decade of the seventeenth century between the Remonstrants and their more strictly
Calvinist Counter-Remonstrant adversaries.
23 The Counter-Remonstrants (like the English Puritans) restricted their understanding of collective divine election to the
community of true believers in the national Dutch Reformed Church. For the Remonstrants, however (who were also echoed by
their fellow Arminians in similar debates across the North Sea), the Dutch “New Israel” was primarily a political notion,
identified with the entire nation.
24 The divinely inspired political model of the Hebrew republic took on a particular appeal for the Remonstrants in the context
of this intense conflict over the theologicopolitical identity of the new Dutch state.
Hugo Grotius, the intellectual leader of the Remonstrant party, attempted to apply the ancient Hebrew example to contemporary
Dutch politics in his earliest piece of extended political writing,
De republica emendanda [On the emendation of the republic] (in manuscript in 1601, but unpublished during his lifetime).
25 However, he left the more
detailed explication of this theme to Petrus Cunaeus, his close friend and Remonstrant ally, whose
De republica Hebraeorum has been described by Richard Tuck as “the most powerful statement of republican theory in the early years of the Dutch Republic.”
26 Published in 1617 at the height of the power struggle between the Arminian and Counter-Remonstrant camps, Cunaeus’s text
was intended to be read first and foremost as a demonstration of how to preserve civil unity and avoid the perils of factionalism
(a danger widely regarded as inherent in the theological exclusivism of the Counter-Remonstrants). His readers did not miss
this pointed contemporary argument: in 1619–20, in the aftermath of the Counter-Remonstrant victory at the Synod of Dordrecht,
Cunaeus was required to “clarify” certain of his arguments and defend his theological orthodoxy.
27The contemporary relevance of Cunaeus’s tract is clearly stated in his preface, patriotically dedicated to “the illustrious
and mighty States of Holland and Western Frisia”:
For your inspection, most illustrious Members of States, I offer a republic – the holiest ever to have existed in the world,
and the richest in examples for us to emulate. It is entirely in your interest to study closely this republic’s origins and
growth, because its creator and founder was not some man sprung from mortal matter, but immortal God Himself. … You will see
what it was, in the end, that preserved the Hebrew citizens for so long in an almost innocent way of life, stirring up their
courage, nurturing their harmonious coexistence, and reining in their selfish desires.
28
The downfall of the Hebrew republic, he emphasized, was caused by factionalism, formented by Jeroboam after the death of Solomon,
and resulting in the disastrous division of the polity into two.
29 The need to learn from the Hebraic example was urgent, because the Dutch Republic faced a very similar and pressing danger:
“Many of your citizens have already split off into factions of one sort or another, and they have been fighting over these
differences of opinion ever since they entered into a pointless conflict over obscure issues of religious doctrine which most
of them do not even understand.”
30Cunaeus did not regard himself as aligning the Hebraic polity with his own faction against another, but rather as turning
to this divinely inspired model as an example of how to transcend faction altogether, by grounding politics in a world of
timeless concord. In contrast with the disputatiousness and flux of his own era, Cunaeus situated the ancient Hebrews virtually
outside history, living in unchanging simplicity. This, he believed, marked them apart from all their neighbors. While increasing
trade intensified the contacts among the various nations around the Mediterranean and eroded the differences between them,
only the Jews were immune to this trend: “only the Jews, living in their own land, and content with the wealth that nature
produced there, led a life free of commerce. They did not cross the sea, nor did they visit foreigners or receive them.”
31 Their economy was exclusively agrarian. There was no such thing as a Jewish craftsmen, which should be regarded as “a great
compliment, not a criticism; for how can it be a noble act to invent things that are of no use to respectable citizens?”
32The uncompromising agrarianism of Cunaeus’s republican vision is striking, and it contrasts with the opinion of Grotius, who
regarded commerce and republicanism as mutually supportive.
33 To some extent this extreme position is generated by the nature of Cunaeus’s material: the Hebrew republic, utterly unique
because underwritten by God, appeared necessarily exceptional in every respect and thus invited exemption from the usual norms
of commercial exchange. However, we also see here an early expression of the association of republicanism with agrarianism
and stability, in opposition to commerce and innovation. This position was not yet present in Machiavelli (who admired Moses
and other political leaders precisely as innovators), but it became a key hallmark of “Machiavellian moment” republican thought
from the mid-seventeenth century onward.
34 The idealization of agrarian simplicity and its association with the preservation of a just and virtuous
respublica had been a prevalent theme in sixteenth-century humanist political thought, exemplified most notably by Thomas More’s
Utopia (1516).
35 Agrarian republicanism was spurred on by the invocation of the ancient Hebraic political example, presented as a biblical
idyll juxtaposed against the disputatiousness and instability of contemporary politics. Cunaeus ascribed the instability of
his own era not only to theological intolerance and factionalism but also, implicitly, to the disruptive impact of commerce.
Cunaeus’s preferred brand of republicanism, like that of Grotius, was firmly oligarchic.
36 In the Hebraic republic he discovered a form of government that conformed to this preference. Almost all decisions, he claimed,
were taken by a wise elite of judges or elders, who transmitted their authority through the laying of hands (“cherothesia”)
on new appointees. On rare occasions they called together assemblies to consult “the people,” but this occurred only for major
decisions such as selecting kings (whose political role is quietly elided by Cunaeus) or deciding whether to wage war.
37Authority resided not only with the elders, however, but also, crucially, in law. Although he did not engage in detailed legal
exegesis, Cunaeus paid careful attention to the key structures and principles of Jewish law, using, like other Dutch Hebraists
in this period, Maimonides’
Mishneh Torah as his principal guide.
38 He particularly admired the laws that regulated the land redistribution practices of the jubilee, which he regarded as crucial
in preventing concentration of landownership and sustaining the social harmony of the Hebrews’ agrarian polity.
39 Cunaeus was also the first to introduce into Western European legal thought the key concept, drawn from Maimonides’
Mishneh Torah, of the seven fundamental and universal Noachide laws, the observance of which was required of all peoples with whom the
Jews were to sustain peaceful relations.
40 This notion was further developed in the jurisprudence of Grotius and John Selden, for whom it assumed fundamental importance
in marking the distinction between “universal” laws, binding on all nations, and “particular” local laws and regulations,
analogous to the “voluntary” divine law that extended beyond the seven Noachide precepts and that was revealed only to the
Jews and binding only on them.
41Despite his deep respect for the ancient Hebrew polity, Cunaeus showed no particular admiration for the Jews as a people.
The ancient Jews, he noted, had been excellent soldiers.
42 However, despite the excellence of their laws and judicial procedures, they had often preferred to believe in superstitions:
he reports the usage of a mystical drink to try women accused of adultery, which was believed to cause those guilty “to burst
on
the spot.”
43 Some contemporary Jews, he commented, still believed in this “asinine Jewish stupidity.”
44 He was particularly scornful of the Jews of his own day. Although in time they would be returned to the “right path,” he
commented that “all of today’s Jews have a slavish and illiberal character,” a misery he in part ascribed to their persecution,
but also seemed to regard as deeply imbued in their collective character.
45 The political model Cunaeus admired resided in the laws and political structures of the ancient Hebrews, and not in the people
themselves.
This distinction could not be so neatly sustained, however. The very practice of Hebraist scholarship was extremely difficult
without contact with living Jews, who were by far the most competent teachers of the language: this was one of the reasons
advanced by Grotius in support of Jewish settlement in Holland, despite his strong desire to restrict informal contact between
Jews and Christians.
46 The political appeal of Cunaeus’s turn to the Hebraic republic also lay in the fact that it offered a political model that
was not only divinely underwritten but also in some sense visibly alive, because inescapably associated with the Jews of his
own era. By 1617 Sephardic Jews were already conspicuously established in Amsterdam, and the simultaneously ancient and contemporary
lens through which they were viewed is vividly apparent in the touches of biblicist exoticism that characterize several depictions
of them by Rembrandt.
47 Cunaeus’s Hebraic politics thus hovered over a confused relationship between imaginary and real Jews, and those of the distant
past and of the local present. Moreover, the seventeenth-century Dutch Sephardim could not have been more different from those
of the Mosaic republic. Utterly nonagrarian, they were commercial intermediaries par excellence, and it was this, rather than
their linguistic skills, that most crucially persuaded the Dutch authorities to look favorably on their settlement. The widespread
Dutch unease regarding the cultural and moral impact of their nation’s rising commercial prowess was nowhere more potently
distilled, in the realm of political theory, than in the diametric contrast between the Jews of utopian fantasy and those
of contemporary reality.
The most intellectually significant edifice constructed, in part, on Cunaeus’s politically engaged approach to Jewish law
was Hugo Grotius’s
De jure belli ac pacis [On the law of war and peace] (1625). This text was
of fundamental importance in establishing the key principles of international law on the basis of the distinction between
universal principles (for which the Noachite laws served as a blueprint) and local or national laws.
48 However, Grotius did not thrust Hebraic themes to the fore of his writing. His central concern was to present his arguments
as logically and rationally as possible: Richard Tuck has aptly described
De jure as “a manifesto for a new science of morality,” emphasizing the very minimal and straightforward nature of morally and theologically
necessary beliefs.
49 Jewish law provided Grotius with a key avenue of approach into the jurisprudential distinctions necessary for his argument,
but his usage of Jewish legal arguments in
De jure was somewhat haphazard.
50 Whereas the Noachite laws foreshadowed the universal principles that were fundamental to his “science of morality,” the bulk
of Jewish law was concomitantly of diminished significance, being relevant only to the Jews themselves – and in any case,
as Grotius conventionally emphasized in his
De veritate religionis Christianae (1627), superseded by the advent of Christianity.
The work of the English legal scholar John Selden, in contrast, was overwhelmingly Hebraic in focus. Almost exact contemporaries,
he and Grotius shared a very similar intellectual agenda, as the work of Richard Tuck has emphasized.
51 Like Grotius, Selden was a politically engaged scholar with strong anticlerical instincts. A vigorous parliamentarian and
a trenchant critic of Charles I’s royal authoritarianism, he was, above all, a historically minded Erastian, committed to
the supreme authority of the state, and particularly of its legal institutions and traditions, which, he stressed, must be
understood as continually evolving within human history. The ancient Jewish case represented, for Selden, a uniquely authoritative
and detailed example of the supremacy and the sophistication of law. Selden’s politics were moderate and pragmatic: in his
earlier work, written prior to the outbreak of the English Civil War, it was clear he regarded England’s immemorial “ancient
constitution” as “mixed,” based on shared sovereignty of monarch, aristocracy, clergy, and representatives of the people.
However, even before his entry into Parliament in 1623 his sympathies were firmly
parliamentarian, and his Hebraic scholarship served as the fundamental intellectual underpinning of his active political engagement.
52Selden’s central intellectual project was to contribute to the theory of natural law: the exposition of a secure, universal
grounding of legal principles, free from clerical meddling and impregnable to arbitrary authority. The key bedrock of his
legal theory was provided by the seven Noachite precepts. This concept, ultimately derived from the Talmud (Sanhedrin 56a),
was, as we have noted, aired by Cunaeus and significant also for Grotius, but Selden engaged with it much more centrally than
either Dutch thinker. In his key work
De jure naturali et gentium juxta disciplinam Ebraeorum [On the law of nature and of nations according to the doctrines of the Hebrews] (1640), he built his legal arguments firmly
on the basis of these principles, universal in their reach, although their divine enunciation was precisely located within
Jewish history. The relationship between the universal applicability and the historical specificity of these moral tenets
was a slippery issue for Selden and has been the subject of some recent historiographical controversy. Selden did not believe
(unlike Grotius) that natural morality was accessible directly by human reason. Morality was, for Selden, part of God’s revelation
to mankind, and this revelation had concretely occurred as an event in the history of the Jewish people. He was not, however,
willing to countenance that prior to the deluge humans had lived without any morals. The Noachite precepts (except for the
seventh one, which forbade the eating of live animals) were, he asserted, enjoined upon Adam, and thus upon all mankind.
53The Hebraic biblical narrative, hovering ambiguously both within and outside history, thus enabled Selden to situate the roots
of legal morality in a similarly ambiguous position. This ambiguity was vital for his broader theory of jurisprudence. For
natural law to have any purchase, it needed to be universal in the extent of its authority. However, Selden regarded these
basic principles as standing at the outset of a process of legal evolution, the historicity of which was key to his understanding
of the essence and strength of the English common law tradition. Selden’s interest in the minute detail of Jewish civil law
stemmed from his desire to elucidate, by analogy, this relationship between revealed principles and historical adaptation
in societies properly regulated by law. Beyond the Noachite precepts,
Jewish civil law, and its rabbinic elucidation and development, in Selden’s eyes represented the model for the relationship
of all particular, specific, or local legislation to its fundamental principles. This is how he succinctly encapsulated this
perspective in his posthumously compiled
Table-Talk:
God at first gave laws to all mankind, but afterwards he gave peculiar laws to the Jews which only they were to observe. Just
as we have the common law for all England, and yet you have some corporations that besides that have peculiar laws and privileges
for themselves.
54
Selden did not directly idealize the agrarianism of the ancient Hebrew polity. However, his earliest and most controversial
use of ancient Jewish sources to advance a contemporary political argument was on a fundamental agrarian theme. Selden presented
his
History of Tithes (1618) as a straightforward, objective account of the history of tithing practices. However, the polemical thrust of his
scholarship was unmistakable: Selden sought to challenge claims that tithing was guaranteed by divine right, by showing their
basis in law, and the historical variation in their practice. His starting point, in pursuing this argument, was the tithe
payments of the ancient Jews, which, he showed, altered over time, reflecting changing conditions and according to the consensus
of reasoned legal opinion.
55 Selden’s deployment of Jewish law ranged over many topics: his extensive and admiring study of Jewish marriage law implicitly
contrasted the legal sophistication and purity of this tradition with the more arbitrary accretions of canon law on marriage
and divorce, while his final work portrayed ancient Jewish government as a positive model of the Erastian subsuming of religious
governance into the broader affairs of state.
56 It is noteworthy, however, that his first engagement addressed the economic and political importance of land tenure.
Jason Rosenblatt, in his recent monograph on Selden, has emphasized the generosity of this highly erudite scholar’s approach
to Judaism, describing his
De jure as “surely one of the most genuinely philosemitic works produced by a Christian Hebraist in early modern Europe.”
57 Rosenblatt’s important study enters deeply into the scholarly texture of Selden’s engagement with Jewish sources, stressing
his “love of
halacha” and taking seriously the appropriateness of his status, as described in quasi-jest by a fellow
Hebraist in correspondence, as England’s “chief rabbi.”
58 It is certainly reasonable to describe Selden as a philosemite: not only was his approach to Jewish law unfailingly respectful,
but it signified for him a blueprint for all legal thinking and governance.
However, it is somewhat misleading to read Selden, as Rosenblatt does, as an apostle for religious toleration who sought to
combat prejudice by emphasizing “the humaneness of rabbinical exegesis.”
59 Selden’s reading of rabbinic literature was certainly animated by a broader political purpose, but this had very little to
do with relations between Christians and Jews in his own era. His passion for Hebraic texts was deep and admiring, and his
scholarly engagement with them was careful and in large measure open-minded. However, his interest in Hebraica was not purely
one of reverential erudition. Selden’s scholarship was also shaped by his juridicopolitical commitment to using the resources
of the past to advance, in the present, the sophistication and supremacy of the law as a check to the authority of over-mighty
monarchs. The foundational status of Jewish law, and the richness of rabbinic interpretations of this legal tradition, made
Jewish sources immensely valuable for Selden in advancing these arguments. There was no necessary connection, though – and
also very little actual connection in Selden’s mind – between this formal use of Hebraic legal exegesis and any particular
interest in or concern with attitudes toward the Jews of his own day.
Unlike the leading continental Hebraists, such as the Buxtorfs of Basel, Selden worked without contact with living Jews, toward
whom his attitudes were certainly not unambiguously positive. In a brief note on the medieval history of Anglo-Jewry he endorsed
the blood libel, stating that it was “usual amongst them, every year towards Easter” to steal, circumcise, and crucify a young
Christian boy, “out of their own devilish malice to Christ and Christians.”
60 His brief comment under the heading “Jews” in his
Table-Talk is not hostile, but not particularly warm either, emphasizing not their religion but their commercial acumen and collective
cohesion:
Talk what you will of the Jews, … they thrive where e’er they come, they are able to oblige the Prince of their country, by
lending him Money; none of them beg, they keep together, and for their being hated, my life for yours, Christians hate each
other as much.
61
Selden’s philosemitism certainly did not entail that he held Jews or Judaism in global positive regard. His Hebraist interests
were focused in the disembodied realm of Jewish law and legal exegesis. However, although
his systematic interest in Jewish law was classically antiquarian, he only partially conformed to Arnaldo Momigliano’s pithy
definition of this type of scholar as someone “interested in historical facts without being interested in history.”
62 The historicity of law, and its mutability within history, was fundamental to Selden’s understanding of what Pocock has described
as the English “common law mind.”
63 His scholarship was also, notwithstanding his occasional strategic protestations to the contrary, unabashedly political,
pursued in support of a particular vision of quasi-republican jurisprudential government. Selden’s engagement with Jewish
law was, thus, not purely systematic, but also historical. However, there were limits to this historical interest, and the
Jews of his modern era fell outside them. He evinced little interest in considering contemporary Jews alongside those of the
era of his scholarship. The modern theological and commercial realities of Jewish-Christian relations found no resonance in
his intellectual world, but generated only an untidy and awkward dissonance.
If an incipient republicanism can be discerned in Selden’s legal critique of arbitrary rule, the republican vision is explicit
in the writings of James Harrington, a mid-seventeenth-century political theorist strongly influenced by Selden and a key
figure in the lineage of Pocock’s
Machiavellian Moment.
64 In his
Oceana (1656) Harrington echoed Selden’s Hebraic Erastianism, arguing that in the divinely ordained Mosaic commonwealth there had
been no distinction between civil and religious authority. This claim pointedly undermined traditional Christian arguments
for the autonomy of the church, which were based on its status as the successor institution to the ancient and divinely instituted
Jewish priesthood. Unlike Selden, but similarly to Cunaeus, Harrington explicitly stressed the republican nature of the Mosaic
polity and offered it, alongside but above the other venerable constitutions of Athens, Sparta, and republican Rome and the
modern exemplar of the Republic of Venice, as the most perfect model for an English republican regime.
The Jews occupied an oddly bifurcated status in Harrington’s
Oceana – as they did for Selden, and in general for seventeenth-century republican thought. On the one hand, Harrington treated
the ancient Jews as one political example among many in history, and analyzed them comparatively alongside Sparta, Rome, and
Venice. However, as a divinely underwritten
polity, founded on “laws given by God such as were not fit to be altered by men,” the “commonwealth of Israel” stood in a
category of its own.
65 Both within history and outside it, the Jews blur the boundary between pragmatism and utopianism in Harrington’s
Oceana – a text published amid great political flux and visionary hope in England, and at a time when the nexus between utopianism
and pragmatism was particularly brought into focus by the issue of the readmission of Jews to England.
An intricate intertwinement of idealism (whether inspired by political republicanism or religious millenarianism) and economic
and strategic pragmatism suffused English thinking about Jews in the era of the readmission. The Jews figure prominently,
indeed, in Harrington’s own attempt to bridge the gap between vision and reality. He opens his text with a mellifluous hymn
to the island of Oceana, which, it is clear, should be understood as England in the immediate post–Civil War future. Harrington
then addresses attention to the problems of the fertile but degenerate “neighbour island” of “Panopea” – “the soft mother
of a slothful and pusillanimous people”: this is clearly Ireland. Panopea, Harrington suggests, should be settled with Jews,
who, he confidently proclaims, would flock there in large numbers if allowed to observe “their own rites and laws.” In Panopea
the Jews would retain their mercantile skills and also rediscover their ancient talent for agriculture, presenting the possibility
of a uniquely profitable arrangement both for the tenant Jews and for the landlord Commonwealth of Oceana.
66This suggestion is clearly a response to contemporary events both in England – where the issue of Jewish readmission had recently
moved center stage – and in Ireland, where Cromwell was attempting to implement a brutal policy of colonial land confiscation
and native transplantation. Harrington’s position here is implicitly critical both of Cromwell’s strategy in Ireland and of
the de facto acceptance of Jewish settlement in England, which had effectively been established only a few months prior to
the publication of
Oceana in the autumn of 1656.
67 In contrast to the newly acknowledged Jewish colony living and working in the heart of London, Harrington’s proposed plantation
of Ireland with Jews was designed to quarantine them from others:
To receive the Jews after any other manner into a commonwealth were to maim it; for they of all nations never incorporate
but, taking up the room of a limb, are of no use or office unto the body, while they suck the nourishment which would sustain
a natural and useful member.
68
Harrington was hostile to the settlement of Jews in Oceana proper because he believed that they would introduce with them
an economic culture of vigorous financial speculation. This commercial energy was, in his opinion, inimical to the form of
virtuous republic he envisaged, in which political power and participation were based on the ownership of landed property,
broadly dispersed among the nobility and gentry.
69 Harrington’s view of the Jews thus mixed admiration with disdain, and reverence with fear. He idealized the latent agrarian
skills of the Jews, which he regarded as part of their timeless collective talents as God’s chosen people. He was much less
comfortable, however, with the economic specialism manifested by the actual Jews of his own time. Once again, the mythic agrarian
Jews of the past clashed uncomfortably with the real, commercial Jews of the present. Whereas Selden for the most part silently
evaded this tension, Harrington attempted to reconcile it. In so doing, he drew attention to the contradictory duality of
the Jews’ association both with the agrarian simplicity that carried such positive connotations in the republican tradition
and with the commercial and speculative skills that he and others regarded as deeply corrosive of this political cause.
Here we see very clearly the ambivalence of the “philosemitic moment.” From Harrington onward, Pocock has stressed, Anglo-American
republican thought was highly suspicious both of parliamentary power and of commercial society and tended to align with “country”
propertied interests and agrarian values, against these urban foci of power, which they perceived as a threat to republican
virtue. Republicanism, however, was unimaginable without parliamentary authority, and, at least in the context of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, unimaginable also without the rise of commerce, which provided the incomes of almost all potential
or actual beneficiaries and participants in republican government. Republican thought in the Enlightenment era was, as Pocock
has shown, thus caught in a quandary, and beset with anxieties of its own decay and corruption.
70 This tension – between the moral and collectivist ideals of republicanism and the commercial energies it unleashed – was
brought into uniquely dense focus by the case of the Jews. While in abstract terms Judaism was very strongly associated with
the values and practices of agrarian republicanism, theorists such as Selden and Harrington also accepted the dominant seventeenth-century
linkage of Jews with commerce, and with its very different, and in some eyes even diametrically opposed, system of values.
Confusion over commerce thus manifested itself in confusion over Jews – with significant consequences for the lives of Jews
themselves, who, in the mid-1650s in particular, did their best to navigate this confusion to their advantage.
Economics and political theology similarly swirled awkwardly around each other in the debates surrounding the readmission
of the Jews to England in 1655/6, as several historians have noted.
71 Established merchants feared Jewish competition and generally argued that their readmission would “enrich Foreigners, and
impoverish English merchants,” to which advocates responded that Jewish competition would lower prices, and thus benefit most
people.
72 The millenarian Baptist preacher Thomas Collier put this argument very forcefully:
If it should be some loss to some rich Merchants, yet it would be advantage to the people in general. The more is brought
in the plentier and cheaper it would be; what a few rich men might lose, a great many poor men might gain, and that would
be indeed and in truth no loss at all.
73
Collier’s interest in Jews was not economic but theologicopolitical. Many of the God-fearing English were, he insisted, eagerly
“waiting for the redemption of Israel.”
74 By treating the Jews with kindness, and welcoming them with open arms, they would show both their true piety and their republican
spirit, in sharp contrast to the ungodliness of papism, of the Turks, and of authoritarian royal government.
75 The biblical ideal of the Mosaic republic was far more engaging for Collier than were the commercial activities of contemporary
Jews. In order to further his millenarian vision, it made sense to align the cause of Jewish readmission with populism and
free trade, against national vested interests and protectionism. This alignment was not, however, stable. While willing to
make alliances of convenience against those London merchants opposed to readmission, religiously inspired proponents of Jewish
settlement generally shared Harrington’s agrarian traditionalism and his suspicion of the untrammeled impact of commerce.
Supporters of Jewish readmission thus variously negotiated the dissonance between the Jews of their biblically based imaginary
and those of seventeenth-century reality. However, although the committed agrarians of the Mosaic republic could scarcely
be more different from the vigorous intercontinental traders of the Sephardic Diaspora, both images of Jews shared a common
assumption that this small minority would make an immense impact wherever they were present. With respect to commerce this
assumption was not altogether unwarranted: Sephardic merchants were indeed among the most significant international merchants
of the period, their success underpinned by uniquely far-flung networks of cooperation
and trust sealed by tight bonds of kinship and identity.
76 Belief in Jewish power, though, also took other guises and was shared by some of the most ardent critics of readmission.
William Prynne, one of the Puritan leaders of this camp, argued in his
Short Demurrer to the Jews (1656) that “this giddy Apostatizing age” was particularly ill suited for the admission of Jews to England, lest “their company
and society should easily seduce the unstable people to their Judaism and Infidelity.”
77 Despite his own unremittingly negative view of the influence of Jews, Prynne’s ascription of such immense rhetorical and
seductive power to them constitutes a certain form of awed idealization, and one that drew on the same pool of assumptions
as did his pro-readmission adversaries.
The impact of philosemitism in this debate was multifaceted and double-edged, and can neither be equated with wholly positive
views of Jews nor straightforwardly annexed only to one position on the readmission issue. Both supporters and opponents of
this campaign – as well as the many people, such as Oliver Cromwell, whose position seems indeterminate – shared a common
belief in the political, economic, and theological exceptionalism of the Jews.
78 This gave rise to responses both of admiring enthusiasm and of anxious hostility. Although these countervailing temperaments
were closely intertwined and cannot be sharply dissected from each other, it is nonetheless the case that the events of 1655
and 1656 would not have unfolded as they did had it not been for the ultimate dominance of positive attitudes toward Jews
among the republican and Puritan leadership in England at this time – attitudes that in both intent and impact can only be
classed as philosemitic. Anglo-Jewish historians have since the nineteenth century cast the readmission as characteristic
of deep-seated English decency and toleration, in contrast to the antisemitic prejudices rife in continental Europe.
79 It makes more sense, however, to understand the readmission in the context of a particular tradition of biblically inspired
republicanism, which was briefly triumphant in England in this unique and tempestuous decade.
Republican philosemitism remained a vital current of British political thought in the early eighteenth century, most significantly
carried
forward by John Toland, who was a fascinated admirer of the Mosaic republic, on which he commented in several brief pieces
and projected but did not complete a major study.
80 Toland was also strongly influenced by Harrington, whose
Oceana and other key works he edited and republished in 1700.
81 Toland’s 1714 essay arguing for the naturalization of Jews in Britain and Ireland was, as Jonathan Karp has shown, heavily
imbued with a Harringtonian republican framework, although Toland proposed a much fuller incorporation of Jews into the national
polity, most crucially extending to them the right to own land throughout the realm.
82 Drawing directly from a Jewish source – Simone Luzzatto’s Venetian apologetic of 1638 – Toland reiterated the distinction
drawn by Cunaeus and Selden between the universal, “natural” core of Judaism and its particularist ceremonial embellishment.
While praising the mercantile usefulness of Jews, his emphasis was on their political loyalty and, latent since ancient times,
their martial skill.
83 His proposal for Jewish naturalization most centrally aimed, as Jonathan Karp has very aptly put it, to “resurrect their
republican capacities” and to harness these primordial Jewish talents in politics, agriculture, and warfare to the contemporary
fortunes of republicanism in Britain.
84In the increasingly commercial eighteenth century the association between landed agrarian and republican ideals came under
considerable strain, and in England (though not in Scotland) concern with the values of civic virtue receded as industrialism
advanced. In America, however, as Pocock has compellingly argued, pessimistic anxieties regarding the corrupting force of
commerce retained their potency, and the self-sufficient landowning yeoman remained the ideal model of the virtuous citizen.
85 The privileging of agrarian republicanism and the biblical roots of this political ideal are particularly evident in the
writings of Thomas Jefferson,
who in his
Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) explicitly assumed the mantle of divine election for the nascent American republic:
Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his
peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. … It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic
in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.
86
Considerable scholarly controversy has raged over the question of Jefferson’s European intellectual influences, but Pocock’s
collocation of him as a culminating thinker of the “Machiavellian Moment,” although certainly not his only lineage, nonetheless
remains persuasive.
87 Although Jefferson does not directly mention Jews here, it is clearly the Judaic position of divine chosenness that he is
invoking, in the long-standing tradition of Protestant Hebraist republicanism. His implicit juxtaposition of agrarian virtue
against the corrupting forces of urban commerce is, again, not explicitly posed in relation to Jews. However, this political
language, which, enshrined in the reverence sustained toward the American “founding fathers,” has remained resonant in the
United States, carrying forward into the modern era the idealization of notionally Judaic Old Testament agrarian traditionalism,
and also the tension between this idealization and the dynamic energy of metropolitan commerce, in which actual Jews have
remained significantly concentrated.
The relationship between philosemitic Hebraism and actual living Jews is, then, extremely complicated. Judaism was certainly
widely used in the seventeenth century as a form of conceptual token, deployed for its particular rhetorical authority in
debates between the adversarial political and theological wings of Dutch and English Protestantism. However, in both countries
policies toward Jews were undoubtedly to some degree shaped by these debates: positive associations with ancient Judaism indirectly
but indubitably fed into greater openness toward actual Jews. More intangibly, the sustained undercurrent of Hebraic idealization
that we see in this period should be recognized as a significant current in shaping underlying cultural attitudes toward Jews
and Judaism. John Toland’s declaration of proto-Zionism, originally advanced as a suggestion to his patron Prince Eugene of
Savoy, was not an utterly anomalous opinion, and nor was the circulation of such ideas in this period utterly unconnected
to their overdetermined realization more than two centuries later:
[If the Jews] ever happen to be resettl’d in Palestine upon their original foundation, which is not at all impossible, they
will then, by reason of their excellent constitution, be more populous, rich and powerful than any other nation now in the
world. I would have you consider, whether it be not both in the interest and duty of Christians to assist them in regaining
their country. But more of this when we meet.
88
It is no less misleading to exaggerate than to diminish the association between real, living Judaism and the rhetorical use
made of Jewish texts by Christians. Fania Oz-Salzberger has recently emphasized the indebtedness of early modern political
thinkers to their Jewish sources, claiming that key concepts, such as federalism, settled boundaries, and a socially responsible
moral economy, were essentially derived from Judaism and incorporated into modern liberalism, while Eric Nelson has argued
that the uncompromising republicanism introduced into English thought in the mid-seventeenth century was prompted by Hebraists’
encounters with particular Talmudic commentaries.
89 However, it is inaccurate to claim primary Jewish ownership of these ideas and oversimplified to interpret Christian reading
of Jewish sources straightforwardly as a process of Jewish “influence.” In parallel with Christian scholars, and similarly
influenced by current political debates in Amsterdam and London, some seventeenth-century Sephardic writers, such as Miguel
Levi de Barrios, also emphasized the republican nature of Jewish political structures, with their roots in Mosaic law.
90 The exegesis of this tradition was, though, a Christian as much as a Jewish project. Moreover, scholars such as Cunaeus and
Selden who made extensive use of Jewish interpreters approached their Jewish sources – usually Maimonides – knowing what they
were looking for. Their commitments to federalism, republicanism, and the authority of law were derived from their preexisting
political perspectives and commitments and certainly were not “discovered” by them in the Bible or the Talmud.
It is ultimately not illuminating to try to gauge the authenticity of philosemitic attitudes in early modern Europe, or to
associate or disassociate them with Judaism as understood and experienced by Jews. The deployment of Jewish themes in the
thought of this period was extremely intricate and complicated and stemmed ultimately from the structurally foundational relationship
between Christianity and Judaism. Nonetheless,
in early modern political thought we discover an engagement with Judaism that, although certainly ambivalent, is in its dominant
tenor highly positive. Attention to this tradition serves as an important corrective to dominant assumptions about the nature
of Jewish-Christian relations. The charged significance of Judaism in this current of republican thought presents us with
a notable ethnoreligious twist to the core tensions that beset this “Machiavellian” lineage. The strain between self-sufficient
agrarian stability and commercial growth was nowhere more sharply crystallized than in the dissonance between the Jews of
the Mosaic imaginary and those actually encountered by the political admirers of Moses.