Michael Walzer, Menachem Lorberbaum, Noam J. Zohar, editors. The Jewish Political Tradition. Volume One: Authority. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. lvii, 578 pp.

Abstract

That the Jewish people has a distinct political tradition should not at all be surprising. Yet, it has been only about thirty years since the process of its recovery has begun. Major political thinkers, including Leo Strauss, Aaron Wildavsky, and especially Daniel Elazar, have made significant contributions to understanding the major impact that Jewish political thought has had on the Western political tradition. With the increasing secularization of political thought since the seventeenth century, there had been a marked reluctance to understand the Bible as a resource for political discussion. However, it has been demonstrated that the consent/contract basis of authority is derived directly from federalist theology of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries in Western Europe. “Federal,” after all, is derived from the Latin, foedus, which means covenant.1 Protestant churches searching for a basis of polity that was not based on Catholic hierarchical sacramental authority returned to the Hebrew Bible. Their clergy studied Hebrew with rabbinic tutors who most probably emphasized the Jewish mutual concept of covenant over the Christian unilateral covenant theory.