The Territorial Contamination of the Blood

The implicit paradoxical combination of monotheism and monolatry, characteristic of Hebraism, has consequences for law. This chapter discusses the legal anthropology of the territorial kinship found in the Hebrew Bible, by examining the categories of the native of the land, citizen, the alien who resides in the land, and the foreigner. This legal anthropology represents a Hebraic deflection from Christian universalism. The problem of describing that legal anthropology as Hebraism when it appears in the absence of references to the Old Testament, for example, in Frederic Maitland’s Constitutional History of England, is discussed. Finally, a re-examination of the concept of secularization is undertaken, with regards to the law of the land.

Cultural History and Hebraism

This chapter provides both an initial formulation of Hebraism as a category of cultural analysis within Christendom and an overview of the problems of that formulation. In doing so, it examines the complications of other categories of cultural history, for example, Hellenism, and of religious categories, specifically monotheism. The characteristics of Hebraic culture are presented: an ascetic mode of conduct that affirms life in this world, an historical orientation, law, and the nation. Also examined are early formulations of the Hebraic influence on the changing significance of the Old Testament, beginning with Matthew Arnold’s contrast between Hellenism and Hebraism.

Conclusion

Hebraism has to do with the changing relation between Christianity and Judaism, between the New and Old Testaments, made possible by the cultural phenomenon of different contents coexisting within a symbol, for example, Israel. This concluding chapter provides a summary of the characteristics of Hebraism as a ‘Jewish Christianity’ or ‘Old Testament Christianity’, including patriotism. The chapter further situates Hebraism within the analysis of the axial age. In doing so, the distinctiveness of religion is taken up, as well as the place of pluralism in cultural history that requires the distinction between unity and uniformity. The chapter also discusses the place of sovereignty in Hebraic culture.

Reading the Talmud in Prison

A corollary of Hebraism’s orientation to this world is law as the vehicle by which to organize this world. This chapter examines the Hebraic understanding of law, its relation to tradition, and its national jurisdiction in contrast to the universal jurisdiction of Roman law and canon law. Regarding this contrast, the Lex Salica, François Hotman’s Francogallia, and Hugo Grotius’ Antiquity of the Batavian Republic are discussed briefly. The contrast does not mean that universal principles of justice are absent in national law, but the relation between those principles and a national jurisdiction presents a problem, as Edward Coke saw. Within the Christian tradition, the prototype of national law is the law of ancient Israel and subsequently Jewish law. In his examination of Jewish law, especially the Noahide laws of the Talmud, John Selden recognized an affinity between Jewish and English common law that supports Hebraism as a cultural category.

Hebraism

This chapter examines Hebraism as the ‘third culture’, distinct from Greek and Roman Christianity, as a kind of Jewish Christianity. Hebraism, as a current of intellectual history, is expressed in the work of the Christian Hebraists of early modern Europe, the quintessential example being John Selden. Hebraism’s focus on life in this world led to the problems of how life should be organized through law, the territorialization of tradition, and the paradoxical national monotheism of the ‘new Israel’. A different interpretation of the Old Testament emerged, influencing the relation between the Old and New Testaments. The theological, political, legal, and social characteristics of Hebraic culture are clarified.