Introduction

This chapter situates Jewish political theology as a discourse developed in the 20th century, mainly by German Jewish thinkers. It sets out the basic differences between this analysis and the discourse on political theology developed by Carl Schmitt, centered on the need for absolute sovereignty to “restrain” disorder and revolutionary upheavals. The chapter argues that Jewish political theology offers an alternative conception of divine sovereignty and its implications for democracy and revolution. Jewish political theology is both republican and anarchic, attached to the idea of a higher law above human sovereignty and to the egalitarian ideal of a politics beyond domination. This chapter presents the two analytical-conceptual guiding-threads of the investigation. The first is concerned with Max Weber’s category of charismatic leadership and the problem of its functioning within a constitutional idea of democratic legitimacy. The second guiding-thread is concerned with the process of secularization. This chapter argues that Jewish political theology reconceives divine providence in order to criticize the assumption of human progress in and through history.

Leo Strauss and the Concrete Order of Law

This chapter is dedicated to Leo Strauss’s attempt to recover the medieval Islamic and Jewish conceptions of the prophet as a political founder of the perfect legal order. The chapter situates Strauss’s political theology within the Weimar debate between proponents of legality and defenders of an extra-legal conception of legitimacy. It argues that Strauss turns back to the ancient conception of law as nomos in order to give a philosophical foundation to legality beyond Christian conceptions of legitimacy. Christian political theology has always pivoted around the polemical claim that Mosaic law was “tyrannical” in some way. Strauss’s contribution to Jewish political theology consists in examining Jewish and Islamic prophetology by formulating it in terms of the so-called tyrannical teaching of Platonic political philosophy. The chapter shows that Strauss ultimately held to the view of a profound compatibility and mutual need between the traditions of Greek philosophy and biblical prophecy.

Conclusion

The Conclusion discusses the symbol of the empty Throne, understood as an image for the connection between theocracy and anarchy. The chapter contrasts Giorgio Agamben’s hypothesis that anarchy is the secret engine of liberal government with the central hypothesis of this book, namely, that Jewish political theology thematizes the paradoxical unity of rule of law and anarchic democracy. The argument is carried out, first, in relation to the idea of a “principle of anarchy” proposed by Reiner Schürmann. The chapter ends by discussing Simone Weil’s hypothesis on the unity between Pythagoreanism and the book of Job and proposing her meditation as an apt interpretation of the meaning of the empty Throne.

Gershom Scholem and the Mystical Foundations of Authority

This chapter is dedicated to reconstructing Gershom Scholem’s analysis of Jewish messianism in light of political theology. Scholem’s political thought is often associated with a critique of any attempt to endow Zionism with messianic traits. This chapter, instead focuses on Scholem’s conception of legal authority, arguing that his historiographical work on the mystical tradition of Judaism shows that the authority of the law is a function of the abdication of divine sovereignty and of a mystical idea of God’s Nothingness. Scholem articulates Jewish political theology around motifs found in Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and nihilism. His is a political theology of the law after the “death of God.”

Hermann Cohen and Socialist Democracy

This chapter is dedicated to Hermann Cohen’s renewal of Jewish theologico-political thought. Cohen is the first to establish an internal, systematic connection between the Jewish messianic idea and a universalistic conception of democracy. He articulates a political theology of socialist democracy, not based on the analogy between One God and One King, but on that between One God and One Humanity. Cohen rejected Zionism as a solution to the political problem caused by the condition of minority nationality in which the Jewish people lived in European states. But he did not believe in assimilation either. He maintained that its messianic religion assigned the Jewish people the task of pointing the way to an international order based not on state sovereignty but on the supremacy of international law founded on human rights that recognized the plurality and right to self-determination of nationalities.

Philo and the Origins of Political Theology

This chapter discusses why Philo became an essential source for the development of political theology in the West through his conception of the prophet as nomos empsychos or living law. The chapter addresses the controversial interpretation of Philo proposed by Erwin Goodenough, which establishes a new paradigm on how to think about the relation between Athens and Jerusalem, pagan philosophy and Jewish revelation, in Hellenistic Judaism. The chapter argues that this interpretative approach to Philo sheds light on why he became a decisive source for the renaissance of Jewish political theology in the 20th century, starting with Hermann Cohen’s foundational work.

Hannah Arendt and Federalism

This chapter discusses the relation between Arendt’s conception of Judaism, its relation to the history of the Jewish people, and her theory of republicanism. The chapter argues that Arendt follows Martin Buber’s lead, who was the first 20th-century thinker to explicitly identify the anarchic core of Jewish political theology. Buber conceives God’s Kingship as the inner meaning of the Jewish faith and articulates this Kingship in the post-Weberian terms of the idea of charismatic leadership. In contrast with Heidegger’s political theology in the 1930s, which attempts to determine peoplehood as a function of opening a space for the manifestation of the gods of the Earth, the chapter shows that Arendt recovers Roman civil religion in order to unify republican federalism with an anarchic conception of political freedom.

Franz Rosenzweig and Religious Constitutionalism

This chapter discusses Franz Rosenzweig’s political theology in light of the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Christian political theology is based on a message of universal love and brotherhood, but Rosenzweig points out how the reception of this message in the West took the form of nationalism and a sanctification of imperialism. This chapter offers a new reading of Rosenzweig’s wartime unfinished work on geopolitics, Globus, as an early meditation on what we now call “globalization.” It then reconstructs his masterpiece The Star of Redemption as a treatise on political theology that opens an alternative path to peoplehood based on the possibility of a cosmopolitan empire of law that is not territorially delimited and an access to citizenship that is not ethno-culturally predetermined. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the contested interpretation that Rosenzweig gives of Islam in the Star of Redemption and the problem of “holy war.”