Kinship and Consent

Jewish Political Tradition and Its Contemporary Uses

Daniel L. Elazar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000677782
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A major dimension of modern Jewish life has been the revival of conscious political activity on the part of the Jewish people, whether through reestablishment of the State of Israel, new forms of diaspora community organization, or the common Jewish fight against anti-Semitism. Precisely because contemporary Jewry has moved increasingly toward self

I
Foundations

Introduction: The Edah as a Classic Republic

The Jewish polity has followed the covenant model since its inception, adapting it to variegated circumstances in which Jews have found themselves over the millennia—as a tribal federation, a federal monarchy, a state with a diaspora, a congress of covenantal communities, a network of regional federations or confederations, or a set of voluntary associations.

The classic Hebrew name for this kind of polity is edah. The edah is the assembly of all the people constituted as a body politic. Edah is often translated as congregation; that term has a religious connotation today that it did not have when it was introduced in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century biblical translations. Then it had a civil meaning as well. It was a “congregation”—an institutionalized gathering of people who congregate (come together) at regular times or frequently for common action and decision making.¹

In Mosaic times edah became the Hebrew equivalent of “commonwealth” or “republic,” with strong democratic overtones. The idea of the Jewish people as an edah has persisted ever since and the term has been used to describe the Jewish body politic in every period to the present. In this respect, the term parallels (and historically precedes) similar phenomena such as the landesgemeinde in Switzerland, the Icelandic althing, and the town meeting in the United States.

The characteristics of the original edah can be summarized as follows:

1. The Torah is the constitution of the edah.
2. All members of the edah, men, women, and children, participate in constitutional decisions.
3. Political equality exists for those capable of taking full responsibility for Jewish survival.
4. Decisions are made by an assembly that determines its own leaders within the parameters of divine mandate.
5. The edah is portable and transcends geography.
6. Nevertheless, for it to function completely, the edah needs Eretz Israel.

These basic characteristics have been preserved with such modifications as were necessary over the centuries. Thus, in biblical times, taking full responsibility for Jewish survival meant being able to bear arms. Subsequently, the arms-bearing measure of political equality gave way to one of Torah study. Today the diaspora measure is contributing to the support of Israel, while arms bearing is again the measure in Israel. The principles of assembly, leadership, and decision making have remained the same although modes of assembling, leadership recruitment, and leaders’ roles and responsibilities have changed from time to time. The portability of the desert-born edah is as notable a characteristic as is its attachment to Zion. The Torah has persisted as the edah’s constitution albeit with changing interpretations.

The regime most common in Jewish experience has been the aristocratic republic, in the classic sense of the term—rule by a limited number who take upon themselves an obligation or conceive of themselves as having a special obligation to their people and to God. For Jews, this has been manifested in some combination of a perceived obligation by those of greater status or wealth to utilize their privileged position to help other Jews and by those learned in Torah to serve the will of God by serving the community.

Jewish republicanism is rooted in a democratic foundation based on the equality of all Jews as citizens of the Jewish people. All Jews must participate in the establishment and maintenance of their polity, as demonstrated in the Bible—at Sinai, on the plain of Moab, before Shechem, and elsewhere—in Sefer HaShtarot, and in many other sources. Nor is that foundation merely theoretical; even where power may not be exercised on a strictly democratic basis, it is generally exercised in light of democratic norms.

There are problems associated with the use of these terms, but they do help us understand that the Jewish polity often has been governed by a kind of trusteeship. It is a trusteeship because the community is republican, because it is a res publica, a public thing or a commonwealth—a body politic that belongs to its members. The Jewish people is a res publica with a commitment to a teaching and law, which its members are not free simply to alter as they wish but must be maintained to be faithful to principles.

The Western world today takes the republican revolution for granted. Yet the republican revolution was one of the great revolutions of modernity. It is the foundation of modern democratic government. The West pioneered in the idea and practice of republican government. The Jews were among the first many centuries ago. Then came the Greeks and the early Romans. Except for a few outposts, including the Jewish kehillah, republicanism died under the realities of imperial Rome and medieval feudalism, replaced by absolutism. In modern times, a revolution was needed to restore the republican principle. Before the republican revolution, the prevailing view was that the state was the private preserve of its governors. When Louis XIV said “I am the state” he was articulating a classic antirepublican position.

The rise and fall of dictators in the Third World today shows the situation in a region that is in transition from prerepublican to republican government. It is no accident that most of the Arab states, after their revolutions in the 1950s and early 1960s, added the word republic to their new names, to signify that they sought to be part of the republican revolution. The Islamic world, far more than Europe, held to the notion for centuries that the organs of governance belonged to whomever held power. The people sought to stay clear of involvement with their governors. At best, the ruler was benevolent; he was Harun al-Rashid, who put on a disguise and wandered in the marketplace and, as he saw injustices, rectified them on the spot. He was a benevolent despot, but it was still despotism; it was not a republican government. More often than not, the despotism was just that, hence the postcolonial revolutions in the Arab world and the at least symbolic embracing of republicanism, which, in most Arab states, has yet to become real.

Still, an aristocratic republic always has a darker side in that it has a tendency to degenerate into oligarchy. The history of governance in the Jewish community has been one of swinging between the two poles of aristocratic republicanism and oligarchy. Though this is a perennial problem, the basic aristocratic republicanism of the Jewish polity has worked equally well to prevent absolutism or autocracy.

The Jewish people rarely has had anything like dictatorship and then only locally and de facto under unique circumstances. Jews are notably intractable people, even under conditions of statehood where coercion theoretically has been possible; hence, dictatorship has not been an acceptable regime for Jews.

Nor have Jews in the past had anything like the open society of the kind envisaged by many contemporary Westerners, in which every individual is free to chose his or her own “life-style.” One of the reasons for this is that being Jewish and maintaining the Jewish polity has not been simply a matter of survival. It has also been a matter of living up to specific norms based on divine teaching and law, which establish the expectation that private and public life is to be shaped according to that teaching and law.

The Three Arenas of Jewish Political Organization

From earliest times, the Jewish polity has been organized in three arenas. Besides the edah, or national, arena, there are countrywide or regional, and local arenas of organization. The immediately local arena comprises local Jewish communities around the world of varying sizes, under varying forms of communal organization. Whether we are speaking of Yavneh or Saragossa, Mottel or Chicago, the local community remains the basic cell of Jewish communal life. Here the institutions that serve the Jewish community are organized and function.

Beyond the local arena, there is a larger, countrywide arena in which the Jews in particular regions, countries, or states organize for common purposes. The organizational expressions of that arena have included such phenomena as the Resh Galuta (Exilarch) and Yeshivot of Babylonia, the Vaad Arba Aratzot (Council of the Four Lands) of late medieval Poland, the State of Israel, the Board of Deputies of British Jewry, and the congeries of “national” (meaning countrywide) organizations of American Jewry framed by the Council of Jewish Federations. Fundraising for Israel, for example, depends on work in local communities but is generally organized in this second arena on a country-by-country basis.

Beyond the second arena, there is the third, that of the Jewish people as a whole: the edah. This arena was extremely weak for nearly a millennium but has been given new institutional form within the last century, most particularly in our time. The edah is the main focus of the reconstitution of the Jewish people in our time.

This threefold division into separate arenas of governance, once formulated in early Israelite history, has remained a permanent feature of Jewish political life. This is so despite frequent changes in the forms of organization of the several arenas and in the terminology used to describe them.

The Bible delineates the first form in which these three arenas were constituted. The edah was constituted by the shevatim (shevet, tribe), each with its own governmental institutions. Each shevet was, in turn, a union of batei av (bet av, extended household). After the Israelite settlement in Canaan, the most prominent form of local organization was the ir (city or township) with its own assembly (ha’ir) and council (sha’nr ha’ir or ziknai ha’ir).

Subsequently, in the local arena, just as the bet av gave way to the ir, the ir gave way to the kehillah (local community) wherever the Jewish population was a minority. The kehillah became the molecular unit of organization for all postbiblical Jewry, especially because new kehillot could be established anywhere by any ten adult Jewish males who so constituted themselves. Although the kehillah survives in the diaspora, in contemporary Israel, the local arena is once again governed by comprehensive municipal units—cities or villages.

Similarly, the breakdown of the traditional tribal system (a phenomenon that long preceded the first exile) resulted in the replacement of the shevet by the medinah (properly rendered as autonomous jurisdiction or province in its original meaning), a regional framework, which embraces a congeries of kehillot that it unites in an organizational structure, as in Medinat Yehud (Judea in the Persian Empire). In the diaspora, the term medinah became almost interchangeable with eretz (country) to describe the intermediate arena, as in Medinat Polin (the organized Jewish community in Poland) or Eretz Lita (the organized Jewish community in late medieval Lithuania). In modern times, the term came to mean a politically sovereign state and is now used only in connection with Medinat Yisrael (the State of Israel).

The term edah, as an expression of the widest form of Jewish political association, retained its original usage unimpaired until transformed in colloquial modern Hebrew usage, where it came to denote a country-of-origin group in Israel. Occasionally, it was replaced by such synonyms as Knesset Yisrael. The edah managed to survive the division of Israel into two kingdoms, the Babylonian exile, and the Roman conquest of Judea by developing new forms of comprehensive organization. During the period of the Second Commonwealth (c. 440 B.C.E.-140 C.E.) and again from the second to the eleventh centuries, it was particularly successful in constructing a fully articulated institutional framework that embraced both Israel and the diaspora. The breakdown of the universal Moslem empire and the consequent demise of the edah-wide institutions of Resh Galuta and Gaonate in the middle of the eleventh century left world Jewry bereft of comprehensive institutions other than the halakhah itself. From then until the mid-nineteenth century, the edah was held together principally by its common Torah and laws as manifested in a worldwide network of rabbinical authorities linked by their communications (responsa) on halakhic matters.²

Notes

1. Daniel J. Elazar and Stuart A. Cohen, The Jewish Polity: Jewish Political Organization from Biblical Times to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), Introduction; Robert Gordis, “Democratic Origins in Ancient Israel: The Biblical Edah” in Alexander Marx Jubilee Volume (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1950); Moshe Weinfeld, “The Transition from Tribal Republic to Monarchy in Ancient Israel and Its Impression on Jewish Political History,” in Daniel J. Elazar, ed., Kinship and Consent (Washington, D...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Introduction: The Jewish Political Tradition
• Part I: Foundations
• Part II: Theoretical Development
• Part III: Institutional Dynamics
• Part IV: Contemporary Implications
• Afterword: Future Directions
• Contributors
• Index