Miguel Vatter’s Living Law is as much a foray and a marker in a burgeoning, always alternative, not-quite-outside subfield – Jewish political thought – as it is an intricately argued and immensely well-researched journey through a network of German-Jewish thinkers in the twentieth century. Vatter ‘show[s] that Jewish political theology offers an alternative conception of divine sovereignty and of its democratic political implications’ (p. 2). Through in-depth readings of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt, Vatter develops and complicates this notion of political theology. Indeed, an alternative, ‘republican and anarchic’ understanding and interpretation of political theology captures the tenor of Jewish political theology from this span of thinkers (p. 1).

One of the book’s successes is showing that there are Jewish alternatives to the frequent characterization of religious authority as commanding obedience, hierarchical, and unidirectional – from the sovereign/God to the subjects/believers. Vatter reintroduces the familiar conceptual constellation of rule, law, and authority as constitutively democratic and anarchic from Jewish texts. Attentive to his chosen thinkers’ motivations, Vatter examines and discusses how focusing on, for example, constitutionalism, human rights, mysticism, or social democracy individually and together compose the republican and anarchic features that are hallmarks of Jewish political theology among this cohort of theorists.

A prime example is in the chapter on Cohen, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism, and his interlocutors (ch. 2). Cohen shows how Jewish notions of messianism become untethered from the ‘legitimacy of the nation state and of sovereignty’ while opening a new path ‘toward a supranational, cosmopolitan ideal of the rule of law’ (p. 34). Vatter is notably attentive to Cohen’s critique of Platonism, and the influence of Maimonides’ rationalist philosophy as pillars of Cohen’s theoretical and theological innovation. Through Maimonides, Cohen articulates a this-world messianism, in which the world to come, ‘the redemption of nature,’ is not a world beyond, but eternal life in this world (p. 79), an important departure from the more typical understanding of Jewish messianism, in which ‘the world to come’ (olam haba) imagines a world, even a figurative one, beyond the present.

Scholem was credited with reviving scholarship in Jewish mysticism in the twentieth century, and the discussion of his work is a provocative and engaging contrast (ch. 4). Vatter animates Scholem’s attention to mysticism and messianism as indicators of an antinomian, even anti-sovereign doctrine from the Torah (pp. 146–147). Scholem’s rereading of Torah as a kind of contestable oral law makes space for the perennially potential ‘messianic interruption’ (p. 186). Mysticism and messianism illustrate a kind of non-sovereign relationship to law and authority.

The choice of sources and how they emerge in Living Law re-engages the question of what it means to do Jewish political thought. Jewish political thought as such, as Vatter reminds us (pp. 40–41), is a relatively new(ly recognized) subfield in political theory. This ‘newness’ raises the unanswerable, but unendingly important question: what is Jewish about Jewish political thought? Colleagues in Jewish studies know this refrain well. Equally important is, how to do Jewish political thought?

Works like Living Law provide some answers. One route Vatter takes for approaching the topic is exploring anew the well-trodden path from Athens to Jerusalem. Although the book focuses on theological–political disputes of Weimar Germany, it opens with a substantive chapter on Philo Judaeus, a Hellenic-Jewish philosopher who lived in Egypt in the first century CE. That Philo straddled Judaism and Hellenism and also wrote theological texts provides Vatter with a genealogy of Jewish political theology and demonstrates how the anarchic (an-arche) aspects of Jewish political theology are found in a nexus of Judaism and Greek/Hellenic thought. As Jewish political theology in the twentieth century beckons toward anarchy through various refractions of messianism and notions of rule, a ‘fateful conjunction of Pythagoreanism-Platonism and Judaism is the fundamental source that nourishes the discourse of Jewish political theology’ (p. 287).

Living Law raises other genealogy questions. Among the core thinkers’ interlocutors is Carl Schmitt, who is key in ‘Leo Strauss and the Concrete Order of Law’ (ch. 5). In understanding and complicating Strauss’s thinking on Jewish political theology, engaging with Schmitt is productive, if not necessary. This is different from how Schmitt is first introduced in Living Law, as part of the overall framing of political theology. We might consider which authors we employ as counterpoints or as imperatives of the historical record (Strauss grappled with Schmitt’s work), and whose work we take up as a conceptual framework as part of our methodology. I wonder if an author’s politics or relevant biography ought to factor into such a determination?

Locating Jewish thought between Athens and Jerusalem informs Vatter’s approach as inflected by philosophy. The highlighted authors are presented as philosophers and their intellectual milieux are presented as primarily philosophical. Engagement with Jewish sacred texts is inconsistent and if there is a method to their inclusion, it is difficult to parse. Similarly, there is closer engagement with concepts and terms from Greek than from Hebrew, even where attention to multiplicity of meanings in Hebrew could add to the analysis. Taken together, however, these pieces begin to form an understanding of the Jewish aspect of Jewish political theology and political thought in this book. Resisting formal religious traditions, ways of interpreting sacred texts or language, ways of bringing in the core thinkers’ relationship to their own identity avoids a familiar issue with defining a Judaism or Jewishness as the one – which the very diversity of Jewish cultures and experiences across the world and millennia shows otherwise. Vatter resists defining Jewishness or Judaism on religious or theological terms, despite the book’s focus on Jewish political theology. There is some sense of how each author related to their Jewish identity, but how in-depth varies for each thinker. This openness is true to an intellectual and lived experience of Judaism, and it leaves some lacunae where further elaboration would have given more to the book’s uniquely Jewish contributions, outside of the German, twentieth-century, and interpersonal commonalities that the thinkers share.

This complicated texture of Jewishness in Living Law might be the result of doing political theology from a non-theological stance. As suggested above, an inconsistent engagement with sacred texts might depict the emergence of core ideas in the book, such as messianism, unclearly. That messianism emerges at least as early as Philo, in Vatter’s reading of Erwin Goodenough (p. 11) is worth serious reconsideration in thinking about the history and genealogy of political theology. But, we must also be attentive to the fact that messianism is also already apparent in the contemporary, or near-to-contemporary Talmud1 as ‘awaiting the Messiah’ or anticipating the ‘world to come.’2 In some ways, this illustrates a persistent gap between the academy and the yeshiva (traditional Jewish school), but this is one of the places where Jewish political thought can bring together these not-so-different knowledge bases. Where the rabbinic tradition might meet or diverge from the Jewish philosophical tradition, in Living Law’s terms, is one of the work’s lingering questions and a potential place for further scholarship.

This discussion and the book raise another important consideration. That is, as simultaneously inside and outside the tradition of ‘the West,’ what makes Jewish thinkers, their writings, and their concepts legible? On the one hand, Vatter draws from familiar sources to ‘translate’ across traditions such that concepts using different names can be put to theoretical work. How Vatter sets this up and continues to rely on this frame is one of the most impressive and abiding contributions of the book. The interplay between Athens and Jerusalem is a consistent hermeneutic for how the core theorists understand Jewish political theology. At times, Judaism is caught between Athens (polytheism) and Jerusalem (monotheistic divine rule) as the theorists themselves move across Athens (reason) and Jerusalem (mysticism/messianism). The overarching argument of the book attends to this negotiation.

What Athens and Jerusalem represent is just as important to consider as what they exclude: Rome, Constantinople, Mecca. Each city is important for the story of ‘the West’ and the many texts that shape Living Law. Athens and Jerusalem, further, reify a kind of externality of Jews and Jewishness as seated in Jerusalem, forever outside the founding locus of ‘Western’ political thought. And one that Jewish political thought will grapple with as it grows and transforms. Vatter’s Living Law challenges our assumptions of the politics of a model of political theology – not of command-obedience authority per se, but of Jewish messianism which instantiates a deeply anarchic practice of law.

Notes

  1. 1

    The most important sacred text in Judaism after the Tanaḥ (Hebrew Bible), whose component parts date to c. 0–200 CE (Mishna) and c. 200–500 CE (Gemara), respectively.

  2. 2

    For example, Sanhedrin 97a, Eruvin 43a, Beraḥot 17a, Bava Batra 75b. Thanks to Sefaria (sefaria.org) for assistance in tracking down these sources, all Babylonian Talmud.