The Jewish Tradition and Civil Society

There is no term for, much less a theory of, civil society in classical Jewish texts. Although the Jewish viewpoint on any given subject is no longer identical with the classical rabbinic viewpoint, until modernity, the latter provided the intellectual framework in which all Jewish thought was set. Any understanding of how Judaism views a topic must begin with the rabbinic tradition. This is still the case today because the rabbinic tradition provides the primary intellectual constraint on the adoption of any and all political theories represented in this volume. Rabbinic writers do not produce theories; they produce commentaries on a biblical or talmudic text, codes of law, and legal responsa. These sources, moreover, are extremely diverse, covering over two millenia of history, and for the most part generated in pre-modern exile, when Jews lacked a state of their own, lived in compact, internally autonomous and religiously homogenous communities scattered across continents, and were segregated from general society legally, politically, and socially. Rabbinic energy was directed at working out the divine scheme of justice for Jewish society. The civil domain was reserved for the non-Jewish world. Without a state of their own, and with little sense of belonging to the host states in which they live, rabbinic writers do not discuss the role of society in relation to the state. So, the Jewish tradition has little to contribute to the civil society/state debate. If one understands civil society, instead, as “an ethical vision of social life,” 1 concerned with the conditions for establishing bonds of social solidarity between diverse members of society, then Judaism has much to contribute to the discussion.