THE INVENTION OF JEWISH THEOCRACY:

Publisher: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 270pp. ISBN: 9780190922764 (epub).

This is not a work of meta-theory, elucidating the nexus of law and governance in the Judaic tradition, or illuminating the nature of the Jewish political vision. Rather, remaining true to the promise of its title, it delivers a sober, non-polemical account of the mundane politics of a historical Jewish polity, the modern Israel, where a seemingly traditional and innocuous, but in reality radical and contentious, call to reinstate Jewish law, the rabbinical Halakhah, as state-law, causes much tension and strife. Given the paucity of Jewish reflection on statehood and self-rule during diasporic times, “the tendency among the Jews to consider their existential situation in exile to be normative until the expected arrival of the messiah”, it is reasonable to claim, as does Kaye, that the concept of ‘Jewish Theocracy’ is a modern invention. Equally unremarkable is the fact that Kaye can trace the genealogy of the modern phantom to a precise historical moment and confidently identify its progenitor. After all, the axiom that law is simply an expression of the political will of the state, that law must be enforceable otherwise it is norm, morality, custom and else, in fact anything but law, is manifestly a modern idea and the sine qua non of secular statehood.