James Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana, of which a first edition from London, 1656 can be found in the Kislak Collections, is usually studied as an important text in the history of modern political thought for its bringing Roman republicanism and Machiavellian ideas to early-modern England in its only “republican” period. But those interested in Jewish politics and Jewish political thought will find this work interesting for another reason: It contains the a proposal for modern Jewish sovereignty, two-hundred years before this idea is usually considered to have entered modern political discourse.
Harrington’s proposal is that rather than incorporate Jews into England, which Cromwell was considering as Harrington was writing, Jews should be settled in Ireland, displacing Ireland’s (Catholic) population as they gathered there from the corners of the earth. The proposal was that Jews should be allowed to live there under their own laws and institutions, with an army to protect them, and that this arrangement would be for them and their heirs in perpetuity.
The proposal is built on three foundations:
The first foundation is “political Hebraism”. As political thinkers from the mid-sixteenth century had argued, Jews held exemplary political, economic, and agricultural wisdom. Harrington was the first to suggest that this wisdom could be employed by contemporary Jews towards running their own state.
The second foundation is the political-theory discussion of the role of religion in stabilizing sovereignty. Since Bodin’s founational work, theorists consistently argued, with few exceptions, that the modern state required some degree of conformity to civil religion for its stability, and the Jews were considered a people who would not conform.
The third foundation is the debate surrounding the reintrodcuton of the Jews to England taking place in mid-seventeenth century England. This debate is likely what brought Harrington to go further than any other theorist in providing a concrete proposal for placing the Jews in the modern world of states: the matter was urgent immediately following the Whitehall conference (convened in 1655 to debate the readmission of Jews to England). “To receive the Jews after any other manner into a common-wealth were to maim it,” wrote Harrington, while realizing that his proposal would have been more pertinent “had it bin thought of in time.”
The reader interested in Harrington’s proposal should read the excerpt provided here, with the following guidelines: Oceana is Harrington’s model England, Marpesia his model Scotland, and Panopea his model Ireland.
