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Modern sovereignty and the non-Christian, or Westphalia’s Jewish State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2017

Meirav Jones  and
Yossi Shain
Meirav Jones*
Affiliation:
Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Yossi Shain*
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science, Tel Aviv University Professor of Government and Diaspora Politics, Georgetown University
*
* Correspondence to: Meirav Jones, Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 420 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106, US. Author’s email: meiravjo@gmail.com
** Correspondence to: Yossi Shain, School of Political Science, Government, and International Affairs, Tel Aviv University, POB 39040, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel. Author’s email: shain@tauex.tau.ac.il
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Abstract

This article participates in efforts by IR theorists to clarify aspects of modern sovereignty – an idea currently in rupture and being rethought – by returning to its founding ‘Westphalian moment’. While recent work has reconnected modern sovereignty to religion, considering Westphalia as a religious settlement and Christian concerns persisting in the groundwork of IR, our work looks beyond Christian concerns and asks how Westphalian sovereignty addressed non-Christians. We trace a yet-untapped discussion of the Jews – presented as a paradigmatic religious ‘other’ – among architects of Westphalian sovereignty from Bodin through Grotius, Hobbes, Harrington, and Spinoza. We demonstrate that foundational theorists of modern sovereignty considered religious diversity a political problem. Some cited essential sameness, minimising difference between Jews and Christians. Others considered the possibility of Jewish sovereignty long before this idea is usually considered to have entered modern consciousness. While the discussion of Jewish sovereignty among architects of modern sovereignty may seem to justify a Jewish state in a world of Westphalian states, it also emphasises Westphalia’s territorialising of religious difference. This aspect of the Westphalian framework is surely inadequate today, when territorialising religious difference is neither normative nor likely possible.

Keywords

SovereigntyWestphaliaReligionHobbesBodinSpinoza
Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 5 , December 2017 , pp. 918 - 938
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2017 

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References

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4 Prominent accounts of the ‘return’ or ‘resurgence’ of religion include Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996)Google Scholar; Juergensmeyer, Mark, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Barber, Benjamin, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Times Books, 1995)Google Scholar. Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015)Google Scholar presents a sophisticated and compelling account of the return of religion in international politics as perceived and imposed, and the politics behind current understandings of religion in international affairs. In light of this, we refer here to a ‘perceived “return of religion”’. It is worth noting that the multiple sources cited here, from IR theory since 2000, show that whether or not there has been a return of religion to international politics, there has certainly been a return of religion to the study of religion and politics.

5 See, for example, Boucher, David, ‘Resurrecting Puffendorf and capturing the Westphalian moment’, Review of International Studies, 27:4 (2001), pp. 557–577 Google Scholar; Caporaso, James A. (ed.), Continuity and Change in the Westphalian Order (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2000)Google Scholar; Glanville, Luke, ‘The myth of “traditional” sovereignty’, International Studies Quarterly, 57:1 (2013), pp. 79–90 Google Scholar; Osiander, Andreas, ‘Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian myth’, International Organization, 55:2 (2001), pp. 251–287 Google Scholar; Philpott, ‘The religious roots’;

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7 A new appreciation of the role of Christianity in the West emerges both from the secularist (or postsecularist) Jurgen Habermas and the former Pope Joseph Ratzinger, in their joint work, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005). Yet even these thinkers’ work is closely related to the challenge of non-Christian religion in the public sphere. While Ratzinger engaged rival cultures in the 2005 text, Habermas wrote: ‘The Muslims next door force the Christian citizens to face up to the practice of a rival faith. And they also give the secular citizens a keener consciousness of the phenomenon of the public presence of religion.’ Habermas, Jurgen, ‘Notes on post-secular society’, New Perspectives Quarterly, 25:4 (2008), p. 20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 In understanding Westphalian sovereignty as encompassing sixteenth and seventeenth-century theories and applications, we are in line with Kant’s critique in Perpetual Peace, which both mocked the 1648 arrangements and labelled Grotius, Vattel, and Puffendorf as ‘sorry comforters’. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795), in Reiss, H. (ed.), Kant: Political Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Straumann, Benjamin, ‘The peace of Westphalia as a secular constitution’, Constellations, 15:2 (2008), pp. 173–186 also suggests this approachGoogle Scholar.

10 Of the sovereignty theorists considered here, Bodin provided the most elaborate treatment of Muslims (though his treatment of Jews was far more extensive). Bodin describes rulers in lands who had rejected the Caliph as being above them, as sovereign. In this context he mentions ‘the princes of Persia, the Curdes, the Turkes, the Tartars, the Sultans of Aegypt, the kings of Marocco, of Fez, of Telensin, of Tanes, of Bugia, and the people of Zenetes, and of Luntune’ as having sovereignty. Bodin, Jean, Six Books of the Commonwealth (London, 1606 [orig. pub. 1576])Google Scholar, 1.9. He discusses the possibility that the Islam of the Caliph who claims to be above the sovereign is a corruption of true Islam; a claim reflecting the Protestant critique of Catholicism, demonstrating that Islam (like Judaism) is discussed from a Christian perspective. Hobbes’s discussion of Islam is very limited, mentioning Mohamed (Mahomet) four times, and only once mentioning Muslims (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil [Leviathan] (London, 1651), 4.44, pp. 336–7) to whom he refers as ‘Turkes’. This single reference is discussed below. Harrington does not discuss Muslims or Islam, with references to the Turk being devoid of religious significance. The minimal treatment of Islam in early modern political theory might relate to the Turkish imperial threat being understood as enmeshed with the threat of Islam, so that Islam was already understood in territorial terms. Nabil Matar’s rich and fascinating work on the encounter between early modern England and Islam illustrates such an understanding, and also engages the enmeshing of the Jewish and Muslim threat in the English imagination. See

Matar, Nabil, Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Matar, Nabil, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. That the political-theory discussion presented here separates Jew from Muslim, resting on common perceptions of Muslims while contesting common perceptions of Jews, warrants further research and comparative work.

11 Where possible, we have consulted first English editions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts on Early English Books Online (EEBO), including Jean Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, Hugo Grotius’s The Illustrious Hugo Grotius Of the Law of Warre and Peace, With Annotations, III Parts [Laws of War and Peace] (London, 1655), and Harrington’s, James Commonwealth of Oceana (London, 1656)Google Scholar. The spelling of Bodin’s and Harrington’s texts have been modernised for clarity. A modern translation of Benedict de Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (1670) has been used. For all sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts we have provided book and chapter numbers to make the references accessible across editions (noting the absence of a full modern edition of Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth). As Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana is not divided into books and chapters, we have provided page numbers from the first edition, accessible at: {eebo.chadwyck.com}.

12 On Christianity understanding itself with respect to Judaism, see Nirenberg, David, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013)Google Scholar.

13 The early modern political-theory approach to Jewish texts as sources of ancient wisdom and political models has been studied in recent work on ‘political Hebraism’. See Schochet, Gordon, Oz-Salzberger, Fania, and Jones, Meirav (eds), Political Hebraism: Judaic Sources in Early Modern Political Thought (Jerusalem: Shalem Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Grosby, Steven, ‘The third culture’, in Jonathan Jacobs (ed.), Judaic Sources and Western Thought: Jerusalem’s Enduring Presence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 73–96 Google Scholar; Nelson, Eric, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. Julie Cooper, in a recent essay, marks the study of ‘political Hebraism’ as one of three large-scale collaborative projects that comprise the field of ‘Jewish Political Thought’.

Cooper, Julie, ‘The turn to tradition in the study of Jewish politics’, Annual Review of Political Science, 19 (2016), pp. 67–87 (p. 68)Google Scholar. Even with a substantial literature on political Hebraism, the bulk of early modern Hebraism was not ‘political Hebraism’, but rather related to the Dutch, English, Anabaptists, early Americans, and others imagining themselves as Israel and employing Hebrew and Jewish sources and images for theological and political-theological purposes, seeking Christian mysteries, connecting to an authentic pre-Catholic past, modelling messianic kingdoms, emulating God’s true people, etc. Notes 20 and 40 below relate to the English imagining themselves as a second Israel and to chosenness in the post-reformation imagination.

14 For the nationalist impetus behind the modern Zionist movement, see Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question (1862), available at: {http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Rome_and_Jerusalem}.

15 Benhabib, Seyla, Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Troubled Times (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p. 17 Google Scholar.

16 Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 9b.

17 Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, pp. 103, 117–19, 129–31, 187.

18 Fredriksen, Paula, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

19 Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, pp. 117–20.

20 See, for example, references to Israel in printed sermons such as: Ashe, Simeon, Gods Incomparable Goodness unto Israel, Unfolded and Applied (London, 1647)Google Scholar; Beech, William, A View of England’s Present Distempers Occasioned by the Late Revolution (London, 1650)Google Scholar; Tombes, John, Anti-Paedobaptism, or, The Second Part of the Full Review of the Dispute Concerning Infant-Baptism (London, 1654)Google Scholar; Adis, Henry, A Fannatick’s Letter sent out of the Dungeon of the Gate-House Prison of Westminster (London, 1660), p. 24 Google Scholar.

21 On this, see Schama, Simon, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)Google Scholar, ch. 2, pp. 51ff., 100.

22 Groves, Beatrice, The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

23 Word search conducted in electronic full text of Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, available at: {http://eebo.chadwyck.com/search/fulltext?ACTION=ByID&ID=D00000998427930000&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&WARN=N&FILE=../session/1420724071_19927} accessed 8 January 2015. Scholarship has explored the role of Judaism in Bodin’s works on religious truth and demonology. See, for example, Baxter, Christopher R., ‘Jean Bodin’s daemon and his conversion to Judaism’, in Jean Bodin: Proceedings of the International Conference on Bodin in Munich (Munich: Beck, 1973), pp. 1–21 Google Scholar; Kuntz, Marion Leathers Daniels, ‘Introduction’, in Jean Bodin, Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime, trans. Marion Leathers Daniels Kuntz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Rose, Paul Lawrence, Bodin and the Great God of Nature: The Moral and Religious Universe of a Judaiser (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1980)Google Scholar; Horowitz, Maryanne Cline, ‘Bodin and Judaism’, Il pensiero politico, 30 (1997), pp. 205–216 Google Scholar. The role of Judaism in Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth has not been examined.

24 Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, 1.6.

25 Ibid., 6.6.

26 Ibid., 4.6.

27 See, for example, ibid., 6.2.

28 Hugo Grotius, De Republica Emendanda (c. 1599), trans. Arthur Eyffinger, Grotiana N.S., 5 (1984), pp. 66–121 (p. 94); Hobbes, Leviathan, 3.41.

29 Cf. Groves, The Destruction of Jerusalem.

30 Hobbes, Leviathan, 3.33, 3.41, etc.

31 Ibid., 2.29–30, 3.33.

32 Ibid., 3.40.

33 Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (1670), ed. Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 17.26–8; Smith, Steven, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 149 Google Scholar.

34 Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, 5.6.

35 Ibid., 2.5.

36 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.12.

37 Ibid., 3.42.

38 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 3.6.

39 Ibid., Preface, 10.

40 Ibid., 3.10–12. One context in which we should view the redefinition and discussion of chosenness in this period is the self-perception of early modern peoples as chosen. This affected popular and political rhetoric and animated art and politics in England, the Dutch republic, and elsewhere. The Hebraic imagination and chosenness were tied in the image of a ‘new’ or ‘second’ Israel. See Manuel, Frank E., The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Hill, Christopher, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Penguin, 1993)Google Scholar; Guibbory, Achsah, Christian Identity: Jews and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Oxford, 2010)Google Scholar. The political-theory discussion unravelled here responds to this perceived chosenness by presenting ‘ancient Israel’ as a political model, exemplary rather than exceptional or ‘chosen’.

41 Nelson, The Hebrew Republic, pp. 17–18.

42 Del Grosso, Anna Maria Lazzarino, ‘The Respublica Hebraeorum as a scientific political model in Jean Bodin’s methodus’, Hebraic Political Studies, 1:5 (2006), pp. 549–567 Google Scholar.

43 Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, 1.2–3.

44 Ibid., 1.8.

45 The Hebrew Bible contains numerous terms that relate to political leadership – melech (king), adon (lord), and even ribon (the modern Hebrew term for sovereign), which appears in the Targum (Bodin cites Chaldaeus – the Targum – for this). See Katchen, Aaron L., Christian Hebraists and Dutch Rabbis: Seventeenth Century Apologetics and the Study of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1984), p. 183 Google Scholar.

46 Hugo Grotius, The Illustrious Hugo Grotius Of the Law of Warre and Peace, With Annotations, III Parts [Laws of War and Peace] (De Jure Belli Ac Pacis Libri Tres, 1625) (London, 1655), 1.9, 3.14; Jones, Meirav, ‘Philo Judaeus and Hugo Grotius’s modern natural law’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 74:3 (2013), pp. 339–359 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Grotius, De Republica Emendanda, pp. 105–21 (pp. 79–80); Grotius, Laws of War and Peace, 1.9, 3.14; Arthur Eyffinger, ‘Introduction, De Republica Emendanda: A Juvenile Tract by Hugo Grotius on the Emendation of the Dutch Polity’, Grotiana N.S., 5 (1984), pp. 5–56 (pp. 23–7).

48 Grotius, Laws of War and Peace, 1.53–4. Grotius’s ideas on the Hebrew commonwealth and on the exportability of Jewish legal models were expressed both in his Laws of War and Peace, and also in his juvenile work of political theory, De Republica Emendanda, where he presented the Jewish commonwealth of antiquity as a model for the Dutch (see Eyffinger, ‘Introduction, De Republica Emendanda’). This work likely informed a more sophisticated study of the Hebrew Republic by Leiden political theorist Petrus (Petrus Cunaeus, De Republica Hebraeorum [Leiden, 1617]). See Katchen, Christian Hebraists and Dutch Rabbis; Lea Campos Boralevi, ‘Classical foundational myths of European Republicanism: The Jewish Commonwealth’, in Van Gelderen, Martin and Skinner, Quentin (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Arthur Eyffinger, ‘Introduction’, in Petrus Cunaeus, The Hebrew Republic, trans. Peter Wyetzner (Jerusalem: Shalem Press, 2006).

49 Harvey, Warren Zev, ‘The Israelite Kingdom of God in Hobbes’ political thought’, Hebraic Political Studies, 1:3 (2006), pp. 310–327 Google Scholar.

50 Hobbes, Leviathan, 3.35.

51 Ibid., 3.40.

52 Ibid., 2.31, 3.48; cf. ibid., 2.30. This interpretation of Hobbes’s sovereign as legalist in the sense of rule of law rather than ‘decisionist’, and indeed of Hobbes as a thinker who drew on Jewish law for his legalism, contradicts Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of Hobbes. Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985 [orig. pub. 1922]), pp. 33–35 Google Scholar.

53 Hobbes, Leviathan, 2.30.

54 Harrington, James, The Commonwealth of Oceana (London, 1656), p. 1 Google Scholar.

55 Nelson, The Hebrew Republic, pp. 57–87.

56 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, Preface, p. 14.

57 Ibid., 3.6.

58 See, for example, Oz-Salzberger, Fania, ‘The Jewish roots of Western freedom’, Azure, 13 (2002), pp. 88–132 Google Scholar; Neuman, Kalman, ‘Political Hebraism and the Respublica Hebraeorum: On defining the field’, Hebraic Political Studies, 1:1 (2005), pp. 57–70 Google Scholar; Nelson, The Hebrew Republic; Grosby, ‘The third culture’.

59 Straumann, ‘The peace of Westphalia as a secular constitution’.

60 The interchangeability of state and commonwealth here reflects the same in seventeenth-century political theory. Hobbes, for example, writes, ‘For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man.’

61 Kuntz, ‘Introduction’; Rose, Bodin and the Great God of Nature.

62 This incident is recorded in a number of places: G. M. Bosquet, Sur les troubles Advenus en la ville de Tolose l’an 1562 (Toulouse, 1595), pp. 140–2; Hauben, Paul J., Three Spanish Heretics and the Reformation: Antonio Del Corro, Cassiodoro De Reina, Cypriano De Valera (Geneva: Droz, 1967), p. 30 Google Scholar, fn. 37; and Greengrass, M., ‘The anatomy of a religious riot in Toulouse, in May 1562’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 34:3 (1983), pp. 367–391 (p. 386)Google Scholar, yet while Bernuy appears as a wealthy merchant in these accounts, his Jewish ex-Spanish origins appear only vaguely. These are easily discoverable in current tourist information on the family hotel, which still stands. See: {http://structurae.info/ouvrages/hotel-de-bernuy}.

63 David, Abraham (ed.), A Hebrew Chronicle from Prague, c. 1615 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), pp. 48–49 Google Scholar.

64 Hsia, Po-Chia R., The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 197–198 Google Scholar.

65 Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, 3.7, 4.7.

66 Ibid., 4.7.

67 Ibid., 3.7, 4.7.

68 The question of whether conversion could protect the Jews remains. The riots in Toulouse show that Jews were not always successful in convincing others of their conversion, and the complex issue of New-Christian identity and toleration is beyond the scope of this article. Still, Bodin’s interest was in protecting Jews’ ‘religion and liberty’, such that conversion would have been counterproductive.

69 Grotius, Laws of War and Peace, 1.8. This is echoed in Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 9.10–11.

70 For Grotius’s more specific responses in his earlier works to questions of how Jews should be tolerated in Dutch society, including their ability to study at university centers, their prohibition from converting Christians, and the redundancy of ghettos, see Eyffinger, Arthur, ‘“How wondrously Moses goes with the House of Orange!”: Hugo Grotius’ De Republica Emendanda in the context of the Dutch Revolt’, Hebraic Political Studies, 1:1 (2005), pp. 79–109 Google Scholar. Like in Grotius, Laws of War and Peace these suggestions reinforced the status quo vis-à-vis the Jews in his time.

71 Grotius’s statue in the market square in Delft remains a controversial reminder of the perceived secularity of this thinker, famously portrayed with his back to the Church and facing City Hall that housed a court. Arthur Eyffinger, The 1899 Peace Conference: ‘The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World’ (New York: Kluwer Law, 1999), p. 331.

72 The closest Grotius came to such a claim was finding religion useful for human society in reinforcing natural law. He also posited minimal standards of morality necessary for participation in the state, drawn from Israelite Noahide law. Nelson, The Hebrew Republic, pp. 105–7.

73 Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.12.

74 Ibid., Bk 3, ch. 42, pp. 271–2.

75 Ibid., Bk 4, ch. 44, pp. 336–7.

76 Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, p. 1.

77 Ibid., Introduction.

78 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 3.12.

79 Katchen, Christian Hebraists and Dutch Rabbis, p. 57.

80 Rosenblatt, Jason, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 162 Google Scholar.

81 Strauss, Leo, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997 [orig. pub. 1930]), pp. 4–6 Google Scholar; Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, p. 204; Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 3.12.

82 We saw above that the idea that the Jews held political wisdom was shared by Bodin, Hobbes, and Grotius, who looked to the Hebrew commonwealth and Jewish law as they elucidated the political structures and laws they advocated. Harrington shared this appreciation for Hebrew wisdom, which he found to be the root of ancient prudence, and to contain important information about the system of distributive justice best administered by states. Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, pp. 1, 26, 32, 43, etc.; Nelson, The Hebrew Republic, pp. 57–87.

83 Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, Introduction.

84 Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, 3.8.

85 One might argue that Harrington’s proposal was not for Jewish sovereignty but Jewish autonomy. After all, he discussed Panopea as a province of Oceana. Yet we recall that to Harrington it appeared that the Republic of the Netherlands was not a commonwealth but a league or confederation of commonwealths. See Pocock, J. G. A., ‘Spinoza and Harrington: an exercise in comparison’, Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden (BMGN) 102:3 (1987), pp. 435–449 (p. 441)Google Scholar. Further, Harrington discussed ‘provincial sovereignty’ as a form of sovereignty (Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, pp. 19, 148), and the salient feature of the sovereign was lawgiving, so his specifying the Jews living under their laws is significant.

86 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 3.12.

87 Ibid., 3.12.

88 We note the debate among scholars on the question of the kind of Jewish state Theodor Herzl envisioned. Hazony, Yoram, ‘Did Herzl want a Jewish state?’, Azure, 9 (2000)Google Scholar, presents this debate, with the author’s conclusion that would support a more robust Jewish State than Spinoza imagined. Strauss termed the type of Zionism that advocated traditional Judaism as state religion ‘cultural Zionism’ rather than ‘political Zionism’, yet non-Jews conceiving of a Jewish state would not have fit his own criteria for this form of Zionism. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, pp. 4–7.

89 Benhabib, Dignity in Adversity, pp. 171–2.

90 On this, see Kaplan, Benjamin, Divided by Faith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

91 Grotius’s concrete proposal for the incorporation of Jews, his ‘Remonstrantie to the states of Holland’, is beyond the scope of this article but concurs with the statements on the Jews in De Jure Belli. See Meijer, Jacob, ‘Hugo Grotius’ “Remonstratie”’, Jewish Social Studies, 17:2 (1955), pp. 91–104 Google Scholar.

92 The controversy surrounding Jewish readmission is masterfully presented in Katz, David, ‘English redemption and Jewish readmission in 1656’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 34:1 (1983)Google Scholar. Katz emphasises the Millenarian considerations of Cromwell’s England, but also offers the political challenge Jews posed to the idea of a Christian commonwealth. See pp. 86ff. for Cromwell’s inconclusion on whether Jews could be legally and morally admitted.

93 For a related discussion of emancipation, see Sorkin, David, ‘Religious minorities and citizenship in the long nineteenth century’, in Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, and Saba Mahmood (eds), Politics of Religious Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

94 The lack of religious distinction within Arab identity may have roots in the Westphalian moment when Muslim was identified as ‘Turk’ and vice versa. Relevant here, particularly to the challenges to Westphalia in Israel-Palestine, are recent decisions to recognise Aramean ethnicity, allowing Christian Arabs to distinguish themselves from Muslim Arabs in Israeli law. The political implications of this are not yet clear, though certainly a two-state solution is challenged in a political reality that recognises such plurality. Also, as this is a religious distinction, it highlights the centrality of the politics of religious difference still today.

95 Numerous movements and initiatives exist today, promoting liberal-democratic, binational, federative, or confederative alternatives to the two-state solution, and there is a growing literature. A range of solutions and some bibliography is presented in Bashir, Bashir, ‘Strengths and weaknesses of integrative solutions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’, Middle East Journal, 70:4 (2016), pp. 560–578 Google Scholar. Beyond this range, solutions promoted by the Israeli Right include federation and annexation. Some solutions have long been promoted by groups opposing partition. Others were discarded with the foundation of the state of Israel and are being newly promoted following the perceived decline of the two-state solution. See, for example, Yossi Beilin, ‘Confederation is the key to Middle East peace’, The New York Times (14 May 2015), available at: {http://nyti.ms/2db60DV}; Uri Avnery, ‘Confederation is the correct and only solution’, Haaretz (30 August 2015), available at: {http://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/.premium-1.2719455} (in Hebrew). While most alternatives to partition adopt recognisable Westphalian forms, the Israeli-Palestinian movement ‘Two States One Homeland’ to which Avnery, ‘Confederation is the correct and only solution’, and Bashir, ‘Strengths and weaknesses of integrative solutions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ allude is theoretically interesting for its departure from existing models. Being impressively inter-sectorial (including Jewish settlers, Left secularists, Palestinian liberationists, and more), this movement works with and through difference, and pursues a negotiated vision of ‘shared sovereignty’ that is necessarily non-Westphalian. While the vision is still abstract, the process of negotiation could potentially concretise a non-Westphalian model of governance grounded in a more satisfying encounter with difference.

96 Hurd, ‘The political authority of secularism in international relations’ discusses the Christian assumptions behind enlightenment universalism as does Robert Yelle in his rich text, ‘Moses’ veil: Secularization as a Christian myth’, in Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers, Yelle, Robert A., and Taussig-Rubbo, Mateo (eds), After Secular Law (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 23–42 Google Scholar.