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Ancient Jewish political thought and the legacy of Isocrates

James R. Muir

St. Edmund's College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K.Online Publication Date: 01 August 1997

To cite this Article

Muir, James R.(1997)'Ancient Jewish political thought and the legacy of Isocrates',The European Legacy,2:5,827 —840

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Ancient Jewish Political Thoughtand the Legacy of Isocrates

JAMES R. MUIR

he standard textbooks in the history of education present ancient Jewish educa-tion as a "religious" or "ethical" enterprise. Barclay, for example, writes that "it has alwaysto be remembered that Jewish education was entirely religious education."

Similarly,Bowen puts monotheism at the foundation of the Jewish legacy to Western thought andeducation.

Others assert that a particular ethical view was the basis of Jewish education.

This standard view of Jewish education is inaccurate in a number of ways, in large partbecause it is too general and fragmented and it attempts to interpret early Judaism in termsof inappropriate categories of thought.Jewish education could not have been originally based on an ethical view because"the biblical-rabbinic tradition does not distinguish a domain of ethics."

One of the dif-ficulties faced by Maimonides in his attempt to interpret the Mishnah from an Aristotelianperspective was the absence of even a word denoting "ethics" in the ancient Jewish writ-

ings.

Similarly, while it is generally true that monotheism is an important background toJewish education, an adequate understanding of the subject requires some understandingof the specific and especially political conception of the very nature of God embodied inJudaic monotheism. While it might be partially true that early Jewish education was insome sense "ethical" or "religious," such education was in an important sense political,both in its foundations and in its normative intentions. As Barclay himself observes, "allprimary education was preparation for reading the Law; and all higher education was thereading and study of it."

As we shall see, the Law was a component of a broader theologico-political doctrine.Jewish education was not "ethical" or "religious" but theological and political, constructedupon the revelations of a peculiarly

political

Deity. The purpose of this paper is to showthat an accurate understanding of the nature of ancient Jewish education requires that werecover a clearer appreciation for the way normative intentions of such education werederived from a theologico-political doctrine and the way this derivation presupposed theproto-Isocratic idea of the nature of education.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY CONTEXT

As the formulation of the purpose of this paper suggests, my argument takes the re-lationship between the history of Jewish political thought and the history of classical Greek

St. Edmund's College, University of Cambridge, Mt. Pleasant, Cambridge CB3 OBN, U.K.

The

European

Legacy,

827

828 r^ JAMES R. MUIR

educational thought as its point of departure. The argument and purpose might thereforebe clearer if we pause here to examine the context provided by each of these histories.

The History of Jewish

Political

Thought

A number of Jewish scholars have recently observed that histories of European po-litical philosophy often neglect the contribution of Jewish thinkers, as well as the historyof Jewish political thought generally. Indeed, Jewish scholars themselves have sometimesassumed that little specifically political philosophy existed between the destruction of thetemple in 70

C.E.

and the establishment of Israel in 1948. As Biale put it in his fine histori-cal study of Jewish political theory:It has often been assumed that, following the destruction of the Temple, the Jews aban-doned politics and, in the absence of a political life, developed no political theories.

Contemporary scholarship has shown this assumption to be unwarranted. Recent editionsof Mendelssohn's

Jerusalem

have reminded us that Jewish political philosophy not only hasa history in its own right but also made important contributions to the development ofEuropean political thought. Similarly, others have begun to revive the reputation of medi-eval Jewish political philosophy, and, reaching still further into the past, of the politicalthought of the

Midrash

and the Diaspora.

The intention of this paper is, in part, to con-tribute to this recovery of Jewish political philosophy from the particular perspective of thesimilarity between the ancient Jewish understanding of the relationship between educa-tional and political aspiration and the view of this relationship advocated by an exception-ally influential, and yet now little studied, Greek political philosopher.It is, I believe, well known that there was extensive interaction between Hellenism andJudaism, particularly during the third and second centuries

B.C.E.

Of particular importancein the context of this paper is the influence exerted on Jewish thought by Hellenistic rheto-ricians. As Gerhardsson has pointed out, both the rhetoricians and Jewish thinkers shareda similar, and perhaps mutually supportive understanding of the distinction between writ-ten and orally transmitted law.

Moreover, the formation and consolidation of rabbinichigher education was "undoubtedly stimulated by the Hellenistic schools of rhetoric."

TheHellenistic rhetorical schools, of course, derived their inspiration almost wholly from thepolitical philosopher Isocrates and his unified legacy to political philosophy and education.The question arises, particularly in the context of the Jewish ambivalence towards (andsometimes rejection of) Greek philosophy, why it was that Jewish educators were able to ac-cept the influence of Hellenic rhetorical education, which at that time often went under thename "philosophy." I would suggest that the Isocratic legacy of politically conditioned edu-cation served Jewish educational aspirations well, because it provided an idea of the natureof education that was compatible with ancient Jewish political thought. Specifically, for ex-ample, Jewish educators derived the normative intentions of education from a theologico-political doctrine originating in Jewish antiquity and ultimately from the most ancient rev-elations. While Plato disparaged ancestral religion, particularly in politics and education,"Isocrates argued that education ought to be similarly derived from an ancestral political doc-trine informed by ancestral theology.