Abstract

In his 1935 treatise on divine sovereignty, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber introduced the idea of an 'anarchic soul of theocracy.' A decade before, the German jurist Carl Schmitt had coined the term 'political theology' in order to designate the Christian theological foundations of modern sovereignty and legal order. In a specular and opposite gesture, Buber argued that the covenant at Sinai established YHWH as the King of the Israelites and simultaneously promulgated the principle that no human being could become sovereign over this people. In so doing, Buber offered an interpretation of Jewish theocracy that is both republican and anarchic. Republican because, by pivoting on the idea that democracy is a function of a people's fidelity to a prophetic higher law, theocracy displaces the central role of the human sovereign. Anarchic because this divine law is saturated with the messianic aim to put an end to relations of domination between peoples. In this book I show that this republican and anarchic articulation of the discourse of political theology characterises the development of Jewish political theology in the 20th century from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt.