A Lecture on the Declaration of Independence

Post By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

May 17, 2009

[A prefatory remark: In view of the myopia and shallowness of today’s presidential candidates, Americans are in need of some Jewish wisdom. Accordingly, I am going to speak of an extraordinary Italian Rabbi, Eliyahu Benamozegh, a philosopher and Kabbalist who was fully conversant in European culture. His magnum opus, Israel and Humanity, was published after his death in 1914.

Rabbi Benamozegh saw three major problems confronting humanity: (1) the conflict between religion and science, (2) the conflict between various religions, and (3) the conflict between religion and state.  In this lecture I will speak primarily about the deeper levels of the American Declaration of Independence of which very few Americans are cognizant.

Benamozegh deemed it of vital importance to clarify the Jewish doctrine of religion and state. Analysis of this doctrine casts significant light on the compatibility of the biblical ideal with the political institutions not only of present-day Israel, but also of the United States. Benamozegh writes:

“To grasp the central idea of the Israelite doctrine [of religion and state], let us first determine what this doctrine categorically rejects. Now the question arises, where is the supreme authority to be found in Israel [under a Torah government]? Does it reside in a man or in a family [or tribe] invested with supreme power? The very idea of a Revelation [such as the Sinai Revelation] which embraces all of life, public as well as pri­vate, precludes any such possibility. A Revelation so total cannot speak through any single entity whatever, whether priest or monarch…. Neither the king nor the priest can possess unlimited authority, for each [operates] in a well-defined sphere and his function is circumscribed by impassable limits.

“Nor is supreme authority vested in a privileged class, an oligarchy or an aristocracy. The provisions of the Law and the … concep­tion of the [Sinai] Revelation itself, prove, if proof be needed, that there can be no such class. Neither is it to be located in the totality of Israelites, at least not in the sense of an absolute power residing in the people as a whole, which would legitimize all that the people might decree. As for the authorized interpreters of the Revelation, however, the people convey their sovereignty in this matter to those whose place in the hierarchy renders them qualified, according to established rule. This role of the community is the only one that is logically possible in a state faithful to a Revelation.”

“If then, according to Judaism, supreme authority adheres neither to the high priest, nor to the king, nor to an elite, nor even to the entire people as a collectivity, where is it to be found?  In God alone, which is to say, using modern categories, in absolute reason and justice. God is the only legislator, and the people His only interpreter on earth. Such is the Jewish ideal.”

The same conclusion may be deduced from the political theology of the American Declaration of Independence. Suffice to consider two of its primary principles.  Its First Principle inheres in these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

These rights are “unalienable” because man is created in the image of God, and therefore possesses free will and the capacity to distinguish good from evil. In other words, it is from God, and not from any Government or body of men, that we derive the rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Imago dei is what makes those rights “unalienable,”  and these are the ends of legitimate Government.

Accordingly – and this is the Second Principle – “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” (Emphasis added.)

The people, therefore, are sovereign under God, which means, in the final analysis, that the People are His interpreters through their chosen representatives!

However, since the phrase “any Form of Government” obviously includes Democracy, it follows that the People or their Representatives are (theologically) prohibited from establishing a Government or enacting laws that violate “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” or, again using modern categories, that violate “absolute reason and justice.” The Declaration of Independence is therefore basically consistent with Jewish law, and it provides no justification for the establishment of a secular democratic state!

This said, let us put to rest certain errors. The “Creator” referred to as the First Principle must be construed as a theistic, not a deistic God, otherwise, and regardless of their private convictions, it would have made no sense for the signers of Declaration to appeal to “the Supreme Judge of the world,” or to express their “firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.”

Moreover, and of paramount significance in interpreting the meaning of the Declaration, its language should be construed in terms of the understanding of its audience, which was overwhelmingly Christian, consisting, therefore, of theists, not deists.

Now consider the phrase “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”  The term “Nature” is foreign to the Torah. Moreover, the notion of “Laws of Nature” suggests autonomous or independently self-sustaining eternal laws, something impossible in a created universe.  And since Greek philosophy never conceived of creation ex nihilo, let us put to rest the prejudice about Stoic basis of the Declaration.

We thus see that Rabbi Benamozegh’s teaching can provide a novel and profound understanding of the American Declaration of Independence.

Although the Declaration does not explicitly refer to any Revelation, its reference to God as the Creator of man excludes Greek philosophy as the ultimate authority of the Declaration. Moreover, by appealing to “the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of [their] intentions,” yet relying on “the protection of Divine Providence,” the fifty-six signatories tacitly affirm that the Declaration is ultimately based on theological ideas derived primarily from the Judeo-Christian heritage, which is obviously rooted in the Sinai Revelation.

That “Revelation” belongs to all the people.  Its laws are activated by the people or by their representatives.  Benamozegh elaborates:

With regard to the exercise of the Law, there is no doubt that this is by the people itself as manifest … in its authorized bodies, which, by virtue of the way they are formed and the persons who compose them, represent the people as an aggregate—all the better, indeed, since the obligation imposed on every Israelite to educate himself in the various parts of the Law inevitably gave to society an influence and a role similar to those of public opinion today. God is God and King, and the people is His prophet: Such is the true Jewish theocracy.

It is to the Lord that supreme authority belongs and not to the priests, and is exercised by the people, whose representatives are the public officials of all ranks, together with the priests and the king himself.  Everyone could aspire to the high positions of the state. The most notable example is the Sanhedrin, which was open to all citizens” (289, emphasis added).

“The people is His prophet” – what an extraordinary idea!  Coming from Rabbi Benamozegh, it casts an entirely new light on the concept of “popular sovereignty,” a concept that has been trivialized and secularized by scholars and laymen alike as the basic principle of democracy. Popular sovereignty in a Judeo-Christian monotheistic culture is not the sovereignty of a people whose educators are virtual atheists. Nor is popular sovereignty meaningful in a monotheistic culture whose educators are sheikhs or mullahs.  Here let us consult James Wilson, America’s first professor of law.

Wilson, who taught law at the University of Pennsylvania, was widely deemed the most learned man of his generation. Although he was perhaps the strongest advocate of popular sovereignty, he was very different from doctrinaire democrats if only because, like Rabbi Benamozegh, he regarded God’s will, as interpreted by the people acting through their representatives, as the source of obligation.

Wilson was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  Moreover, his contribution to the deliberations of the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787 was second only to that of James Madison.  Wilson was also one of the six original justices appointed by George Washington to the Supreme Court of the United States. His influence on the founding has been obscured, even though he is the only founder that undertook to formulate a systematic legal and political philosophy, one grounded in theological principles (a fact that stands in striking contrast to scholars who regard the Declaration and the Constitution as “Lockean” documents). In one of his law lectures, Wilson declared that “The laws of nature and the law of revelation are both divine: they flow, though in different channels, from the same adorable source.  It is, indeed, preposterous to separate them from each other. The object of both is – to discover the will of God – and both are necessary for the accomplishment of that end.”

Wilson’s political theology illustrates that the United States of America was originally based on the Seven Laws of Noah, which is to say Jewish law!

If we define “theocracy” literally as “rule of God” and understand by the “rule of God” that God is the ultimate source of law and authority, this definition renders the American Declaration of Independence a theocratic as well as a political document! We see that the signers of the Declaration justified their rebellion against the laws of Great Britain by appealing to a Higher Law, “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” As previously indicated, not the laws of parliaments and kings, but the laws of God endow man with the “unalienable rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Without this “Higher Law” doctrine, the Declaration’s long list of grievances against the British Crown would be nothing more than arbitrary expressions of discontent having no moral justification.  Nor is this all.

It is hardly known that most of the original thirteen states of the American Union incorporated the Declaration of Independence into their own state constitutions.  Abraham Lincoln saw in that political-theological document the moral foundations of the Federal Constitution. In his Gettysburg Address (“Four score and twenty years ago …”), Lincoln linked the beginning of the nation with its Declaration of Independence.  Reason compels us to conclude that the Constitution provides the means of implementing the political theology of the Declaration. Stated another way, since the laws and institutions prescribed in the Constitution were designed to preclude the grievances enumerated in the Declaration, we may logically conclude that the Constitution translates into political terms the theological principles of the Declaration. It is hardly a stretch, therefore, to say that the Constitution is based the Seven Laws of Noah!

This theological interpretation conforms to contemporaneous statements of Harvard president Samuel Langdon and Yale president Ezra Stiles who held that the American Constitution was very much rooted in Jewish ideas and tacitly based on the Ten Commandments.

Nevertheless, no one deemed the Government established under the Constitution a theocracy, and quite apart from the First Amendment. That amendment, as initially understood, simply prohibited Congress from establishing a State religion. Revolted by the example of England, the American Founding Fathers refused to sacralize the modern nation-state, which they deemed powerful enough without investing it with religious authority or even a unitary form.  Instead of a centralized-bureaucratic system of government, they established federalism, which requires local self-government (as does the Torah, under which each tribe, later called a “district,” had its own Governor and Small Sanhedrin).

Moreover, in a monotheistic culture rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, not the State but the people are sovereign, of course under God.  If we but think within the context of such a culture and maintain intellectual detachment from our present culture of Triumphant Secularism, it will be obvious that the First Amendment does not prevent Congress from passing laws supportive of the ethical monotheism or universal moral principles of the Declaration of Independence. But let us provide further evidence of the ethical monotheism of early America, which very much influenced the constitutions of the original thirteen states.

Many early American statesmen and educators were schooled in Hebraic civilization. The second President of the United States, John Adams, a Harvard graduate and signer of the Declaration of Independence, had this to say of the Jewish people:

The Jews have done more to civilize men than any other nation…. They are the most glorious Nation that ever inhabited the earth.  The Romans and their Empire were but a bauble in comparison to the Jews.  They have given religion to three-quarters of the Globe and have influenced the affairs of Mankind more, and more happily than any other Nation, ancient or modern.

The curriculum at Harvard, like those of other early American colleges and universities, was designed by learned and liberal men of “Old Testament” persuasion. Harvard president Increase Mather (1685-1701) was an ardent Hebraist (as were his predecessors, Henry Dunster and Charles Chauncey).  Mather’s writings contain numerous quotations from the Talmud as well as from the works of Sa’adiah Gaon, Rashi, Maimonides and other classic Jewish commentators.

Yale University president Ezra Stiles readily discoursed on the Mishna and Talmud with visiting rabbinical authorities. At his first public commencement at Yale (1781), Stiles delivered an oration on Hebrew literature written originally in Hebrew.  Hebrew and the study of Hebraic laws and institutions were an integral part of Yale’s as well as of Harvard’s curriculum. Much the same may be said of King’s College (later Columbia University), William and Mary, Rutgers, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Brown University. Hebrew learning was then deemed a basic element of liberal education. Samuel Johnson, first president of King’s College (1754-1763), expressed the intellectual attitude of his age when he referred to Hebrew as “essential to a gentleman’s education.”

This attitude was not merely academic.  On May 31, 1775, almost on the eve of the American Revolution, Harvard president Samuel Langdon, addressing the Congress of Massachusetts Bay, declared: “Every nation … has a right to set up over itself any form of government which to it may appear most conducive to its common welfare.  The civil polity of Israel is doubtless an excellent general model.” (Emphasis added.)

Unfortunately, all this is more or less unknown to the American people, and it goes a long way to explaining why so many eminent Americans today fear that America is going the way of decadent Europe.  They see how in his Inaugural Address, President Obama jettisoned the long-established locution that embodies the generally-accepted notion of “the Judeo-Christian tradition.” As Professor Edward Alexander pointed out, “That tradition, in America, mandates the phrase ‘Christians and Jews,’ with Christians in first place for the good reason that the roots of this country and most of those who founded it are Christian. In contrast, Obama said in his first Inaugural Address: ‘We are a nation of Christians and Muslims,’ and then, after a slight pause, ‘Jews and Hindus,’ another slight pause, ‘and unbelievers.’”

Later, in his Al-Arabiya interview, he demoted the Jews still further, calling America a country of “Muslims, Christians, Jews.” Obama’s actions (and inactions) with respect to Jewish concerns suggest that this demotion is real and not merely verbal.

But this means that by ensconcing Barack Obama in the White House, America has taken a giant step toward abandoning the basic Judeo-Christian principles of its heritage.◙