How Jews, Judaism, and Torah Played a Role In Democracy’s Birth
Rabbi Moshe Taub – Ami Magazine, June 30, 2026
I. Huckabee Hucksters
America’s Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, recently set off a firestorm among the usual suspects when, speaking to a Jewish crowd, he stated:
“It is your heritage, without a doubt [Yiddishkeit / Judaism]. But it is also the heritage of the United States. Without Israel, without the Jewish foundation, there would not be America. We owe our very existence to what happened in this land.”
Admittedly, I bristled when I heard this.
One can certainly argue that this was an overstatement. One may also quibble with the shrewdness of making such a hyperbolic philosemitic comment publicly during this precarious time of mass anti-Jewish hysteria.
However, no dispassionate student of American history can ignore the shadow of truth peeking through his remarks.
John Adams famously remarked:
“I will insist the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.”
He also stated:
“They are the most glorious nation that ever inhabited this Earth. The Romans and their Empire were but a bauble in comparison with the Jews.”
More directly related to the formation of America, Samuel Langdon—New Hampshire’s delegate to the convention to ratify the Constitution, as well as Harvard University’s president—preached:
“The Jewish government, according to the original constitution which was Divinely established, … was a perfect republic … some principal laws and orders of it may be copied, to great advantage, in more modern establishments.”
Even the Liberty Bell, as early as 1751, bore a pasuk [verse] from vayikra [Leviticus]:
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” (25:10).
In fact, the only thing surprising about that engraving is that it wasn’t in Hebrew, since one of the Founding Fathers, James Madison, went so far as to deliver his valedictory address at Princeton in that ancient lashon [language]!
But this does not even scratch the surface.
The connection between Jews, rabbanim [rabbis], and our Torah to the founding of America is extraordinary. Every time I sit down to write, new research opens several doors of endlessly unfolding fractals of connections—whether an important Jew, a prominent talmid chacham [Torah scholar], or a classical Torah source. So much so that my initial draft of this article was close to ten thousand words.
II. The Sugya That Sparked a Revolution
In January 1649, the English Parliament did something that had never been done in the history of Western civilization: it put its king on trial, found him guilty of tyranny, and executed him. England would now become a Commonwealth. This experiment lasted barely eleven years before the monarchy was restored, but a fascinating debate emerged from the ashes that would help shape a document signed in Philadelphia 127 years later.
The king’s execution stunned every royal court in Europe. Someone had to respond in defense of monarchy. That someone was Claude de Saumaise, known by his Latin name, Salmasius. The exiled son of the dead king—the future Charles II, whose own connections to Jews were discussed in my latest book—reportedly paid him a hundred pounds to write a defense titled Defensio Regia pro Carolo I. Written in Latin, it argued that monarchy was a divinely ordained concept and that the English republicans were therefore murderers.
To defend their actions, the English Commonwealth turned to John Milton, who in 1651 published Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. This is where the Jewish foundation comes back into the picture. Salmasius had cited a chazal [teaching of the Sages] as proof for his royalist position.
Rav Yose, together with Rav Yehuda, in Sanhedrin 20b, argues that both Devarim and Sefer Shmuel show that malchus [monarchy] is a positive commandment. Salmasius wrote:
“In hanc sententiam recte omnino de R. Iose in Gemara Sanhedrin scriptum est”
[In this opinion, what is written in the Gemara Sanhedrin concerning Rabbi Yose is entirely correct.]
In response, Milton turned to that same chazal, as well as to the peirush [commentary] of the Abarbanel [Don Isaac Abarbanel, 15th century Spanish chief treasurer, later exiled in 1492]. After Am Yisrael [the Nation of Israel] demanded a king, Hashem [God] told Shmuel [Samuel]: “They have not rejected you; they have rejected Me from ruling over them” (I Shmuel 8:7).
The Gemara in Sanhedrin 20b seeks to resolve the tension between Devarim—which seems to indicate that appointing a king is a mitzvah [commandment]—and Sefer Shmuel, which implies it is an aveira [sin]. While Rav Yose indeed argues that it is a mitzvah, Rav Nehorai argues there that the allowance in Sefer Shmuel was only a hora’as sha’ah [temporary decree], a reluctant—but sadly necessary—concession, “kneged tarmatan” [corresponding to their complaint].
Milton marshaled the Abarbanel, who followed Rav Nehorai’s approach and wrote that monarchy is inherently a displacement of the malchus Shamayim [Kingdom of Heaven]. In other words, the Torah’s ideal is a nation governed directly under Divine law, never surrendering its freedom to a lower human power. If this sounds like saying that only Hashem endows us with certain unalienable rights, you would be correct.
It was this argument, transmitted through Abarbanel’s writings into the Milton-Salmasius exchange, that Harvard political philosopher Eric Nelson, in a landmark 2007 article in The Historical Journal and in his 2010 book, identified as the birth of “republican exclusivism.” This is the idea, entirely new to the Western world in the seventeenth century, that monarchy is not merely an inferior form of government, but an inherently illegitimate one. This concept was previously unheard of in Europe, and it came directly from this Gemara, among other sources.
One of Milton’s ideological allies was Algernon Sidney, a seventeenth-century English republican who developed this anti-monarchy argument further in Discourses Concerning Government, a work for which King Charles II eventually had him executed in 1683.
It was this same Sidney whom Thomas Jefferson explicitly cited, alongside Locke, as a primary source for the Declaration of Independence.
So the next time you read those words—that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by Hashem with certain inalienable rights that no human king may touch—think of Shmuel HaNavi [Samuel the Prophet], the Gemara in Sanhedrin, and the Abarbanel.
{Milton and Sidney also heavily relied on classical Roman history (Cicero, Livy) and Deuteronomy 17. The Gemara provided the spark that allowed them to call monarchy a sin, but it was not their sole source. In addition, while Harrington, below, explicitly used the Jubilee framework to argue for agrarian laws, Jefferson’s concept of “inalienable rights” in the Declaration was much more directly influenced by John Locke’s secularized theories of natural rights. Connecting it strictly back to the Rambam would be an overstatement.}
III. Deeper Roots: From Medieval Debates to Modern Liberty
In medieval England, Christians were forbidden by the Church from lending with interest. Consequently, Jews filled the gap by necessity, effectively becoming England’s bankers. However, when a Jewish lender passed away, his loan books automatically reverted to the Crown. This meant that wealthy barons would borrow from Jewish financiers, only to eventually owe those debts directly to the king.
A prominent Jew, Aaron of Lincoln (d. 1186), was the wealthiest man in England. When he died, the Crown inherited an estate so vast that it had to create a dedicated government department just to manage it.
The king’s growing control over these debts became a massive source of tension between the monarchy and the barons. Those financial strains, alongside disputes over royal authority, taxes, and military failures, culminated in the barons’ army overtaking London in 1215. Under immense pressure, King John sealed the Magna Carta that year.
The Magna Carta is often cited as the genesis of modern law and civil liberties, establishing the principle that not even the king is above the law, alongside an early version of due process. It also planted the seed for Parliament, composed of the “Lords” for nobility and the “Commons” for landowners. While far from representative government in the modern sense, it allowed the king to borrow money in a more open and equitable forum.
However, the Magna Carta was a brutal document when it came to the Jews. For example, clause ten affirmed:
“Si quis mutuo ceperit aliquid a iudeis…”
[If anyone who has borrowed a sum of money from Jews dies, then no interest is accrued.]
That same year, the Fourth Lateran Council mandated that all Jews and Muslims across “Christian Europe” wear distinguishing badges. This was finally enforced in England by King John’s grandson, Edward I, in 1275.
This Jewish badge consisted of two yellow felt tablets shaped like the Luchos [Tablets of the Covenant]. Five years later, in 1280, he banned Jewish lending entirely.
Economically ruined and no longer useful to the kingdom, the king expelled all Jews from England in 1290—close to twenty thousand Yidden [Jews]. Naturally, the Crown confiscated all their remaining assets.
IV. The Reformation and the Hebrew Scholars
The spread of civil liberties remained stunted by the Church’s power over European kingdoms until the Reformation in the early 1500s, when kings were able to break away from papal authority.
This shift brought both positive and negative consequences.
On the positive side, by the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell could quietly allow Jews to return to England and practice privately, as the Pope’s restrictions no longer applied (see my book, Jews in the New World, for a more detailed account).
On the negative side, the newly created Church of England led monarchs to believe they ruled by divine right. Kings began dissolving Parliament, sparking a civil war that culminated in the 1649 trial and execution of Charles I mentioned above.
With the people expressing a clear desire for self-government, political theorists began searching for new models, turning directly to ancient Jewish jurisprudence.
V. “Mishpat HaMelech” Enters Europe
In 1625, a German minister named Wilhelm Schickard published a small Latin book titled Mishpat HaMelech [The Law of the King]. Schickard (d. 1635) was a professor of Hebrew at the University of Tübingen and a close friend of the scientist Johannes Kepler. Kepler himself was close with Dovid Ganz, a prominent talmid [disciple] of the Maharal of Prague. This intellectual connection likely helped shape the extensive rabbinic sources Schickard would soon marshal.
In Mishpat HaMelech, Schickard carefully examined the chazal and peirushim [commentaries] regarding malchus [monarchy], compiling them so a European reader with no knowledge of Hebrew could follow the internal Jewish debate. He fairly presented both sides of the Talmudic dispute:
Those who held that requesting a king was a mitzvah [commandment]: Rav Yose, as well as the Rambam [Maimonides] and Radak [Rabbi David Kimhi].
Those who held that it was a sin: Rav Nehorai, Rabbeinu Bachya [Rabbi Bahya ben Asher], and various midrashic texts.
For the first time, the full range of rabbinic political thought was accessible to European thinkers. Among them was James Harrington, an English scholar who would soon build the century’s most systematic blueprint for self-government from these sources, and Algernon Sidney, who synthesized these ideas for the generation that inspired Jefferson.
Midrashic and Halachic Contributions to International Law
Schickard’s compilation prominently featured a passage from Devarim Rabbah 5:9 [a homiletic commentary on Deuteronomy]. This midrash’s position on malchus was even more stringent than Rav Nehorai’s:
“When Bnei Yisroel [the Children of Israel] saw what befell them under the rule of their kings, they began crying out: ‘We do not want a king, we want our original King: “For Hashem is our King; He will save us”’ (Yishayahu 33:22). Hashem responded, ‘By your lives, I will do so.’ From where is this derived? “Hashem will be King over the entire earth…” (Zechariah 14:9).”
As Eric Nelson documents in The Hebrew Republic (2010), while previous European political theorists hesitated to label human monarchy itself as inherently sinful, this midrash, transmitted via Schickard, gave John Milton the explicit theological backing to cross that line.
Aside from Schickard and Milton, two other towering scholars used Jewish law to frame modern political systems:
VI. Hugo Grotius and John Selden
Hugo Grotius (d. 1645)
In 1621, Grotius’s wife smuggled him out of prison, and he spent the remainder of his life in Paris producing works that defined international law. Grotius read rabbinic literature in Latin translation and cited it extensively. His De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace, 1625)—written the same year Schickard published Mishpat HaMelech—became the foundational text of international law. In it, Grotius used the Rambam’s sections of Hilchos Melachim and Hilchos Sanhedrin to reconstruct the constitutional structure of the ancient Hebrew republic, arguing that political theorists should look to Hashem’s model of government to understand legitimate civil authority.
John Selden (d. 1654)
Selden went a step further, learning Gemara in its original Aramaic. John Milton called him “the chief of learned men.” Extant notes show that he was in direct contact with Rav Menasseh ben Israel or his printing company: “In libris venalibus apud Menasseh Ben Israel Amstelodam iuxta catalogum impressum” [In the books for sale at the house of Menasseh ben Israel in Amsterdam, according to the printed catalog].
The Library of Congress explains Selden’s surprisingly sympathetic approach to rabbinic studies:
“At a time and in a country in which the average man believed Jews to be misanthropic, usurious and dishonorable, John Selden set out to research the sacred texts of rabbinic Judaism with sympathy and interest… His work, De Jure Naturali et Gentium Juxta Disciplinam Ebreorum (1640), was an examination of the concepts of natural law and the ius gentium as they were taught in the rabbinic tradition.”
At the heart of Selden’s work is a detailed analysis of the Noahide laws (see Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilchos Melachim uMilchamos 8:9–10:12). From the Noahide mandate to establish courts of law, Selden generated a universal template for ethics, family law, government, and international law.
Furthermore, Selden expressed open hope for the Bayis Shlishi [Third Temple]. He believed, correctly, that the Temple of Jerusalem was structurally designed to permit the children of Noah—the mass of mankind who observe the Noahide commandments—to participate in Temple worship alongside the Children of Israel. The detailed engravings illustrating his 1665 Strasbourg edition demonstrate how the Temple served as an inclusive, welcoming place of worship for all nations.
VII. The Chain to the American Founders
Through these works, Selden, Harrington, and Milton gained direct access to the Talmudic debates and the midrashic material Schickard had introduced. James Harrington fully absorbed this, drafting a systematic constitution for the seventeenth century in his masterpiece, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656).
In his 1658 work, The Stumbling-Block of Disobedience and Rebellion, Harrington explicitly sorted the views of the rishonim [medieval rabbinic authorities] into specific political camps, translating them by name into English for constitutional debate:
“…Nachmoni [Nachmanides/Ramban], Gerschone [Ralbag / Levi ben Gershon], and others. Kimchi [Radak / David Kimhi], it is true, and M. Maimonides [Rambam / Moses Maimonides] are of opinion, that the people making a King, displeased Gd not in the same matter…”
Harrington sided firmly with the anti-monarchy camp, famously concluding:
“He that is for the government of laws is for the government of Gd, and he that is for the government of a man is for the government of a beast.”
Algernon Sidney synthesized Harrington’s constitutional arguments with Milton’s theological ones in Discourses Concerning Government. As noted, Charles II had him executed for this in 1683.
Thomas Jefferson later named Sidney explicitly as a primary source for the Declaration of Independence, and John Adams quoted Sidney’s summary of the Hebrew republic verbatim in Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787), written while the Constitutional Convention was actively sitting in Philadelphia.
The chain of transmission from Schickard’s Mishpat HaMelech (1625) to Adams’s Defense (1787) is unbroken and direct.
VIII. The Ultimate Foundational Truth
Harrington did not stop at the kingship debate. In Oceana, he turned to an entirely different section of the Mishneh Torah: Hilchos Shemittah v’Yovel [The Laws of the Sabbatical and Jubilee Years].
What he discovered within those halachic frameworks directly influenced the concept behind the Liberty Bell and guided Jefferson’s definition of “inalienable” rights. It established the core constitutional principle—derived from the biblical concept of “ki li ha’aretz” [For the land is Mine]—that certain fundamental human rights cannot be bought, sold, or permanently extinguished by any human power.
That profound legal connection, iy”H [with Gd’s help], will be the focus of next week’s column.
Just as Ambassador Huckabee publicly voiced appreciation for our legacy, we owe a deep debt of hakaras hatov [gratitude] and admiration to this great country for everything it has given us. May its days as a lighthouse to the civilized world continue, and may it long remain a safe haven for Jews and all peoples.
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