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America's Forgotten Jewish Roots
America tells itself a pleasing story about its own origins. It imagines the Republic as the offspring of Athens, Rome, and the Enlightenment: Greek reason, Roman republican virtue, English common law, and French political theory, all finally brought to perfection in Philadelphia.
There is truth in this. But it is not the whole truth. The story is too marble, too secular, too clean. It omits the older and deeper source from which the American constitutional imagination drew much of its moral architecture: the Hebrew commonwealth.
The Founders were not creating a Jewish state. Nor were they trying to reproduce ancient Israel. They were doing something subtler and more consequential. They read the Hebrew Bible as a political text. They saw in Israel’s passage from bondage to law-bound nationhood the prototype of their own passage from imperial subjection to republican self-government.
That is why Exodus became America’s founding metaphor. The colonies were Israel. George III was Pharaoh. The Atlantic crossing became a kind of Red Sea. The wilderness was the hard school of liberty. And the Constitution, while emphatically not divine revelation, bore the unmistakable marks of covenant: “We the People... do ordain and establish.”
Thomas Paine drew from Milton, whose anti-monarchical theology itself rested on Hebrew Scripture, the Talmud, Midrash, and medieval Jewish exegesis. Harvard’s Eric Nelson has described this as the rise of “republican exclusivism”: the idea that monarchy is not merely compatible or incompatible with liberty depending on circumstance, but is inherently suspect, even idolatrous. By 1787, that Hebraic republican frame had become part of the Founders’ atmosphere.
The American system does not assume that power will be purified by good intentions. It assumes that ambition must be made to counteract ambition. That is Madison. But it is also Samuel, Deuteronomy, and the prophets.
The same Hebraic inheritance appears in federalism. The word itself tells the story. “Federal” derives from the Latin foedus, meaning “covenant,” which is used to translate the Hebrew berith. Covenant is not contract in the thin modern sense. It is a binding moral and political act that creates a people through mutual obligation under a higher law.
At Sinai, Israel accepts the covenant and becomes “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” This is not yet a modern nation-state. It is a covenanted commonwealth. Ancient Israel’s governance was layered: families, tribes, elders, princes, judges, and a national law. The tribes retained identity and local authority, yet belonged to a larger covenantal union.
This is the forgotten background to the American federal system. It is not merely administrative convenience. It is covenantal architecture. Local authority is not a nuisance. It is part of the moral structure of self-government.
America cannot be fully understood without the Jewish political imagination: Exodus against Pharaoh, Samuel against kingship, covenant against arbitrary power, divided crowns against tyranny, and law as the condition of liberty.
The Hebrew Bible did not imagine liberty as liberation from law. It imagined liberty as lawful self-government. Judges at the gate. Elders in the city. Tribes under covenant. Kings under judgment. Power always answerable to something prior to itself.
The Founders did not copy ancient Israel. They were not theocrats. They did not mistake Mosaic law for American law. Their achievement was more profound. They took from the Hebrew commonwealth a structural mirror. A people comes out of bondage. It binds itself by covenant. It divides power because men are fallen. It rejects kingship because no man may stand as god over his fellows. It federates local communities into a larger union. It treats law not as the enemy of freedom, but as freedom’s condition.
That is the Jewish root of the American republic.
- Bob Goldberg
open.substack.com/pub/thenewzion…
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