Positive Law and Politics in the Modern World Actually Came From Judaism, NOT Secularism!
“Political Hebraism” is one of the best-kept historical secrets.
There’s a seminal book about it on Amazon: “The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought“.
Here is a good description (broken into paragraphs for clarity’s sake):
Eric Nelson’s recent book The Hebrew Republic makes the remarkable and convincing case that seventeenth-century European political thinkers were deeply engaged by Jewish texts. This, he notes, runs counter to our standard assumptions, as it is often held that modernity’s achievements were made through a progressive secularization. The truth, Nelson shows, is exactly the opposite.Renaissance humanism, “structured as it was by the pagan inheritance of Greek and Roman antiquity, generated an approach to politics that was remarkably secular.” Yet, in the seventeenth century, during the ongoing fervor of the Reformation, “Christians began to regard the Hebrew Bible as a political constitution, designed by God himself for the children of Israel.They also came to see the full array of newly available rabbinical texts as authoritative guides to the institutions and practices of this perfect republic.”Nelson goes on to argue that the political achievements associated with modernity—including democracy and religious toleration—reflect a “political Hebraism,” an outlook on civic life that used rabbinic sources to bring European ideas about the polity into better conformity with biblical sources.
Of course, each of these thinkers analyzed things differently and came to widely diverging conclusions. But the point is, classical liberalism, anarchism, equality before the law, etc. etc. all came from the Torah…