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NINE ‰ Nancy K. Levene Judaism’s Body Politic The human arts are arranged in accordance with nature in three ways. 1) Some of them help nature to do its work—like tilling the ground and the art of medicine and the like. . . . 2) There are arts that differ from, and are alien to, nature, for they make things in which nature plays no role—like most of the productive arts, such as the making of clothing, house-building, shipmaking, and others. . . . 3) The third way of the arts is opposed to and against nature—like throwing a stone upward or causing ¤re to go downward. Also like this, among men, is the attempt of some to domineer over others and to subjugate some to others, though nature has made men free and equal at their birth. —Isaac Abravanel1 Whoever thinks that the halakhah is frozen, and that we may not deviate from it right or left, errs greatly. On the contrary, there is no ¶exibility like that of the halakhah. . . . Only by virtue of this ¶exibility were the Jewish people, relying on numerous and useful innovations introduced by the hakhamim [wise ones] of Israel, each in his generation, able to walk in the path of Torah and its commandments for thousands of years. If the hakhamim of our [own] generation will have the courage to introduce halakhic innovations true to Torah, with utter faithfulness to the body of Torah as written and received, then the halakhah will continue to be the path of the Jewish people unto the last generation. —Hayyim David Halevi2 Those who look upon the Bible, in its present form, as a message for mankind sent down by God from heaven, will doubtless cry out that I have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost in maintaining that the Word of God is faulty, mutilated, adulterated and inconsistent, that we possess it only in fragmentary form, and that the original of God’s covenant with the Jews has perished. However, I am con¤dent that re¶ection will at once put an end to their outcry; for not only reason itself, but the assertions of the prophets and the Apostles clearly proclaim that God’s eter- 235 Judaism’s Body Politic nal Word and covenant and true religion are divinely inscribed in men’s hearts—that is, in men’s minds—and that this is the true handwriting of God which he has sealed with his own seal, this seal being the idea of himself, the image of his own divinity, as it were. —Baruch Spinoza3 ‰ Introduction: Feminism, Judaism, and Political Philosophy Of all the sub-¤elds in Jewish philosophy, political philosophy is one of the most promising areas for feminist research. For one thing, the political sphere has occupied a central place in feminist thinking generally, and feminist philosophers have followed suit in this regard. If the very core of feminism was from the outset a critique of social and political inequality, feminist philosophers have contributed to this critique by moving from the inside out, as it were, challenging conventional assumptions about knowledge , language, and experience and thus creating the possibility for political arrangements that do more than simply equalize the inherited ones. For its part, Jewish political theory has also been preoccupied with questions addressed to living as a minority (or a disempowered group) in a majority culture , as well as to majority–minority relations within its single culture. But it is also true that there are rich overlaps with feminist philosophical questions and strategies. For while Jewish philosophical re¶ection on the nature of political existence has naturally varied enormously over time, it has shared with many contemporary feminist philosophies a resistance to an abstract or procedural reasoning that would depict the citizen unencumbered before the law by linguistic, religious, cultural, or sexual identities. In other words, it has been in thinking about a body politic that Jewish thinkers have displayed the most willingness to challenge the puri¤ed notions of reason and the intellect that are otherwise so dominant in Jewish philosophy, especially in the Middle Ages.4 Thus Jewish political thought is potentially very fertile ground on which to nourish feminist philosophical insights. These insights and their connections have not yet adequately been pursued , and in this essay I seek to do so only in outline and in a preliminary manner. But it is also worth beginning by challenging what might be a covert assumption that the Jew and the woman—as...

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