Jewish Political Studies Review 17:3-4 (Fall 2005)
Hidden in Plain Sight:
Alexis De Tocqueville's
Recognition of the Jewish Origin of the Idea of Equality
Joel Fishman
Although Alexis de Tocqueville examined in depth the idea of equality
in his classic Democracy in America, and attributed its origin to Christianity,
he explicitly recognized its Jewish provenance in a letter to Arthur
de Gobineau of 24 January 1857. This finding is significant, because
Tocqueville's pioneering study identified the central importance of equality
in modern democracy and described its benefits and dangers. This
year marks the bicentennial of Tocqueville's birth (29 July 1805-16
April 1859).
Alexis de Tocqueville, Historian and Social Observer
On 25 July 2005, the world commemorated the bicentennial of the
birth of Alexis Charles Henri Clerel de Tocqueville, the French historian
and statesman. Tocqueville, who was born in Paris into the old
nobility of France and belonged to a Norman family, is famous for
his two major studies, Democracy in America (Volume 1, January 1835
and Volume 2, 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856).Possessing a fine analytical intellect, he is known for his thoughtful
examination of the workings of modern democracy, which he observed
during his visit to the United States during 1831 and 1832 with his
friend, Gustav de Beaumont.
In Democracy, he studied the implications of the idea of equality,
particularly how political equality was derived from conditions of
material equality. In his study of the French Revolution, he explained
that the revolution first took place in men's minds before it broke out
in real life and advanced the thesis which became known as
the "Revolution of Rising Expectations." It posited that revolutions
took place not necessarily in times of despair but under improving
conditions:
Thus the social order overthrown by a revolution is almost always
better than the one immediately preceding it, and experience teaches
us that, generally speaking, the most perilous moment for a bad
government is one when it seeks to mend its ways....Patiently endured
for so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear
intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men's minds.1
As an observer of history, Tocqueville viewed men as being at the
center of the historical stage, placing them in the context of material
conditions, political structure, legal and social relationships, religion,
ideas, and previous history. One of Tocqueville's important historical
and methodological contributions was his identification of the important
link between religion and political culture. To use the language
of the time, he was interested in the "moral influence that religion
exercised on society."2 Thus, his work anticipated a new field, the
sociology of religion. His writing is deep and nuanced, and by taking
into account a maximum of variable factors, he was able to produce
major works which would stand the test of time and to make a number
of accurate long-term predictions. His most famous was that, by the
middle of the twentieth century, Russia and the United States would
be the two leading powers in the world.3 Another was that, when
abused, equality in modern society could serve the ends of the totalitarian
state.4
Tocqueville and Gobineau: Opposed Worldviews
Generally, the scholarly literature has devoted attention to Tocqueville's
main works, to the exclusion of his extensive personal correspondence.5 Nevertheless, much of his correspondence is highly valuable,
particularly Tocqueville's exchange of letters in the 1850s with
his diligent young secretary, Arthur de Gobineau, an atheist and adherent
of Hegel's dialectical approach, who became one of the first
European writers to interpret the historical development of mankind
as being dependent on race. Between 1853 and 1855, Gobineau published
a work titled Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (Essay on
the Inequality of Human Races). After reading it, Tocqueville penned
a withering refutation of Gobineau's racist theory with its implied
historical determinism, predestination, and fatalism.6
According to Jean-Louis Benoit, a leading Tocqueville scholar,
the correspondence with Gobineau, taken as a whole, represents the
most important single contribution in which Tocqueville devoted his
attention directly to questions of moral and ethical human behavior.
Benoit recognized the importance of this correspondence, which he
analyzed in his recently published study, Tocqueville moraliste. He
also published an inspired selection of the most sensitive texts of
this correspondence in his anthology, Alexis de Tocqueville, textes
essentials.7
Although under normal conditions the debate for equality and
against racism would not be drawn to its ultimate conclusion, one
must grasp what is at stake. In order to understand the virtue of
equality and the principle of man's moral perfectibility, it is necessary
to point out that the actual antithesis of freedom is slavery.8Bernard Lewis explained the link between racism and slavery: "For
the ancient Greeks, the medieval Muslims, and the modern philosophers,
[racism] served the same purpose - to justify slavery."9 Indeed,
when Tocqueville wrote, the burning moral and political
question of his age was the institution of slavery in the United
States. It follows therefore that the debate for and against democratic
universality, whose basic idea is equality, has extensive political and
practical consequences.
Tocqueville, in his correspondence with Gobineau - particularly
his letter of 17 November 1853, the best known of the series - pointed
out that Gobineau's ideas led to fatalism and ideas of predestination.
Using blunt language, Tocqueville relentlessly attacked Gobineau's
main idea: "Do you not see that your doctrine brings out naturally
all the evils that permanent inequality creates - pride, violence, and
the contempt of fellow men, tyranny, and abjectness under all its
forms?"10 He then added that: "...courage, energy, integrity, foresight,
good sense" are the true reasons for the prosperity of individuals as
of empires, and that the destiny of man "either as an individual or as
a nation is what he wants to make of it."11
Writing some four years later, Tocqueville produced a succinct and
forceful exposition of his thinking on the subject of equality. Here, he
returned to one of the central themes of Democracy in America, which
he had developed in the early 1830s. He declared that he viewed
Christianity as morally superior to Gobineau's materialistic determinism,
which, as a professing Christian, he rejected out of hand. His
position was absolutely uncompromising:
...I confess that it was impossible for me to believe that you did not
perceive the difficulty of reconciling your theories with the letter and
even the spirit of Christianity. As to the literal meaning, what could
be clearer than the unity of mankind in Genesis and that all men
are descended from the same man?12And as to the spirit of Christianity,
has not its distinctive characteristic been to want to abolish all
the distinctions of race ["nationality" in this context], which the
Jewish religion allowed to persist, and to create one human species
of which all of its members could perfect themselves and become
like one another? How could this spirit, according to widely-held
ideas of common sense, be reconciled with a historical doctrine that
creates distinct races, unequal ones, made more or less to understand,
judge, act, and this as a consequence of a certain original disposition
that cannot change and invincibly restricts the perfection of some
of these? Christianity was inclined to make brothers and equals of
all men. Your doctrine effectively makes them cousins at best whose
common father is in heaven. Here on earth, there are only conquerors
and the vanquished, masters and slaves by right of birth, and it is
so very true that your doctrines are approved of, cited, and commented
on by whom? by the owners of blacks [literally Negroes] and
in favor of their eternal servitude [slavery] which is based on the
radical difference of race....13
Tocqueville's Statement in Historical Context
This passage is unique because in it Tocqueville explicitly recognized
the Jewish origin of the principle of equality, although he was not
overly generous about it. At all events, his words should be placed in
historical context. When Tocqueville writes that Christianity's distinctive
characteristic was "to want to abolish all distinctions of race,
which the Jewish religion allowed to persist...," it should be noted that
in the nineteenth century "race" meant nationality,14 and in ancient
times, legal rights customarily belonged only to the citizens of a given
city.
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, the great nineteenth-century
historian of the ancient city, explained: "If we wished to give an exact
definition of a citizen, we should say that it was a man who had the
religion of the city. The stranger, on the contrary is one who has not
access to the worship, one of whom the gods of the city do not protect,
and who has not even the right to invoke them."15
Tocqueville, a professing Christian, was deeply convinced that
the rise of Christianity in the ancient world represented a totally
new form of morality and reversal of values in contrast to what
preceded.16 His views may have been correct in the case of the pagan
religions of the time, but were mistaken with regard to Judaism. It
is evident that Tocqueville overlooked the fact that Judaism in ancient
times was an open, proselytizing, monotheistic religion and,
then as now, the benefits of life under Jewish law and equal status
within this community were accessible to anyone prepared to accept
the commandments. Moreover, the stranger in Israel enjoyed certain
defined rights.
It is more likely that the exclusivity which Tocqueville attributed
to Judaism better describes the condition prevailing in the pagan cities
of the ancient world. It should be noted as well that while Christianity
created a more universal type of affiliation based on faith in Jesus, it
did not improve on or detract from the originality of the Jewish idea
of equality.
Indeed, the first Christians and subsequently the Church Fathers
endeavored to demonstrate the originality of Christianity by claiming
that with its advent, Judaism lost its historical purpose and was destined
to be replaced by the new faith. Although today many Christians
have dissociated themselves from Replacement Theology and Supersessionism,
this discredited doctrine may be identified in the assertion
that because Christianity appropriated and widely disseminated the
idea of equality it became a Christian concept. Tocqueville, it should
be noted, wrote well before the fundamental reexamination of the
relationship between Christianity and Judaism that took place after
the Holocaust and which fostered a new recognition of the Jewish
contribution both to Christianity and to world culture.
Historically, it was not through the medium of early Christianity
that the idea of equality became a part of modern Western thought,
as Tocqueville had implied, but as a result of one of the great cultural
events of all times, the translation of the Bible into European languages
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through this medium,
the literate public, particularly of the English-speaking world, gained
direct access to Jewish ideas in the scriptural texts, particularly of the
Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament in the commonly accepted terminology.
Indeed, Protestant culture attached special importance to literacy
both for boys and girls.17 Furthermore, recent scholarship has abundantly
demonstrated that the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the
Gospels are replete with Jewish ideas which were current in the Second
Temple era.18
Christopher Hill in his study, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-
Century Revolution, explained the importance of this cultural event:
When we say, rightly, that the English became the People of the
Book, we must not suppose that theology or the after life were all
that they studied in that Book. The after life indeed has no place in
the Old Testament. They found lessons and consolations for living
on earth as well as the path to heaven. Some Englishmen also found
confirmation and justification of their worst vices - sexism, patriarchalism,
racialism, social hierarchy, national arrogance. Nor did
the pious monopolize the idiom of the Bible. In the late eighteenth
century popular songs celebrated the Biblical virtues of highwaymen.
The Bible has established cultural norms which survived religious
beliefs.19
Taken in historical context, Tocqueville's letter to Gobineau of 24
January 1857 clearly recognizes the contribution of the distinctly
Jewish idea of equality to the evolution of Western thought. This
attribution is significant, because in Democracy in America he emphasizes
its central importance to modern democracy, describing both its
benefits and potential dangers. To date, it has been the accepted view
that all political thought in the Bible which contributed to the unique
development of American political culture is Christian. Indeed, several
American political scientists have propagated this majority view of
history which is both inaccurate and unsupported by the evidence.
Hopefully, the present examination of Tocqueville's correspondence
will provide a better appreciation of his analytical thinking at the end
of his career, which found expression in an emphatic affirmation of
universal equality which he articulated, most appropriately, in a vigorous
refutation of racist thought.
* * *
Notes
1. Ancien Regime, Part III, Ch. 4, as quoted in John Stone and Stephen Mennell,
Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy, Revolution and Society (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 230.
2. Andre Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography, trans. Lydia Davis with Robert
Hemenway (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 322. See
also "Indirect Influence that Religious Beliefs Exert on Political Society in
the United States," "How in the United States Religion Knows to Make Use
of Democratic Institutions," in Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (respectively) of Alexis de
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and
Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
3. Democracy in America, Vol. 1, Part II, Ch. 10, "Conclusion," p. 395.
4. See: "Continuation of the Preceding Chapters," Vol. 2, Part IV, Ch. 7, Democracy
in America, pp. 666-673. In this famous section Tocqueville predicted
that conditions of equality under certain circumstances could lay the foundation
for what later become known as totalitarian rule. He wrote:
I believe that it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government
in a people where conditions are equal than in any other, and I think
that if such a government were once established in a people like this, not
only would it oppress men, but in the long term it would rob each of
them of several of the attributes of humanity. Despotism therefore appears
to me particularly to be dreaded in democratic ages. (ibid., p. 666)
5. See, e.g.: Pierre Manent, Tocqueville et la nature de la democratie (Paris:
Julliard, 1982) (French).
6. Jean-Louis Benoit, Tocqueville moraliste (Paris: Honore Champion éditeur,
2004), p. 77 (French). See also: Pierre-Andre Taguie., "Le racialisme pessimiste:
La Vision gobinienne de l'histoire comme décadence," in La Couleur et
le Sang: Doctrine racistes a la française (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2002), pp.
46-47 (French). It should be noted that Gobineau expressed positive views
about the Jewish people.
7. Benoit, Tocqueville moraliste, p. 122; Alexis de Tocqueville, Textes essentials,
Anthologie critique par J.-L. Benoit (Paris: Agora, 2000) (French). See also:
Francoise Melonio, Tocqueville and the French, trans. Beth G. Raps (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1998).
8. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986),
p. 90.
9. Ibid.
10. A. de Tocqueville to A. de Gobineau, 17 November 1853, in J.-P. Mayer,
ed., Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, Vol. 9, Correspondance d'Alexis
de Tocqueville et d'Arthur de Gobineau (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p. 203
(French), as quoted in Olivier Zunz and Alan S. Kahan, eds., The Tocqueville
Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Library, 2002), p. 269.
11. Ibid.
12. Genesis 2:3; also Malachi 2:10: "Have we not all one father? Hath not one
God created us?"
13. A. de Tocqueville to A. de Gobineau, 24 January 1857, in J.-P. Mayer, ed.,
Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, Vol. 9, Correspondance d'Alexis de
Tocqueville et d'Arthur de Gobineau (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p. 277 (French).
(Author's translation.)
14. For an analysis of Tocqueville's use of the word "race," see: Anne Amiel,
Le vocabulaire de Tocqueville (Paris: Ellipses, 2002), pp. 47-49 (French).
15. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion,
Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, trans. Willard Small (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), p. 194. The author thanks Prof. Daniel R.
Schwartz of the Hebrew University for this reference.
16. Benoit, Tocqueville moraliste, pp. 81-91. For Fustel de Coulanges' description
of the profound effects of the new Christian idea of affiliation in the ancient
world, see: The Ancient City, pp. 389-96.
17. David Landes, "Culture Makes Almost All the Difference," in Lawrence
E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Culture Matters (New York:
Basic Books, 2000), p. 12. Here, Landes drew on the research of Max
Weber.
18. See: David Flusser, Judaism and the Origins of Christianity (Jerusalem:
Magnes Press, 1988); ibid., Jesus (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1997); ibid.,
Jewish Sources in Early Christianity (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1989);
Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels (London:
Fontana-Collins, 1976); ibid., Jesus and the World of Judaism (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1984); Geza Vermes and James G. D. Dunn, eds., The Parting
of the Ways: Jews and Christians AD 70 to AD 135 (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr,
1992).
19. Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution
(London: Allen Lane, 1993), pp. 438-39. See also: David Daniell, The English
Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 461.
* * *
DR. JOEL FISHMAN is a fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and of the Centre for Strategic and Military Studies at the University of Calgary. He received his doctorate in modern European history as well as the Certificate of the Institute of European Studies from Columbia University. He has recently published on Israel�s position after the Oslo agreements and his book, with Efraim Karsh, La Guerre d'Oslo, appeared this year. This article contains findings from his project, Democracy in Israel, under the auspices of the JCPA.
* * *
The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect
those of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
The above essay appears in the Fall 2005 issue of the Jewish Political Studies Review, the first and only journal dedicated to the study of Jewish political institutions and behavior, Jewish political thought, and Jewish public affairs.
Published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (http://www.jcpa.org/), the JPSR appears twice a year in the form of two double issues, either of a general nature or thematic, with contributors including outstanding scholars from the United States, Israel, and abroad. The hard copy of the Spring 2005 issue will be available in the coming weeks."
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Israel in the Australian Media by Tzvi Fleischer
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