Jewish World Review June 7 , 1999 / 23 Sivan, 5759
WAS MACHIAVELLI Jewish?
Well, it all depends on what the word "Jewish" means. Certainly, he was not
openly Jewish. But then, there was every reason to conceal one's
Jewishness, or even sympathy for the Jews, in Renaissance Florence,
especially during the years when the Medicis were driven into exile by the
Florentine state for which Machiavelli worked as Secretary of the Republic.
In those years, the Jews of Florence were living under an expulsion order,
which was, however, suspended thanks to a massive loan from the Jewish
community. Perennially strapped for cash, the Republic was slow in repaying
the money, and by the time they had paid it off the Medicis -- who welcomed
Jewish partnership in their banking activities -- were at the gates, soon to
resume their control over the city.
So we might not know the whole story about Machiavelli's religious convictions.
If Machiavelli was a believing Catholic, he was certainly a very unorthodox
one. His tirades against the corruption of the Church of Rome were every
bit as virulent as those of his northern contemporary, Martin Luther, and
he went much further than Luther in condemning what he saw as the
potentially fatal consequences of Christian doctrine for good government
and the preservation of virtue.
Machiavelli tirelessly denounced the soft,
forgiving, turn-the-other-cheek themes of Christianity, and called instead
for a return to older, pre-Christian values of manly virtue, courage and a
willingness to do the hard, sometimes even evil things that are required of
great leaders, a theme that is found explicitly in several Mishnaic
lessons, as well as implicitly in the Torah.
You will search in vain throughout Machiavelli's writings for a kind word
about Jesus, Mary or the Apostles. Instead you will find praise for ancient
Roman and Spartan kings, generals and Caesars. Occasionally there are bows
in the direction of contemporary figures, most famously Cesare Borgia,
hardly a model of Christian virtue.
But above all, you will find praise for
the greatest of all Jewish leaders, Machiavelli's greatest hero, Moses.
He reveres Moses because Moses was the leader of both a new religion and a new state,
and spoke directly to G-d, thereby placing him atop the list of history's
greatest leaders.
Machiavelli tells us that Moses was "a sheer executor of
the things ordained by G-d," which might appear to diminish his greatness
as a leader. But no, others knew what G-d wanted of them, but fell short,
while Moses must be revered for "that grace that made him worthy of
speaking with G-d."
Many are called, but few are able to respond.
Moreover, Moses is the highest example of the most successful kind of
leader: a visionary who is willing and able to use force to accomplish his
mission. Machiavelli has little time for martyrs; he wants winners, and he
knows, in the words of one of his most famous phrases, that "all the armed
prophets won, the disarmed went to their ruin."
Moses was the greatest of the armed prophets.
At G-d's behest, Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and across the
desert toward the Promised Land. He left them briefly to climb Mount Sinai,
where he received G-d's sacred commandments. Descending the mountain, he
saw with horror the idolatrous orgy around the golden calf. He smashed the
tablets, and asked Aaron for an explanation, to which Aaron replied, "Let
not thy anger wax hot; thou knowest the people, that they are set on evil."
"Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said: 'Whoso is on the
L-rd's side, let him come unto me.' And all the sons of Levi gathered
themselves together unto him. And he said unto them: 'Thus saith the L-rd,
the G-d of Israel: Put ye every man his sword upon his thigh, and go to and
fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother,
and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.' And the sons of
Levi did according to the word of Moses; and there fell of the people that
day about 3,000 men."
"Whoever reads the Bible sensibly," Machiavelli tells us, "will see that
Moses was forced, were his laws and institutions to go forward, to kill
numberless men." Machiavelli doesn't pretend that the means used by Moses
were good. He knows that somewhere in the shards of the shattered tablets
it says, "Thou shalt not murder." He readily admits that the means are
evil, but he insists that they are the only ones that work in such dire
circumstances. If Moses had said to the idolators, "Let us reason
together," he would have failed. In these circumstances, to do good -- to
adhere to the Sermon on the Mount -- is to guarantee the triumph of evil.
Just as the quest for peace at any price invites war, and, worse than war,
defeat and domination by your enemies, so good acts sometimes advance the
triumph of evil. There are circumstances when only doing evil ensures the
victory of a good cause.
Machiavelli is commonly taken to be saying that the ends always justify the
means, but he does not believe that. Quite the contrary. Machiavelli is not
telling you to be evil, he is simply stating the facts: If you lead, there
will be occasions when you will have to do unpleasant, even evil things, or
be destroyed. If you are lucky, these occasions will be few and far between
(a leader who never had to do such things would be fortunate indeed).
For
the rest, he wants you to be and do good, convinced as he is that the
proper mission of great leaders is to achieve the common good, to fashion
good laws and enforce them with good arms and good religion. He wants you
to achieve glory and goodness for all your people, and thus for yourself.
Only such an accomplishment is worth the energies and passions of great men
and women.
But it isn't easy.
"States are not held with paternosters in hand," as Cosimo Medici once
remarked. Moses' revolution could not have succeeded if, as he himself
preferred, he had led by example alone. Moses led the Israelites out of
bondage, guided them through the wilderness by divine light and nourished
them with manna falling from heaven. To no avail! No sooner had he left
them to their own devices, they demanded new G-ds to worship (there's that
nasty impulse again). The execution of the sinners was necessary to confirm
Moses' -- and G-d's --- authority.
After receiving the Commandments and crushing the heretics of the golden
calf, he continued on to the borders of the Promised Land. There, at G-d's
instructions, Moses organized an espionage mission headed by Joshua and
Caleb, in preparation for the invasion and occupation of the country. After
40 days the spies returned. The good news was that the land was beautiful
and bountiful; the bad news was that the inhabitants were big and strong,
impressively armed and well fortified. All the spies, save Joshua and
Caleb, argued it was suicidal to attack, and the vast majority of the
people agreed. Fearing they were about to be destroyed in battle, they
turned against Moses. "And they said one to another: 'Let us appoint a
captain, and let us return into Egypt.'" Recently freed from Egyptian
slavery, the Israelites nonetheless demanded a return to bondage rather
than fight for freedom.
This was the beginning of a vast revolt against Moses, a revolt that spread
to every tribe and involved the most powerful and distinguished leaders as
well as members of the priestly hierarchy, even Aaron himself. Ingratitude,
Machiavelli ruefully observes in a poem, is the daughter of Greed and
Suspicion, nursed in the arms of Envy, and it has been an essential part of
human nature ever since Adam and Eve ungratefully ate the apple and
departed Eden. Moses' followers were suitably ungrateful. Some accused
Moses of abuse of power, while others denounced him for incompetence. As at
Sinai, the participants were ruthlessly punished. Ringleaders were killed,
and G-d sentenced the remainder of the adults to die wandering in the
wilderness for 40 years, a year for each of the days of the espionage
mission. Of the adults, only Joshua and Caleb were permitted to enter the
Promised Land and live there in freedom.
The revolt against Moses in the name of slavery is one of the most powerful
of the "infinite examples" to which Machiavelli refers in order to show the
difficulties in leading to freedom a people that has become accustomed to
living in slavery, a fundamental Jewish theme that is as important to us
today as it was in the Italian Renaissance. As Machiavelli puts it, "It is
as difficult to make a people free that is resolved to live in servitude,
as it is to subject a people to servitude that is determined to be free."
How, then, do we achieve the mentality of free men and women, and not of
slaves?
The Jews, even under Moses' leadership, could not overcome the slave mentality of those who
grew up under Egyptian tyranny. To create a free nation, the entire
generation had to be obliterated in the wilderness. A new generation,
raised in freedom, fulfilled the mission.
Machiavelli's Passover sermon bears repeating, especially nowadays when our
educational establishment stresses the similarities of all human beings
above the fundamentally important differences that derive from drastically
different histories. Machiavelli reminds us that the capacity of people for
freedom is intimately linked to their history. Just what you would expect
from somebody meditating on the fate of the Jews, expelled from Spain in
1492, the same year Lorenzo the Magnificent died in Florence, just 21 years
before the writing of "The Prince." Europe was awash in migrating Jews,
some headed over land towards Central Europe, where the shtetl would be
founded, others by sea across the northern Mediterranean to such centers of
Jewish culture as Livorno and Venice. Machiavelli was surely in contact
with these wandering Jews.
Listen to his political philosophy, and you will hear the Jewish music.
Unlike the great thinkers of antiquity who inspired so much of Renaissance
thought, Machiavelli denied that we have some kind of built-in political
instinct. Aristotle insisted that man is a political animal; Machiavelli
scoffs at this naivete. The good society, even a glorious one, can
certainly be created, but it will not be the outcome of man's instincts.
Left to our own devices, we will forge the golden calf. At the first sign
of trouble, we will demand to be taken back to Egypt.
Thus, one of Machiavelli's many paradoxes: It may well be that only a
tyrant can lead us to freedom, and to the creation of a good and just
society. Obviously, this imperative does not come from human instinct; our
instincts are not nearly so noble. The goal of achieving the common good
comes from the highest authority: G-d Himself. The act "most gratifying to
G-d" is one that benefits one's country, and Machiavelli is quite outspoken
about the best form of government.
Despite his infamy as the tutor of
dictators, he favors republics, and he does so because he knows that a
single ruler is more likely to be corrupted by wealth and power than the
people, who will generally have less of each, and the single ruler will be
more likely to advance his own interests than those of the whole state.
There have been great single leaders, and there are times and places when
only a single leader can lead the people to glory, but it is a risky
enterprise, because tyranny is the worst government.
These are not ideas that abound in the Christian liturgy. The notion that
G-d wants us, above all, to devote our lives to the creation of the good
society is, however, a very Jewish idea. Medieval and early modern
Christianity relegated the accomplishment of justice to the hereafter. In
this life, the important thing was fulfilling the sacraments. Insofar as
politics was a religious concern, it was dominated by the notion that man
should "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's," and give G-d his due in
other activities.
Machiavelli will have none of this, insisting that
achieving glory for one's country is the single act most pleasing to G-d.
So: Was Machiavelli Jewish? Well, maybe not entirely, but certainly quite
Jewish, maybe even very Jewish. If his great contemporary, Christopher
Columbus, was most likely a secret Jew, if many crew members of the Niņa,
the Pinta and the Santa Maria were baptized on the gangplank, if, a century
later, a majority of the founders of the Jesuit order were recent, probably
opportunistic converts from Judaism, the notion that Machiavelli might have
embraced much of Judaism is not so far-fetched.
Was he Jewish? Well, let's
say he was at least kinda Jewish, and maybe even very
What Machiavelli (A Secret Jew?) Learned From Moses
By Michael Ledeen
JWR contributor Michael Ledeen holds the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.
He is author of "Machiavelli on Modern Leadership", just published
by St. Martin's Press. Send your comments to him by clicking here. This article was reprinted with permission of the Forward, where it originally appeared.