My book club recently finished Linda Colley's The Gun, the Ship and the Pen, a history of the spread of constitutions. I'm glad it's done. I learned a lot, but it wasn't a great book. The most interesting part was learning about the non-Western world's interest in Japan's Meiji constitution of 1889 and a reminder of how psyched the non-West was when Japan kicked Russia's ass in 1905, because at last the white man had lost one. We forget about how strong this dynamic is. It's part of the backdrop to what we are seeing now in our strategic rivalry with China and with the Global South's failure to line up behind a condemnation of Russia in Ukraine.
It's interesting also to reflect on the relationship of Torah to Mishnah and Talmud as something like a constitution. This analogy came to me when reading the book of Nehemiah earlier this week, in which Ezra, having returned from Babylon and rebuilt Jerusalem and the Temple, stands before the people and propounds the law (Torah) while they stand and listen.
It's also very interesting that Ezra focuses for the first thing on two things: observation of the sabbath (including not conducting commerce with non-Jews) and the importance of marrying within the fold -- there had been problem of intermarriage in Babylon and the Jews did a mass divorcing and renunciation of outmarriages on the way out the door. Up until now the biggest transgression the Old Testament had focused on was worshipping at hill-shrines, especially to Baal. Presumably the population had moved past that tendency and were able to focus on more rarefied matters like sabbath observance and keeping the tribe pure. Which counts as progress, I suppose.
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