Democracy and the Halakhah

This study analyzes the writings of Rabbi Haim Hirschensohn, a Hebrew cultural pioneer who laid the foundation for the Zionist enterprise. His writings focused on finding a philosophical basis that could reconcile the Torah with the transformation forced upon the Jewish people by modernity.



Eliezer Schweid in Democracy and the Halakhah analyzes the writings of Rabbi Haim Hirschensohn, one of the early Hebrew cultural pioneers who laid the foundation for the Zionist enterprise. Born in Safed Eretz Israel in 1857, Hirschensohn was pushed out of the fanatic Ashkenazi religious community and ended up as an Orthodox rabbi in Hoboken, New Jersey. His writings focus on finding a philosophic basis that could reconcile the Torah with the transformation forced upon the Jewish people by modernity so as to come out with a coherent systematic system of political thought that could encompass both. Co-published with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.