Jewish Studies Seminar with Jacob Abolafia: "Jewish and Democratic: Philo and Stoic Egalitarianism"

The Yale Jewish Studies Seminar, organized by graduate students, invites junior and mid-career scholars to campus to present their Jewish Studies research in a seminar setting with the university community.  All are warmly invited to attend.

Scholars have long been fascinated by Philo’s use of Stoic notions of natural law to describe Mosaic legislation as the written embodiment of universal reason. But few have taken much notice of the fact that Philo uses a pointedly democratic vocabulary to describe this legislation’s political form. In fact, against the background of the anti-democratic consensus in Ancient Greek philosophy, Philo of Alexandria called democracy “the most law-abiding and best of constitutions,” applying the term to the Mosaic polity as a regime of ordered equality under divine rule. Philo’s conception, though very different from modern ideas of democracy, represents a novel and important synthesis of Jewish law and Stoic egalitarianism. 

The talk begins by tracing Philo’s adaptation of Greek political vocabulary—particularly his choice of dēmokratia over Platonic or Peripatetic alternatives. Relying on similarities with contemporary philosophical texts, including the doxographies attributed to Arius Didymus, the talk shows how Philo redefined democracy to mean relations among moral equals rather than popular sovereignty. Philo’s alignment of democracy with proportional equality and divine kingship is a novel philosophical contribution to the history of philosophy, and one that may reflect previously unnoticed philosophical attitudes in Philo’s Alexandrian milieu. 

The talk's final sections analyze Philo’s portrayals of the Essenes and Therapeutai as real-world embodiments of this philosophical democracy: egalitarian, ascetic communities living according to the law of nature. Philo’s “Jewish democracy,” though limited to those living by in accordance with the natural law, nonetheless introduces a concept of equality grounded in shared human rationality. His thought therefore anticipates both later Stoic universalism and the modern reclamation of democracy as popular rule among moral equals, making him an important link in the histories of Judaism, Stoicism, and democratic theory.

Jacob Abolafia is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He is the author of The Prison Before the Panopticon: Incarceration in Ancient and Modern Political Philosophy, published by Harvard University Press in 2024. He received his PhD from Harvard, his Masters Degree from Clare College, Cambridge, and his bachelor's degree from Yale.