ABSTRACT
In nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, the shtetl became the archetypical covenantal community. Baruch Spinoza's democracy was secular and was based at least in part on an attack on the theo-political bases of earlier traditions, including Jewish tradition. Spinoza was the first modem secular Jew as well as one of the most important architects of modernity. The Jewish response to New World conditions was to adapt the covenant principle through federative arrangements, generally without any conscious awareness that they were continuing the Jewish political tradition. While the Zionist pioneers relied upon Jewish political tradition, implicitly at least, in nation building, when it came to state building, they turned to the European models they knew, superimposing upon the network of compacts and charters a centralized and highly bureaucratic model of parliamentary democracy. Martin Buber applied the same model in his contemporary political theory.
