“Athens, Jerusalem, and the House of Wisdom” — The Ancient Sources and the Great Transmission

“And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.”— 1 Samuel 8:11–17 (King James Version)¹

Three Cities

The Greeks asked how a good city should be ordered. The Hebrews asked what a free people owed to a law higher than the king. The Muslim scholars of Baghdad and Córdoba asked what the ancients had known and whether their wisdom could be recovered for a new age. These three questions — and the answers their askers proposed — became three threads of the same cord. The cord that the American Founders, fourteen hundred years after the last of these civilizations had passed its peak, would weave into the framework of a new republic.

In our last article, we traced the Greek and Roman contribution. This piece traces the other two civilizational sources of the inheritance, and the medieval workshop in which all three were combined. It tells two stories at once. The first is the story of how the Hebrew tradition gave the West its most radical political idea — that even the king is under the law, and that law itself comes from a source no man can repeal. The second is the story of how that idea, and the Greek philosophy that complemented it, survived a thousand years of civilizational collapse in the West, preserved by scholars in cities most Americans have never been taught to think of as relevant: Baghdad, Córdoba, Cairo, Toledo. Without that preservation, much of what the Founders read in their Aristotle and their Aquinas would have been lost. With it, they inherited a synthesis that no single civilization could have produced alone.

This is the article in which the cross-civilizational character of the liberty tradition becomes unmistakable. The reader who insists on seeing the Founding as the product of one people, one continent, one faith, will find the historical record contradicts such insistence. The reader willing to follow the evidence will find an inheritance richer than any chauvinism could fit inside.

Part I: Jerusalem — Covenant and the Critique of Kings

The Hebrew Bible contains many things. It contains genealogies and ritual instructions, prophetic visions and historical chronicles, poetry of unmatched power and law codes of considerable severity. What it also contains, woven through the historical and prophetic books, is the most sustained ancient critique of state power that has come down to us from any pre-classical civilization. The Hebrew political tradition was not theory in the Greek sense. It did not produce systematic treatises. It produced narrative — stories of kings and prophets, slaves and liberators, covenants kept and covenants broken — and the political theology these stories carried became one of the most consequential intellectual inheritances in human history.

Three features of that inheritance matter for our story.

The Covenant

The relationship between God and Israel in the Hebrew Bible is structured as a covenant — a formal agreement between two parties, with terms, obligations, and consequences for breach. The covenant at Sinai, in which the people receive the Law and accept it (”All that the LORD hath spoken we will do,” Exodus 19:8), is the founding act of Israel as a political community. The covenant is not a unilateral decree imposed by a distant power on a passive people. It is an agreement that requires the people’s consent. The structure prefigured, by more than two thousand years, the social-contract tradition that would emerge in early modern Europe. Hebrew covenant theology would shape American federalism more directly than most modern readers recognize. The Mayflower Compact of 1620, the first self-governing founding document of English North America, is structured as a covenant in the Hebrew sense. The Puritan towns of New England were organized as covenanted communities. Federal theology — the Reformed Protestant tradition that emphasized the covenant as the structural relationship between God, ruler, and people — was a central current in colonial American religious and political thought. The American constitutional order’s distinctive emphasis on compact, consent, and limited delegated authority owes a great deal to this Hebrew inheritance, transmitted through the Reformed Protestant tradition that the Pilgrims and Puritans brought to America.²

Even the King Is Under the Law

In the political theology of the ancient Near East, the king was typically a god, or the son of a god, or the chosen representative of the gods. The Code of Hammurabi, dating to roughly 1750 BCE, presents law as the gift of the king to his people. The pharaoh of Egypt was himself divine. In Mesopotamia, royal inscriptions celebrated the king’s intimate relationship with the gods who had selected him to rule. The king made the law. The king was, in significant measure, above the law.

The Hebrew tradition broke with this entire framework. In the Hebrew Bible, the law is given by God to the people, and the king — when Israel finally has a king — is bound by that law no less than the humblest farmer in the kingdom. Deuteronomy 17, the passage prescribing the conditions of Israelite kingship, requires the king to keep a copy of the law beside him and to read it daily, “that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them: that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren” (Deuteronomy 17:19–20, KJV).³ The king is not the source of the law. The king is its student.

The prophetic tradition gave this structural subordination operational force. When King David arranged the death of Uriah the Hittite to take possession of Bathsheba, the prophet Nathan came to him with the famous parable of the rich man who stole the poor man’s lamb. David, listening to the parable, pronounced judgment on the rich man — and Nathan turned to him and said, “Thou art the man” (2 Samuel 12:7, KJV). The king of Israel had to hear, from a prophet without armies or office, that he had committed a capital crime under the same law that bound his subjects. When Ahab and Jezebel arranged the judicial murder of Naboth to seize his ancestral vineyard, the prophet Elijah confronted Ahab in the vineyard itself, denouncing the king to his face and pronouncing the destruction of his line (1 Kings 21:17–24). The pattern recurs throughout the historical and prophetic books. The king sins. The prophet confronts. The law remains supreme. No earthly authority, however high, escapes the higher accountability.

This was a structural innovation of profound consequence. It established, in the religious dogma of a small people, the principle that authority is limited by a law it does not control — and that the function of the truth-teller is to remind authority of its limits, regardless of the personal cost. The prophets who fulfilled this function in Israel were not always heard. Several were killed. The principle survived their deaths. It became part of the political grammar of the Western world.

Samuel’s Warning

The most extraordinary moment in the Hebrew political tradition is the passage with which this article opens. In 1 Samuel 8, the elders of Israel come to the aging prophet Samuel and demand a king. They want a king “to judge us like all the nations” — they want, in other words, to be a normal kingdom on the model of their neighbors, with a ruler in the conventional ancient Near Eastern sense. Samuel is displeased. He prays to God, and God instructs Samuel to do as the people ask, but also to warn them, fully and honestly, what a king will do.

What follows is a passage that any libertarian reader can recognize immediately as the ancient template of the case against the state. Samuel does not warn about bad kings, or about kings who misuse their authority. Samuel warns about the manner of the king — what a king, by virtue of being a king, will do. The warning is structural, not personal. And the structural warning is devastating.

A king will take your sons. He will conscript them for his armies, for his cavalry, for his chariot corps, for the unpaid labor of plowing his fields and reaping his harvests and manufacturing his weapons. A king will take your daughters, for the kitchens and baking houses of his court. A king will take your fields, your vineyards, your olive orchards — the best of them, by right of his office — and distribute them to his retainers. A king will take a tenth of your harvest as the standing tax of his court. A king will take your servants and your strongest young men, and put them to work for him. A king will take a tenth of your flocks. And in the end, Samuel concludes with a phrase that should chill any reader who pays attention to its weight: “and ye shall be his servants.” The Hebrew word translated “servants” — avadim — is the same word translated “slaves” elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. The same word used for the condition of Israel in Egypt. The people who fled bondage in Egypt are warned that, in demanding a king, they will reduce themselves to bondage again, in their own land, under a king of their own choosing.

The reader who has internalized the Liberty Test recognizes immediately what Samuel is describing. The king will take what no individual could take. The king will conscript what no individual could conscript. The king will dispose of property and labor he never produced, by right of an office whose authority no one can challenge once it has been granted. The king will perform on a national scale the aggressions that, performed by any private person, would be recognized as theft, kidnapping, and enslavement. Samuel sees this clearly, twenty-eight hundred years before the libertarian tradition that would name it in modern terms. He sees that the question is not whether the king will be a good king or a bad king. The question is what the office of king is, and what its existence will require of the people who establish it.

And the people, hearing the warning, do not relent. “Nay; but we will have a king over us,” they tell Samuel. “That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles” (1 Samuel 8:19–20, KJV). The people choose the king, Samuel warns them, and the people accept the warning’s price. The Hebrew political tradition would record, across the rest of 1 and 2 Kings, the unfolding of exactly what Samuel had described.

The Exodus and American Appropriation

The other indispensable political narrative of the Hebrew Bible is the Exodus — the story of the liberation of an enslaved people from a tyrannical empire. The Exodus story was the foundational political narrative of the Hebrew people, recited annually at Passover, woven into the legal and ritual texture of Israelite life. It was also, by happy historical accident, the most readily applicable biblical narrative for a colonial people preparing to overthrow what they regarded as the tyrannical rule of George III.

The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in 1620 understood themselves as a new Israel, fleeing a corrupt Egypt for a promised land. The Puritan settlers of Massachusetts Bay developed an elaborate typology in which biblical Israel served as the typological precursor to New England, with the Atlantic crossing as the Red Sea passage. By the time of the Revolution, Exodus imagery saturated American political and religious discourse. Sermons compared George III to Pharaoh. Tax collectors became taskmasters. The Continental Army marched under banners that drew on biblical liberation theology.

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed a committee — Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson — to propose a design for the Great Seal of the United States. Franklin’s proposal, recorded by Jefferson, depicted “Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity. Motto, ‘Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.’”⁴ Jefferson’s proposal was milder but no less biblical: the Children of Israel in the Wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, with Hengist and Horsa, the legendary Saxon chieftains, on the reverse. Adams, who had less talent for symbolic design, proposed Hercules choosing between Virtue and Sloth, drawn from the Greek tradition.

The committee’s proposals were not accepted in any detail. The final Great Seal, adopted in 1782, used the eagle and the pyramid we know today. But the proposals themselves are revealing. Two of the three drafters of the Declaration of Independence, when asked to imagine the visual symbol of the new nation, reached first for the Exodus narrative. The Founders’ political imagination, even in its symbolic vocabulary, was Hebrew before it was Greek. The motto Franklin proposed — “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God” — Jefferson adopted as his own personal seal and used for the rest of his life.

Hebrew was studied as a regular part of the curriculum at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and William and Mary throughout the colonial period. Ezra Stiles, president of Yale from 1778 to 1795, corresponded with rabbis and made Hebrew study mandatory for divinity students. John Adams cited the “Hebrew republic” as a constitutional model and discussed at length the political institutions of ancient Israel in his Defence of the Constitutions. The Hebrew political tradition was, for the educated Founder, not exotic background but operational reference, drawn upon as freely as the Greek and Roman material.¹²

The Hebrew contribution to the American inheritance can be summarized in four propositions: that political community is constituted by covenant rather than by force; that even the highest earthly authority is bound by a higher law it did not make; that the function of the truth-teller is to remind authority of its limits, at whatever personal cost; and that the office of unaccountable rule — the office of king in Samuel’s sense — is intrinsically dangerous, regardless of the personal qualities of the man who holds it. These four propositions found their way into the Declaration, into the Constitution’s enumerated and limited powers, into the prophetic-political tradition of American dissent, and into the structural assumption that the people who establish a government retain the standing to call it to account.

Part II: The House of Wisdom — Preservation and Transmission

In 476 CE, the last Roman emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the Germanic chieftain Odoacer. The political event was less consequential than the cultural one that accompanied it. Across the next two centuries, the institutional structures that had preserved and transmitted the Greco-Roman intellectual inheritance in the western half of the Empire collapsed. The schools closed. The libraries were dispersed, burned, or abandoned. The administrative apparatus that had ordered intellectual life from Britain to Spain to North Africa disintegrated. By the seventh century, the Latin West had access to only a fraction of the Greek philosophical corpus. Plato survived primarily through the Timaeus, in a partial Latin translation. Aristotle survived primarily through a small number of logical works translated by Boethius in the early sixth century. The great body of Aristotelian philosophy — the Metaphysics, the Physics, the De Anima, the Politics, the Nicomachean Ethics, and most of the rest — was effectively lost to the Latin West for almost six hundred years.

It was not lost to the world. Greek manuscripts survived in Byzantium, where Greek remained a living scholarly language. And in the eighth century, a new civilization arose that would do something Byzantium itself never quite did: it would actively seek out the Greek philosophical and scientific corpus, translate it systematically, comment on it extensively, and develop it further across the next five centuries. That civilization was the Islamic world, and the institution that gave the early phase of its intellectual effort its name was the Bayt al-Hikma — the House of Wisdom — in Baghdad.

The Translation Movement

The Abbasid Caliphate, founded in 750 CE, moved its capital to the newly constructed city of Baghdad in 762. Within a century, Baghdad had become the largest city in the world. Under the caliphs al-Mansur, al-Mahdi, al-Rashid, and especially al-Ma’mun (who reigned 813–833), the Abbasids organized what historians call the Translation Movement — a centuries-long, state-supported effort to obtain Greek manuscripts from Byzantium, India, and the lapsed libraries of Alexandria, and to translate them into Arabic.

The motivations were mixed and instructive. The Abbasids inherited a vast multilingual empire that required practical administrative knowledge: medicine, astronomy, mathematics, engineering, the calculation of the qibla (the direction of Mecca, requiring spherical geometry), and the calculation of the Islamic lunar calendar (requiring astronomy). They also inherited a religious culture that, while distinctive in its commitments, did not regard the pursuit of wisdom as a threat. The famous hadith — “Seek knowledge even unto China” — captured an early Islamic disposition that the Translation Movement institutionalized. By the end of the ninth century, almost the entire surviving Greek scientific and philosophical corpus had been translated into Arabic, often in multiple competing translations, with the translators paid in some cases the weight of the manuscript in gold.⁵

It is necessary to acknowledge, here as in our treatment of the classical world, the political character of the civilization that produced this achievement. The Abbasid Caliphate was an empire built by conquest, sustained by tribute, and powered in significant part by slave labor and slave armies. The intellectual openness that produced the Translation Movement coexisted, in the same cities and under the same caliphs, with the institutional violence of imperial rule. This was not a modern liberal civilization. It was a medieval one — sophisticated in its philosophy, militarily expansionist in its politics, and bound by the moral assumptions of its age. The philosophical contributions of its scholars are real and unimpeachable. The empire those scholars served was not the Founders’ kind of republic. Both observations are true. The series will neither romanticize the political character of medieval Islamic civilization nor allow that political character to obscure the genuine intellectual achievement.

Al-Farabi

Abu Nasr al-Farabi (c. 870–950) was born in Central Asia, studied in Baghdad, and lived for much of his career in Damascus and Aleppo. He was known to later Islamic philosophers as “the Second Master” — the second only to Aristotle, the First Master. Al-Farabi’s most important political work, Al-Madina al-Fadila (The Virtuous City), drew on Plato’s Republic and on Aristotle’s Politics, adapting their analysis to the conditions of an Islamic polity. His writings on logic, metaphysics, and ethics formed the foundation on which subsequent Islamic philosophy would be built. Avicenna would describe himself as having understood Aristotle’s Metaphysics only after reading al-Farabi’s commentary on it.⁶

Avicenna

Ibn Sina (980–1037), Latinized as Avicenna, was born in what is now Uzbekistan and lived in various courts in Persia. He was a physician, philosopher, scientist, and statesman. His Canon of Medicine was the standard medical textbook in European universities for five centuries after his death. His philosophical writings, especially Kitab al-Shifa (The Book of Healing), represented the most ambitious systematic philosophy produced in the Islamic world before the twelfth century. Avicenna shaped Western philosophy in two ways: directly, through the Latin translations of his works that circulated in European universities; and indirectly, through his influence on later Islamic thinkers, especially Averroes, whose readings of Aristotle the Latin West would absorb in the thirteenth century.

Averroes

Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd (1126–1198), Latinized as Averroes, was born in Córdoba, the capital of Muslim Spain, into a prominent family of judges and legal scholars. He served as chief judge of Seville and later of Córdoba, as personal physician to two caliphs, and as the most prolific commentator on Aristotle that any medieval civilization produced. Averroes wrote three commentaries on virtually every major Aristotelian work — short, middle, and long commentaries, calibrated to different levels of readership. His ambition was to recover Aristotle’s actual meaning, stripped of the Neoplatonic accretions that earlier Islamic philosophy had introduced. He read Aristotle harder and more carefully than almost anyone else in the medieval world.

When Averroes’s commentaries reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century — translated from Arabic into Latin by Christian scholars, often in Toledo, often with the help of Jewish intermediaries — they did not merely transmit Aristotle. They transmitted an interpretation of Aristotle. Latin medieval philosophy, including the scholastic synthesis of Thomas Aquinas, was shaped decisively by Averroes’s readings. Aquinas, who would devote substantial portions of his career to refining and in some cases refuting Averroist interpretations, called Averroes simply the Commentator — the figure whose work on Aristotle had to be answered before any further Aristotelian project could proceed. Dante, writing a century after Averroes’s death, placed him in Limbo with the great pre-Christian philosophers, identified by the single word Averroè, che ‘l gran comento feo — “Averroes, who made the great commentary.”⁷

The Founders, when they read their Aristotle, read a text whose interpretive shape had been substantially set by a Muslim judge from twelfth-century Córdoba. They did not always know this. The chain of transmission had become invisible to them by the eighteenth century. But the inheritance was unmistakable to anyone who traced the historical scholarship. Without Averroes, the medieval Aristotle on whom the entire scholastic tradition was built would have been a different and lesser text.

Ibn Khaldun

Abu Zayd ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was born in Tunis, educated in the standard Islamic curriculum of his time, and served in various government posts across North Africa and Andalusia before settling in Cairo as a judge and historian. His Muqaddimah — the introduction to his world history — is one of the most original works of social and political analysis produced anywhere in the medieval period. It is also the source of an analytical framework that bears striking parallels to the Polybian cycle examined in Article 2.

Ibn Khaldun’s central concept is asabiyyah — a term usually translated as “group feeling” or “social cohesion,” referring to the bonds of solidarity that hold a tribe, clan, or community together against external threats. Strong asabiyyah, Ibn Khaldun argued, is the precondition of political success. A community whose members are bound by intense kinship loyalty, shared hardship, and common purpose can overcome larger, wealthier, more sophisticated communities whose internal cohesion has decayed. This is how desert peoples have repeatedly conquered settled civilizations across the history of the Mediterranean and Near East.

But asabiyyah decays. The conquering generation, hardened by hardship and bound by shared struggle, takes power and establishes a dynasty. The next generation, raised in the comforts of palace and city, retains some of the original cohesion but begins to lose its edge. The third generation, fully urbanized, surrounded by luxury, mistaking inherited authority for personal achievement, has lost the asabiyyah that founded the dynasty. The fourth generation rules a civilization that is wealthy, sophisticated, and structurally hollow — and is conquered, in due course, by the next desert tribe with strong asabiyyah coming over the horizon. The cycle repeats.

The parallel to Polybius is genuine, and the differences are instructive. Polybius’s anacyclosis concerned the cycle of constitutional forms — monarchy decaying to tyranny, tyranny overthrown by aristocracy, and so forth. Ibn Khaldun’s framework concerns the cycle of social and cultural cohesion — the rise and fall of the binding solidarities that make political success possible in the first place. The two cycles operate on different analytical layers and may proceed at different speeds, but they are mutually compatible observations of related phenomena. A constitution can be well-designed and yet hollow if the people governed under it have lost the social cohesion that gives any constitution practical force. Conversely, a strong-asabiyyah community can sustain a poorly designed constitution for some time, until its cohesion in turn decays. Polybius watched republics fall. Ibn Khaldun watched dynasties fall. Both were watching the same phenomenon from different angles.⁸

The Founders, in 1787, did not read Ibn Khaldun. He was not translated into English until the twentieth century. But the analytical lesson he had developed was recognizable in classical sources they did read, and the cyclical caution he embodied — that no political order survives by its own design alone, that the people who operate the machinery matter as much as the machinery itself — was a lesson they had absorbed from Polybius, from Plutarch’s biographies of failed and successful statesmen, and from their own observation of the unfolding French Revolution in its early years. The Ibn Khaldun framework is now available to us in a way it was not available to them. It deepens, rather than displacing, the analytical tradition the Founders inherited from antiquity.

Part III: The Translation and Synthesis

The Islamic preservation of Greek philosophy would have remained an isolated cultural achievement if it had not been transmitted, eventually, back to the Latin West. The mechanism of that transmission is one of the most extraordinary stories in intellectual history.

The Toledo School

In 1085, Christian forces under Alfonso VI of León and Castile captured Toledo, a Spanish city that had been under Muslim rule for nearly four centuries. The city’s libraries — public, private, and institutional — contained an extensive collection of Arabic-language works, including the entire Islamic philosophical corpus and its translations of Greek philosophy and science. Toledo’s population at the time of the conquest was a mix of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, with substantial bilingual and trilingual capacity among the educated classes.

Primatial Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption — Toledo Cathedral — since 1088

Archbishop Raymond of Toledo, who held the see from 1126 to 1152, organized what later scholars would call the Toledo School of Translators — an ongoing collaborative project to render Arabic philosophical, scientific, and medical works into Latin for the Christian Latin West. The work continued under his successors and reached new heights under Alfonso X “the Wise” of Castile (reigned 1252–1284), who extended the project to include translations from Hebrew and original works in Castilian Spanish. Across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a constant stream of Arabic texts — Aristotle, the Islamic commentators, original works in medicine and astronomy and mathematics — was translated into Latin in Toledo and in similar centers in Sicily, Norman southern Italy, and elsewhere. The Latin West, by 1280, had access to nearly the entire Aristotelian corpus that the Islamic world had preserved, accompanied by the commentaries of al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, and many others.⁹

Maimonides and the Jewish Intermediaries

Jewish scholars played an indispensable role in this transmission, for reasons rooted in their position within both Christian and Islamic civilizations. Many Sephardic Jews of medieval Iberia were trilingual, reading Arabic for daily affairs and the philosophical tradition, Hebrew for religious scholarship, and Latin (or its romance descendants) for engagement with Christian neighbors. They served as translators, copyists, and intellectual go-betweens at every stage of the Toledo project.

The most consequential figure in this Jewish dimension of the synthesis was Moses ben Maimon — Maimonides — born in Córdoba in 1135 and dying in Cairo in 1204. Maimonides wrote in Arabic, lived under Islamic rule for most of his life, and was perhaps the greatest single synthesizer of Aristotelian philosophy and revealed religion produced in the entire medieval period. His Guide for the Perplexed, composed in Arabic around 1190 and translated into Hebrew and then Latin within decades, became a touchstone for medieval Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophy alike. Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century, cited Maimonides repeatedly as “Rabbi Moyses” and drew on his treatment of philosophical-theological questions in his own Summa Theologiae. The intellectual debt was substantial and was acknowledged in the manuscripts themselves.¹⁰

Posthumous engraving in Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, from which all modern portraits of Maimonides are derived, c. 1744

The medieval synthesis was thus, at its most ambitious moments, a genuinely tri-civilizational achievement. Christian Latin theologians worked with Greek philosophical sources transmitted through Arabic translations annotated by Muslim commentators and rendered into Latin with the assistance of Jewish intermediaries — and in the writing of the synthesis itself, the Christian theologians cited the Muslim and Jewish predecessors by name. This was not pluralism in the modern sense; the various communities were not equal participants in a shared political order, and the relations among them ranged from cooperative collaboration to open religious warfare across different times and places. But at the level of philosophical work, the synthesis was real, and the citations preserved the record of who had contributed what.

The Synthesis Reaches Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) sits at the intersection of all the streams traced in this article. He read Aristotle in Latin translations that had passed through Arabic. He cited Averroes — the Commentator — on virtually every philosophical question he treated. He cited Avicenna and al-Farabi. He cited Maimonides. He cited Cicero and Augustine and the Hebrew prophets. And he wove all of these sources into a theological-philosophical synthesis that would shape Catholic intellectual life from his own time forward, and through Catholic universities and the broader Christian intellectual tradition, would shape the natural-law tradition that the American Founders received in their reading of Coke, Locke, and the early modern legal writers.

Aquinas will be the subject of the next article. The note here is only to establish what reaches Aquinas, and through Aquinas the eighteenth-century American tradition: a synthesis of Athens (Greek philosophical reason), Jerusalem (Hebrew covenant and natural-law moral seriousness), Rome (Cicero’s jurisprudence and Stoic natural law), and the Islamic and Jewish commentaries that had preserved and developed each of these threads across the centuries when the Latin West could not have done so on its own. The Founders inherited the synthesis. The synthesis was not theirs alone to claim. It was, in the most precise sense, a human inheritance — contributed to by every civilization that had taken seriously the questions of justice, law, and the limits of legitimate power.

The Skeptic’s Case

Three challenges to the account in this article deserve fair statement and direct answer.

The Theological Critique

The first and strongest challenge is that the Hebrew tradition is religious doctrine rather than philosophical argument, and that to include it in a history of political philosophy is to confuse two different kinds of intellectual work. On this view, the Greeks gave us philosophy because they argued for their positions from reason, examining competing claims and developing systematic accounts. The Hebrews gave us scripture — narrative and revelation, persuasive perhaps to those who already accept the underlying theology, but unable to ground a political order for those who do not. The American Founders, the argument continues, drew on the Greek and Roman traditions because those traditions were genuinely philosophical and therefore universally accessible. Their use of Hebrew imagery was decorative or rhetorical, not philosophically substantive.

This is a serious challenge. The honest answer is twofold.

First, the distinction between philosophical argument and religious narrative is sharper in modern academic categorization than it was in the eighteenth century or in any of the centuries that preceded it. The Greek philosophical tradition itself drew on religious sources — Plato’s Republic concludes with a religious myth, Aristotle’s Metaphysics terminates in the Unmoved Mover, and Cicero’s natural law passage culminates in the claim that God is the author of the law that binds all rational beings. The traditional distinction between philosophy and theology was not the modern secular distinction. It was a distinction within a shared framework that took the existence of a moral order in the universe for granted and asked how it might be known and articulated. The Hebrew tradition contributed to that shared framework. Whether one accepts its theological premises or not, the political claims it generated — that even kings are under the law, that authority requires accountability, that liberation from tyranny is a legitimate and praiseworthy political project — are claims that can be evaluated on their merits as political claims, independent of the religious framework that produced them.

Second, the philosophical-versus-religious framing understates the operational role of the Hebrew tradition in the actual political thinking of the Founders. They did not treat the Hebrew material as decoration. They studied Hebrew at college. They cited the Hebrew political institutions in constitutional debate. They drew on Hebrew covenant theology in their structuring of federal arrangements. The most famous American political slogan of the Revolutionary era — Franklin’s “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God” — is unintelligible outside the Hebrew framework that placed the Exodus narrative at the center of political imagination. To treat the Hebrew contribution as decorative is to misread the historical record.

The Byzantine Transmission Counter-Thesis

A second challenge holds that the Islamic-transmission account is overstated. Greek manuscripts survived in Byzantium throughout the medieval period, and the recovery of Greek philosophy in the Latin West owes at least as much to direct Greek-to-Latin translation as to the Arabic intermediary. On the strongest version of this argument, the Islamic contribution was real but more limited than recent enthusiasms have suggested, and the Latin West’s recovery of Aristotle would have happened — perhaps more slowly, but happened — through direct Byzantine transmission alone.

This is a legitimate scholarly observation that deserves direct answer. The Byzantine transmission was real and important, particularly in the later medieval period and after the Fourth Crusade (1204) and the fall of Constantinople (1453). Greek manuscripts and Greek scholars did reach the West directly, and the Renaissance recovery of Plato in the fifteenth century owed substantially more to direct Greek transmission than to Arabic. But for the recovery of Aristotle in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — the recovery that produced the scholastic synthesis, that shaped Aquinas, and that ultimately fed into the natural-law tradition the Founders inherited — Arabic transmission was decisive. The Latin translations that reached the universities of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were predominantly Arabic-to-Latin renderings, often produced in Toledo. The commentaries of Averroes, al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Maimonides reached the Latin West simultaneously with the texts of Aristotle they discussed, and shaped the interpretive frame in which those texts were received. The Byzantine transmission supplemented and eventually surpassed this Arabic stream, but it did not produce the initial medieval recovery. The scholarly consensus on this point is solid and is the consensus this article has followed.

The Conflict-Ridden Synthesis Critique

A third challenge holds that the medieval synthesis was not the harmonious convergence this article has described, but a contested and conflict-ridden process. The Paris condemnations of 1277, in which Bishop Stephen Tempier formally condemned 219 propositions associated with Averroist readings of Aristotle, are routinely cited as evidence that the Latin Church repeatedly suppressed the very intellectual transmission this article celebrates.¹¹ The synthesis, on this account, was incomplete at best and was being actively contested even as Aquinas was writing it.

This is correct on the historical facts and instructive in what it shows. The reception of Islamic-transmitted Aristotle in the Latin West was contested. Some Averroist propositions were condemned. Aquinas himself wrote against certain Averroist readings — his De Unitate Intellectus Contra Averroistas is precisely such a polemic. The synthesis was not produced by an undifferentiated stream of acceptance. It was produced by a contested and difficult intellectual engagement in which Christian theologians sometimes accepted what their Muslim and Jewish predecessors had argued, sometimes modified it, sometimes rejected it, and sometimes — as in 1277 — saw the church politically condemn certain positions. The synthesis was nonetheless real. Aquinas, the Latin philosopher most identified with the synthesis, was canonized in 1323, fewer than fifty years after his death, and his theological-philosophical work was officially endorsed by the Catholic Church as central to its intellectual tradition. The conflict and the synthesis coexisted. Both belong to the historical record.

The Inheritance Carries Forward

Three civilizations, four threads, one common cord.

From Jerusalem: the covenant tradition, in which political community is constituted by consent under a law neither party has the authority to repeal; the principle that even the highest earthly office is bound by an order it did not create; and the prophetic vocation of speaking truth to power as the function of free citizenship.

From Baghdad and Córdoba: the preservation, commentary, and development of Greek philosophy across centuries when the Latin West had lost access to it, accompanied by original contributions in political philosophy and the analysis of social cohesion that the Latin tradition would inherit at a remove.

From Toledo and the Jewish intermediaries: the practical mechanism by which the Greek and Islamic and Jewish traditions were rendered into Latin and made available to the Christian Latin West, with the citations preserved that recorded the contributions of each community.

From Aquinas, the synthesizer: the integration of Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and the Islamic and Jewish commentaries into a single theological-philosophical framework that would shape Western intellectual life for centuries afterward, including the natural-law tradition that the American Founders received and adapted.

The Founders, when they spoke of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” were speaking in a vocabulary built across two and a half millennia, contributed to by Greek philosophers and Hebrew prophets, by Muslim judges in Córdoba and Jewish scholars in Cairo, by Christian theologians in Paris and translators in Toledo. They did not know the full chain of transmission. The historical scholarship that recovered it for us was largely the work of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the inheritance was real before it was recovered, and the recovery is now part of what every careful reader can know.

The next article will take up the medieval synthesis directly — Magna Carta, Aquinas, the canon-law tradition, and the early arguments for resistance to unjust authority. The Latin West, having recovered its inheritance through the routes traced here, would put that inheritance to immediate political use.

Self-Reflection Prompts

1. Apply the Liberty Test to Samuel’s warning in 1 Samuel 8. Samuel describes a king who will take sons for war, daughters for service, fields and harvests for tribute, and finally the people themselves as servants. Now consider a modern government that taxes labor, conscripts for war when it sees fit, regulates property to its purposes, and claims authority over its subjects’ lives in countless particulars. Is the modern government materially different from the king Samuel warned against, or are we describing the same office under different forms?

2. The Hebrew prophetic tradition required individual men, often without office or institutional authority, to confront kings to their faces and pronounce divine judgment on royal misconduct. What is the modern equivalent of the prophetic vocation? Who carries it today, and what costs are paid by those who attempt it?

3. The Islamic preservation of Greek philosophy was a five-hundred-year intellectual project carried on by a civilization whose political character differed substantially from the modern liberal order the inheritance would eventually help to produce. How should a free society regard intellectual debts to civilizations whose political arrangements it does not share or admire? What does honest acknowledgment look like in this situation?

4. Ibn Khaldun’s framework holds that political success depends not only on constitutional design but on the underlying social cohesion of the ruling people, and that this cohesion decays predictably across generations of comfort and inherited authority. Apply this analysis to the present condition of the American republic. What does Ibn Khaldun’s lens reveal that the constitutional analysis of Articles 1 and 2 does not?

5. The Founders inherited a tri-civilizational synthesis without knowing the full chain of transmission that had produced it. We know more of that chain than they did. Does this knowledge change the inheritance, or only our understanding of it? What obligations follow from understanding more of where our ideas come from than those who first put them to use?

Endnotes

1. 1 Samuel 8:11–17 (King James Version, 1611). Public domain. The full passage and its surrounding context — including the Israelites’ demand for a king and Samuel’s prayer for guidance — appears in 1 Samuel 8:1–22. The King James Version was the standard biblical translation in colonial and revolutionary America and is the form in which the Founders would have encountered the passage.

2. On the influence of Hebrew covenant theology on American federalism, see Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel: Biblical Foundations and Jewish Expressions (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995); and Donald S. Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 13–30, on covenant as a structural feature of colonial American political documents. On the Mayflower Compact as a covenant document, see Lutz, 16–17.

3. Deuteronomy 17:14–20 (King James Version). The passage prescribes the conditions of Israelite kingship, including the requirement that the king “shall write him a copy of this law in a book” and “read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the LORD his God.”

4. Benjamin Franklin’s design for the Great Seal, August 14, 1776, as recorded in Thomas Jefferson’s notes. In The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 1:494–97. The Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin proposals are described in John Adams’ letter to Abigail Adams, August 14, 1776, available at Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-02-02-0091. The motto “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God” was later adopted by Jefferson as his personal seal.

5. On the Abbasid Translation Movement, the standard scholarly treatment is Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries) (London: Routledge, 1998). On the broader Islamic intellectual contribution, see Jonathan Lyons, The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization (London: Bloomsbury, 2009); and the more measured account in Richard E. Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered the Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages (Orlando: Harcourt, 2003).

6. On al-Farabi and the foundational role of his commentary, see Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Avicenna’s report on understanding Aristotle’s Metaphysics only after reading al-Farabi appears in Avicenna’s autobiography, preserved in the writings of his student al-Juzjani.

7. Dante Alighieri, Inferno IV, line 144, where Averroes appears with the great pre-Christian philosophers in Limbo. On Aquinas’s engagement with Averroes, see Richard C. Taylor, “Averroes’ Philosophical Conception of Separate Intellect and God,” in Routledge History of Medieval Philosophy, ed. John Marenbon (London: Routledge, 2012). Aquinas’s polemic De Unitate Intellectus Contra Averroistas is available in English as On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists, trans. Beatrice H. Zedler (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1968).

8. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Foundation, 1958; abridged ed. 1969). The discussion of asabiyyah and the four-generation pattern of dynastic decline is concentrated in Books I and II. On Ibn Khaldun’s analytical originality, see Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

9. On the Toledo School and the broader Arabic-to-Latin translation movement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Charles Burnett, Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages: The Translators and Their Intellectual and Social Context (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); and David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), chs. 9–10. On Alfonso X of Castile and his sponsorship of translation and original scholarship, see Joseph F. O’Callaghan, The Learned King: The Reign of Alfonso X of Castile (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).

10. On Maimonides as philosophical synthesizer and as a source for Aquinas, see Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (New York: Doubleday, 2008); and Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Maimonides and St. Thomas on the Limits of Reason (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed is available in English as The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).

11. On the Paris condemnations of 1277 and the broader conflict over Averroist readings of Aristotle, see Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 4; and Étienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955), pt. 9. The official documentary record of the 1277 condemnations is available in Heinrich Denifle and Émile Châtelain, eds., Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis (Paris: Delalain, 1889–1897), vol. 1, no. 473.

12. On Hebrew study in colonial America, see Shalom Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). On Ezra Stiles and Yale’s Hebrew curriculum, see Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). On John Adams’ use of the “Hebrew republic” as a constitutional model, see his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, vol. 1, in The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1850–1856), 4:271–588, particularly the discussions of ancient Israelite federation.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary Sources

• The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611). The translation in which the Founders read the Hebrew political tradition. Standard modern critical editions are widely available.

• The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). For comparative scholarship, the Jewish Publication Society translation and the Robert Alter translation (The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, W. W. Norton, 2019) are recommended.

• Al-Farabi, The Virtuous City (Al-Madina al-Fadila). English translations available; see Richard Walzer, Al-Farabi on the Perfect State (Oxford University Press, 1985).

• Averroes, Commentary on Plato’s Republic, trans. Ralph Lerner (Cornell University Press, 1974); On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy (Fasl al-Maqal), trans. George F. Hourani (Luzac, 1961).

• Avicenna, The Metaphysics of the Healing, trans. Michael E. Marmura (Brigham Young University Press, 2005).

• Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols. (Princeton University Press / Bollingen, 1958).

• Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols. (University of Chicago Press, 1963).

• Founders Online (National Archives), for the Great Seal proposals of Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson (August 14, 1776).

Secondary Works

• Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society (Routledge, 1998). The scholarly standard on the Translation Movement.

• Richard E. Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered the Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages (Harcourt, 2003). Accessible synthesis for general readers.

• Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel (Transaction Publishers, 1995). On Hebrew covenant theology and political theory.

• Donald S. Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Louisiana State University Press, 1988). On covenant as a structural feature of American political documents.

• Shalom Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). On Hebrew study and political imagination in colonial America.

• Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (Doubleday, 2008).

• Charles Burnett, Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages (Ashgate, 2009). On the Toledo School and related translation enterprises.

• Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1996). On the 1277 condemnations and the reception of Aristotle.

• Robert Irwin, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton University Press, 2018).

• Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2001).