“And Thou Shalt Love Him as Thyself” (Leviticus 19:34): The Bible’s Forgotten Nussbaumian Moment

The Torah’s envisages an Israeli sovereignty whose body-politic extends beyond the boundaries of Israelite peoplehood. The various laws regarding the gentile stranger, with their explicit allusion to the people’s prior ‘strangership’ in Egypt, will be shown to yield a vision of a multi-ethnic Israeli ‘national collective’ whose members are not only required to be treated justly, but to be forged into a solidaire national fraternity. It will be shown further that the Torah’s idea of political love bears interesting affinity to that proposed in Martha Nussbaum’s 2013 Political Emotions: Why Love Matters to Justice, and suffers from the similar drawbacks. Resources for a preferable notion of civic comradeship will be shown to reside in the ethos of rabbinic discourse.