Last August Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks published an essay in which he cited R. Zvi Hirsch Chajes, *Torat Nevi’im*, as saying that Jewish monarchy is a social contract in the way that Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau would have described it — the people voluntarily give up power to the monarch. Later in the same essay Rabbi Sacks quotes Thomas Jefferson! This is quite something from the Chief Rabbi of the country Jefferson was rebelling against. Rabbi Sacks clearly identifies with Abarbanal’s position that monarchy is not mandated.
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