What Abraham Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory” are Hebraic rather than Anglo-Saxon. America retained Britain’s regard for individual rights, but it shifted the source of these rights to the direct and immediate relationship of God and the individual citizen. In different ways, Britain and America anchor their identities in that most ancient and robust of all national cultures, namely Israel. The Americans are Hebrews of the imagination; their mother country hopes to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, and identifies its monarchy in symbolic as well as mythological fashion with the throne of David. Curiously, this divide mirrors a Biblical ambiguity over the desirability of monarchy which persisted through ancient and medieval rabbinic commentaries. Selden and Milton cited rabbinical sources who eschewed monarchy on the strength of I Samuel 8. Yet Jewish redemption is founded on the restoration of the Davidic monarchy. Jewish tradition remains ambivalent on the issue. Michael Wyschogrod proposed to resolve Israel’s difficulty in choosing between secular and religious nationalism through monarchy: Israel’s head of state, now a president, would become instead the regent for an absent king, namely the successor of David who can be identified only by prophecy. All other political functions would remain as they are, but the regent would embody Israel’s messianic hope.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points to a precedent in the biblical covenant for the modern notion of social contract. “What God and Samuel were proposing was a social contract, on the lines later expounded by the founders of modern political thought: Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau,” he wrote in 2008:

A group of self-interested individuals will find it worthwhile to appoint a leader who will defend them from lawlessness within and enemies outside. To do so they will have to sacrifice some of their liberty and wealth, but the alternative is anarchy and foreign conquest. Samuel’s appointment of Saul is the first recorded instance of a social contract.

Rabbi Sacks’s insight is important, but it begs the question of what causes a social contract to endure beyond the perceived self-interest of the participating parties. That is the sense of the sacred, which cannot be a philosophical abstraction, but rather must pervade daily life and the ordinary culture of the people.

It is noteworthy in this context that the revival of the Jewish nation-state and its startling success in arms, enterprise and the arts remains a source of inspiration to other nations who have taken Israel as an exemplar. Israel’s victory in the 1967 war was a watershed event for the American evangelical movement, which viewed the outcome as “fulfillment of Biblical prophecy,” according to Rev Stephen Sizer, the author of the 2004 book Christian Zionism. That is an exceptional response, to be sure, but Israel has been the “exemplar and paragon of a nation” (Franz Rosenzweig), the model for Europe’s nascent monarchies from the Low Middle Ages onwards, as Professor Adrian Hastings has shown in his 1996 volume The Construction of Nationhood.