272
PARTISAN REVIEW
Pound and Chamberlain begrudge admiration for Meyer Anselm and
Ezra respectively for their tenacity and willingness to use desperate
means.
For Chamberlain, the interests of the Jewish people as a whole
were institutionalized in the "nomocracy," the rule of law, which
"unites the Jews, no matter how scattered they may be over all the lands
of the world, into a firm, uniform and absolutely political organ–
ism.... This national idea culminates in the unshakeable confidence
in the universal empire of the Jews which Jehovah promised." Cham–
berlain makes no distinctions among the Jewish people, their sup–
posed political organization, the "nomocracy," and the goal of that
political organization, the Kingdom of God on Earth. But the King–
dom of God on Earth becomes distorted in Chamberlain's view into the
"universal empire of the Jews." That the Kingdom of God on Earth
meant that the Jews would possess material things follows from
Chamberlain 's notion that the Jews accept only material proofs of the
existence of God. He claimed that the Jewish conception of God "is
always ... a question of outward experience, not of inner; the concep–
tions are always thoroughly concrete, material." The characterization
of the Kingdom of God on Earth as a conquered "empire" follows from
Chamberlain's inability to distinguish between rule-governed and
rule-constituted behavior.
An example of rule-constituted behavior would be the game of
chess which is nothing if not its rules.
If
one moved a bishop in a
straight line instead of a diagonal, one simply would not be playing
chess. Driving a car, for instance, is a different matter.
If
one chose to
drive through red lights and stop at green ones, no one could say that
this type of behavior was not driving a car. In rule-governed behavior,
the rules are arbitrary. They are not intrinsic
to
the activity they
govern. In rule-constituted behavior, the rules are the activity.
Chamberlain believed the Jewish Covenant to be rule-governed
behavior:
Pure malerialism is the bargain which Jacob enlers into with
Jehovah (Genesis xxviii, 20-22), in which he makes five condilions,
or, as the jurisl would say, slipulalions, and lhen concludes: as thou
doesl this so lhou shall
be
my God.
He believed that the activity the Jews were engaged in was the
acquisition of the Kingdom of God on Earth. The Jewish Law is the
means by which they acquire that Kingdom. To consider the keeping
of that Law to be a type of rule-governed behavior instead of rule-
