A 14th-Century Rabbi’s View of the Relationship between the Judiciary and the Executive

One of the great talmudic scholars of his day, Nissim of Girona (1320–1376) was also one of very few medieval rabbis who wrote extensively on what, in modern terms, would be termed political philosophy. In the opinion of Warren Zev Harvey, Rabbi Nissim “thought in constitutional terms strikingly similar to those of Tocqueville.” Harvey thus finds this sage’s thought germane to the current political debate in Israel over the extent of judges’ authority, and in particular over whether there should be some check on the supreme court’s ability to overturn duly enacted laws simply because it finds them to be “unreasonable.”