The Territorial Contamination of the Blood

Abstract

The implicit paradoxical combination of monotheism and monolatry, characteristic of Hebraism, has consequences for law. This chapter discusses the legal anthropology of the territorial kinship found in the Hebrew Bible, by examining the categories of the native of the land, citizen, the alien who resides in the land, and the foreigner. This legal anthropology represents a Hebraic deflection from Christian universalism. The problem of describing that legal anthropology as Hebraism when it appears in the absence of references to the Old Testament, for example, in Frederic Maitland’s Constitutional History of England, is discussed. Finally, a re-examination of the concept of secularization is undertaken, with regards to the law of the land.