The ethical tradition of Judaism has always had a political dimension, which introduced the subject of Jewish modernity during the Haskalah period in the eighteenth century: how does Judaism participate in the secular society with some kind of publicity? According to the theory of Moses Mendelssohn, a leader of Haskalah, expressed in his masterpiece Jerusalem, Judaism is both a "religion of reason" and "revealed legislation" but not a "revealed religion," so that a modern Judaism could response to Enlightenment spirit and keeps the Torah and does not fall into the opposition of reason and revelation. However, this Jewish political theology path envisioned by Mendelssohn faced setbacks from the Holocaust. From the point of view of Levinas, who committed to restore Jewish ethical tradition in the post-Holocaust era, we can obtain a new direction of Jewish political theology. This article attempts to portray this thought course, to explore the political theological implications of Jerusalem and to describe Levinas's interpretation of this book, in the hope of understanding the basic characteristics of Jewish political theology.
