Proclaim Liberty

An analysis of the Jubilee’s interpretation in the ancient texts of early Judaism and Christianity in conversation with Utopian Studies

In Proclaim Liberty, Jonathan Kaplan examines the Jubilee in its original context, when it primarily referred to an ancient Israelite economic practice: that of announcing liberty for enslaved Israelites every fifty years and returning real estate to its original ancestral owners in that year. Kaplan tells the story of how this ancient practice, which is mandated in Leviticus 25 but which may or may not have been observed to the letter, has inspired diverse religious, economic, and political practices and movements since antiquity, and particularly the abolitionist movement in the United States.

Kaplan chronicles the earliest stages of this underappreciated story of reception and inspiration in conversation with the field of Utopian Studies—an emerging interdisciplinary space that brings together the dislocations of utopian and dystopian literature, the history of Utopian communities, and insights into the meanings of and manifestations of “Utopia.” By doing so, he moves beyond the question of “was the Jubilee observed” to analyzing the ways the Jubilee and the idea of Jubilee were employed in antiquity, both to shape visions for renewing Jewish economic practices and to frame new ways of thinking about time in Jewish society.

Exploring the Jubilee’s interpretation in a wide swath of ancient literature from the Hebrew Bible, ancient Jewish and Christian Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, New Testament, Patristic literature, and early rabbinic midrash, Kaplan shows how the Jubilee became, by the third century CE, less central in both early Judaism and Christianity. However, Proclaim Liberty demonstrates that the lasting idea of Jubilee, when viewed through a Utopian Studies framework, can productively surface new insights into the ways in which it informed religious exegesis, political activism, and reform movements throughout the medieval and modern eras.