THIS IS GENERATING SOME DISCUSSION:

Protests after Israeli minister signals shift toward theocracy

Published Date: 09 December 2009
By Ben Lynfield in Jerusalem (The Scotsman)

ISRAEL'S justice minister has touched off a storm of controversy by suggesting that he would like to see the country evolve into a theocracy based on Jewish religious law.

Minister Ya'acov Neeman, an observant Jew, told a conference of rabbis and religious court judges late on Monday that holy texts contain "a complete solution to all the things we are dealing with".

He said that the past standing of Jewish religious law "needs to be restored so that the law of the Torah will become the binding law of the land". The Torah can mean parts of the Old Testament but it also sometimes includes the Talmud, a delineation of Jewish laws dating to the second and third centuries and subsequent rabbinic opinions.

Mr Neeman praised the work of rabbinical courts that gain jurisdiction by mutual consent in solving financial disputes. He said they are "a worthy way of inculcating the Torah's laws step by step".

[...]

If the quotes are accurate and in context, they are bound to offend a large part of the Israeli population. Minister Neeman and others are already back-pedaling away from the "theocracy" characterization, but the damage seems to be done. Calls for his resignation are noted in the Jerusalem Post. The same publication suggests mildly that "[i]f our justice minister wants to think out loud, he should do so in the privacy of his own home." Yossi Sand in Haaretz takes a rather firmer line: "And if such shameful words uttered by the justice minister do not cause him to resign and to sit at home, or at a private law firm, then some evil is bound to befall us; for we have become like Iran of the ayatollahs, like Afghanistan of the Taliban, and Sodom is no longer so bad." The Taliban are being invoked by others as well - see first Jerusalem Post link above.

By the way, regarding the Scotsman article, although both Talmuds may contain Tannaitic (i.e., second and third-century) material in their Gemaras, their more-or-less final editing came well after this, the Yerushalmi in the early fifth century and the Bavli in the sixth century or later.