The Light & the Dark, Volume XXX
Chapter II - part 6
DISPRIVILIGED GROUPS 10
THE JEWS 6
THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE JEWS
1. The situation of European Jewry during the eighteenth century

During the eighteenth century Europe numbered about two million Jews; half of them lived in Poland. Their situation varied from country to country, but the main difference, as Poliakov remarks and has also been mentioned in these pages, was that between Sephardim and Ashkenazim.[i] The Sephardim were a minority of about a hundred thousand people; they were the wealthiest Jews, the best integrated and assimilated. The Ashkenazim, who were the great majority, were on the whole less well off. There was, writes Poliakov, a marked difference between rich Jews and poor Jews, between autochthonous Jews and foreign, immigrant Jews, between western and eastern Jews.[ii]
The situation of Jewry in Great Britain and the Dutch Republic was satisfying, in England even more than that. In France the decrees of expulsion had never been repealed, so that the presence of Jews was illegal. Yet there were Jewish communities, leading a semi-clandestine existence. The lower clergy of Nancy, not a French city then, asked the Duke of Lorraine in 1705 why the presence of Jews was tolerated by the authorities, whereas the heretics - the Huguenots - had been so firmly expelled. They described the Jews as "the most deadly enemies of Jesus Christ, his Church and the Christian name. "Is it possible, monseigneur. that this race, cursed so visibly, banned from almost all states, finds an asylum in your state?"[iii]
As late as the Eighties of the eighteenth century Malesherbes (1721-1794), a minister of King Louis XVI, had this to state: "There still exists in the heart of the Christian majority a very strong hatred against the Jewish nation, a hate founded on the memory of the crime committed by their ancestors [Jesus' crucifixion] and corroborated by the custom of the Jews in all countries to devote themselves to commerce, which the Christians consider as their ruin."[iv] Yet the Jews had their defenders, for instance, Prince Charles de Ligne (1735-1814), a famous general, who wrote this: "The Israelites, while awaiting the impenetrable decrees of Providence for hardening on account of their ancestors' wrongdoings, should be happy and useful in this world and stop being the most villainous people on earth. I understand very well the cause of the horror inspired by the Jews, but it is time that this ends. It seems to me that a rage of eighteen hundred years is long enough."[v]
As we have seen, the Jews were expelled from many German states. Yet there were also regions and cities where they were allowed to stay and even enjoyed the protection of the public authorities, as was the casae in Prussia. Here too, however, the Christians feared their competition. Although there was a budding class of better-off Jews, the great majority of them was poor. The great flourishing of the emancipated German Jewry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with their fascinating contributions top art, science and scholarship, was still far off. Most German Jews did not have much culture.
"Do you want to have their portrait? They are always sweating because of their `running' [courir] the public places and the inns to sell there something; almost all hunch-backed, with a greasy red or black beard, a livid colour, ruined teeth, a long and curbed nose, a fearful and uncertain look, a shaking head, horrifying crisped hair, bared knees, long inward folded feet, hollow eyes, stubby chin." This masterpiece flowed from the pen of that same Prince de Ligne, who was mentioned in the previous passage. This passage could be - and was - transferred to the pages of Julius Streicher's infamous weekly Der Stürmer.[vi] There was even a general feeling that one could recognize Jews by their smell, the foetor judaicus.
In many cities of the German Empire the Jews must live in ghettoes. Since the Christians abhorred visiting them, prejudices could easily remain intact. Since non-Jews almost never got acquainted with Jews, let alone befriended them, and since most people hardly ever saw a Jew, with the exception of the occasional pedler, `the Jews' remained an anonymous collectivity, without individual traits. They were all lumped together, vilified, distrusted, misjudged, despised, but first and foremost, feared.

2. English Deists and the Jews

The eighteenth century is known as the `Age of Enlightenment', in French the siècle des lumières. May we expect that light was also shed on the situation of the Jews, that the age-old prejudices would be no match for the new insights? We shall see. An early English Deist was John Toland (1670-1722). He was a Christian, but a rational Christian. What he wanted was a Christianity without the `mysteries', which were superstition to him; his Christianity was based on the Gospels, on Jesus' message of love and humanity. Needless to say that, in his opinion, the mainline Christian Churches were not Christian at all; they had perverted Christianity. Authentic Christianity was in fact Jewish, he found; he thought to have discovered this variant in the early Christian sect of the Ebionites. These were people who felt that one could be Jew and Christian at the same time.[vii] Toland called them `Nazareans' and later `Jews'.
From there it was only a small step to consider the Jews as the true Christians, whereas those who think they are the true Christians, the gentiles, have perverted Christendom with all "the Greek and Roman superstitions, of which I [Toland] defy you to find only the slightest trace in the whole Bible." And it is because these gentiles are Christians only nominally that they hate the Jews. Remaining true to himself, Toland published a treatise in 1714, entitled Reasons for naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland, in which he pleaded for a mass immigration of continental Jews into England. We must not be suprised that this extreme philosemitism did not appeal to the English.[viii]
The reader who is now expecting a flood of philosemitic tracts is alas wrong; quite the contrary is the case. The fact that English authors virulently attacked orthodox Christianity should not deceive us: Judaism was not the alternative to them. In 1730 Matthew Tindal (1657-1733) published a treatise called Christianity as Old as Creation: or the Gospel, a republication of the religion nature. This title speaks for itself: Tindal rejected all the dogmatic tenets of the mainline Churches. The original, authentic religion of humanity was the natural one. That we do no longer have this was Moses's fault: it was he who made religion the bloodthirsty affair of which the Bible amply testifies. He praised the Gnostics who opposed the cruel Jehovah to their God of Light; theirs was the true Christian religion.[ix]
The Gnosis has the curious property of regularly popping up as an alternative to orthodox Christianity, or as the more authentic form of Christianity. Thomas Morgan (+ 1743) argued that the Gnosis contained Christ's authentic teachings. He shared with the Gnostics their hatred of Israel's God and his people. The Jewish God was no more than a war god, a tribal and tutelary god residing among his people. "Suppose that a horde of poor and despicable egyptianized slaves who, hardly delivered from their yoke, were placed under another [yoke = Mosaic Law], that a people hardly known to the rest of humanity, relegated to a corner of the earth, being prohibited from mixing with other peoples, that a people like this one, placed in circumstances of this kind, was destined by the Wisdom and the divine Council to serve as a light to the gentiles, as a means for preserving true Knowledge and Adoration of God in the world, to guide to the Veritable Religion and the road to Salvation, to suppose this amounts to admitting what we proclaim with contempt, to know, that God attempted to attain a so despicable end with the help of means that are as vicious as Moses."[x]
Another author, Thomas Woolston (1670-1733), a pastor, quoted with approval the opinion of several Roman writers that Jews are `tumultuous and stinking'. "In accordance with the proverbs and the common opinion of mankind, the world is infected by the Jews ... Their blasphemies against Christ, the maledictions they launch against his Church and their false commentaries to Scripture, suffice to make their name odious and abomimable."[xi] No, from these English Deists, who vaunted to be enlightened men, the Jews had nothing to expect.

3. France's progressive thinkers and the Jews

Let us now see whether they would be luckier with French Deists. It began very well, but not with a Deist. A French Calvinist pastor, Jacques de Barnage de Beauval,in 1710 published in the Dutch Republic a Histoire des Juifs, applying, as Poliakov writes, the rules of historical criticism to his subject. He vitiated, for instance, the legend that the Emperor Constantine the Great had the ears of the Jews cut off. Another pastor, Louis Dupin, found that this book deserved to be distributed in France, to which end he published a new edition. This edition contained more than a hundred `rearrangements'. For instance, Barnage wrote that the expulsion of the Jews from Spain had been a catastrophe for this country; Dupin, however, highly praised Ferdinand and Isabella for this. In this way Dupin hoped to make the book more palatable to the French authorities and the general public. Barnage protested, but in vain.[xii]
One of the great lights of the French Enlightenment, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), was, although he spoke of `the prejudices of this miserable people', on the whole not Jew-unfriendly. Jews were, however, not the only people with `prejudices'; those of the Christians were worse, and he vigorously combated them. The main vehicle for his opinions was his two-volumed Dictionnaire historique et critique, which appeared in 1697 in Rotterdam, where he then lived. Earlier, in 1686, he had pleaded for the Jews, but also for any other religion, even for Muslims, in the name of tolerance.[xiii]
In the previous pages we have seen that some authors went so far in their philosemitism that they wanted to be Jews rather than Christians; these `judaizers' veered to the other side. It seemed impossible to be objective with regard to Judaism and Jews. A curious instance was the marquess Jean-Baptiste d'Argens, who established himself in the Dutch Republic. Originally he was a Roman Catholic, but later he attacked all forms of organized religion. In his Lettres juives he presented two Jews as the spokesmen of his ideal; they were `philosophical Jews' who served to sustain `the deistic propaganda' of the author. These Jews believed "in a God who created the Universe and who recompenses the good and punishes the bad. What do we need to believe more?" An orthodox Jew would not have recognized himself in d'Argens' exemplary Jew.
His opinion of real Jews was quite different. Why has the Jewish people suffered so abominably in history? There must be a reason for this. "Is it possible ... that the Divinity exposes a people to such great evils, if they would not have deserved them for crimes which demand such chastizing?" Which crimes did he mean? He did not know this. But "I believe to be on firm ground, when I sustain that our authors never told us the true causes which obliged the Lord to thus abandon his people to the cruelty of their enemies."[xiv]
Montesquieu first and foremost wanted to be a reasonable man, and with regard to Jews he did not succeed badly. Nevertheless, we sometimes find the time-honoured anti-Jewish quips also in his writings. "You ask me whether there are Jews in France? Know that everywhere where is money, there are Jews."[xv]
Yet he also pleaded for tolerance. He nade a Jew speak like this. "We conjure you, not by the almighty God whom you and we serve, but by the Christ, who, as you say, assumed the human flesh to propose an example which you can follow; we conjure you to act with us as he would act himself, if he would still be on earth ... You make us die, us who do not believe what you believe, because we do not believe what you believe ... We believe that God still loves us, and you think that he does not love us any more, and because you think so, you let pass through iron and fire those who have this pardonable error of believing that God still loves those whom he once loved."[xvi]
What about Voltaire, the figure-head of French and European Enlightenment? Poliakov speaks of his `anti-Jewish phobia'.[xvii] He mentions a French historian, Henri Labroue, who composed a book entitled Voltaire anti-Juif (in the ominous year 1942), entirely based on the philosopher's writings. According to Voltaire, the morals of Theists are necessarily pure, because they always have the God of justice before them, conveniently forgetting that the Jewish religion is also theistic. He castigates the biblical Jews: "We do not rob the Egyptians; ... one will not see us selling our wives like Abraham, we do not get drunk like Noach, and our sons do not insult a respectable member that gave them birth."[xviii]
In the thirty articles written by him for Diderot's Dictionnaire he goes all-out against the Jews, "our masters and our enemies, whom we believe and whom we detest, ... the most abominable people of the earth ... whose laws do not contain a word of spirituality and of the immortality of the soul." His article Juif numbers thirty pages and is the longest of the Dictionnaire. "You will find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people, that since long joins the most sordid avarice to the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for the people who tolerate them and make them rich." He admonishes them: "You are calculating animals, attempting to be thinking animals."[xix] This is his conclusion: "One regards the Jews with the same eyes with which we see the negroes, as an inferior human sort."[xx] No, in this respect Voltaire did not live up to his reputation as the enlightened prophet of modernity, just as he also did not in his attitude regarding women.
We find in Rousseau's writings the same monotonous stereotypes: the vilest of peoples, the baseness of this people incapable of any virtue, the most vile people that perhaps ever existed. His attitude with regard the religion of the Old Testament is ambivalent. On the one hand he is full of admiration for Mosaic Law, on the other he abhors Israel's God. "If [the godhead] only taught absurdities without sense, if it inspired into us only sentiments of aversion for our fellow-beings, if it depicted to us only an angry God, jealous, vengeful, partial, hating humans, a God of war and combat, always ready to destroy and lighten, always speaking of torments and pains, vaunting that it punishes also the innocent, my heart would not be attired to this terrible God ... Your God [of the Jews] is not our God. One who begins with choosing a single people and proscribes the rest of the human race, is not the common father of mankind."[xxi] This is a revealing text, full of stereotypes and misunderstandings. This making such a distinction between the God of the Old Testament and the God of Christianity is not Christian at all; it is perfectly Gnostic.
It is not necessary to mention other authors of the French Enlightenment, like Diderot, Mirabaud, and baron d'Holbach; they were no more positive than Voltaire and Rousseau.

4. The German Aufklärung and the Jews

In the Germany of the Aufklärung the tone was milder. Several authors propagated the idea of the `good Jew'. Our thoughts now immediately swerve to Lessing's play Nathan der Weise (1779) in which he depicts a rational and sensible Jew and pleads for tolerance. Exceptionally, in this Europe of the eighteenth century, there was even a Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn (1726-1789), considered as the chief of the `philosophical party'; he too pleaded for tolerance. Although he professed to believe in God and in the immortality of the soul, he was not an orthodox Jew, but rather, as so many of his contemporaries, an adherent of a `natural religion', people who could not believe in the Fall.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), on the contrary, felt no enthusiasm at all for Jews. "Judaism is not properly a religion", was his verdict. What Moses established was a civil society, not a religion. Judaism could not claim to be a universal religion. "One might rather say that it excluded the entire human race from its communion; it regarded itself as the chosen people of Jahveh, with the result that it attracted to itself the hostility of all peoples and excited in itself the hatred towards them." And elsewhere: "The Palestinians [sic] who live among us have the highly justified reputation of being crooks, because the spirit of usury that dominates the greater part of them."[xxii] This is the old dualistic downgrading of Jewry.

5. Conclusion

The most open eighteenth-century philosophers pleaded for tolerance, but nowhere we meet sympathy, let alone empathy, for Jews and their religion. Many of these enlightened thinkers were inacapable of freeing themselves of the old hateful stereotypes. Even the most positive never come any further than `tolerance', which is quite different from acceptance.

--------------


BIBLIOGRAPHY


CONTEMPORARY WORKS


MONOGRAPHS


POLIAKOV, Léon, Histoire de l'antisémitisme. Vol.III. De Voltaire à Wagner. Paris, 1968.


NOTES


[i].. Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 17.

[ii].. Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 19.

[iii].. Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 38/39.

[iv].. Quoted by Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 42.

[v].. Quoted by Poliakov, Histoire del l'antisémitisme III, 43.

[vi].. Quoted by Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 60.

[vii].. See for the Ebionittes Vol. XII, Ch. III, § 5.

[viii].. Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 76/77.

[ix].. Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 80.

[x].. Quoted by Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 80/81.

[xi].. Quoted by Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 82.

[xii].. Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 87/88.

[xiii].. Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 89.

[xiv].. Quoted by Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 93-95.

[xv].. From the Lettres persanes LX.

[xvi].. Quoted from L'esprit des lois XXV.13 by Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 98.

[xvii].. Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 107.

[xviii].. Quoted from his Profession de foi des théistes by Poliakov. Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 104.

[xix].. Quoted from the Dictionnaire Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 107/108.

[xx].. Quoted from the Essai sur les moeurs XIII by Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 108.

[xxi].. Quoted from the Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard by Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 120/121.

[xxii].. Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme III, 196.

vol. XXX
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