SOURCE: Schechter, Robert. “Rationalizing the Enlightenment: Postmodernism and Theories of Anti-Semitism.” Historical Reflections 25, no. 2 (summer 1999): 279-306.

[In the following essay, Schechter examines the roots of anti-Semitic thought, beginning with François-Marie Voltaire in the Enlightenment and continuing into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.]

The Jews of France did not wait for postmodernism before criticizing the Enlightenment. In response to an anti-Jewish libelist who in 1786 accused the Jews of being “superstitious,” Isaiah Berr Bing of Metz defended himself and his coreligionists in a published letter:

I do not know what you call superstitious; is it to show the most inviolable attachment to a religion in which you do not dare ignore the mark of divinity? Is it to observe very scrupulously all that it prescribes? If it is in that that we appear superstitious to you, I shall willingly admit that we are, that I hope quite sincerely that we shall always be; in spite of the progress of fashionable philosophy, in spite of its aversion for the ceremonial, and for everything that it cannot, as it were, touch with its finger.¹

Yet it would be mistaken to characterize Bing as somehow against the Enlightenment. Indeed, in his pamphlet he drew liberally from the philosophes, postulated the natural equality of men and urged religious toleration. His philippic against the tendency of “fashionable philosophy” to encourage what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno would later call the “disenchantment of the world” was a rhetorical ploy designed to make his opponents appear overly abstract and cerebral. This was a prudent strategy, since Bing knew that his audience valued the piety and sincerity of the naïve believer over the intellectual dexterity of the hair-splitting rationalist. (If this statement seems doubtful, I hope to convince the reader of its veracity by the end of this essay.) Moreover, he knew that Christians tended to attribute precisely the traits he ascribed to his adversaries—a mentality of calculation and excess of reason over feeling—to the Jews themselves. Thus his apparent defiance of a dominant trend was really the expression of a widely-held set of values.

Yet historians and other retrospective observers have tended to reify the rhetorical figure of “fashionable philosophy”—conjured up as a serviceable straw man by any number of defensive eighteenth-century polemicists, not only maligned Jews—into a historical fact. They have posited an airy, abstract Enlightenment on the basis of accusations made in the heat of contestation, then ventured to determine the effect of this object on the people allegedly subjected to it. Not surprisingly, this version of the Enlightenment has come up wanting, first by conservatives advocating greater respect for “traditional” institutions and religious orthodoxy, and in the twentieth century by postmodernists who have determined that totalizing abstractions such as those attributed to the Enlightenment skew the perception of chaotic reality and violate the “right to be different.”

Not surprisingly, evaluations of the “Jewish question” during and following the eighteenth century have similarly been affected by the construction of the Enlightenment as abstract and rationalistic. Thus Arthur Hertzberg argues in The French Enlightenment and the Jews that the poison of modern anti-Semitism is a legacy of the Enlightenment. Similarly, though more radically and with greater philosophical sophistication, Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment found anti-Semitism to be paradigmatic of the Enlightenment's allegedly destructive and violent tendencies. These two books afford an opportunity to re-evaluate the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Jewish question, which in turn will permit a re-examination of the values of the Enlightenment.

Arthur Hertzberg's French Enlightenment and the Jews takes as its point of departure the chilling paradox that “[t]he era of Western history that began with the French Revolution ended in Auschwitz.”² The author's explanation of this terrible reversal was not simply that Europeans had failed to live up to the liberal Enlightenment principles of the Revolution, or that the dark forces of reaction had won them over, but that the Enlightenment itself was in some significant measure inimical to Judaism and the Jews. Thus, “Modern, secular anti-Semitism was fashioned not as a reaction to the Enlightenment and the Revolution, but within the Enlightenment and Revolution themselves.”³ Hertzberg's critique does not extend to the Enlightenment as a whole. Montesquieu is exempt because his “relativism” favored the acceptance of difference among peoples, and Hertzberg claims that “pro-Jewish” commentators in the late eighteenth-century debates on the Jews' legal status “invariably quoted from Montesquieu.”⁴

The primary culprit in Hertzberg's scheme is Voltaire, against whom the “friends of the Jews … did battle.”⁵ Hertzberg maintains that Voltaire, though often remembered as an apostle of tolerance, made an exception of the Jews, whom he denounced as “ignorant,” “barbarian,” “superstitious,” “fanatical” and asocial, insults he supposedly derived from classical authors, especially Cicero. Moreover, he argues that Voltaire, unlike “pro-Jewish” commentators, did not expect the vices typically attributed to the Jews to disappear upon an improvement in their legal condition; rather he “ruled the Jew to be outside society and to be hopelessly alien even to the future age of enlightened men.”⁶ And though Voltaire's alleged bias against Jews was the source of controversy in his own day and the subject of historiographical debate since the nineteenth century, Hertzberg has raised the stakes by claiming that Voltaire established a model of modern anti-Semitism on which future anti-Semites would draw when seeking an “enlightened” justification for their prejudices.⁷

Whatever merit there is to Hertzberg's claims about the road from Voltaire to Auschwitz could only be established by a study of postrevolutionary anti-Semitism, though even that project would be of doubtful value, since it would have to reify anti-Jewish statements made in various contexts into a “unit-idea” in the fashion of Arthur Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being.⁸ Hertzberg's failure even to attempt to show a connection between the anti-Jewish statements of eighteenth-century authors and those of later writers, however, constitutes a serious shortcoming, since it is this very thesis which distinguishes The French Enlightenment and the Jews from previous books that have posited an “enlightened” form of anti-Semitism, especially in the writings of Voltaire.⁹ More seriously still, I would submit, and will try to demonstrate later in this essay, that Hertzberg is mistaken even in his claims about the relationship between Voltaire's statements about the Jews and those of other eighteenth-century authors.

Yet before critiquing the specifics of Hertzberg's argument, it is instructive to compare his discussion to that of a more famous treatment of the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Holocaust: namely Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), by the German-Jewish philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. To be sure, Dialectic of Enlightenment was written as a work of social theory and cultural criticism rather than historiography, and its treatment of “Enlightenment” extends far beyond the historical period traditionally known as the Age of the Enlightenment. For Horkheimer and Adorno, Enlightenment is a mode of thinking characterized by “instrumental reason” rather than an historical epoch per se. It is evident wherever a capitalist mode of production is in place. Enlightenment is already present in embryonic form in Homeric times, as the ingenious “proprietor” Odysseus reveals through his mastery of nature (i.e., his ability to restrain himself in the face of the sirens' temptation) and his deception of anyone still in the thrall of a pre-representational, mythic attitude toward language (i.e., his ability to trick the blind cyclops Polyphemus by calling himself “No one.”)¹⁰ It remains in residual form as late as the era of fascism and monopoly capitalism, in other words the authors' own day, when its worst feature, domination, is all that survives, and a farcical version of liberal individualism barely conceals the eclipse of human agency, choice and responsibility.¹¹ Yet the Enlightenment as an era or a historically bounded movement, which the authors tend to designate with a definite article—die Aufklärung as opposed to Aufklärung—gets considerable attention in the Dialectic, and indeed is the period in which Enlightenment as a mode of thinking, as the “disenchantment of the world,” appears in its most unalloyed form.¹²

Moreover, Horkheimer and Adorno, like Hertzberg nearly a quarter century later, took as their central problem the paradox that the Enlightenment itself contained a virulence capable of producing the horrors of National Socialism. The authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment did not reduce the phenomenon of National Socialism to the Holocaust, and considered fascism more broadly as a force affecting all of society; yet they unequivocally regarded anti-Semitism as central to the paranoiac ideology of the Nazis, the Jews as their primary victims, and the gas chamber as the symbol of their descent into barbarism. Although Horkheimer and Adorno devoted a chapter to the subject of anti-Semitism, which they subtitled “The Limits of Enlightenment,” they hinted at the problem in their earlier chapter, “The Concept of Enlightenment.” There they argued that with the “disenchantment of the world” and the “extirpation of animism,” the Enlightenment came to reduce all particularities to instances of universal concepts. For the scientist this meant that every object had to fit into universal schemas of species and genera. For the moralist it meant that nothing was valuable—neither actions nor individuals—except insofar as it was valuable for something else, preferably a universal principle such as happiness or utility. Thus, “[f]or the Enlightenment, whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect.” The increase in the activity of commodity exchange, whose dominant principle was fungibility, fed the habit of regularization, until “equivalence itself [had] become a fetish.” As a result the Enlightenment “excise[d] the incommensurable. Not only [were] qualities dissolved in thought, but men [were] brought to actual conformity.” Social distinctions were deemed absurd, but “under the leveling domination of abstraction” individuals formed what Hegel had called a “herd.”¹³

With hindsight one can derive the implications of the Enlightenment mode of thought for the Jews. The Jews might be tolerated insofar as their presence is deemed useful—and indeed, as Hertzberg points out, the French monarchy tolerated the Jews precisely on the basis of utilitarian reasoning.¹⁴ Yet they might be expelled, or worse, should their usefulness disappear. Their difference, their incommensurability, was a problem, and the undifferentiated herd viewed them as intolerable. Yet the question remains as to why the Jews should have received so much attention—as opposed to some other “other” such as Basques or Bretons. At one point Horkheimer and Adorno suggested that the “herd's” preoccupation with the Jews was accidental, and accordingly speculated, “The fact that anti-Semitism tends to occur only as part of an interchangeable program is sure hope that it will die out one day.”¹⁵ But the bulk of their analysis in the chapter, “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” suggests the opposite: namely the historically necessary development of anti-Semitism.

From Roman times, according to this analysis, the Jews were forced into commerce, an activity which became “not their vocation but their fate,” and consequently provoked the hostility of their impoverished customers.¹⁶ Yet coexisting with this orthodox Marxian explanation—which made the Jews harbingers of modernity—was the more peculiar claim that, on the contrary, the Jews reminded moderns of the terrifying natural world from which Enlightenment had striven to liberate humanity. This “greater affinity to nature” was visible in “certain gestures and behavior patterns”—specifically flattery and entreaty—that society in the “bourgeois mode of production” wished to have “consigned to oblivion.”¹⁷

There are important differences between Hertzberg's analysis of “enlightened anti-Semitism” and that of Horkheimer and Adorno. Specifically, as Gary Kates has noted, Hertzberg's argument contains a distinctly Zionist subtext.¹⁸ By contrast, Horkheimer and Adorno maintained what Martin Jay has called an “indifference to Zionism as a solution to the plight of the Jews.”¹⁹ Moreover, in Hertzberg's account laissez-faire economists receive praise for viewing Jewish merchants as a counterforce to the restrictive trading practices of the guild system;²⁰ and “secular anti-Semitism” is identified exclusively with “the left,” both before the Revolution, when Voltaire is improbably associated with that wing, and in the nineteenth century, when the main culprits are utopian socialists and Marx.²¹ Horkheimer and Adorno, meanwhile, typically showed their Marxist colors by explaining ideas in terms of a materialist base and associating the worst type of thinking with capitalist mentalities.

Considering the differences between The French Enlightenment and the Jews and Dialectic of Enlightenment, one might question the wisdom of examining them together in an essay intended to contribute to a discussion on postmodernism. After all, postmodernism is usually associated with the left, and though Horkheimer and Adorno certainly fulfill that apparent prerequisite, Hertzberg's conservatism would seem to disqualify him, as would his Zionism, since the latter is intimately connected to the quintessentially modern project of nationalism. Moreover, Hertzberg's positivist method, which consists of finding quotations, lining them up as “pro-Jewish” or “anti-Semitic,” judging their authors accordingly and looking for the influence of ideas on thinkers, is hardly compatible with the postmodern suspicion of binary opposites, its skepticism regarding influences and coherent doctrines, and its emphasis on the relationship between language and cultural practices.

Yet if Hertzberg is not a self-conscious practitioner of postmodern scholarship, his principal theme—the destructive nature of hostility to difference—is quite compatible with the most characteristic goals of postmodernism. Jean-François Lyotard defines “postmodern knowledge” as “refin[ing] our sensitivity to differences and reinforc[ing] our ability to tolerate the incommensurable.”²² Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman argues that postmodern ethics require a respect of others “precisely in their otherness.” He writes:

One needs to honour the otherness in the other, the strangeness in the stranger, remembering—with Edmond Jabès—that ‘the unique is universal,’ that it is being different that makes us resemble each other and that I cannot respect my own difference but by respecting the difference of the other.²³

In this context, Hertzberg's story of a people condemned for their supposed inability to conform to new universal standards of rationality and accepted only insofar as they rejected what made them different (i.e., their identity) can be seen as an object lesson in the abusive effects of Enlightenment universalism. Though the question of assimilation was relevant to Jews from the late eighteenth century—when enlightened Europeans first invited them to take part in their society on their terms—it acquired a new significance in the context of postmodern concerns. Just as liberal calls for the assimilation of immigrants and absorption of regional identities into a modernizing state were being challenged by those who invoked, in post-1968 fashion, the droit à la différence, Hertzberg's book, itself published in 1968, seems to have confirmed an increasing distaste for the ethos of assimilation.²⁴ And just as postmodern feminists proclaim the need to recognize women as fundamentally different from men rather than conflating the terms “equal” and “identical,”²⁵ Hertzberg notes the damage done to Jews by those who wished to deny their specificity.

In addition to addressing postmodern concerns more generally, Hertzberg's argument resembles that of Horkheimer and Adorno in some important specifics. Both Hertzberg and the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment share the belief that it was the extreme rationalism of the Enlightenment that anti-Semites could use as a weapon against the Jews. In some cases this rationalism appears simply as the horror of and desire to eliminate difference. Thus Hertzberg sees the Jews as a problem to many philosophes and revolutionaries who mistrusted their alleged “particularism”; and Horkheimer and Adorno saw the Jews as an affront to anyone who employed abstract Verstand—the Enlightenment's favored mode of intellection—when attempting to make sense of reality. In other cases the menacing rationalism is depicted in the more mundane terms of “enlightened” thinkers denouncing the Jews as primitive. Thus Hertzberg refers to Voltaire's disparaging comments about the Jews' alleged “barbarism” and “superstition,” while Horkheimer and Adorno hypothesized an urbane aversion to the “mimetic” gestures of insufficiently civilized Jews still in the thrall of “nature.”

To what extent does this picture of the Jews in conflict with rationality correspond with eighteenth-century French texts on the “Jewish question”? There is a good deal of evidence for the first claim—that the Jews posed a problem to “enlightened” thinkers simply because they were different, particular, or “other.” Yet it must be remembered that this discomfort is precisely what made the elimination of discriminatory laws possible. For Pierre-Louis Lacretelle, the barrister who in 1775 defended two Jewish merchants excluded from setting up a store in Thionville despite a 1767 royal decree permitting nonguild members to establish retail shops, the issue was not whether a specific law had been violated. Rather, “The real question of this case” was “to determine whether Jews are men.”²⁶ Of course, the problem was purely rhetorical, since Lacretelle had no doubt that Jews were “men.” But since he implicitly believed in the natural equality of all human beings and assumed his audience shared this belief,²⁷ his point was precisely that their exclusion from equal participation in society absurdly implied that they were outside the human race. Similarly, the Comte de Mirabeau claimed that reducing Jews to the label “Jew” suggested they were nonhuman, and in arguing for equal property rights wrote, “The Jew is still more a man than he is a Jew … how could he not wish for a status in which he could become a landowner?”²⁸ Abbé Grégoire proved that the “regeneration” of the Jews was possible by noting, “[F]or a long time now it has been repeated that they are men like us, [that] they are [men] before they are Jews”²⁹; and a member of the Paris Commune countered opponents to the proposed revolutionary decree on Jewish equality by writing, “To say that the Jews are incapable of satisfying the duties of society is to sustain that the Jew is more Jew than he is man.”³⁰ Examples such as these could be multiplied, but the point is clear: the denial of Jewish specificity was a crucial strategy in the struggle for civic and political equality.

Nevertheless, the denial of difference cut both ways, and if it facilitated legal equality it simultaneously did violence to any components of Jewish identity deemed “particularistic.” In an oft-quoted statement, the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre urged his fellow deputies in the Constituent Assembly, “One must refuse the Jews everything as a nation and give them everything as individuals … they must form neither a political corporation nor an order in the state; they must be individual citizens.”³¹ Insofar as this exhortation pays homage to the individual, it appears to conform to a respect for difference. Yet it contained the hint of a threat, which Clermont-Tonnerre made explicit when he claimed that any Jews who did not wish to be citizens under the conditions laid out above should be “banished.” He said, “It is repugnant that there should be a society of noncitizens in the state and a nation within the nation.”³² This was perhaps a rhetorical concession to opponents of his proposed legislation, since he went on to assure the Assembly that Jews did indeed wish to be citizens. Yet the statement reflected a real tension in the contract between the representatives of the revolutionary state and the Jews, according to which legal equality entailed a change in habits and beliefs that deviated from some (admittedly fictional) norm, as well as the elimination of allegedly “antisocial” practices such as endogamy and dietary restrictions. In a word—assimilation. Clermont-Tonnerre himself did not believe that this assimilation had to go beyond submission to French law and the relinquishing of corporate privileges of self-governance, and asked rhetorically, “Is there a law obliging me to marry your daughter? Is there a law obliging me to eat hare, and to eat it with you?”³³ In this respect he deviated from Hertzberg's picture of revolutionaries who made “demands … on the inner spirit and religion of the Jews.”³⁴ Yet other proponents of Jewish “regeneration,” most famously Grégoire, proclaimed the need for the Jews to abandon the Talmud—which supposedly produced superstitious beliefs and an aversion to sociability—and for the state to oversee religious instruction to prevent rabbis from teaching such nonsense.³⁵ He proposed the forced re-education of Jews, their removal from miasmic ghettos to rural surroundings, where they would learn the morally salutary as well as physically healthful vocation of agriculture.³⁶

Grégoire toned down his coercive program of 1787 when the Revolution broke out and he stood a realistic chance of enacting “regenerating” legislation. In his Motion en faveur de Juifs, published between mid-October and late December 1789, he simply called for the formal abolition of the legal difference between Jews and Christians. Perhaps he reasoned that any restrictive proposals would play into the hands of those deputies opposed to all reform in the Jews' legal status. He may also have been responding to the anti-Semitic violence that had gripped Alsace in the summer and fall of 1789. Yet he did not retract his earlier Essai, and even proudly referred readers to it.³⁷ Whether or not he changed his mind about the Essai or some components of it, however, is less important than the fact that it reflected the widely-held belief that Jews would be better citizens to the extent they became more like their non-Jewish compatriots.

Even the Revolution's complete dismantling of Jewish communal autonomy, therefore, did not protect Jews from the accusation they were a “nation within the nation.” The persistence of this epithet is not surprising when one considers that it indicated less an institutional structure than an attitude of exclusiveness and even hostility which Christians repeatedly attributed to the Jews. This is what the Alsatian anti-Semite François Hell meant when in 1779 he denounced the Jews as “a nation in the nation” and a “powerful little state in a large state.”³⁸ And Napoleon evidently had something similar in mind when in 1806 he responded to accusations of persistent Jewish usury in Alsace by declaring the Jews a “nation within a nation.”³⁹ He could not have been referring to communal structures since these had been abolished with the Revolution, and indeed Napoleon himself quickly responded to the perceived problem by establishing a neocorporate system of consistories—without the legal autonomy of the ci-devant communities, to be sure—by which Jewish “notables” could enforce civic virtue.⁴⁰

If the hostility to difference was pervasive both in undisguised libels and proposals for the legal and moral “regeneration” of the Jews, as Hertzberg suggests, it was not limited to the “Jewish question.” Indeed, the very relevance of this discourse lies in its ability to reveal a larger animosity to difference which was, as Horkheimer and Adorno claimed, characteristic of the Enlightenment. Thus the tendency to regard Jews as actually or potentially a “nation within the nation” is symptomatic of a political philosophy that insists on the indivisibility of the body politic. It bears a striking resemblance to Sieyès's denunciation of the nobility as imperium in imperio, which itself evokes Rousseau's claim that sovereignty must remain undivided.⁴¹ Moreover, these taboos against particularism—with their ethical overtones aligning civic virtue with conformity and civic vice with nonconformity—constitute the moral-political version of a taboo against alterity in general. With respect to the latter prohibition, Horkheimer and Adorno claimed that “the Enlightenment recognizes as being and occurrence only what can be apprehended in unity …” And further, “To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.”⁴² In this respect, Jacobinism can be seen as merely the moralization of an epistemological principle. With it unity has been transformed from a condition of intelligibility to a moral imperative.

If the Enlightenment was inimical to the Jews insofar as they constituted an incommensurable “other,” however, the second set of claims by Hertzberg and the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment—namely that “enlightened” observers found the Jews insufficiently civilized, lacking in rationality, or overly proximate to nature—is less supportable.

For Hertzberg, Voltaire was the greatest and most influential of the “enlightened anti-Semites,” and since this claim plays such a central role in the “enlightened anti-Semitism” thesis more generally, it is worth examining in some detail. As evidence of Voltaire's anti-Semitism, Hertzberg relies almost exclusively on biblical criticism and commentary on classical history, in which the ancient Hebrews are allegedly denounced as barbaric and superstitious. Thus the Jews of Abraham's time (!) are called “a small, new, ignorant, crude people.”⁴³ Hertzberg alludes to “Voltaire's arguments against the Bible” as if Biblical criticism were identical with anti-Semitism. He goes to great lengths to find in Bayle and the English Deists “the crucial sources” of this critique without considering that indignant remarks about Saul's treachery against David or David's murder of Naboth do not constitute anti-Semitism; indeed the behavior of both kings is denounced in the Old Testament itself.⁴⁴ Elsewhere, the perfectly accurate claim that the Bible depicts God commanding the Israelites to kill idolaters is a “slur.”⁴⁵ More evidence of Voltaire's anti-Semitism is found in his distaste for the Hebrew language, which evidently showed that the ancient Israelites “had no idea of that which we call taste, delicacy, or proportion.”⁴⁶ His belief that the Jews borrowed Bible stories from Greek myths is yet another tell-tale sign of his anti-Semitism, as is his praise of Grotius for “his opinion that Alexander and Aristotle were superior to the Jews” of the fourth century B.C.⁴⁷

As to Voltaire's animosity toward contemporary Jews, Hertzberg provides a single letter, buried in the immense corpus of his correspondence, in which he wrote that the converted Jews in the English colonies were “the greatest scoundrels who have ever sullied the face of the globe.”⁴⁸ In the face of this lack of evidence, Hertzberg uses comments by other philosophes to indict Voltaire. Anti-Jewish remarks by Diderot and Holbach are unearthed, though these too were primarily directed against the ancient Jews.⁴⁹ Even so, Voltaire is judged guilty by association with a “coterie” of philosophes, which he simultaneously is presumed to have led.

Hertzberg might have made a more convincing case had he refrained from prosecuting Voltaire as a kind of anti-Jewish ringleader and simply argued that a tendency to criticize the Jewish religion as irrational was present in a number of Enlightenment thinkers. Yet even this claim would be meaningless outside the polemical context of these “anti-Semitic” statements. As Peter Gay has convincingly argued, Voltaire's criticism of Judaism and the biblical Jews served the strategic purpose of defaming the Church, his real enemy, and that he “struck at the Jews to strike at the Christians.”⁵⁰ One finds support for this position in the Dictionnaire philosophique, in which Voltaire depicted the “fanaticism,” “ignorance,” and “barbarity” of the ancient Jews, but then revealed his contemporary anticlerical agenda when he claimed that Christians “have imitated” the “cruelest and most intolerant people of all antiquity” in “their absurd furors.”⁵¹ Elsewhere, in a passage cited by Hertzberg, Voltaire insisted that the Christians were merely “uncircumcised Jews,” the heirs to a religion they held in contempt. He wrote that the Jews of Roman times “kept all their customs, which are exactly the opposite of all proper social customs; they were therefore rightly treated as a people opposed to all others, whom they served, out of greed and hatred, out of fanaticism; they made usury into a sacred duty.” Yet he went on to write a crucial addendum, “And these are our fathers.”⁵² This subtle mixture of humanism and calumny was meant to deflate a pretentious church by reminding it of its familial origins among a people it otherwise reviled and persecuted.

That Voltaire's strategy was not unique among the philosophes is evident from an examination of the writings of the baron d'Holbach, who similarly defamed the genealogy of “l'infâme” by associating it with its most celebrated adversary. Indeed, even the title of his principal work on Judaism, L'Esprit du Judaïsme, ou examen raisonné de la loi de Moyse, et de son influence sur la religion chrétienne, reveals his goal of determining the influence of the Judaism on Christianity. In this work Holbach summarized the history of the ancient Jews as the deeds of “a throng of people whom [a] healthy [sense of] morality would have us regard as monsters sullied by the most revolting cruelties and the most horrifying crimes.”⁵³ The villain of the story is Moses, a cynical tyrant who has invented a religion for the sole purpose of enriching himself and his successors. Moses takes advantage of the credulity of the Jews, “this vulgar people, still incapable of reasoning.”⁵⁴ He convinces them, through magic tricks that he learned in Egypt, of his special relationship to God. He invents the fable of Abraham and Isaac, since the barbarians he is trying to convince can only conceive of a God who demands blood sacrifices.⁵⁵ Moses and his successors the priests whip the common people into a “perpetual fanaticism” that enables them to conquer the territory of their neighbors.⁵⁶ Once established, the priests steal from the people on the pretext of requiring sacrifices for the expiation of their sins. They ally themselves with the monarchs, then attempt to usurp their authority, the result being a long and bloody series of civil wars that ends only with the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the Jews.

Throughout his narrative, Holbach makes it clear that his real enemy is the contemporary church. He treats the Jews as a dead people whose only significance lies in the lessons their history can teach contemporary Europeans.⁵⁷ Thus the priests of ancient Israel stand for the modern Catholic clergy, and the High Priest of the Temple represents the Pope. Demands for agricultural sacrifices are likened to modern tithes and indulgences.⁵⁸ The fanaticism and barbarity of the ancient Jews is seen again in the Christian people, and the conception of a bloodthirsty God that produced the barbaric story of Abraham and Isaac also explains the Christian belief in a “cannibal God” who could only redeem his sinful creatures by spilling the blood of his son.⁵⁹ Holbach sees the dangerous alliance between priests and kings reproduced in his own day, as well as the dangers of their quarrels.⁶⁰ He sees almost no meaningful difference between Judaism and Christianity. The latter is only “a reformed Judaism,” and its believers are, in language identical to that of Voltaire, merely “uncircumcised Jews.”⁶¹ The principal defect of ancient Judaism, the “spirit of priesthood,” is the defining character of Christianity.⁶² The only difference is that Christianity has done more damage. Whereas the “prophets of Judea” only caused harm to “a little corner of Asia,” “the Christian Priests have covered immense empires with corpses and blood.”⁶³

Thus Voltaire participated in a larger campaign of anticlericalism in which “anti-Semitic” statements served the purpose of condemning the Church. None of this is meant to exculpate Voltaire, a project which would be as pointless as condemning him. For what it is worth, it is likely that Voltaire, like nearly all his contemporaries, “enlightened” or not, harbored prejudices against the Jews of his day. It may also be true that Voltaire “regarded the Jewish character as a continuity from ancient times to the present,” a claim Hertzberg borrows from Hannah Emmrich's 1930 study, Das Judentum bei Voltaire.⁶⁴ That he considered Jews incapable of regeneration and “hopelessly alien even to the future age of enlightened men” is thoroughly unsubstantiated.⁶⁵

More important than Voltaire's personal feelings, as Hertzberg acknowledges, is the reception of his statements by contemporaries and posterity. As noted above, Hertzberg does not even attempt to prove his assertion that Voltaire is “the major link in Western intellectual history between the anti-Semitism of classic paganism and the modern age,” so there is little need to refute this claim.⁶⁶ As to the eighteenth-century reception of his statements, there is some support for the belief that contemporaries regarded Voltaire as hostile to Jews past and present. Thus Isaac de Pinto, taking offense to remarks in the Dictionnaire philosophique, defended the religion of his ancestors in a spirited rejoinder.⁶⁷ The Jansenist Abbé Guénée posed as a group of insulted Jews and undertook to disabuse Voltaire of his apparent misconceptions about the Jews and Judaism, clearly doing so because of outrage at what he rightly took as an attack on his own religion.⁶⁸

Yet if Jews and defenders of the Bible took offense at Voltaire's statements about them, this does not mean that anti-Semites in eighteenth-century France drew much inspiration from him. The most infamous of these Jew-baiters was François Hell, an Alsatian bailiff who in the late 1770s organized the production of forged receipts to release Christians from loans owed to Jewish lenders; he then attempted to justify his action in a pamphlet entitled Observations d'un Alsacien sur l'affaire présente des Juifs d'Alsace. Yet Hell made no mention of Voltaire in his 86-page diatribe. Untroubled by this inconvenient omission, Hertzberg writes, “Though Hell never quoted Voltaire directly, it is clear from his book that he had read with great care the anti-Jewish pronouncements of the sage of Ferney.”⁶⁹ In fact, this is not at all clear; and even if Hell had read Voltaire's writings on the Jews his own opinions were in direct opposition to them. While Voltaire saw the persecution of the Jews as evidence of a deplorable popular fanaticism, Hell saw it as the “just wrath of Heaven.”⁷⁰ Whereas Voltaire denounced the belief that Jews crucified Christian children at Passover and poisoned wells from which Christians drank as outrageous libels, Hell repeated these very accusations and used them to justify anti-Semitic violence.⁷¹ In style as well as the content of his writing Hell was the very opposite of Voltaire. Voltaire ironically mocked what he disliked; Hell was a student of sensibilité, relying on tear-jerking tropes and narratives of domestic tragedy—complete with weeping wives and children—brought on by Jewish usury. His defiant abhorrence of irony was reminiscent of Rousseau, Voltaire's rival in content and style, and he had a Rousseauian persecution complex as well. Both are evident in his prediction that his opponents, the “sectarian[s] of tolerance whose eye sees fanatics everywhere” (hardly the words of a disciple of Voltaire) and “the bel esprit who runs after brilliance”—would “pronounce an edict of proscription against me.” Yet he defiantly wrote, “Et qu'importe? I will immediately call my heart, which will absolve me.” Further along these lines, he confessed (i.e., boasted) that he was “a bit agitated by an excess of patriotism,” but added, “my sentiments are pure.” His only desire was to “unmask crime,” that is the crime of Jewish usury that forced him to take the technically illegal but morally justifiable action of forging receipts.⁷² The implications of Hell's style and the content of his claims will be considered later, but for now it is sufficient to note that Voltaire, far from being an influence or inspiration upon Hell, was on the contrary inimical to the anti-Semitic message he was trying to send.

By contrast, in 1786 the anti-Semitic libelist Latour-Foissac did refer to Voltaire when accusing the Jews of “ignorance,” “superstition” “fanaticism” and “barbarism.” Yet the bulk of his pamphlet, like that of Hell, was a sentimental tableau in which gullible yet virtuous Christians are duped by clever, evil Jews.⁷³ It thus clashed with the elitist contempt for the unlettered canaille suggested by the reference to Voltaire. Yet, aside from Latour-Foissac's reference to Voltaire, Hertzberg shows nothing else to suggest that he had any impact on any anti-Semitic authors or statements in eighteenth-century France.

This does not mean that rationalist language was never used in the discourse on the Jews and Judaism. Grégoire, for example, lamented what he saw as the Jews' “acquired ignorance, which has depraved their intellectual faculties.” He did not consider the Jews incapable of genius, and like contemporaries interested in improving their condition cited the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn as proof that they harbored the potential for intellectual greatness if given the proper conditions. Mendelssohn, moreover, was a sign that the Jews were “at least at the dawn of reason.” Grégoire nevertheless claimed that “since the historian Josephus it took seventeen centuries to produce a Mendelssohn.” In the intervening time the Jews had allegedly only borrowed ideas from their neighbors, “and what ideas!” Alchemy and cabbala were what the Jews in Grégoire's view had found most appealing. Most irrational, according to the author, was the Jews' attachment to the Talmud, “this sewer in which the deliriums of the human mind are accumulated.”⁷⁴ Similarly, Mirabeau envisaged intellectual improvement as crucial to the program of “regeneration,” and in a eulogy for Mendelssohn he opposed the philosopher to his ignorant coreligionists, especially the rabbis who “could not see without indignation that humanity and truth seemed dearer to Mendelssohn than the dark dreams of the Talmudists.”⁷⁵

Yet if commentators occasionally criticized the Jews for being insufficiently rational, persistently primitive or troublingly close to nature, the shortcomings much more often attributed to them were quite the opposite. Indeed, pace Hertzberg and the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, they were denounced as all too rational, as overly cunning and calculating and in possession of the unnatural ability to conceal their thoughts and emotions. By contrast, their “victims,” i.e., their debtors, were idealized as naïve innocents incapable of calculation, transparent in their emotional expression, but all the more virtuous for their natural simplicity. The binary opposition between the natural Christian and calculating Jew is unmistakable in the anti-Semitic pamphlets of the 1770s and 1780s. Specifically, Hell takes on the role of the simple citizen defending his compatriots from the depredations of clever Jews. As mentioned earlier, he “call[s] [his] heart” to prove his sincerity, which is apparently a rhetorical substitute for reason. This kind of cardiac language saturates his pamphlet, which he hopes will “reheat the hearts” of his compatriots, and if his “ideas [do] not appear … subtly fashioned enough or encased in a sufficiently elegant style,” they have been “dictated by a patriotic heart.”⁷⁶

The dichotomy between “citizen” and “Jew” is clearest in Hell's representation of the paradigmatic fraudulent loan. The victim of usury is “the youth, in whom reason is still weak or bewildered by the ardor of budding passions.” He “cannot foresee,” that is, cannot calculate, “the finesse of the fraud and the consequences of the commitment” to the loan.⁷⁷ In what amounts to a monetary seduction, the Jewish usurer repeatedly “offers his purse” to the “young man,” who is naturally “susceptible to debauchery” (enclin à la débauche).⁷⁸ Each time the victim “avidly bites” at the contents of the purse, and his “passions, nourished by this food, grow.” (Les passions nourries par cet aliment croissent.) “The prodigal son … returns,” and “each time well-received, he receives” more money. But each time he must offer to pay a higher rate of interest. “The passions” of the young man “are kindled, the taste of dissipation is excited and quickly consumes” him. Yet the Jew, in contrast to the picture presented by Horkheimer and Adorno of a person in the thrall of natural or “mimetic” gestures, controls himself. He “seizes the moment at which [the young man] returns, “feigns an obdurate expression,” (fait mine d'être dur) “refuses for a moment, but after prevailing upon the young man to sign IOUs the sum total of which is quadruple that of the loan, he gives in” and lends. Hell writes:

It is thus that this young man of good family, corrupted by the fire of debauchery, drinking from the perfidious cup of usury, swallows in one gulp the patrimony that he does not yet have and the dowry of the woman to whom he is not yet engaged.⁷⁹

For Hell, then, it is the “young man of good family” who is close to nature, as his uncontrollable “passions” and his penchant for corporeal satisfaction—expressed in the digestive language of biting, swallowing and tasting—makes clear. It is the calculating Jew who controls his gestures and profits from the Christian's appetites. Yet Hell asks the reader to be sympathetic to the debauched young man, whose excesses should be forgiven—as the biblical metaphor of the prodigal son suggests—and whose errors are sentimentalized through their connection to domestic tragedy.

A strikingly similar rhetorical strategy is evident in Latour-Foissac's Cri du citoyen. Here the author recalls his experiences as a young officer away from home for the first time. Writing in the third person, he describes the naïve citizen, “[j]ust out of the hands of an instructor, under whom his petulant concern for liberty sighed.” At this time “[his] open, honest and loyal heart is still in the heedlessness of a profound calm. …” Like the victim of usury in Hell's account, he is incapable of foreseeing the traps set by the calculating Jew. As soon as he arrives in the garrison town of Metz, he and his colleagues “become the object of the Synagogue's scrutiny.” The Jewish moneylenders have already determined that this is one of the “opportune moments that can make seductive and pleasant the ruinous offers they make,” presumably since the men are away from the supervision of their families and tempted to various forms of debauchery. In a revealing phrase the author claims that it is at precisely such “moments when weakened reason becomes powerless, that the Jews appear and deal their money.” The officer tries to resist the temptation, but dissimulation triumphs over naïveté, and inevitably “the transaction will be completed, to the certain ruin of the unfortunate borrower.”⁸⁰

In addition to unequivocal anti-Semites such as Hell and Latour-Foissac, those who agitated for the legal improvement in the Jews' condition similarly considered them, in their unregenerated state, to be overly calculating and thus the opposite of natural, hence virtuous, citizens. Grégoire, although capable of denouncing the irrationality of the Talmud and rabbinical teaching, much more frequently accused the Jews of harboring a cold, commercial mentality and lacking the attachment to nature that would presumably increase their level of morality. He called rabbis “casuists,” suggesting a hair-splitting rationality on their part, and claimed that “a multitude” of them “authorize … bad faith, equivocation, mental restrictions, hypocrisy.” “Is it true,” he asked, reserving judgment on the answer, “that, according to the Talmud, a Jew must … wish [a Christian] a bon voyage while adding, under his breath, ‘like that of Pharaoh in the sea … ?’”⁸¹ Thus he attributed a kind of duplicitous irony to Jews that would be seen as “aristocratic” during the Revolution. That irony, absent from the unambiguous, straightforward citizen, was a sign of the corruption of civilization, not a proximity to primitive “nature.” Indeed, in his claim that Jews were not to blame for their decadent morality, Grégoire opposed them to the “peaceable Tahitians” presumed to be superior in morality not only to Jews, but to Europeans in general. He proposed a thought experiment: “bring [the Tahitians] on the scene … forbid them all means of subsistence except a retail commerce whose gains are precarious and small, sometimes nonexistent when agility and activity do not suffice to support imperious and ever reappearing needs,” and “soon they will call to their aid cunning and trickery.”⁸² “Cunning and trickery,” then, were absent from the moral economy of the noble savage; they were conditions that only obtained in a civilized, capitalist economy.

On those few occasions when Grégoire praised the Jews of his day, moreover, he did not praise their rationality, but their “natural” virtues. He noted that certain vices of civilization, such as drinking, libertinage, pornography and adultery, were not common among Jews. They were frugal, charitable to their poor and respectful of their elders, and Grégoire noted with Rousseauian approval that Jewish mothers breast-fed their children.⁸³ In other words, he praised their simple, natural affections, and hoped that someday these would not be limited to their domestic relations, but would extend toward their relations with Christians. Thus it was possible for him to predict that with regeneration they “would acquire sociability, sentiments, virtues, without losing the antique simplicity of their morals.”⁸⁴ For that transformation to take place, the Jews would have to abandon the decadent occupation of commerce and return to the pastoral existence that Grégoire believed they had led in Biblical times. At that time, Grégoire prophesied:

The rustic tasks will then call the Hebrew to our fields, once watered by the blood of his forefathers, and which at that time will be watered by his sweat; he will leave his manor to breathe the pure air of the hills: soon stimulated by interest, his once-soft arms will be strengthened by exercise, and this physical improvement will bring moral improvement too, for the first of arts is also the first in virtue.⁸⁵

Grégoire also considered traditional crafts as regenerative work, but his main requirements were that the work be simple, traditional and, in keeping with physiocratic doctrine, productive.

Mirabeau similarly conceived of Jewish vice and the possibilities of regeneration in terms of an opposition between decadent commerce and virtuous work, especially agriculture. He had apparently inherited anti-commercial ideas from his father, one of the founders of physiocracy, and disparaged trade not only as economically sterile, but morally degrading as well. He idealized the farmer, writing, “The simple morals of the countryside, the regular diligence that [the farmers'] work requires, preserve his innocence and hospitable morality.”⁸⁶ The merchant, by contrast, had “different habits, different principles, a completely different spirit.” In a kind of psychopathology of commerce he wrote:

Continually occupied with making a profit, avoiding losses, fighting foreign interests, consulting, provoking, tampering with his fortune, [the merchant] is incessantly agitated by restless activity. … The habit of seeing everything from the point of view of gain must naturally tighten his feelings; temptations are too frequent; overpricing is too hard to distinguish from taking prudent advantage of circumstances. The merchant, even an honest one, might eventually deceive himself and take the one for the other. He always stands to lose or gain in his relations with other men; insensibly he accustoms himself to regarding them as adversaries or rivals; his soul contracts, his sensitivity is deadened, sordid interest or ostentatious luxury too often take its place.⁸⁷

If the ordinary merchant was subjected to such assaults on his morality, Mirabeau argued, then a fortiori the Jew, who saw nothing but contempt from his Christian neighbors, would be even less inclined to act honestly. It was not about the Jew's rationality that Mirabeau expressed concern, but his “sensitivity,” which would be “deadened” by the effects of incessant calculation. His intellect operated effectively, even too effectively; it was his “feelings” that were “tighten[ed]” and his “soul” which was “contract[ed].”

.....

The texts on the Jewish question in eighteenth-century France call for a re-evaluation of the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Jews. If Enlightenment rationality made it difficult to accept the Jews as an incommensurable other, rationality as a value in and of itself was rarely invoked in evaluations of the Jews and their level of morality. On the contrary, the Jews tended to receive praise insofar as they appeared “natural” and “sensitive” and criticism insofar as observers judged them to be calculating and clever. In the latter case they were typically opposed to an ideal Christian “citizen,” either a peasant or a soldier, who embodied the qualities necessary for civic virtue: visible, affective (yet unaffected) intensity and proximity to nature.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this re-evaluation of “enlightened anti-Semitism,” as it sheds light on the much larger question of just what the values of the Enlightenment were. Indeed, if Hertzberg and the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment were mistaken about the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Jews, it is because they were mistaken about the respective value the Enlightenment placed on reason and “nature,” rationality and sensitivity, or (to borrow a dichotomy from Jane Austen) Sense and Sensibility.

This is a very large claim, one that the eighteenth-century French literature on the Jewish question alone cannot prove. Yet other tendencies in eighteenth-century thought tend to corroborate the hypothesis that the Enlightenment placed a greater value on the senses and the emotions than is typically assumed. The most obvious piece of evidence in this respect is the corpus of sentimental literature that flourished in eighteenth-century Europe. Tear-jerking authors, from Richardson to Rousseau to Goethe, aimed not at the head but the heart, as did genre painters such as Greuze, upon whom Diderot famously lavished praise.⁸⁸ The valorization of sensation was not limited to art and novels. It was crucial to the century's most favored epistemology, known significantly as sensationalism. From Locke to Condillac to Hume, theorists of knowledge rejected the rationalism of Descartes in favor of a system in which feeling preceded both knowing and thinking. Even Kant's greatest work was, revealingly, A Critique of Pure Reason, a book that rejected the “dogmatic” belief that the Understanding alone could know the thing-in-itself.

In the philosophical subfield of ethics, sensation was again indispensable. Not only was “un coeur sensible … the precondition for morality.”⁸⁹ In Hume's philosophy ethics derived from sensation, and in the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie d'Alembert argued that it was the prior sensation of injustice, either direct or indirect, that made knowledge of right and wrong possible.⁹⁰ To be sure, Kant had hoped to derive an ethics from rationality alone, i.e., from a priori principles without the aid of experience, and Horkheimer and Adorno made much of his failure to do so. They argued devastatingly that the autonomous individual postulated in the categorical imperative could just as easily (and justifiably) behave like a character invented by the Marquis de Sade as a restrained moralist such as Kant himself.⁹¹ The failure itself is nevertheless indicative—as is Kant's desperate recourse to “practical reason”—of the Enlightenment's prior success (with Kant's help) at lowering philosophical expectations about the power of unaided reason. Sade's pornographic burlesque of philosophy, moreover, is itself evidence that the mind was not the summa for Enlightenment thinkers.

Horkheimer and Adorno used Sade as evidence that the Enlightenment had rationalized (in both senses of the word) vice and crime, but did not appreciate the implications of just what kind of vice and crime was being rationalized. The single-minded determination with which Sade's characters attempt to reduce sexual activity to a dispassionate, mechanical activity reveals the dangerous power the author attributed to the senses, which needed to be dominated if they were not to dominate their subjects. In a less overtly sexual way, the moral and political philosophers of the eighteenth century problematized the human will as a set of drives that conflicted with those of fellow human beings in civil society. Thus Kant, in his categorical imperative, wished to rationalize the will by requiring it to be fairly and feasibly universalized, and Rousseau, in his Social Contract, sought to domesticate it by making it conform to the consent of public-spirited citizens. In both cases the will was potentially dangerous—though elsewhere in Rousseau's writings strong desires are themselves evidence of virtue. But by recognizing that danger Kant and Rousseau, like Sade, showed their belief in the power of a force, the senses, which could with only great difficulty be governed by reason.

Even the Rousseauian-Jacobin fear of “particularism,” which translated into a contempt for dissenting individuals and Jewish or noble “nations within the nation,” can be seen as a kind of irrationalist organicism. Although Horkheimer and Adorno attributed the Enlightenment disdain for the incommensurable to its fetishistic need to “reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one,”⁹² when seen in the context of nascent nationalism this tendency appears to confirm Durkheim's claim that Rousseau (as well as Montesquieu) viewed society as an organism, as having a living identity irreducible to the sum of its parts.⁹³ Thus Rousseau, Sieyès and the republican nationalists of the revolutionary era were closer to animism than they were to the preferred rationalist physics of mechanism.

Of course, it would be wrong to deny that rationalism and the ethos of rationality played significant roles in the Enlightenment. Certainly philosophes were capable of singing reason's praises, and the desire of thinkers to understand both the natural and human world in terms of predictable laws is undeniable—though again it should be emphasized that these laws, according to empirical epistemology and the scientific method, could not be derived without the data of experience, and ultimately of the senses. But even this modified rationalism competed with a valorization of the senses as vehicles of knowledge, both physical and moral, and indeed as guarantors of ethically correct behavior. The tension between reason and sensation, the mind and the body, the head and the heart provided the stuff of philosophical speculation as well as imaginative literature throughout the century, as is evident in Hume, Rousseau, Kant and Sade. It is perhaps here, at the intersection of thinking and feeling, rather than the crossroads of myth and disenchantment, that one should locate the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Yet what explains the error made by Hertzberg and the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment? To be fair, it is an old mistake which does not belong to them alone. For more than two centuries critics have conjured up a largely fictitious image of a cold, dispassionate, bloodless Enlightenment. This essay began with a description of how Isaiah Berr Bing exaggerated the rationalist, materialist tendencies of “fashionable philosophy” for polemical purposes. Those who opposed the French Revolution—which had sought its justifying heritage in the philosophy of the eighteenth century—would have other reasons for presenting the Enlightenment as the apotheosis of rationalism.

For example, Edmund Burke was an heir to Enlightenment empiricism, which he consecrated in his paeans to human experience. His reluctance to alter established institutions, though later consecrated “conservative,” does not mean that he was anti-Enlightenment, since the Enlightenment thinkers were themselves, as empiricists, respectful of human experience and reluctant to change institutions on the basis of abstract models. Thus Burke's defiant acclaim for the “prejudices” of peoples was not so different from Montesquieu's reverence for the “genius of the nation” and his caution with respect to altering institutions.⁹⁴ Yet the Revolution's appropriation of the philosophes made it desirable for Burke, as an opponent of the revolutionary program, to distance himself from the Enlightenment Pantheon. Thus he criticized the revolutionaries as abstract system builders and “metaphysicians,” though it should not be forgotten that this was precisely the language that Voltaire had used to deride his adversaries.⁹⁵

Similarly, Hegel viewed the Enlightenment through the prism of the Revolution, which for him took the form of Napoleon and the battle of Jena. He too critiqued the Enlightenment as an abstract, “gaseous” movement that fetishized the universal and ignored the particular.⁹⁶ This analysis, on which Horkheimer and Adorno would later rely and which conforms to Lyotard's and Bauman's conceptions of postmodernism as discussed earlier, bears more than a little resemblance to that of Burke, especially insofar as it justified Hegel's reputedly conservative call for the preservation of established institutions, however irrational.

Thus an overly rationalized, insufficiently sensitized Enlightenment was fabricated by Enlightenment thinkers themselves, for polemical and political reasons, then bequeathed to historians and philosophers as an object for evaluation. Some would reject it, others would embrace it, merely placing a positive spin on its fabled rationalism.⁹⁷ But in the process of judging the Enlightenment they would forget the extent to which it valued sensation, emotions and displayed an arational or even irrational reverence for nature, both in its order and its chaos.

Notes

1. Lettre du Sr.I[saïah] B[err] B[ing], Juif de Metz, à l'auteur anonyme d'un écrit intitulé: Le Cri du citoyen contre les Juifs (Metz, 1787), pp. 29-30; repr. in Révolution française et l'émancipation des Juifs (Paris: EdHis, 1968), vol. 8. Cf. Ronald Schechter, “Translating the ‘Marseillaise’: Biblical Republicanism and the Emancipation of Jews in Revolutionary France,” Past and Present 143 (May 1994): 131.

2. Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York, 1968), p. 5.

3. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, p. 7.

4. Ibid., p. 10.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. On Voltaire's relationship to the Jews and Judaism see Heinrich Graetz, “Voltaire und die Juden,” Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums XVI (1867): 321-30; Herbert Solow, “Voltaire and Some Jews,” Menorah Journal XIII (1927): 186-97; Hanna Emmrich, Das Judentum bei Voltaire (Breslau, 1930); Pierre Aubery, “Voltaire et les Juifs,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century XXIV (1963): 67-79; and Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York, 1964), pp. 97-108.

8. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA, 1936 and 1964), pp. 3-23. For a powerful critique of Lovejoy's approach see Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969): 3-53.

9. See note 8 above.

10. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1972), pp. 43-80.

11. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, passim.

12. Ibid., p. 3.

13. Ibid., pp. 6, 12-13, 17.

14. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 12-28, 64-71 passim.

15. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. 207. Elsewhere they wrote that “victims [of persecution] are interchangeable according to circumstances—gypsies, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, and so on. …” Dialectic, p. 171.

16. Ibid., pp. 174-5.

17. Ibid., pp. 112, 181-2.

18. Gary Kates, “Jews into Frenchmen: Nationality and Representation in Revolutionary France” in Ferenc Fehér, ed., The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 103-16. Hertzberg reveals his sympathies when he writes that the Zionist founders Leo Pinsker and Theodor Herzl “both independently recognized that modern anti-Semitism was … a new, secular, and continuing phenomenon.” By implication, only a coherent and self-conscious Jewish nation, or nation-state, could protect the Jews from the hatred of non-Jews. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, p. 5. Emphasis added.

19. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston and Toronto, 1973), p. 32.

20. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 12-28, 64-71 passim.

21. Ibid., pp. 10-11, 357.

22. Jean-François Lyotard, “Excerpts from The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge” in Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon, eds., A Postmodern Reader (Albany, 1993), p. 73.

23. Zygmunt Bauman, “Postmodernity, or Living with Ambivalence” in Natoli and Hutcheon, Postmodern Reader, p. 14.

24. On the assertion of the “right to be different” among Jews and regional minorities in post-1968 France, see Judith Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France since 1968 (New Haven, 1990), p. 38-64.

25. On the division of feminists between advocates of “sameness” and “difference” see Carol Lee Bacchi, Same Difference: Feminism and Sexual Difference (Sydney, 1990).

26. “LVIIIe cause. Question d'état sur les Juifs de Metz,” Causes célèbres, curieuses et intéressantes, de toutes les cours souveraines du royaume, avec les jugemens qui les ont décidées, vol. 23 (Paris, 1776), p. 65. Published separately as Plaidoyer pour Moyse May, Godechaux et Abraham Lévy, Juifs de Metz. Contre l'hôtel-de-ville de Thionville et le Corps des Marchands de cette ville (Bruxelles, 1775). On Lacretelle see David A. Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (New York, 1994), pp. 164-67, 175-80.

27. The “audience” did not merely include the court, but the reading public for whom legal briefs such as Lacretelle's were extraordinarily popular. On this phenomenon see Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, 1993).

28. Honoré Gabriel de Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, Sur Moses Mendelssohn, sur la réforme politique des Juifs: et en particulier sur la révolution tentée en leur faveur en 1753 dans la grande Bretagne (London, 1787), p. 66, repr. in Révolution française et l'émancipation des Juifs (Paris, 1968), vol. 1.

29. Abbé Henri Grégoire, Essai sur la régénération physique, morale et politique des Juifs (Paris, 1789), p. 118, repr. in Révolution française et l'émancipation des Juifs (Paris, 1968), vol. 3.

30. [Jean Debourge], Lettre au comité de constitution sur l'affaire des Juifs; par M. de Bourge, représentant de la commune de Paris (Paris, 1790), p. 31.

31. Opinion de M. le comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, député de Paris. Le 23 décembre 1789 (Paris, 1789), p. 13. Cf. Archives parlementaires, vol. 10, pp. 754-56.

32. Opinion de M. le comte, p. 13.

33. Opinion de M. le comte, p. 12.

34. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, p. 364.

35. Grégoire, Essai, p. 87.

36. Ibid., p. 124.

37. Motion en faveur des Juifs, par M. Grégoire, curé d'Embermenil, député de Nancy; précédée d'une notice historique, sur les persécutions qu'ils viennent d'essuyer en divers lieux, notamment en Alsace, et sur l'admission de leurs députés à la barre de l'Assemblée nationale (Paris, 1789), repr. in Révolution française et l'émancipation des Juifs (Paris, 1968), vol. 7.

38. François Hell, Observations d'un Alsacien sur l'affaire présente des Juifs d'Alsace (Frankfurt, 1779), p. 66.

39. Simon Schwarzfuchs, Napoleon, the Jews, and the Sanhedrin (London, 1979), p. 49.

40. On the Jewish consistories in France see Phyllis Cohen Albert, The Modernization of French Jewry: Consistory and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Hanover, N.H., 1977).

41. Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Qu'est-ce que le tiers-état? (1789; reprint Paris: Société de l'Histoire de la Révolution Française, 1888), p. 31. Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, book II, ch. 2.

42. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. 7

43. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, p. 303.

44. Ibid., p. 39, 39n.

45. Ibid., p. 304.

46. Ibid., p. 301.

47. Ibid., p. 303.

48. Ibid., p. 284.

49. Ibid., pp. 281-82, 308-12.

50. Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York, 1964), p. 103.

51. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; reprint Paris, 1954), p. 402.

52. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, pp. 302-3.

53. Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach, L'Esprit du Judaïsme, ou examen raisonné de la loi de Moyse, et de son influence sur la religion chrétienne (London [i.e. Amsterdam], 1770), pp. viii, ix.

54. Ibid., p. xiv.

55. Ibid., pp. 7-8.

56. Ibid., p. xv.

57. Though he mentions the modern Jews and even professes sympathy for their suffering, Holbach revealingly entitles his penultimate chapter, “The conduct and fate of the Jews from their captivity to their total destruction.” This conceit is necessary for him to predict that Christianity will ultimately be destroyed as well.

58. Holbach, L'Esprit du Judaïsme, pp. 49-65.

59. Ibid, pp. xxi-xxii, 7-8, 176.

60. Ibid., pp. xv, 96.

61. Ibid., pp. i, 182.

62. Ibid., p. 56.

63. Ibid., p. 97.

64. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, p. 300. Cf. Hannah Emmrich, Das Judentum bei Voltaire (Breslau, 1930).

65. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, p. 10.

66. Ibid.

67. [Isaac de Pinto], Apologie pour la nation juive, où réflexions critiques sur le premier chapitre du VIIe tome des oeuvres de M. de Voltaire au sujet des Juifs. Par l'auteur de “l'Essai sur le luxe” (Amsterdam, 1762).

68. Abbé Antoine Guenée, Lettres de quelques Juifs portugais et allemands à M. de Voltaire: avec des réflexions critiques, & c: et un petit commentaire extrait d'un plus grand (Paris, 1769).

69. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment, p. 288.

70. Hell, Observations, p. 11.

71. Ibid., pp. 11-18. For Voltaire's denunciation of medieval anti-Jewish fanaticism and false beliefs regarding alleged ritual crimes, see Essai sur l'histoire générale (Geneva, 1756), 343; and “Le philosophe ignorant” in J. Van Den Heuvel, Ed., Mélanges (Paris, 1961), p. 929.

72. Hell, Observations, pp. 3-4. On Rousseau's preoccupation with “unmasking,” see Jean Starobinski, J.-J. Rousseau: la transparence et l'obstacle (Paris, 1971), esp. pp. 84-101.

73. [Philippe-François de Latour-Foissac], Le Cri du citoyen contre les Juifs de Metz. Par un capitaine d'infanterie (Lausanne [Metz], 1786).

74. Grégoire, Essai, pp. 87, 116, 161-3.

75. Mirabeau, Sur Moses Mendelssohn, p. 28.

76. Hell, Observations, pp. 3-4.

77. Ibid., p. 40.

78. Whether “susceptible to debauchery” means desiring the sex money will presumably buy or defenseless in the face of the Jew's monetary debauchery of the young man is (perhaps deliberately) ambiguous.

79. Hell, Observations, pp. 40-1.

80. Latour-Foissac, Cri du citoyen, pp. 5-24. Emphasis added.

81. Grégoire, Essai, pp. 87-8.

82. Ibid., p. 67.

83. Ibid., pp. 65-7, 80-1.

84. Ibid., p. 139.

85. Ibid., p. 124. Cf. Schechter, “Translating the ‘Marseillaise,’” p. 121.

86. Mirabeau, Sur Moses Mendelssohn, p. 86.

87. Ibid., p. 87.

88. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989), pp. 145-62; and Anita Brookner, Greuze: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon (Greenwich, CT, 1972).

89. Schama, Citizens, p. 149.

90. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (London, 1751), esp. section 1; and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. and intro. Richard N. Schwab (Chicago, 1995), pp. 12-13.

91. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, pp. 81-119.

92. Ibid., p. 7.

93. Emile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology, trans. Ralph Manheim, foreword Henri Peyre (Ann Arbor, 1960).

94. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790). Cf. Montesquieu, De l'esprit des loix, esp. pt. 6, bk. 31, ch. 4.

95. Burke, Reflections, passim. I have found 25 variations on the term “metaphysics” and 15 on “abstract,” all of them pejorative, in the Reflections.

96. Hegel, Phenomenology, §488-595. On the “gaseous” nature of Enlightenment religion see §586. Similarly, Burke referred to the “spirit of liberty” as a “wild gas.” Reflections, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 90.

97. Most recently, Jürgen Habermas has praised the Enlightenment as a period during which rational individuals could discuss issues dispassionately in the “political public sphere,” and lamented the replacement of this golden age by a late-capitalist culture of public opinion management. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1991).