Judaism in the Anti-Religious Thought of the Clandestine FrenchEarly Enlightenment

Sutcliffe, Adam.

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 64, Number 1, January2003, pp. 97-117 (Article)

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Judaism in the Anti-Religious

Thought of the Clandestine

French Early Enlightenment

Adam Sutcliffe

Judaic themes recurred frequently and in many forms in the debates of the

European Enlightenment.1 As has been noted by scholars such as Richard Popkin

and Silvia Berti, Jewish anti-Christian arguments were a notable early source

of irreligious critiques of Christianity. These attacks, penned mostly by seven-

teenth-century Sephardic rabbis and polemicists in Amsterdam to fortify the

Jewish commitment and pride of their own communities, percolated into French

and English non-Jewish radical circles by the second decade of the eighteenth

century, within which they were highly valued as intriguingly subversive curi-

osities.2 More typically, however, Judaism was during this period itself the tar-

get of irreligious polemic. Voltaire’s repeated assaults on the alleged barbar-

ism, arrogance, and immorality of the Jews are by far the most notorious in-

stance, but this was neither an isolated nor an original case. The French clan-

destine philosophical literature of the early eighteenth century, which in many

respects anticipated the arguments of the High Enlightenment, also foreshad-

owed and may well have influenced the anti-Judaic rhetoric of Voltaire and

d’Holbach. In several of these manuscript texts Jewish traditionalism and

textuality is cast as the defining polar opposite of enlightened rationalism. How-

ever, it was within this same philosophical underground that Jewish anti-Chris-

tian arguments circulated widely and were enthusiastically appropriated. The

status of Judaism in this formative intellectual milieu was thus strikingly am-

biguous and unstable. An examination of the representation of Judaism in these

97

Copyright 2003 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.

1 See Frank Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, Mass.,

1992); Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York, 1968); and Adam

Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2003).2 Silvia Berti, “At the Roots of Unbelief,” JHI, 56 (1995), 555-75; Richard H. Popkin,

“Jewish Anti-Christian Arguments as a Source of Irreligion from the Seventeenth to the Early

Nineteenth Century,” in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter

and David Wootton (Oxford, 1992), 159-81.

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98 Adam Sutcliffe

clandestine manuscripts offers a unique insight into the intricate dynamics of

fascination and hostility that characterized attitudes towards Jewish difference

in this key chapter of the emergence of the Enlightenment.

Divine Accommodation and Philosophical Polemics

Medieval biblical exegesis, both Jewish and Christian, was underpinned

by the hermeneutic principle of accommodation: the notion that “Scripture

speaks the language of man.” According to Amos Funkenstein, this principle

has deep roots within Judaism. It occurs in the Talmud in a legal context and

was later extended by medieval rationalist rabbis to justify the allegorical in-

terpretation of Scripture.3 Christian theologians also made extensive use of this

notion to account for apparent discrepancies between biblical cosmology and

the medieval worldview. The language of Scripture was couched in metaphor

and allegory, they argued, in order to accord with the limited intellectual capa-

bilities of its original audience. This understanding of the relationship between

world and text was destabilized by the impact of Cartesianism. From the 1640s

onwards Dutch academic Cartesians, particularly at Leiden and Utrecht, in-

voked the principle of accommodation in justification of the independence of

philosophy from theology. Cartesian scientists such as Henricus Regius, theo-

logians such as Abraham Heidanus, and polymaths such as Lambert van

Velthuysen argued that because the Bible accommodated in scientific matters

to the level of popular understanding it provided only moral and not math-

ematical certainty. These arguments, loosely aligned with the interpretively

progressive theology of Johannes Cocceius (1603-69), provoked an intense

reaction from the literalist Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676), and led to prolonged

battles between Cocceian and Voetian camps up to the end of the century and

beyond.4

After an initial period of bitter conflict, a fragile truce between philosophy

and theology was established in Dutch universities in the early 1650s. This

uneasy peace soon however came under strain, and was dramatically challenged

by Spinoza’s extension of the idea of accommodation into the ethical domain.

In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) Spinoza distinguished between

the simple, accommodated pathway to salvation offered by Scripture and the

higher ethical insights of philosophy, accessible only to an élite:

3 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to theSeventeenth Century (Princeton, 1986), 213-39.

4 Wiep van Bunge, “Balthasar Bekker’s Cartesian Hermeneutics and the Challenge of

Spinozism,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 1 (1993), 55-79, 63-66; Jonathan

Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806 (Oxford, 1995), 889-99,

and Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford, 2001),

23-29.

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99Judaism in Anti-Religious Thought of the Enlightenment

All are able to obey, whereas there are but very few, compared with the

aggregate of humanity, who can acquire the habit of virtue under the

unaided guidance of reason.5

With this argument Spinoza radically secularized the principle of accommoda-

tion. For Spinoza, the Old Testament is a text that in every respect, morally as

well as mathematically, reflects the conceptual limits and weaknesses of the

primitive ancient Hebrews. He implicitly divests Scripture of any universal

ethical significance, treating it simply as a secular record of early Jewish his-

tory. While this step is most notable as a logical completion of the separation of

hermeneutics and ethics, it also introduced a new problematic into the relation-

ship between Judaism and philosophy. If the moral limitations of the Old Tes-

tament were due to the shortcomings of the Ancient Jews, then this group could

readily appear as in some sense responsible for ambiguity of Scripture, and for

all the lamentable historical consequences this has caused. This argument was

never starkly enunciated and was in no sense Spinoza’s own position. How-

ever, as from 1670 onwards anti-religious arguments grew increasingly bold,

they were also increasingly often imbued with an anti-Judaic tinge.

After the publication of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the outcry

that it provoked, Dutch scholars handled the notion of accommodation much

more cautiously, but for Cocceio-Cartesian exegetes who sought to protect the

project of the rationalization of Scripture, the concept remained indispensable.6

Although writers such as Lambert van Velthuysen and Christopher Wittich took

pains to distinguish between what they regarded as the correct theological ap-

plication of Cartesian principles and the heresy of Spinozism,7 no self-evi-

dently watertight division could be drawn between these two approaches. The

tensions inherent in this philosophical debate exploded to the fore in the bitter

controversy provoked by the publication of Balthasar Bekker’s De BetoverdeWeereld (The World Bewitched) (1691), which attempted to demonstrate from

a Cartesian perspective that angels and demons did not intervene in human

affairs. The intensity of this dispute highlighted the difficulty of demarcating a

secure boundary between Cartesianism and Spinozism—a problem that led to

the almost unanimous repudiation of Bekker’s views by his fellow Cartesians.8

5 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, tr. R. H. M. Elwes (New York, 1951 [1670]),

199.6 Van Bunge, “Bekker’s Hermeneutics,” 68.7 See Christopher Wittich, Anti-Spinoza (Amsterdam, 1690); Wiep van Bunge, “Van

Velthuysen, Batelier and Bredenburg on Spinoza’s Interpretation of the Scriptures,” The SpinozisticHeresy , ed. Paolo Cristofolini (Amsterdam, 1995), 49-65.

8 Jonathan Israel, “The Bekker Controversies as a Turning Point in the History of Dutch

Culture and Thought,” Dutch Crossing, 20 (1996), 5-21, 8-9, and Radical Enlightenment, 375-

405.

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100 Adam Sutcliffe

Bekker was careful to distinguish his own view of Scripture from that of

Spinoza. In setting out a list of his exegetical rules, he explicitly established as

fundamental the divinely revealed status of the Bible.9 He also insisted on the

non-superstitious purity of biblical Hebrew. Misunderstandings and distortions

of Scripture, he argued, had been caused by inaccurate translation: the Hebrew

word malachim, for example, should be translated as “messengers” rather than

“angels” and in the Bible almost invariably refers straightforwardly to humans

and not to spirits.10 However, while preserving an idealized view of the Hebrew

Bible and of originary Judaism, Bekker’s argument was based on a primitivist

view of the Jews themselves. Like Spinoza, he explains the ubiquity of super-

natural occurrences in the Old Testament as due to God’s accommodation to

the Jews’ particular ignorance and superstition. Bekker’s attitude to Judaism is

thus ambivalent: he simultaneously represents the Jews as uniquely intimate

with divine truth and as irredeemably distant from it.

Despite his protestations, similarities between Bekker’s arguments and those

of Spinoza were noted by several critics, whose observations could not easily

be brushed away.11 As Wiep van Bunge has demonstrated, Bekker’s attempt to

integrate a commitment to absolute biblical truth with a rigorous Cartesian

dualism led him to some extremely contorted argumentative gymnastics, par-

ticularly in accounting for such crucial scriptural episodes as the Fall.12 Ulti-

mately, Bekker failed to offer a fully convincing integration of the supremacy

of reason and the authority of Scripture. The concealed limitations of his argu-

ment are most clearly apparent in the confusion that emerges in his treatment

of Judaism. Bekker both privileges the Jews as the original recipients of the

revealed truths of pure monotheism and implicitly blames them for the opacity

of this message in the Bible: it was owing to their taste for superstition that it

had been necessary to introduce misleading references to angels and demons

into Scripture. Reason and revelation blatantly strain against each other in this

simultaneous idealization and denigration of the Old Testament Jews.

A central current of radical religious thought in the late seventeenth cen-

tury was the loosening of the relationship between personal faith and religious

confession. The philosophical analysis of religion by Bekker and others was

closely related to this process, in that it put increasing emphasis on the indi-

vidual scrutiny of belief, in opposition to the unquestioning acceptance of priestly

edicts. In this movement towards the personalization of faith the Jews stood

out as the contrasting pole of religious organization. In opposition to the Prot-

estant emphasis on personal conscience Judaism represented an extremely tight

9 Balthasar Bekker, Le Monde Enchanté (2 vols., Amsterdam, 1694), II, 283.10 Ibid., II, 119-26. See also Andrew Fix, “Bekker and Spinoza,”Disguised and Overt

Spinozism Around 1700, ed. Wiep van Bunge and Wim Klever (Leiden, 1996), 23-40, 26-27.11 Fix, 23-25.12 Van Bunge, “Bekker’s Hermeneutics,” 72-74.

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101Judaism in Anti-Religious Thought of the Enlightenment

integration of faith, confession, and political community. As Leszek Kolakowski

has pointed out, non-conformist Christians consciously challenged the estab-

lished Church in the same terms that St. Paul had challenged his fellow Jews,

by insisting on the paramountcy of faith over the law.13 This parallel was strongly

felt by religious radicals in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic and

was an important factor in shaping the adulatory reception of Spinoza by his

early admirers, such as Johannes Bredenburg, Pieter Balling, and Jarig Jelles.14

However, despite the considerable interest in Judaism among Collegiants and

Quakers in this period, these Christian nonconformists understood their own

reliance on a personal “inner light” as markedly in contrast to the perceived

legalism of rabbinic Judaism.

The most provocative early expression of religious radicalism in the Dutch

Republic was not channeled through religious movements but appeared in more

isolated satirical texts. Attempts by thinkers such as Bekker to integrate ratio-

nalist arguments into a sustainable positive theology were fraught with philo-

sophical problems. Authors of satirical polemics were able to avoid such diffi-

culties and to criticize established religion with devastating effect. Subversive

texts such as Johannes Duijkerius’s Philopater novels (1691 and 1697) and

Simon Tyssot de Patot’s Voyages et Avantures de Jacques Massé (c.1715) put

forward comic, transgressive lampoons of established religion. Duijkerius’s

immensely popular first novel ridicules the sterile theological pedantry of the

Dutch Reformed Church. The eponymous Philopater, in training (as was his

creator) for the priesthood, particularly laments the long hours of Hebrew study

to which he is subjected. “Holy offices, Holy objects, Holy times....”: the stu-

dents study the Mosaic religion in such arcane detail that it seems to Philopater

as if they were themselves intending to become Jewish.15

Judaism also figures in Tyssot de Patot’s novel, a meandering travelogue

containing within it much powerful advocacy of reason and parody of conven-

tional theology. Before Tyssot’s eponymous narrator embarks on his travels he

encounters in Bordeaux a certain Michob, “a wandering Jew, once a servant of

Pontius Pilate.”16 Michob has many fascinating tales to tell from his seventeen

centuries of peripatetic existence. He captivates an audience late into the night

with his eyewitness account of the panic that swept Jerusalem in response to

the resurrection of the saints after Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, when “people saw

human figures rise straight out of their tombs.”17 In using Michob as a mouth-

13 Leszek Kolakowski, Chrétiens sans Église (Paris, 1969), 804.14 Andrew Fix, Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment

(Princeton, 1991), esp. 162-214; K. O. Meinsma, Spinoza et son Cercle (Paris, 1983 [1896]),

147-80.15 Johannes Duijkerius, Het Leven van Philopater (Amsterdam, 1991 [1691]), 83-84.16 Simon Tyssot de Patot, Voyages et Avantures de Jacques Massé (Amsterdam, 1714-17),

12.17 Ibid., 14.

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102 Adam Sutcliffe

piece for this absurdly literalistic account of resurrection, Tyssot inverts the

traditional didactic role of the Wandering Jew, whose testimony here ridicules

rather than reinforces Christian belief. Later in the text, through the quasi-

authorial voice of a wise judge, Tyssot deploys the concept of accommodation

to devastating satirical effect, suggesting that only the foolishness of the Jews

enabled them to be duped by the preposterous absurdities of the Old Testa-

ment:

There is no doubt ... that the idea of a God who works and who rests

can only be swallowed by extremely ignorant and primitive people,

whom somebody wished to dominate, and over whom this Moses ...

claimed to be the temporal overlord, while his brother Aaron would

entirely dominate their moral conscience.18

The Culture of French Clandestine Philosophy

The formative controversies of the late seventeenth-century Dutch Repub-

lic forged the basic structures on which later, more stridently anti-Judaic En-

lightenment polemic was based. The essence of these arguments emerged from

the unraveling of the theological principle of accommodation over the course

of the later seventeenth century. However, by the end of the century the key

terrain of debate had moved from the universities to the public domain, and

with this shift the tone of argument grew more militant. In the writings of

Duijkerius and Tyssot de Patot the hermeneutic tool of accommodation has

been turned against its theological makers, being applied not to interpret but to

ridicule the Bible. During the early eighteenth century this denigratory strand

of argument gathered increasing force across Europe but most dramatically in

France. The Dutch Republic was until at least 1730 the hub of the formal En-

lightenment—the “Republic of Letters,” tightly governed by its conventions of

scholarly conduct and hierarchy.19 In both Germany and England ecclesiastics

and academics remained important players in intellectual discourse, often at-

tempting to mediate between radical and traditional world views.20 In France

under Louis XV, however, intellectual life was largely divided into two sepa-

18 Tyssot de Patot, Jacques Massé, 169-70.19 See Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Let-

ters, 1680-1750 (New Haven, 1995); Graham Gibbs, “The Role of the Dutch Republic as the

Intellectual Entrepôt of Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Bijdragen enMededelingen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 90 (1975), 255-87.

20 On the relative conservatism of the English Enlightenment, see B. W. Young, Religionand Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998); David Bell, Spinoza in Ger-many from 1670 to the Age of Goethe (London, 1984); Winfried Schröder, Spinoza in der deutschenFrühaufklärung (Würzburg, 1987), and Ursprünge des Atheismus: Untersuchungen zurMetaphysik- und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1998).

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103Judaism in Anti-Religious Thought of the Enlightenment

rate cultural spheres that made very little attempt to engage with each other.

Ironically, it was the tightness of the French censorship regime that fueled the

development of a uniquely outspoken philosophical underground. The suffo-

cation of heterodoxy in the public sphere led to the development and clandes-

tine circulation of an extensive philosophical literature in manuscript.21 Much

of the inspiration for this literature came from beyond France: several texts by

John Toland and other English Deists circulated in loose translation, as did

modified versions of various Jewish anti-Christian polemics written by the late

seventeenth-century Sephardic physician of Amsterdam, Orobio de Castro.22

In tone, however, the French clandestine tradition was highly distinctive. This

literature exhibited no interest in measured compromise or gradual persuasion.

The recurrent clandestine themes—scientific speculation, irreligious polemic,

and theories of materialism and natural religion—are expounded vigorously

and adversarially. Although a range of antagonistic targets appear in these manu-

scripts, Judaism in some form is positioned, with striking regularity, as the

representative inverse of the positive values that the texts seek to propagate.

There is still a great deal that is unknown about the culture of the French

philosophical underground. The manner in which clandestine manuscripts were

written, circulated, and discussed remains to a considerable extent a subject on

which historians can only speculate. Leading authors and collectors have been

identified. It is striking that many intellectuals prominent in the official acad-

emies of Paris, such as Bernard Fontenelle, Nicolas Fréret, and Jean Baptiste

de Mirabaud, also dabbled in clandestine philosophy. However, in doing so

they entered into another conceptual world, sharply segregated from their ap-

proved public personae.23 Many writers of radical texts lived tranquil lives re-

mote from the metropolis. Jean Meslier (1664-1729) spent his entire adult life

working as a curate in remote rural Champagne, where he wrote perhaps the

most trenchantly anti-Christian text of the entire Early Enlightenment, which

circulated only after his death as Le Testament de Jean Meslier.24 Benoit de

Maillet (1656-1738), for a long period French consul in Egypt, devised the

proto-evolutionist theory of the ancient retreat of the sea and the derivation of

21 See Alain Niderst, “Du libertinage et de l’origine des manuscrits clandestins,” Materiaactuosa: Antiquité, Âge classique, Lumières, ed. Miguel Benítez, Anthony McKenna, Gianni

Paganini and Jean Salem (Paris, 2000), 555-68.22 Miguel Benítez, “Orobio de Castro et la littérature clandestine,” La Face Cachée des

Lumières: Recherches sur les manuscrits clandestins de l’âge classique (Paris, 1996), 147-54.

For a full inventory of the manuscripts, listing 213 known to have circulated, see Benítez, FaceCachée, 20-54.

23 See Alain Niderst, “Fontenelle et la Littérature Clandestine,” Filosofia e Religione nellaLetteratura Clandestina, ed. Guido Canziani (Milan, 1994), 161-73.

24 See H. Weber, “Meslier er le XVI Siècle,” Études sur le curé Meslier (Paris, 1966), 53-

69; Ira Wade, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from1700 to 1750 (Princeton, 1938), 65-93; Miriam Yardeni, “L’antisémitisme du curé Meslier,”

Revue des études juives, 137 (1978), 47-60.

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104 Adam Sutcliffe

all life from sea-forms, put forward in his Telliamed.25 The ways in which these

writers understood the relationship between open and clandestine texts and

between their public lives and their clandestine philosophizing is clearly a sub-

ject of extreme complexity, and it suggests a striking fluidity in intellectual

identities.26

The readers and collectors of clandestine manuscripts were a different but

no less diverse constituency than their authors. Many collectors were also ex-

tremely established and respected individuals, who were drawn to radical lit-

erature largely because of its value as a curiosity. The Abbé Sépher (c.1710-

1781), for example, was vice-chancellor of the University of Aix-en-Provence

and a distinguished bibliophile with a particular passion for heterodox theol-

ogy, although he also owned a vast collection of thoroughly orthodox historical

and theological texts.27 Other collectors were of more humble origins: Sépher

noted that he had purchased several of his manuscripts from an otherwise un-

known “Mr. Languener, medecin suisse mort a Paris vers 1740.”28 Robert

Darnton has strikingly demonstrated the close association of radical philoso-

phy and erotica in later eighteenth-century French libertinism.29 While no such

overlap is directly apparent for the early decades of the century, the provoca-

tively unrestrained tone of many of the manuscripts suggests that they were

often read more for a generalized thrill of iconoclasm than for their substantive

content. In his study of the Huguenot refugee community in Berlin in the de-

cades around 1700 Jens Häseler has noted that clandestine philosophical manu-

scripts were widely and avidly read, but he suggests that this stemmed more

from a desire within the community to affirm a general taste for philosophical

reason from any critical attitude towards traditional beliefs.30

Although the underground circulation of radical philosophy was particu-

larly associated with the manuscript form, this was not always the case, for

some printed texts were equally clandestine in their circulation.31 However, the

25 See Claudine Cohen, “La Communication Manuscrite et la Genèse du Telliamed,” DeBonne Main: La communication manuscrite au XVIIIe siècle, ed. François Moureau (Paris,

1993), 9-69.26 See Geneviève Artigas-Menant and Anthony McKenna, “Anonymat et clandestinité aux

XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” La Lettre Clandestine, 8 (1999), 13-138.27 Anthony McKenna, “Les Manuscrits Clandestins dans la Bibliothèque du Marquis de

Méjanes,” Treize Études sur Aix et la Provence au XVIIIe Siècle (Aix-en-Provence, 1995), 19-

40.28 MS Aix 818: note on flyleaf in the hand of Sépher; and see Languener, see Benítez, Face

Cachée, 18.29 Robert Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1995),

esp. 167-246.30 Jens Häseler, “Réfugiés Français a Berlin: Lecteurs de Manuscrits Clandestins,” Canziani,

Filosofia, 373-85.31 See Ann Thomson, “Qu’est-ce qu’un manuscrit clandestin?,” Le Matérialisme du XVIII

siècle et la littérature clandestine, ed. Olivier Bloch (Paris, 1982), 13-16.

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manuscript had many advantages over the printed book, since they could be

produced far more cheaply, could without impunity include pirated sections of

printed texts, and could readily be modified in subsequent editions.32 Accord-

ing to Roger Chartier, the “author function” was in the process of emergence in

this period: authors were only beginning to be identified as the unique propri-

etors of their texts, in contrast to the sixteenth century, when the printer, book-

seller, author, and reader had all been regarded as equally complicit in the dif-

fusion of subversive ideas in print.33 The culture of the French Radical Enlight-

enment was in rebellion against this process; plagiarism, tendentious transla-

tion, and authorial ventriloquism or anonymity were all standard practice. Clan-

destine texts were regarded as ownerless and were freely embellished and modi-

fied. Of the various extant copies of Telliamed, each one is slightly different,

having been freely adapted by each copier.34 As Jeroom Vercruysse has demon-

strated in detail for those clandestine manuscripts derived from the writings of

the English Deist Thomas Woolston, many French versions of foreign texts

unilaterally amended the original to such an extent that it is often more accu-

rate to describe them as rewritings rather than translations.35

The self-conscious slipperiness of French radical culture in this period has

important implications for the understanding of the treatment of Judaism within

it. Jewish themes occur in various clandestine manuscripts in widely differing

contexts, and are handled flexibly in order to make particular polemical points.

Judaism is seldom invoked in these texts as part of the measured enunciation of

a stable philosophical system. The intended argumentative impact of the de-

ployment of Judaism is often deliberately ambiguous. While decoding these

authorial intentions is extremely important, the conceptual difficulties that clus-

tered around Judaism for Early Enlightenment thinkers operated largely at a

subconscious level. The case of the Jews profoundly destabilized attempts to

construct purely rational accounts of history, politics, and religion. A close

examination of the ways in which Jewish themes are handled in these texts

reveals a great deal about the relationship of the Early Enlightenment to these

occluded philosophical paradoxes.

The Old Testament and the Enlightenment Quest for Rational History

The defining text of the clandestine underworld was in a sense the notori-

ous and highly influential Traité des Trois Imposteurs. The precise origins of

this work remain uncertain. Its central argument—that Moses, Jesus, and

32 François Moureau, “La plume et le plomb,” in Moureau, De Bonne Main, 5-16.33 Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between

the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1994), 41-42, 50.34 Cohen, “Communication Manuscrite,” 59-69.35 Jeroom Vercruysse, “Les Trois Langages du Rabbin de Woolston,” Canziani, Filosofia,

337-53, 352-53.

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106 Adam Sutcliffe

Mohammed, the three great prophets of monotheism, were in truth calculating

impostors, inventing the regulatory details of their respective pseudo-religions

in order to gain control over the duped masses—can be traced back at least to

the thirteenth century, when claims of the existence of a “Three Impostors” text

first emerged. There is, however, no firm evidence that such a text actually

existed earlier than around 1700, when various manuscript versions began to

circulate clandestinely. Not only was this one of the most widely circulated

manuscripts of the early eighteenth century, but it also exemplifies almost all

of the characteristic traits of the clandestine manuscript tradition as a whole.

Like many other clandestine texts, the Traité was based on an old argument,

was compiled anonymously, contained extracts from a number of ancient and

modern sources, circulated in a large number of differing but broadly similar

forms, and retained an aura of mystery surrounding its provenance.36

The theme of the text, an exposé of the oppressive nature of religious au-

thority, was also the central argument of many other clandestine manuscripts.

The primary political aim of all these radical texts was clearly to undermine the

authority of the Church. The section of the Traité dealing with the imposture of

Jesus Christ is far more detailed than its analysis of either Moses or Mohammed.

However, as the original impostor, the position of Moses in the text’s argument

is particularly significant. Moses is implicitly cast in the Traité as personally

responsible for the entire subsequent tradition of Western religious deception:

Jesus merely “built on the foundations” that Moses had provided.37 Both Moses

and his Jewish followers are portrayed in the Traité extremely negatively. Moses

is described as an extremely cunning master of the arts of deception and his

brother Aaron as a “master magician.”38 When the Jews were expelled from

Egypt, because they were infected with venereal disease and leprosy,39 Moses

seized a unique opportunity to use his skills:

There had never been a people more ignorant than they were, and nei-

ther, consequently, more credulous. With this magnificent opportunity

to make use of his talent, Moses made up for these good people the

story of the Burning Bush, and tried to convince them that God had

appeared to him.40

36 See Wade, Clandestine Organization, 124-40; Miguel Benítez, “Une Histoire Intermi-

nable: Origines et Développement du Traité des Trois Imposteurs,” Heterodoxy, Spinozism andFree Thought in Early Eighteenth Century Europe: Studies on the “Traité des Trois Imposteurs,”

ed. Silvia Berti, Françoise Charles-Daubert, and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht, 1996), 53-74.37 Traité des Trois Imposteurs, ed. Silvia Berti (Turin, 1994 [1719]), 120.38 Ibid., 115.39 Ibid.40 Ibid.

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This exceptionalist invective directed towards the Jews is at odds with the dis-

passionate tone of the beginning of the text, where imposture is discussed as

part of the natural weft of human exploitation: “Ambitious people ... have al-

ways been masters of the art of deceit.”41 Moses is thus represented both as an

example of a typical historical phenomenon and, exceptionally, as a uniquely

shrewd manipulator of a uniquely gullible people.

This slippage from the rationalist historicization of the Old Testament into

a polemical reading of Jewish history as a narrative of exceptional stupidity

and depravity is amplified in several other clandestine texts. A notable ex-

ample is the Dissertation sur Moyse, an anonymous text tentatively dated to

around 1710.42 This essay draws on the long-standing Hermetic linkage of Moses

with Egyptian magic to undermine his claims to originality and divine inspira-

tion.43 The text then moves to a wider attack on the obstinacy and superstition

of the Jews, presenting the triumph of Christianity and Islam while the Jews

have been abandoned by their God as clear proof that their religion is based on

“false principles.”44 Several other manuscripts attack the absurd miracles and

immoral behavior in the Old Testament, while those devoted to the entire Bible

typically critique the Old Testament much more vigorously than the New.45 In

the brief Extrait de Zinzendorf sur la Bible, in which the Bible is described as

“such a despicable work that it is only worthy of being touched with the feet,”46

both Testaments are derided as rabbinic pedantry.47

Occasionally a sustained attempt is made within the clandestine tradition

to interpret the Old Testament in a genuinely historical context. An interesting

example of this appears in a manuscript titled Le Rabbinisme renversé, ou Dis-sertation Historique et critique sur le prophete Elie et sur le Patriarche Enoch,

a text primarily concerned to refute the biblical prophecy of a Day of Judg-

ment.48 The text argues that the belief of the ancient Hebrews—“that supersti-

tious people”49—in a future day of just reckoning was common to all primitive

peoples. Whenever life is particularly arduous and blighted by frequent natural

disasters, it is natural for a people to turn to religious optimism, which offered

“powerful comfort in times of misery.”50 But this form of anthropological ex-

planation is notably rare in the Early Enlightenment; in many more clandestine

41 Traité des Trois Imposteurs, 110.42 Dissertation sur Moyse, MS Bibliothèque Mazarine (Paris) 1194, 59-111; Wade, Clan-

destine Organisation, 138-39.43 Dissertation sur Moyse, 59.44 Ibid., 107.45 See, e.g., Objections contre les livres St. des Juifs et des Chretiens, MS Aix 10, 33-47.46 Extrait des ouvrages du Comte de Zinzendorf, MS Aix 10, 4.47 Ibid., 1.48 Le rabbinisme renversé, MS Maz. 1197.49 Ibid., 11.50 Ibid., 12-13.

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108 Adam Sutcliffe

texts the primitivism of the ancient Hebrews is presented not as a natural result

of historical circumstance but as an extreme phenomenon implicitly ascribed

to their own intrinsic nature.

A particularly strident hostility towards the Jews is expressed in the NouvelleMoysade, a text presented as the story of a traveler in search of wisdom and

truth. The mock-innocent narrator reports his approach to the Jews, “in the

hope of at last finding truth.”51 Instead, he is revolted by what he finds:

I seem to wander in the field of imposture: everything bears the scourge

of fanaticism, everything is stamped with impertinence and absurdity,

barbarism and savagery!52

The narrator then offers a detailed and scandalized report of his discovery of

the Jewish Bible, dwelling on the distastefulness of Abraham’s sacrifice of

Isaac, Noah’s drunkenness, and above all Moses’ fanatical tyranny.53 He re-

joices at the Jews’ historical fate, celebrates the irony that dispersal and misery

has been the destiny of the chosen people of a supposedly true, loving, and

merciful God, and concludes with a rhetorical address to them: “And you,

furious people, vile and coarse men, deserving slaves to the yoke that you bear,

go, take away your books, and get away from me.”54 The extreme ferocity of

this text extends beyond the level necessary for argumentative force or polemi-

cal effect and suggests a deeper, frustrated anger. No amount of rationalist sat-

ire could dislodge the Jewish Bible from its foundational position in the Judaeo-

Christian view of history. The anomalous survival of the Jews and their texts

was a persistent reminder of the inconclusivity of attempts to establish a fully

convincing counter-history. In an era before the development of archaeology

and rigorous linguistic analysis, clandestine polemicists had no serious extra-

textual evidence with which to challenge the Bible. They could only reiterate

familiar anti-biblical arguments with increasing insistency and ferocity.

Dislodging the authority of the Bible required establishing an alternative

account of the history of the Jews. One of the most widely circulated clandes-

tine manuscripts, the Opinions des Anciens sur les Juifs, attempted to address

this question. This lengthy text, consisting of four loosely connected sections,

was assembled at some stage before 1722, possibly by Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud

(1675-1760), secretary of the Académie Française.55 Drawing on a wide range

51 La Nouvelle Moysade, MS Aix 10, 2.52 Ibid., 3.53 Ibid., 17.54 Ibid., 16, 17-18.55 Wade, Clandestine Organization, 205-21; also Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach, “A quo?—

Datation de l’Opinion des anciens sur les Juifs. Ad quem?—Une source des Lettres persanes,”

La Lettre Clandestine, 5 (1996), 33-41, and “Remarques sur la date, la bibliographie et la réception

des Opinions des anciens sur les Juifs,” La Lettre Clandestine, 6 (1997), 51-63.

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109Judaism in Anti-Religious Thought of the Enlightenment

of classical sources, the manuscript opens with a rebuttal of the traditional

Christian claim that the misery of the Jews was due to their role in the death of

Jesus Christ:

However, it is certain that the Jews, before they brought onto them-

selves the curse that is regarded as the cause of their misery, were al-

ready hated and despised everywhere they were known, and this is

confirmed by the fact that they are virtually never mentioned in antiq-

uity except in connection with this general disdain and aversion that

people felt towards them.56

Following Josephus’s account of the opinions of the Egyptian annalist Manetho,

the text suggests that the Jews were expelled from Egypt because they were

infested with leprosy and other contagious diseases.57 Citing a wide range of

classical sources, including Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Plutarch, Juvenal, Horace,

and Martial, the text concludes that the ancients’ hatred of the Jews was uni-

versal and that “people felt they had good reasons to hate and despise them.”58

The Jews deserved contempt because of their absurd customs, their despicable

character, and the fact that they themselves hated everybody else.59 Above all,

the Jews were despised because of their credulous belief in the absurd miracles

contained in their scriptures:

Although circumcision, the superstitious observation of the Sabbath,

the fasts and the sorrowful ceremonies of the Jews drew much mock-

ery onto them, nothing caused them to be so generally despised as did

their extraordinary credulity.60

The second section of this text, Etat de la Judée au tems de Jesus-Christ, etdepuis, jusqu’à la ruine de Jerusalem, emphasizes the trans-historical obsti-

nacy of the Jews.61 This is so ingrained, the essay concludes, that they will

never abandon their belief that their Messiah will come. Their subjection at the

hands of the Romans and since has only caused them to harden their ways still

further: “they have become even more meticulously observant of a religion

which neither the hatred nor the scorn of all peoples will ever make them re-

nounce.”62

56 Opinion des Anciens sur les Juifs, MS Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris) NAF 4369, 172.57 Ibid., 173.58 Ibid., 182.59 Ibid.60 Ibid., 206-7.61 Ibid., 263-79.62 Ibid., 277-78.

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110 Adam Sutcliffe

The third section of the manuscript, Caractère, Sectes et Opinions des Juifs,

focuses on the Jews at the time of Jesus Christ. The mass suicide of the de-

feated Zealots at Masada is recounted as an example of the Jews’ absurd fa-

naticism.63 The endemic and ineradicable superstition of the Jews is heavily

emphasized:

The Religion of the Jews being based only on marvels, their Law being

entirely divine, their Histories filled from beginning to end with won-

ders and miraculous events; it is obvious that people raised according

to such principles must always have had a very strong taste for miracles

and wonders.64

The implication of this argument is that the Jews were extremely susceptible to

the miracles of Jesus. The unstated but unmistakable underlying intention of

this text is to undermine the authority of Christianity by discrediting the judg-

ment of its earliest Jewish disciples. In the fourth and final section, Du Messie,

the credibility of Jesus’ first followers is more directly questioned: “The senti-

ments of a few members of the vilest rabble,” the text asserts, should not be

taken as representative of the general population.65 This elaborate text is thus

carefully constructed in order to pose a subtle but extremely potent anti-Chris-

tian argument. However, the invective of the text is exclusively directed at the

Jews. Jewish history, both biblical and non-biblical, bears the heavy polemical

brunt of an argument of which the ultimate target lies elsewhere. While appear-

ing to analyze the Jewish past with a scholarly scrupulousness, the Opinionsdes Anciens in fact utilizes Judaism as a polemical tool for use in wider philo-

sophical and theological argument.

A different historiographical strategy is exemplified by Henri de Boulain-

villiers’ Abrégé de l’Histoire Universelle Jusqu’à l’Exode.66 Boulainvilliers

has traditionally been cast as a reactionary aristocrat and is best known for his

writings on French history, which sought to rehabilitate feudalism and to assert

the political importance and natural superiority of the titled nobility.67 How-

ever, he was also the author of several clandestine manuscripts, which reveal

seemingly very different intellectual interests. His Essai de Metaphysique, writ-

ten around 1712 but only published posthumously in 1731, played an impor-

tant role in the diffusion of Spinoza’s philosophy in France: despite presenting

itself as an exposure of Spinoza’s impiety this essay in fact consisted of a straight-

63 Opinion des Anciens sur les Juifs, 286.64 Ibid., 291.65 Ibid., 372.66 Abrégé de l’Histoire Universelle Jusqu’à l’Exode, MS BN FF 6363.67 See Harold A. Ellis, Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy (Ithaca, 1988).

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111Judaism in Anti-Religious Thought of the Enlightenment

forward and thorough summary of his Ethics.68 In his historical AbrégéBoulainvilliers puts forward a rationalist interpretation of Genesis and Exodus

that clearly bears the stamp of Spinoza’s influence. Invoking the concept of

accommodation, he argues that because the ancient Jews had no knowledge of

science or astronomy Moses’s account of Creation should be understood figu-

ratively rather than literally.69 Closely echoing the first chapter of the TractatusTheologico-Politicus, Boulainvilliers asserts that the ancient Hebrews’ notion

of God was a product of their ignorance:

The limited discernment with which the earliest Hebrews distinguished

between vice and virtue necessarily rendered them extremely supersti-

tious. It is also noticeable that they were crudely fearful of seeing God,

or of encountering him, and that through the extension of this fear they

associated his name with everything that amazed them: tall mountains

were the mountains of God; thunder and lightning were the voice and

the breath of God.70

However, Boulainvilliers adopts a very different approach to early non-Jewish

history. He argues that, in contrast with the superstitious Hebrews, the Chinese

and the Egyptians had a much purer notion of the Divinity.71 While surmising

that the lifestyle of the Jewish Patriarchs was “more or less the same as that led

today by the desert Arabs,”72 he emphasizes the much greater sophistication of

Egyptian culture. He then goes on to cover Egyptian history in much more

extensive detail than his treatment of the Bible.73 Taking his lead from the sev-

enteenth-century prioritization of Egyptian chronology and culture by John

Marsham and John Spencer, Boulainvilliers applied this theory in a deliber-

ately polemical manner. Although the title of his text invites the expectation of

a history conventionally based on the Old Testament narrative, Boulainvilliers

in fact offers an anti-biblical counter-history in which Jewish history is system-

atically deprivileged and the contrasting sophistication of the Egyptians maxi-

mized. While ostensibly engaging in a serious exercise of comparative cross-

cultural history, Boulainvilliers’s effective concern, like that of most of the

clandestine manuscript authors, is almost exclusively polemical.

68 See La Vie, Essai de Metaphysique, et Esprit de Spinosa, MS BN FF 12242, esp. 40-45;

Paul Vernière, Spinoza et la Pensée Française Avant la Révolution (Paris, 1954), 306-22; Wade,

Clandestine Organization, 97-123.69 Abrégé, 21-30.70 Ibid., 151; cf. Spinoza, TTP, 21.71 Abrégé, 153-34.72 Ibid., 176.73 Ibid., 178-348.

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112 Adam Sutcliffe

Judaism and Materialism

It is perhaps not surprising that Jewish themes were to the fore in these

radical attempts to reformulate the basis of European historical understanding.

However, in French clandestine writings on other topics, particularly on meta-

physical issues, a similar, less systematic but nonetheless significant tendency

to engage with Judaism is also in evidence. The most important abstract con-

troversy of the period concerned the nature of the soul and the related wider

question of the relationship between mind and body. At the beginning of the

eighteenth century there were three orthodox positions in this debate: the pre-

Cartesian theory of physical influences, Descartes’s occasional causes, and

Leibnizian pre-established harmony.74 Increasingly, however, radicals rejected

all three options, and advocated instead an uncompromising materialism, in

which the soul itself was conceptualized in material terms. The most outspo-

ken text advancing this position was a clandestine manuscript titled L’AmeMaterielle, written by an unknown author at some stage in the first three de-

cades of the eighteenth century. Drawing on a number of sources, including

Lucretius, Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire, Levesque de Burigny’s Histoire de laPhilosophie Payenne, and a number of articles from the Dutch francophone

literary periodicals of the 1690s, this text argues unequivocally that the soul is

material, mortal, and identical in animals as it is in humans.75 A loosely similar

position was advanced in various other clandestine manuscripts. There was,

however, no clear consensus regarding precisely how to conceptualize the ma-

terial soul: it was sometimes represented as a current of very fine particles in

constant motion and sometimes, in more Cartesian terms, as the mechanical

function of a particular bodily structure, akin to a form of nervous system.76

There was only a very limited scope for conducting this speculative debate

in strictly scientific terms. The history of the notion of the soul therefore as-

sumed considerable polemical importance. In the materialist Opinions des an-ciens sur la nature de l’âme, also attributed to Mirabaud,77 it is argued that the

original meaning of the word “soul” (the Hebrew word ruach) was simply

animal breathing. Referring to a point made by Spinoza in the first chapter of

the Tractatus, the text asserts that there is no word in Hebrew for “l’esprit”

distinct from the word for “wind” and “breath.”78 The notion of the immortal

soul was in origin an Egyptian notion, which must have been invented after the

74 See John W. Yolton, Locke and French Materialism (Oxford, 1991), 10-37.75 L’Ame Materielle, ed. Alain Niderst (Rouen, 1969).76 See Aram Vartanian, “Quelques Réflexions sur le concept d’Ame dans la Littérature

Clandestine,” in Bloch, Matérialisme, 149-63, 149-50.77 Wade, Clandestine Organization, 211-15.78 Opinions des Anciens sur la nature de l’âme, MS BN NAF 4369, 15.

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113Judaism in Anti-Religious Thought of the Enlightenment

departure of the Jews because Moses had known nothing of it.79 Although the

text never explicitly endorses the theory of the materiality of the soul, the reader

is clearly invited to draw this conclusion. The materialist theories of Lucretius

and other ancient thinkers are discussed in detail, and the text concludes with

the comment that the Christian adoption of belief in the soul’s immortality had

necessitated the renunciation of an ancient, natural, and easy manner of think-

ing, in favor of one that was new, difficult, and abstract.80

The Jews’ conception of the soul is here treated with a notable ambiva-

lence. While at the beginning of the text the authority of the Hebrew language

is invoked in support of materialism, it is also implied that the Jews’ materialist

beliefs simply reflect their ignorance and confusion:

We are not surprised that the Jews confused the spirit with the body, as

it seems clear that the first writers of this nation had no knowledge of

the Spirit, but it is amazing that … neither the ancient Greeks nor the

Ancient Romans had any notion of immaterial being....81

In this passage the authority of the Jews is simultaneously denigrated and posi-

tively appealed to, reflecting once again the deep ambivalence of the Early

Enlightenment towards Judaism. In another clandestine manuscript on this

theme, the Dialogues sur l’âme, the Jews are presented as divided on the issue.

This text recounts a debate between a philosopher, a Pharisee, and a Sadducee.

While the Pharisee believes in the immortality of the soul, both the Sadducee

and the philosopher do not. Encouraged by this agreement, the philosopher

strenuously attempts to convince the Sadducee of the superiority of natural

religion but is unable to persuade him to abandon Judaism.82 Positive identifi-

cation with the Sadducees, in opposition to the “rabbinical” Pharisees, is a

recurrent Early Enlightenment theme, although, as in this text, even the

Sadducees are often portrayed as limited by their Jewish prejudices.

Closely related to the rejection by philosophical radicals of the notion of

the immortal soul was their denial of the conventional Christian understanding

of Creation. In this debate, which centered on the interpretation of the opening

chapters of Genesis, the status of Judaism was of central importance. The clan-

destine text that most extensively deals with this theme is the Opinion desanciens sur le monde, the third in Mirabaud’s trinity of subversive compila-

tions of ancient opinions. This text opens with a general survey of ancient

views of the origins of the world, in which it is established that only Anaxagoras

79 Ibid., 42.80 Ibid., 125-26.81 Ibid., 15-16.82 Dialogues sur l’âme, MS Maz. 1191.

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114 Adam Sutcliffe

and the followers of Plato espoused a notion of deliberate, divine Creation:

“everyone else seems simply to have attributed its cause to chance or to neces-

sity.”83 The author then turns to the beliefs of the Chinese and the Indians, who

are also found to have no notion of Creation, instead considering the world to

be eternal. Without expressly rejecting the Genesis account, Mirabaud none-

theless unambiguously undermines its authority by presenting it as virtually

unique among the varied beliefs of all mankind. Inverting the logic of Pierre-

Daniel Huet’s Demonstratio Evangelica (1679), which sought to show that the

myths and cosmogonies of all cultures were derived from the Jewish proto-

type, Mirabaud here presents the Old Testament account of Creation as iso-

lated and anomalous. The Jews, he suggests, invented this theory in order to

flatter their own antiquity by associating their own origins with that of the

world itself.84

As Miguel Benítez has pointed out, Mirabaud simply counters Jewish his-

tory by holding other, especially Chinese and Indian, histories against it. No

serious attempt is made to understand these alternative accounts: they are de-

ployed only in order to discredit the authority of the biblical narrative.85 De-

spite the rationalist, scientific aspiration of the Early Enlightenment, this text

puts forward no substantive positive argument. Instead, assertions are com-

bated with counter-assertions, and the Judaeo-Christian tradition is implicitly

discredited through the construction of a balance of probability against it. Once

again radical philosophy largely reduces to negative polemic, of which the Old

Testament Jews are the primary target.

The natural mode of the clandestine philosophical genre was attack. In

attempting positively to enunciate a renewed conception of metaphysics, histo-

riography, or religion, radicals were forced to confront the inadequacy of the

intellectual tools at their disposal for devising alternative arguments that were

decisively more certain than those of the old orthodoxy. However, polemical

attack and propositional assertion were in a sense inextricable from each other:

it was almost impossible to enunciate a sustained critique of Christianity with-

out also to some extent expounding an alternative metaphysical or ethical vi-

sion. In general the positive theology put forward in these clandestine manu-

scripts is sketchy, or merely implicit. Many texts, such as the extremely widely

diffused Examen de la Religion, are almost entirely devoted to the negative

savaging of established Christianity.86 However, in several texts certain alter-

83 Opinions des Anciens sur le monde, MS BN FF 14696, 22.84 Ibid., 35-36.85 See Miguel Benítez, “L’ailleurs dans le littérature clandestine: la Chine comme argu-

ment,” Face Cachée, 409-10.86 Examen de la Religion, MS Arsenal (Paris) 2091; also the modern critical edition, Gianluca

Mori (Oxford, 1998), which attributes the compilation of this text to César Chesneau Du Marsais

(b. 1676), a “philosophical grammarian” from Marseille.

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115Judaism in Anti-Religious Thought of the Enlightenment

native creeds, such as the universality of redemption, were positively expounded.

This theme was the central thesis of Pierre Cuppé’s extremely popular Le cielouvert à tous les hommes, where it also carried an implicit anti-Judaic slant.

Cuppé expressly presents his thesis in opposition to the doctrine of the divine

election of the Jews, arguing that they have no privileged place in history and

that there is no reason or need for God to have chosen one people only to be the

repository of the divine law.87 In such primarily theological manuscripts and

also in those addressing scientific themes, attempts to establish an alternative

paradigm repeatedly folded back onto the critique of established opinion, and

its basis in the Old Testament. The dependence of this iconoclastic clandestine

genre on polemic thus led to a tendency for manuscripts on almost any philo-

sophical theme to converge on a broadly similar attack on orthodoxy, and on its

most exposed and vulnerable roots in biblical Judaism.

Conclusion

Radicalism is a slippery term. As Margaret Jacob has made clear, a self-

conscious sense of philosophical boldness was an important binding element

in new socio-political forms—Freemasonry in particular—that emerged at the

beginning of the eighteenth century.88 However, while the ideals espoused and

ideas entertained by these groups were certainly radical from some perspec-

tives, the emphasis on secrecy and exclusivity in many of these circles could

also be seen as, in social terms, markedly conservative. The radicalism of the

writers, distributors, and readers of French clandestine philosophical manu-

scripts was similarly ambiguous. The anonymous, informal nature of the genre

enabled these texts to carry a transgressive appeal that may often have been

extremely superficial and ephemeral, owing more to the manuscripts’ aura of

subversiveness than to their substantive content. As with Freemasonry, much

of the clandestine literature appears caught between contrary impulses towards

élitism and popularism. While frequently expressing the demand that knowl-

edge and truth should be accessible to all, many radical texts also carry an

implication that the ignorant are not really capable of true philosophical knowl-

edge.89 Perhaps the most important caveat to the radicalism of these texts, how-

ever, is that the polemical rhetoric on which their argumentation is based could

readily imply an exclusionary rather than an emancipatory politics. The con-

flicted but primarily hostile stance towards Judaism of so many of these manu-

87 Pierre Cuppé, Le Ciel ouvert à tous les hommes, MS Maz. 1176, 152-53.88 Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans

(London, 1981), and Living the Enlightenment (New York, 1991).89 See Miguel Benítez, “Lumières et élitisme dans les manuscrits clandestins,” Face Cachée,

199-211.

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116 Adam Sutcliffe

scripts is of significance because it by far the most conspicuous instance of this

ambiguity.

The opposition of Judaism and Reason became increasingly outspoken in

the mid-eighteenth century. Voltaire, whose urbane wit and engaged polemical

campaigning made him almost the personification of the French Enlighten-

ment, in a very large proportion of his writings mounts almost obsessively

repetitive attacks on the Old Testament and on Judaism. No systematic study

has been carried out of Voltaire’s Early Enlightenment sources, but it is known

that he (and also such figures as Diderot, Rousseau, and d’Holbach) were fa-

miliar with many of the manuscripts discussed here.90 The similarity of Voltaire’s

anti-Judaic polemics to those in the earlier clandestine manuscripts suggests a

strong degree of influence. Frequently echoing these texts, Voltaire repeatedly

denigrates the primitivism, immorality, superstition, barbarism, and lack of cre-

ativity of the ancient Jews. The ubiquity of these attacks in Voltaire’s writings

stands at odds with his frequently stated desire to ignore the self-important

Jews and their insignificant history. In his Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764)

he describes the Old Testament as recounting merely the petty triumphs of “the

forgotten chieftains of an unfortunate, barbarous land,”91 but nonetheless al-

most a third of this text consists of sustained attacks on the Pentateuch.92 Al-

though many attempts have been made to account for Voltaire’s anti-Jewish

polemics as an incidental aspect of his thought or simply as a by-product of his

broader assault on Christianity, such arguments do not explain the extreme

intensity and frequency of these attacks. Judaism was in no sense a marginal

target for Voltaire but was of key importance both as a contrasting pole against

which his own ideals was defined and as an unconscious polemical vent for the

frustrations engendered by the inevitable incompleteness of his own philosophi-

cal project.93

In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in 1944 in Californian exile

from Nazi Germany, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that the

Enlightenment legacy had come close to self-destruction. Having crushed the

remnants of myth, uncertainty and individuality that were vital for the suste-

nance of the human spirit, Enlightenment rationalism had become a tool of

90 Wade, Clandestine Organization, 274-75; Marie-Hélène Cotoni, “Aperçus sur la littérature

clandestine dans la correspondance de Voltaire,” in Benítez, McKenna, Paganini and Salem

(eds.), Materia actuosa, 635-55.91 Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, Moland, Voltaire, Oeuvres, XIX, 242.92 David Levy, “Voltaire et son exégèse du Pentateuque,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eigh-

teenth Century, 130 (1975), 223.93 See Adam Sutcliffe, “Myth, Origins, Identity: Voltaire, The Jews and the Enlightenment

Notion of Toleration,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 38 (1998), 67-87;

also Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach, “Voltaire et les Juifs: bilan et pladoyer,” Studies in Voltaireand the Eighteenth Century, 358 (1998), 27-91, and “Le messianisme juif dans divers écrits du

siècle des lumières,” La Lettre Clandestine, 5 (1996), 291-331.

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117Judaism in Anti-Religious Thought of the Enlightenment

economic domination and cultural deception. In the present age, they wrote,

Enlightenment was reduced to “wholesale deception of the masses.”94 Their

critique of the enslavement of critical rationalism to the alienating interests of

commodity capitalism concluded with a chapter on the elements of antisemitism,

which they interpret as a politically manipulated decoy to distract the masses

from reality and also as an expression of the universalizing violence of Enlight-

enment absolutism.95 The intention of Adorno and Horkheimer was not to bury

the Enlightenment tradition but, at its darkest historical moment, to save it.

This key point is readily obscured, particularly by writers who have sought to

cast the Enlightenment in general, and often Voltaire in particular, as in some

sense responsible for modern antisemitism, and therefore deserving of blanket

denigration.96 The prevalence of Judaic themes in the early eighteenth-century

French clandestine philosophical manuscripts and in their Dutch antecedents

demonstrates their crucial importance in the formation of Enlightenment thought.

The complexity and intensity with which these arguments were articulated re-

fute the notion that the anti-Judaic strand of the Enlightenment can be narrowly

personalized in Voltaire. This evidence suggests, in contrast, confirming the

insights of Horkheimer and Adorno, that this anti-Judaic current must be rec-

ognized as having been of key importance in the ordering structures of the

Enlightenment from the period of its first emergence.

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

94 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 2000

[1994]) 42.95 Ibid., 168-208.96 See Hertzberg, French Enlightenment; Leon Poliakov, The History of Antisemitism (4

vols., London, 1965-85).

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