Judaism and Enlightenment (review)

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Summer 2004) 523–530 R E V I E W F O R U M ADAM SUTCLIFFE. Judaism and Enlightenment. Ideas in Context 66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xv Ⳮ 314. DAVID B . R UDERMAN ADAM SUTCLIFFE’S BOOK represents an important new synthesis, offering novel and insightful readings of both familiar and less-known thinkers. Since no one before him has attempted to examine so broadly European intellectual life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the perspective of attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, Sutcliffe’s monograph represents a major contribution to Jewish and Enlightenment studies alike. What is especially remarkable is the range of erudition and mastery of sources on the part of a youthful author of a first book. Based on his doctoral dissertation written at University College London, the work shows immense learning, elegant prose, and a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the Enlightenment project as well as the place of Judaism in the consciousness of its primary and less primary exponents. Sutcliffe’s thesis is clear and straightforward: Judaism was ‘‘a key site of intellectual contestation, confusion, and debate’’ (p. 5) among European thinkers in this period. Through a systematic examination of the reflections on Judaism by thinkers conventionally associated with the Enlightenment, but also those outside its usual purview, Sutcliffe attempts to show how ambiguous and ambivalent responses by these thinkers point to the larger question of the limits of Enlightenment rationalism and tolerance in general. Although Sutcliffe mentions the well-known postmodernist critiques of the Enlightenment of recent years and openly situates his discoveries within their context, he is very cautious about joining the postmodernist bandwagon. He strives to balance negative assessments of Judaism in his sources with more sympathetic and positive ones. He is neither ideological nor stridently polemical in his judgments but opts for the more neutral language of ‘‘ambivalence,’’ ‘‘incongruity,’’ or the ‘‘intricate mix’’ of attraction to and repulsion from Judaism (p. 9). For example, in contrast to Arthur Hertzberg’s earlier characterization of Voltaire’s attitude toward Jews as anti-Semitic,1 Sutcliffe judiciously 1. Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York, 1968). The Jewish Quarterly Review (Summer 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 524 JQR 94:3 (2004) eschews any essentializing anti-Semitic or philo-Semitic labels in offering a more nuanced treatment of the vast array of thinkers he considers. The book is divided into three broad parts treating various aspects of European thought on Judaism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries , although Sutcliffe mentions earlier premodern views and concludes the book by following his theme into the nineteenth century and beyond. The first part, called ‘‘The Crumbling of Old Certainties,’’ deals primarily with the flourishing of Christian Hebraism in early modern Europe until its alleged decline by the early eighteenth century. In this useful section (more useful than the late Frank Manuel’s survey because of its citations of primary and secondary literature and because of its less idiosyncratic readings of individual thinkers),2 Sutcliffe surveys the explosion of biblical and rabbinic studies by Christians from the Renaissance and Reformation into the eighteenth century, along with Christian political thought inspired by biblical models of government, and the fate of biblical chronology in relation to competing classical and world historical schemes. He concludes with a special chapter on the important contributions of Jacques Basnage and Pierre Bayle. In the second section, ‘‘Judaism and the Formation of Enlightenment Radicalism,’’ he studies the place of Judaism in the so-called radical Enlightenment, focusing especially on Sephardic Amsterdam, Spinoza and his image, the place of the kabbalah in Enlightenment thought, and the manifold ways in which Judaism was deployed in the Enlightenment’s general critique of religion. The final part, ‘‘Judaism, Nationhood, and the Politics of Enlightenment,’’ moves to wider social and political concerns of utopianism, cosmopolitanism, and tolerance and asks how the discourse on Judaism impinged on these larger issues. Voltaire is finally considered not so much as a...