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2. Jews and Philosophes
- University of California Press
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thinking with jews Historians concerned with the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Jews have tended to ask whether the philosophes were antiSemitic or philo-Semitic, whether their plans for the integration of Jews into Gentile society were a positive or negative development, and whether those Jews who embraced the Enlightenment were liberating themselves or shamefully casting aside their ancient identity. These are all variations on a single question, namely, whether the Enlightenment was good or bad for the Jews.1 They have been debated since the time of the Enlightenment itself, though some of the terms (such as anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic) are specific to a later age. They will continue to be debated in the future, since they are not susceptible to resolution by means of any historical investigation. The question of whether the Enlightenment was good or bad for the Jews is, more properly speaking, an occasion for the expression of one’s feelings about Enlightenment universalism on the one hand and the destiny, character, or obligations of the Jewish “people” on the other. These feelings in turn are necessarily conditioned and justified by one’s knowledge of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury history, in which the victories and failures of universalism and nationalism appear to confirm, a posteriori, one’s chosen or inherited position on the question. By contrast, my principal question will be one that commentators, in their zeal to cast ballots for or against the Enchapter 2 Jews and Philosophes 35 lightenment, have neglected: namely, why was the Enlightenment interested in the Jews in the first place? In retrospect the interest that philosophes and their readers showed in the Jews appears inevitable. The troubled relationship between modernity and the Jews suggests that the Jews had to be prominent in the thinking of those who, we are continually told, ushered in modernity. But if one resists the teleological urge to look for origins, the fact that eighteenth-century French authors wrote so much about the Jews appears puzzling, even bizarre. A search for the word juif (and its feminine and plural variants) on the ARTFL database of French literature yields 2,352 hits for its 474-volume sampling of eighteenth-century books. This total is 60 percent of the number of references to the English (anglois , anglais, and inflected forms), France’s principal rival, a famous topic of discussion among philosophes, as well as the name of the English language. (There was no langue juive.) Voltaire, the famous Anglophile , in his vast corpus referred to the Jews nearly twice as often (4,394 times) as he did to the English (2,303), as the Voltaire électronique indicates .2 Statistics do not tell the whole story, and it will be necessary to examine how the Jews functioned in eighteenth-century French writing, yet the numbers are significant insofar as they suggest an enormous interest in a negligible and relatively powerless population. The Jews were outnumbered more than two to one by the Basques, another stateless “nation” that resided on the geographic periphery and spoke a (very) distinct language, yet there was never a “Basque question” in eighteenthcentury France.3 Why, then, was there a Jewish question? The answer, to adapt a celebrated formulation by Claude LéviStrauss , is that the Jews were “good to think.”4 The multiplicity of associations that one could make between the Jews and various concepts dear to eighteenth-century French thinkers made them an especially popular object of description, speculation, analysis, imagination, and ultimately reform. Other groups, such as American “savages,” Muslims, blacks, and women, were also rich in symbolic meaning, and indeed the discursive proximity between the Jews and these other “others” will be recognized in the following chapters. Yet I would like to argue that the Jews occupied a special place in the French Enlightenment discourse, that they were not simply interchangeable with other “marked” figures. To demonstrate this, it is necessary to move from the question of why to how the Jews were “good to think,” and thus to ask what concepts the Jews helped Gentiles to articulate. A full menu of conceptual possibili36 Jews and Philosophes [54.173.221.132] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:33 GMT) ties would be impossible to reproduce, but the texts examined in this chapter reveal that Jews were invoked when authors wished to discuss the following ideas: fanaticism and tolerance; carnality and spirituality; the “natural” role of ceremony and dogma in religious belief and practice ; the...