Judaism in the Anti-Religious Thought of the Clandestine French

Early Enlightenment
Sutcliffe, Adam.
Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 64, Number 1, January
2003, pp. 97-117 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/jhi.2003.0019

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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 seventeenth-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 curiosities.2 More typically, however, Judaism was during this period itself the target of irreligious polemic. Voltaires repeated assaults on the alleged barbarism, arrogance, and immorality of the Jews are by far the most notorious instance, but this was neither an isolated nor an original case. The French clandestine philosophical literature of the early eighteenth century, which in many
respects anticipated the arguments of the High Enlightenment, also foreshadowed and may well have influenced the anti-Judaic rhetoric of Voltaire and
dHolbach. In several of these manuscript texts Jewish traditionalism and
textuality is cast as the defining polar opposite of enlightened rationalism. However, it was within this same philosophical underground that Jewish anti-Christian arguments circulated widely and were enthusiastically appropriated. The
status of Judaism in this formative intellectual milieu was thus strikingly ambiguous and unstable. An examination of the representation of Judaism in these
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.

97
Copyright 2003 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.

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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 interpretation 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 capabilities 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, invoked the principle of accommodation in justification of the independence of
philosophy from theology. Cartesian scientists such as Henricus Regius, theologians 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 mathematical 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 Spinozas 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 lite:
3
Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the
Seventeenth Century (Princeton, 1986), 213-39.
4
Wiep van Bunge, Balthasar Bekkers 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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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 accommodation. 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 history. 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 relationship between Judaism and philosophy. If the moral limitations of the Old Testament 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 Spinozas own position. However, 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 application of Cartesian principles and the heresy of Spinozism,7 no self-evidently 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 Bekkers De Betoverde
Weereld (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 Spinozisma problem that led to
the almost unanimous repudiation of Bekkers views by his fellow Cartesians.8

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

199.
6

Van Bunge, Bekkers Hermeneutics, 68.

See Christopher Wittich, Anti-Spinoza (Amsterdam, 1690); Wiep van Bunge, Van
Velthuysen, Batelier and Bredenburg on Spinozas Interpretation of the Scriptures, The Spinozistic
Heresy , 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, 375405.
7

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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, Bekkers argument was based on a primitivist
view of the Jews themselves. Like Spinoza, he explains the ubiquity of supernatural occurrences in the Old Testament as due to Gods accommodation to
the Jews particular ignorance and superstition. Bekkers 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 Bekkers 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, Bekkers attempt to
integrate a commitment to absolute biblical truth with a rigorous Cartesian
dualism led him to some extremely contorted argumentative gymnastics, particularly in accounting for such crucial scriptural episodes as the Fall.12 Ultimately, Bekker failed to offer a fully convincing integration of the supremacy
of reason and the authority of Scripture. The concealed limitations of his argument 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 century 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 individual 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 Protestant emphasis on personal conscience Judaism represented an extremely tight
9

Balthasar Bekker, Le Monde Enchant (2 vols., Amsterdam, 1694), II, 283.

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, Bekkers Hermeneutics, 72-74.
10

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

has pointed out, non-conformist Christians consciously challenged the established 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 rationalist arguments into a sustainable positive theology were fraught with philosophical problems. Authors of satirical polemics were able to avoid such difficulties and to criticize established religion with devastating effect. Subversive
texts such as Johannes Duijkeriuss Philopater novels (1691 and 1697) and
Simon Tyssot de Patots Voyages et Avantures de Jacques Mass (c.1715) put
forward comic, transgressive lampoons of established religion. Duijkeriuss
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 students 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 Patots novel, a meandering travelogue
containing within it much powerful advocacy of reason and parody of conventional theology. Before Tyssots 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 Christs crucifixion, when people saw
human figures rise straight out of their tombs.17 In using Michob as a mouth13

Leszek Kolakowski, Chrtiens sans glise (Paris, 1969), 804.

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 Mass (Amsterdam, 1714-17),
12.
17
Ibid., 14.
14

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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 quasiauthorial 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 Testament:
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 Republic forged the basic structures on which later, more stridently anti-Judaic Enlightenment 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 Enlightenmentthe 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 attempting to mediate between radical and traditional world views.20 In France
under Louis XV, however, intellectual life was largely divided into two sepa18

Tyssot de Patot, Jacques Mass, 169-70.

See Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (New Haven, 1995); Graham Gibbs, The Role of the Dutch Republic as the
Intellectual Entrept of Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Bijdragen en
Mededelingen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 90 (1975), 255-87.
20
On the relative conservatism of the English Enlightenment, see B. W. Young, Religion
and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998); David Bell, Spinoza in Germany from 1670 to the Age of Goethe (London, 1984); Winfried Schrder, Spinoza in der deutschen
Frhaufklrung (Wrzburg, 1987), and Ursprnge des Atheismus: Untersuchungen zur
Metaphysik- und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1998).
19

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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 suffocation of heterodoxy in the public sphere led to the development and clandestine 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 themesscientific speculation, irreligious polemic,
and theories of materialism and natural religionare expounded vigorously
and adversarially. Although a range of antagonistic targets appear in these manuscripts, 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 academies of Paris, such as Bernard Fontenelle, Nicolas Frret, and Jean Baptiste
de Mirabaud, also dabbled in clandestine philosophy. However, in doing so
they entered into another conceptual world, sharply segregated from their approved public personae.23 Many writers of radical texts lived tranquil lives remote 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 lorigine des manuscrits clandestins, Materia

actuosa: Antiquit, ge classique, Lumires, ed. Miguel Bentez, Anthony McKenna, Gianni
Paganini and Jean Salem (Paris, 2000), 555-68.
22
Miguel Bentez, Orobio de Castro et la littrature clandestine, La Face Cache des
Lumires: Recherches sur les manuscrits clandestins de lge classique (Paris, 1996), 147-54.
For a full inventory of the manuscripts, listing 213 known to have circulated, see Bentez, Face
Cache, 20-54.
23
See Alain Niderst, Fontenelle et la Littrature Clandestine, Filosofia e Religione nella
Letteratura Clandestina, ed. Guido Canziani (Milan, 1994), 161-73.
24
See H. Weber, Meslier er le XVI Sicle, tudes sur le cur Meslier (Paris, 1966), 5369; Ira Wade, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from
1700 to 1750 (Princeton, 1938), 65-93; Miriam Yardeni, Lantismitisme du cur Meslier,
Revue des tudes juives, 137 (1978), 47-60.

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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 subject 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 extremely established and respected individuals, who were drawn to radical literature largely because of its value as a curiosity. The Abb Spher (c.17101781), for example, was vice-chancellor of the University of Aix-en-Provence
and a distinguished bibliophile with a particular passion for heterodox theology, although he also owned a vast collection of thoroughly orthodox historical
and theological texts.27 Other collectors were of more humble origins: Spher
noted that he had purchased several of his manuscripts from an otherwise unknown Mr. Languener, medecin suisse mort a Paris vers 1740.28 Robert
Darnton has strikingly demonstrated the close association of radical philosophy and erotica in later eighteenth-century French libertinism.29 While no such
overlap is directly apparent for the early decades of the century, the provocatively 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 decades around 1700 Jens Hseler has noted that clandestine philosophical manuscripts 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 particularly 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 Gense du Telliamed, De
Bonne Main: La communication manuscrite au XVIIIe sicle, ed. Franois Moureau (Paris,
1993), 9-69.
26
See Genevive Artigas-Menant and Anthony McKenna, Anonymat et clandestinit aux
XVIIe et XVIIIe sicles, La Lettre Clandestine, 8 (1999), 13-138.
27
Anthony McKenna, Les Manuscrits Clandestins dans la Bibliothque du Marquis de
Mjanes, Treize tudes sur Aix et la Provence au XVIIIe Sicle (Aix-en-Provence, 1995), 1940.
28
MS Aix 818: note on flyleaf in the hand of Spher; and see Languener, see Bentez, Face
Cache, 18.
29
Robert Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1995),
esp. 167-246.
30
Jens Hseler, Rfugis Franais a Berlin: Lecteurs de Manuscrits Clandestins, Canziani,
Filosofia, 373-85.
31
See Ann Thomson, Quest-ce quun manuscrit clandestin?, Le Matrialisme du XVIII
sicle et la littrature 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 According 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 proprietors of their texts, in contrast to the sixteenth century, when the printer, bookseller, author, and reader had all been regarded as equally complicit in the diffusion of subversive ideas in print.33 The culture of the French Radical Enlightenment was in rebellion against this process; plagiarism, tendentious translation, and authorial ventriloquism or anonymity were all standard practice. Clandestine texts were regarded as ownerless and were freely embellished and modified. Of the various extant copies of Telliamed, each one is slightly different,
having been freely adapted by each copier.34 As Jeroom Vercruysse has demonstrated 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 accurate 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 deployment of Judaism is often deliberately ambiguous. While decoding these
authorial intentions is extremely important, the conceptual difficulties that clustered 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 notorious and highly influential Trait des Trois Imposteurs. The precise origins of
this work remain uncertain. Its central argumentthat Moses, Jesus, and
32

Franois Moureau, La plume et le plomb, in Moureau, De Bonne Main, 5-16.

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.
33

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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 massescan 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 Trait 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 expos of the oppressive nature of religious authority, 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 Trait 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 texts argument
is particularly significant. Moses is implicitly cast in the Trait 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 Trait 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 neither, 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 Bentez, Une Histoire Interminable: Origines et Dveloppement du Trait des Trois Imposteurs, Heterodoxy, Spinozism and
Free Thought in Early Eighteenth Century Europe: Studies on the Trait des Trois Imposteurs,
ed. Silvia Berti, Franoise Charles-Daubert, and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht, 1996), 53-74.
37
Trait 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 dispassionate tone of the beginning of the text, where imposture is discussed as
part of the natural weft of human exploitation: Ambitious people ... have always 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 example 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 inspiration.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 renvers, ou Dissertation 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 Judgment.48 The text argues that the belief of the ancient Hebrewsthat superstitious people49in 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 explanation is notably rare in the Early Enlightenment; in many more clandestine
41

Trait des Trois Imposteurs, 110.

Dissertation sur Moyse, MS Bibliothque Mazarine (Paris) 1194, 59-111; Wade, Clandestine 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 renvers, MS Maz. 1197.
49
Ibid., 11.
50
Ibid., 12-13.
42

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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 Nouvelle
Moysade, 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 Abrahams sacrifice of
Isaac, Noahs drunkenness, and above all Moses fanatical tyranny.53 He rejoices 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 polemical effect and suggests a deeper, frustrated anger. No amount of rationalist satire could dislodge the Jewish Bible from its foundational position in the JudaeoChristian 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 extratextual 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 clandestine 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 Acadmie Franaise.55 Drawing on a wide range
51

La Nouvelle Moysade, MS Aix 10, 2.

Ibid., 3.
53
Ibid., 17.
54
Ibid., 16, 17-18.
55
Wade, Clandestine Organization, 205-21; also Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach, A quo?
Datation de lOpinion 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 rception
des Opinions des anciens sur les Juifs, La Lettre Clandestine, 6 (1997), 51-63.
52

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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 themselves the curse that is regarded as the cause of their misery, were already hated and despised everywhere they were known, and this is
confirmed by the fact that they are virtually never mentioned in antiquity except in connection with this general disdain and aversion that
people felt towards them.56
Following Josephuss 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 universal 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 mockery 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 Jude au tems de Jesus-Christ, et
depuis, jusqu la ruine de Jerusalem, emphasizes the trans-historical obstinacy 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 renounce.62
56

Opinion des Anciens sur les Juifs, MS Bibliothque Nationale (Paris) NAF 4369, 172.
Ibid., 173.
58
Ibid., 182.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid., 206-7.
61
Ibid., 263-79.
62
Ibid., 277-78.
57

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The third section of the manuscript, Caractre, Sectes et Opinions des Juifs,
focuses on the Jews at the time of Jesus Christ. The mass suicide of the defeated Zealots at Masada is recounted as an example of the Jews absurd fanaticism.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 wonders 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 judgment of its earliest Jewish disciples. In the fourth and final section, Du Messie,
the credibility of Jesus first followers is more directly questioned: The sentiments 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-Christian 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 appearing to analyze the Jewish past with a scholarly scrupulousness, the Opinions
des Anciens in fact utilizes Judaism as a polemical tool for use in wider philosophical and theological argument.
A different historiographical strategy is exemplified by Henri de Boulainvilliers Abrg de lHistoire Universelle Jusqu lExode.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 However, he was also the author of several clandestine manuscripts, which reveal
seemingly very different intellectual interests. His Essai de Metaphysique, written around 1712 but only published posthumously in 1731, played an important role in the diffusion of Spinozas philosophy in France: despite presenting
itself as an exposure of Spinozas impiety this essay in fact consisted of a straight-

63

Opinion des Anciens sur les Juifs, 286.

Ibid., 291.
65
Ibid., 372.
66
Abrg de lHistoire Universelle Jusqu lExode, MS BN FF 6363.
67
See Harold A. Ellis, Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy (Ithaca, 1988).
64

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forward and thorough summary of his Ethics.68 In his historical Abrg

Boulainvilliers puts forward a rationalist interpretation of Genesis and Exodus
that clearly bears the stamp of Spinozas influence. Invoking the concept of
accommodation, he argues that because the ancient Jews had no knowledge of
science or astronomy Mosess account of Creation should be understood figuratively rather than literally.69 Closely echoing the first chapter of the Tractatus
Theologico-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 superstitious. 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 seventeenth-century prioritization of Egyptian chronology and culture by John
Marsham and John Spencer, Boulainvilliers applied this theory in a deliberately 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 systematically deprivileged and the contrasting sophistication of the Egyptians maximized. While ostensibly engaging in a serious exercise of comparative crosscultural history, Boulainvillierss 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 Vernire, Spinoza et la Pense Franaise Avant la Rvolution (Paris, 1954), 306-22; Wade,
Clandestine Organization, 97-123.
69
Abrg, 21-30.
70
Ibid., 151; cf. Spinoza, TTP, 21.
71
Abrg, 153-34.
72
Ibid., 176.
73
Ibid., 178-348.

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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 metaphysical issues, a similar, less systematic but nonetheless significant tendency
to engage with Judaism is also in evidence. The most important abstract controversy 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 preCartesian theory of physical influences, Descartess 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 outspoken text advancing this position was a clandestine manuscript titled LAme
Materielle, written by an unknown author at some stage in the first three decades of the eighteenth century. Drawing on a number of sources, including
Lucretius, Pierre Bayles Dictionnaire, Levesque de Burignys Histoire de la
Philosophie 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 material 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 assumed considerable polemical importance. In the materialist Opinions des anciens sur la nature de lme, 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 lesprit
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.
LAme Materielle, ed. Alain Niderst (Rouen, 1969).
76
See Aram Vartanian, Quelques Rflexions sur le concept dAme dans la Littrature
Clandestine, in Bloch, Matrialisme, 149-63, 149-50.
77
Wade, Clandestine Organization, 211-15.
78
Opinions des Anciens sur la nature de lme, MS BN NAF 4369, 15.
75

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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 souls immortality had
necessitated the renunciation of an ancient, natural, and easy manner of thinking, in favor of one that was new, difficult, and abstract.80
The Jews conception of the soul is here treated with a notable ambivalence. 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 positively appealed to, reflecting once again the deep ambivalence of the Early
Enlightenment towards Judaism. In another clandestine manuscript on this
theme, the Dialogues sur lme, 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 identification 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 clandestine text that most extensively deals with this theme is the Opinion des
anciens sur le monde, the third in Mirabauds trinity of subversive compilations 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.
Ibid., 125-26.
81
Ibid., 15-16.
82
Dialogues sur lme, MS Maz. 1191.
80

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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 necessity.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 nonetheless unambiguously undermines its authority by presenting it as virtually
unique among the varied beliefs of all mankind. Inverting the logic of PierreDaniel Huets Demonstratio Evangelica (1679), which sought to show that the
myths and cosmogonies of all cultures were derived from the Jewish prototype, Mirabaud here presents the Old Testament account of Creation as isolated 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 Bentez has pointed out, Mirabaud simply counters Jewish history by holding other, especially Chinese and Indian, histories against it. No
serious attempt is made to understand these alternative accounts: they are deployed only in order to discredit the authority of the biblical narrative.85 Despite the rationalist, scientific aspiration of the Early Enlightenment, this text
puts forward no substantive positive argument. Instead, assertions are combated 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, historiography, 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 without also to some extent expounding an alternative metaphysical or ethical vision. In general the positive theology put forward in these clandestine manuscripts 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.

Ibid., 35-36.
85
See Miguel Bentez, Lailleurs dans le littrature clandestine: la Chine comme argument, Face Cache, 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 Csar Chesneau Du Marsais
(b. 1676), a philosophical grammarian from Marseille.
84

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

This theme was the central thesis of Pierre Cupps extremely popular Le ciel
ouvert tous les hommes, where it also carried an implicit anti-Judaic slant.
Cupp 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 philosophical 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 selfconscious sense of philosophical boldness was an important binding element
in new socio-political formsFreemasonry in particularthat 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 perspectives, 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 manuscripts 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
litism and popularism. While frequently expressing the demand that knowledge and truth should be accessible to all, many radical texts also carry an
implication that the ignorant are not really capable of true philosophical knowledge.89 Perhaps the most important caveat to the radicalism of these texts, however, is that the polemical rhetoric on which their argumentation is based could
readily imply an exclusionary rather than an emancipatory politics. The conflicted but primarily hostile stance towards Judaism of so many of these manu-

87

Pierre Cupp, Le Ciel ouvert tous les hommes, MS Maz. 1176, 152-53.
Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans
(London, 1981), and Living the Enlightenment (New York, 1991).
89
See Miguel Bentez, Lumires et litisme dans les manuscrits clandestins, Face Cache,
199-211.
88

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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 Enlightenment, 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 Voltaires Early Enlightenment sources, but it is known
that he (and also such figures as Diderot, Rousseau, and dHolbach) were familiar with many of the manuscripts discussed here.90 The similarity of Voltaires
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 creativity of the ancient Jews. The ubiquity of these attacks in Voltaires 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 almost a third of this text consists of sustained attacks on the Pentateuch.92 Although many attempts have been made to account for Voltaires 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 philosophical 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 sustenance of the human spirit, Enlightenment rationalism had become a tool of
90

Wade, Clandestine Organization, 274-75; Marie-Hlne Cotoni, Aperus sur la littrature

clandestine dans la correspondance de Voltaire, in Bentez, McKenna, Paganini and Salem
(eds.), Materia actuosa, 635-55.
91
Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, Moland, Voltaire, Oeuvres, XIX, 242.
92
David Levy, Voltaire et son exgse du Pentateuque, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth 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 Voltaire
and the Eighteenth Century, 358 (1998), 27-91, and Le messianisme juif dans divers crits du
sicle des lumires, La Lettre Clandestine, 5 (1996), 291-331.

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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 Enlightenment 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 refute 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 recognized 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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