I don't have the time to go through the jillion letters of Voltaire to pick out the relevant passages, though I've read a number of them and he was a real sleeveen. Here's a passage from Jews: The Making of a Diaspora People By Irving M. Zeitlin.
But Voltaire also hurled dark and unsavory epithets at the Jews. Scholars have for the most part either ignored this side of Voltaire or have attempted to explain it away. How? By suggesting he attcked the Bible to get at Christianity.
Which is generally what Voltaire was want to do and which is a use that Jews are still commonly put to by the ideologues who will turn on them as soon as that use has been made of them.
But a survey of Voltaire's writings on Judaism and Jews suggests that in order for the Jews to be able to enter rhis new heaven, they had to purge themselves of their despicable traditions and history.
Again, this is something which is a theme throughout the “enlightenment” literature when the “rights of Jews” is the topic. Jews are OK, as long as they stop being Jews. Well, that's among the best of those “enlightened” folk. As the book points out, even among those gods of the enlightenment, even as they promoted their theories about the universal nature of man, a considerable number of them made an exception for those who were not white, Western, Europeans who had abandonned Christianity.
They had to abandon their particularism and become “enlightened.” But the evidence of his [Voltaire's] letters, in which he is most candid and frank, indicates something more than demanding that the Jews give up their particularism. Responding to his correspondent's favorable comments about the Spanish-Portugese Jews in the British colonies – who had been expelled from the Iberian Peninsula – Voltaire wrote:
"I know that there are some Jews in the English colonies. These Marranos [conversos] go wherever there is money to be made… But that these circumcised Jews who sell old clothes to the savages claim that they are of the tribe of Naphtali or Issachar is not of the slightest importance. They are, nonetheless, the greatest scoundrels who have ever sullied the face of the globe." (Correspondence, LXXXVI, 166; Cited in Herzberg, 285)
Both Arthur Herzberg and Leon Poliakov propose that the view expressed in Voltaire's correspondence is an early form of secular antiSemitism. The essence, after all, of the Enlightenment message is that humans are not bad by nature, and that they can be improved and perfected through freedom and education. As a general proposition that applies to all humans, it ought to include the Jews. But from Voltaire we hear something else: that the Jewish character has not changed from ancient times to the present. It is an eternal trait. The issue for Voltaire is not the theological quarrel between Christians and Jews. It is, rather, the clash between GrecoRoman Western culture and those who infected it with oriental ideas.
In 1771, Voltaire adopted one of his favorite poses, that of a classic Roman, and wrote Lettres de Memmuis a Ciceron, placing in the mouth of Memmius a description of Syria in which the Jews were singled out as the worst of men, hating all others and in turn hated by them : “The Persians and Scythians are a thousand times more reasonable ...” Voltaire then goes on the praise Cicero for his anti-Jewish oration Pro Flacco, the climax of which reads: “They [the Jews] are, all of them, are born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race”. (Oeuvres Completes. XXVIII, 439-40; cited in Herzberg, 300). And Herzberg comments: “Voltaire had thus, being an ex-Christian, abandoned entirely the religious attack on the Jews as Christ-killers or Christ-rejectors. He proposed a new principle on which to base his hatred of them their innate character” (Herzberg, 300).
Herzberg then goes on to aver that this “racist” remark by Voltaire is no accident as is shown by what he wrote the following year in his Il faut prendre une partie. It consisted of speeches by the adherents of various religions, each speech designed to make the particular religion appear rediculous. At the end, a “theist,” Voltaire, reviews the speeches and addresses the Jews:
"You seem to me to be the maddest of the lot. The Kaffirs, the Hottentots, and the Negroes of Guinea are much more reasonable and more honest people than your ancestors, the Jews. You have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct, and in barbarism. You deserve to be punished, for this is your destiny." ( Oeuvres Completes, XXVIII; cited in Herzberg. 549)
But Voltaire's new form of Jew-hatred is in continuity with the old: he blames the Jews for their expulsion from Spain – they brought in on themselves because they allegedly controlled all the money and commerce in the country. Why are the Jews hated?
"It is the inevitable result of their laws; they either had to conquer everybody or be hated by the whole human race. They kept all their customs, which are exactly the opposite of all proper social customs; they were therefore rightly treated as a people opposed to all others;…. they made usury a sacred duty. And these are our fathers ." (Oeuvres Completes, XII, 159-63: cited in Herzberg, 302-2)
Voltaire's utterances soon take on the character of silliness as well as venom: the Jews borrowed everything in their culture from others. He goes so far as to assert that the Jewish religion was borrowed from the Greek. How did they manage to do so? By identifying Lot's wife with Eurydice and Samson with Hercules. The Jews, for Voltaire, were inveterate plagiarizers and there is not a single page of the Jewish books that were not stolen, mostly from Homer. The gist, then, of Voltaire's view of the Jews is this: there is a cultural, philosophical, and ethnic tradition of Europe that was handed down, from the values taught by the Greeks, and then carried to all reaches of the European world by the Romans. This is the normative culture of which Voltaire approved. But the Jews, he asserts, are a different family and their religion is rooted in their character. It is possible to redeem Europe by bringing it back to its pre-Christian values. But the Jews are radically different: being born a Jew and the obnoxiousness of the Jewish outlook are indissoluble; it is, therefore, most improbable that even the “enlightened” can escape their innate character. “The Jews,” as Herzberg sums up Voltaire's position, “are subversive of the European tradition by their very presence, for they are radically other, the hopeless alien. Cure them of their religion, and their inborn character remains.” (304). Thus, it seems that Voltaire, by providing a new, secular anti-Jewish rhetoric in the name of European culture, rather than in the name of religion, planted the seeds for a quasiracial or racist conception of the Jews.
If a lot of that sounds familiar, well, you can read atheists saying similar things on the internet every day, most of them alleged leftists or liberals (in the 18th century meaning of the word). And if that doesn't ring a bell, a lot of it sound remarkably like how the proto-Nazis and the Nazis viewed Jews. As I pointed out, also late last year, there was a huge difference between that kind of biological anti-semitism and that which, for example, the Vatican has been charged with. The Catholic church welcomed Jews who wanted to convert to Catholicism, a number of converts and their children have been named to high positions in the Catholic hierarchy.
And there is certainly a difference between how Voltaire and atheists, in general, view the Jewish scriptures and how Christians, in general, view them. The Jewish scriptures have, from the beginning of the canon of the Christian Bible, been included as inspired scripture. There has never been a period in the past two-thousand years in which non-Jews have been more interested in getting the understanding of those writings right, of understanding them within their original context than today. And there are no non-Jews who are more interested in getting it right than serious, committed Christians. Walter Brueggemann's incredibly in depth study of them is not unique among modern, Christian scholars. Even as the intellectual descendants of Voltaire, or at least their cartoon, sanitized, plaster secular Saint Voltaire, are saying the same things they pretend he didn't say before the fascists and Nazis said them.
There is a strain of anti-semitism in Western culture that was carried by Christianity; there can't be any doubt of that.
ReplyDeleteBut the burden also rests on the shoulders of Rome and the deep imprint it left on Western civilization. To this day Piccadilly has a "circus" because it comes from the Latin word for "circle," and Brits studied Latin in the 19th century because it was still considered a superior language to their native tongue (and therefore a better model for shaping the thought of those who would rule the world as Rome once did).
The same is true on the Continent, as Voltaire's adoration for Greco-Roman thought (with the emphasis, inevitably, on Roman) shows. The Greeks regarded non Greeks as barbarians (best exemplified in Euripides' "Medea"), the Romans were more cosmopolitan but still persecuted the Hebrews in Judea (they didn't become "Jews" until after 70 C.E.) in ways that became the norm for Europe ever after.
History is never so simple that it only has one villain. Anti-semitism has a lot of roots (Luther was a flaming anti-semite), and it is very ugly. But the idea that all bad thoughts begin in religion, not in "reason," is truly the beginning of blinkered ignorance.