An earlier version of this essay, “The Role of Biblical Criticism in Enlightenment Antisemitic Thought from Spinoza to Voltaire” was submitted as a final paper for History 164S, the “History of Antisemitism,” taught by History Professor Malachi Hacohen.
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Biblical criticism and antisemitism have long had a curious relationship. In the 13th century, Dominican and Franciscan conversionist friars began using Jewish biblical texts for antisemitic purposes. The friars obviously couched their biblical analysis—or exegesis—in Christian terms. They were motivated to convert Jews to Christianity, not to eliminate them. And independent of this inter-religious conflict, both Medieval Jews and Christians who practiced exegesis did so using the hermeneutical principle of accommodation, the idea that “scripture speaks the language of man.”.
It would take until the time of Baruch Spinoza in the mid-to-late 17th century for the debate surrounding the Bible and, moreover, the role of the Jews in Western society (both ancient and contemporary) to be “essentially secularized.” Spinoza, an Amsterdam-based Jewish philosopher and child of Portuguese marranos (or nominal Catholic converts from the Iberian peninsula) contributed more than perhaps any single individual to the rise of secular Western philosophy, with its focus on reason and liberalism. In particular, Spinoza developed a new principle of accommodation in his 1670 Theological-Political Tractate. In this book, Spinoza argued that the law of the Hebrew Bible was intended to be a political constitution for a religious state and that, as such, it was no longer applicable in his day. Spinoza’s argument led to the following revolutionary conclusion, in the words of scholar Amos Funkenstein: that “the Bible is a book written by primitive man in his own language, which he could not escape. It is a historical rather than a perennial document.”
By 1678, Spinoza’s Theological-Political Tractate (originally written in Latin) had been published in French. In France, it was banned by thought leaders and the Catholic Church. This strict censorship, combined with a large demand for banned literature, spurred the creation of a clandestine underground network of hand-written literature. This network operated until the middle of the 18th century and involved hundreds of handwritten manuscripts that were considered ownerless. Clandestine works were freely embellished and changed by others within the network. According to scholar Arthur Hertzberg, “‘everybody’ had a copy” of Spinoza’s book.
It was through these clandestine French authors, such as Henri de Boulainvilliers, author of Essai de Metaphysique (1712), that Spinoza’s philosophy would be diffused through France. These authors were attempting to devise a truly rational understanding of history, politics, and religion—Jewish thought, therefore, presented a significant challenge for them. Although the typical method of writing within the clandestine manuscripts was attack (regardless of subject), Judaism was attacked with “particularly vigorousness” by clandestine authors.
With Spinoza’s ideas now in the clandestine French culture, his version of the doctrine of accommodation would allow these authors to attack Judaism in a way that they saw as rational, albeit one which was undeniably antisemitic. Many manuscripts argued that the ancient Jews were uniquely “primitive.” That primitiveness was not a natural aspect of their historical circumstance, but a unique phenomenon inherent to the nature of the people. Even manuscripts celebrating the Jewish diaspora were rife with antisemitism. These manuscripts, with their Spinozan influence, would influence some of the most preeminent of the philosophes, including Rousseau, Diderot, d’Holbach, and Voltaire, to whom we now turn.
François-Marie Arouet, better-known by the pen name Voltaire, was the most prominent of the philosophes, the thought-leaders of 18th century France. Hertzberg even calls the 18th century “the ‘century of Voltaire.’” Adam Sutcliffe writes that “Voltaire stands metonymically for the Enlightenment spirit of engaged struggle against intolerance and superstition.” In his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire even wrote that toleration “is the prerogative of humanity.” According to René Pomeau, one of the world’s foremost scholars of Voltaire, it is “above all thanks to Voltaire that tolerance is now universally recognized as natural, humane, and necessary.” But Voltaire’s reputation—as a kind of heroic force advancing secular “Reason” in the face of backwards religious despotism—is of a construct of the ideals he represented than his actual work.
Although Voltaire was a well-known and ferocious opponent of the “repressive” and “anti-human” Christian institutions of his day, he had a strained relationship with Jews and Judaism. Jews were somewhat of a fixation of Voltaire’s (the very first instance of antisemitism in Voltaire’s writings was in 1722, when he was twenty-eight. Concerning an obscure affair of espionage involving a Jew named Solomon Levy, Voltaire wrote that Levy “passed over to the enemy with the facility the Jews have of being received and dismissed everywhere”) . In 2023 a study of the ARTFL database of French literature by Ronald Schechter found that Voltaire mentioned the words “juif” or “juives” 922 times in his writings (he himself was responsible for nearly 40% of the database’s total). Voltaire mentioned the words “Jew,” “Jews,” or “Jewish” in published writing almost once a week, every week, for his entire (and remarkably long) adult life. The contexts in which he discussed Jews were typical of antisemitic literature. Voltaire’s writings often portray Jews as materialists, usurers, greedy, iniquitous, clever, and rootless, among many other quintessentially antisemitic descriptors.
Many scholars have identified Voltaire as an antisemite and condemned him for it (including Henri Labroue in his 250-page book Voltaire Antijuif). Some even contend that, among all thinkers of his age, Voltaire was the most hostile to Jews. Hertzberg, in the prototypical description of Voltaire’s relationship with Jews, claimed that “Voltaire personally disliked Jews quite intensely … in the discussions of the several decades before the Revolution Voltaire was consistently understood on all sides to be the enemy of the Jews of the present as well as of those of the past. His writings were the great arsenal of anti-Jewish arguments for those enemies of the Jews who wanted to sound contemporary. The ‘enlightened’ friends of the Jews invariably quoted from Montesquieu and did battle with Voltaire.” Hertzberg argues, in brief, that Voltaire “provided the fundamentals of the rhetoric of secular anti-Semitism.”
Beyond Hertzberg, other scholars have criticized Voltaire for having “little respect” for the Jews, having “nearly total alienation from, and antipathy to Judaism,” and for having a “sustained disparaging and dismissive attitude to Judaism and the Jews.” Some scholars, while accepting Voltaire’s dislike for Jews, contend that this antipathy does not amount to antisemitism. Max Dimont notes that “Voltaire did not like the Jews, but that did not make him antisemitic. He thought of all Jews as ignorant and superstitious, but held that this was no reason why they should be burned.” Other historians, like J.H. Brumfitt, Peter Gay, and C. Lehrmann insist Voltaire’s opposition to, and biblical criticism of, Judaism was (at least partially, in the minds of Lehrmann and Brumfitt in particular) part of his opposition to the Christian Church. And still others, like Jacob Katz, insist that “Voltaire did more than any other single man to shape the rationalistic trend that moved European society toward improving the status of the Jews.”
But although Voltaire did much to advance toleration, his literalist interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, and resulting arguments about the Jewish people as a whole, unequivocally demonstrate his personal belief in the timeless, essentialized inferiority of the Jewish people. Looking at a series of examples throughout his writings will paint a picture of Voltaire’s hardened attitude toward the Jewish people, even those who were highly educated and socially elite like him. In 1762, Voltaire wrote a letter to the Jewish philosopher Isaac de Pinto, the most important pre-Revolutionary Jewish literary figure who wrote in French, telling de Pinto:
Remain a Jew, since you are one; you will no longer massacre forty-two thousand men for failing to pronounce the word Shibboleth, nor twenty-four thousand for having slept with the Midianite women; but be a philosopher, that is the very best I can wish for you in this brief life.
This letter that Voltaire wrote to De Pinto reveals how Voltaire equated biblical and modern Jews. As Katz writes, Voltaire fundamentally believed a core antisemitic precept: that “the Jews of every generation are tainted by the same defects as their forefathers.” Voltaire also believed in the inherited inferiority of the Jews (in unmistakably racial language), as seen in his fictionalized letter from Memmius to Cicero, which claims that Jews “are all of them born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blonde hair.”
Voltaire’s obsession with the Jews and Judaism is perhaps most notably seen in his Dictionaire Philosophique. “The large majority” of articles in this book are attacks on the Hebrew Bible. In this book, one of his more widely-read, Voltaire’s antagonism to the Bible and biblical Jews is clear. While there are some instances of Voltaire admiring the Hebrew Bible, as can be seen in his many references to all the books from Genesis to the Apocrypha and his sympathy to the Patriarchs (despite what he writes about Abraham), most of the evidence supports the claim Voltaire was “negative in his attitudes toward scripture.” One of the charges he levels consistently against the Jews is that they were merely originally nomadic Arab tribes.” Moreover, this Arab tribe, he writes, were idol worshippers. According to scholar Arnold Ages, Voltaire’s article titled “Jews” (the longest article in the book), presents the argument that
the Hebrews [are] an uncultured people, having no books, physicians or astronomers. The Jews had no schools and even the Indian tribes in Peru had a better calendar. Geometry was completely unknown to them. This primitive people had to borrow their major customs and ceremonies from neighboring cultures. The names of the angels Gabriel, Uriel, and Raphael come from the Babylonians. The doctrine of immortality is a patent copy of a similar Persian belief. Circumcision, the vaunted Hebrew practice, was taken from the Egyptians, likewise the minutiae of the dietary laws.
In his exegesis, Voltaire lowered holy Jewish texts to a lower standard than Spinoza’s historical and text-based approach: they “are only monuments of human imagination, in which we cannot learn a single truth, whether scientific or historical. Any little book on natural philosophy is nowadays more useful than all the books of antiquity.”
Beyond biblical criticism, the Dictionaire Philosophique also contained invectives against the Jews. Voltaire wrote that “You will … find in the Jews an ignorant, lazy, barbarous people who for a long time have combined the most undignified stinginess with the most profound hatred for all the people who tolerate and enrich them.” In his letter On the Jews, Voltaire is direct in saying that
the Jews are perhaps the most to be dreaded; and if there were not to be opposed to them the miracles of our Lord Jesus Christ, it would be very difficult for a man of no more than a moderate share of learning to make head against them. They look on themselves as the elder-born of the family, who, though they have lost their inheritance, still keep their title. They have employed a profound sagacity in explaining all the prophecies to their own advantages. They pretend that the Law of Moses was given [to] them as an eternal one; that it is impossible that God should have changed, and forsworn himself; that our Saviour himself has acknowledged it. They object to us, that according to Jesus Christ, not a point, not a tittle of the Law, ought to be transgressed; that Jesus was come to accomplish the Law, not to abolish it; that he was circumcised; that he kept the sabbath, and solemnised all the festivals [sic]; that he was born a Jew, lived a Jew, and died a Jew; that that he never instituted a new religion; that we have not a a single line of his; that it is we ourselves, and not he, that made the Christian religion.
Voltaire continues this letter by saying that Christians “must not pretend to hazard” a debate with Jews unless they have a mastery of Hebrew and sarcastically asserts that not a single Jew has ever converted to Christianity: “A Carthaginian would sooner have taken the part of Rome, than a Jew have turned Christian.” He also explains that “The Jews have not written against Mahometanism which they are for from holding in such horror as they do our doctrine: the reason of which is evident, the Mahometans do not make a God of Jesus Christ.” He continues by repeating the antisemitic stereotype that “the Jews have always lent their money, at an exorbitant interest, to Christians, and have not been the more converted by them.” Yet, Voltaire notes in his concluding paragraph to this letter by rationalizing and even sympathizing with the actions of the Jews, arguing that Jews are merely trying to “justify their ancient religion at the expense of ours.” Instead of hating the Jews or committing violence against them, Voltaire writes, “they are only to be pitied.”
Impact and Legacy
As Spinoza’s re-interpretation of the Hebrew Bible diffused through clandestine manuscripts in France, the theory that the Hebrew Bible reflects the primitivity of the ancient Israelites would be adapted and exploited. In 18th century France, these ideas reached Voltaire ,who went beyond biblical criticism to argue that there was an inherent inferiority in all Jews that persisted across time, based on his literal interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. This inferiority, Voltaire believed, was not a modern biological or racial one, but one originating in Jewish character, which he saw as bad and innate, and coming from an inherent civilizational inferiority. Though Voltaire’s antisemitism was not racial, it helped to lay the groundwork for the racialized antisemitism that would emerge in the 19th century, making the antisemitic path from the Enlightenment to the Holocaust more clear.
Voltaire also contributed to the dangerous secularization of antisemitism. His “abandonment of Christian theology,” as Katz put it, removed the element of hope that Jews would recognize Christ and convert to Christianity. Thus, the secularization of antisemitism removed the barriers placed on Christian society and put Jews in greater danger. That Katz uses the word “solution” in this context is a rather telling sign of to what he saw as an inevitable consequence of Voltaire’s antisemitism.
It is fitting to close with the conclusion of a letter by three ordinary congregants of a synagogue in Utrecht, responding to specific claims Voltaire made against the Jews. This letter’s remarkable and prophetic conclusion is how I see Voltaire’s legacy:
What has been our object, Sir, in all these observations? Was it to humble M. Voltaire, and to enjoy an insolent triumph over a great man? Far be from us such thoughts! We have been attacked and abused in our patriarchs, our kings, and prophets, our laws and manners, &c., and we thought that we might justly defend ourselves; that we might instruct those who are dazzled with your style and sallies of wit; that we might convince them, chiefly in this case of the Jews, that they must examine before they believe; that, although you are a great man and a great philosopher, yet you have your absences of mind, your prejudices and errors; that your quotations are sometimes false, your translations unfaithful, your assertions rash, your decisions unfair. In short, that he who would rest his faith on your word, or take you for a sure and infallible guide, as many credulous readers have done, would necessarily expose himself to many mistakes.
Upon the whole, Sir, we think it our duty to make this public declaration before we conclude: the multitude of mistakes, contradictions, and bad arguments, which we have pointed out in your writings, and so many more which might be pointed out, shall never diminish our esteem for your personal qualities, or our admiration for your talents … Teach citizens to obey the laws, give to legislators lessons of humanity, and to sovereigns precepts of wise toleration. But whilst you are preaching up toleration, exclude not men from it who worship the same God you do, who are your brethren by nature, your fathers in the faith, a people who deserve to be pitied on account of their misfortunes; and, if we dare say it, to be respected on account of their antiquity, religion and laws.
by Max Zinkin
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