“Let there be light” was the message — the light of reason to illuminate the dark corners of ignorance, superstition and cruelty that disfigured post-medieval Europe.
But the intellectual reform movement that swept that continent in the 17th and 18th centuries, known as the Enlightenment, also had a dark side, according to Adam Sutcliffe. His book, “Judaism and Enlightenment,” maintains that the Jews were both its beneficiaries and its victims.
Ambiguity is one of his major themes. He finds the real story of the Enlightenment not only in its written words, but in the gaps and contradictions that obscure them. The troubled status of the Jews is treated as central to an understanding of the ambiguities of the Enlightenment.
Now assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois, Sutcliffe developed his Ph.D. thesis into this three-part book.
The first reviews the ancient canard that Jews must suffer for rejecting Jesus as their messiah and for his crucifixion. Yet, despite their outcast status, they were privileged as “custodians” of the Mosaic Law on which Christianity was founded. Their survival was considered necessary so they might finally be converted.
Since the 15th century, the Old Testament had been studied by Christian Hebraists, who regarded Judaism with both fascination and revulsion. When the Scientific revolution undermined the Bible’s authenticity, educated people dismissed the Jews for accepting its absurdities, and as barbarians, fools, hoaxers or plagiarists of Egyptian culture.
The second section focuses on Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza (1632-1677). His family had fled the Inquisition to the Portuguese Sephardic community in Amsterdam, which Sutcliffe describes as “uniquely caught in the eye of the intellectual storms that accompanied the emergence of modernity.” He perceives Spinoza as “the critical conduit” connecting it to the wider Enlightenment.
A lens-grinder and mathematician, Spinoza developed a philosophy based entirely on reason, rejecting the “sacred” element in Scripture. He was expelled from the Sephardic community for heresy.
Actually, he never ceased to identify with the Jewish people and to value the Old Testament as the source of their ethics and history. However, his philosophy would eventually be used against them.
Wider social and political issues are addressed in “Judaism, nationhood and the politics of Enlightenment.” Sutcliffe’s prime example of Enlightenment ambivalence is François Marie Arouet (1694-1778), better known as Voltaire. Although his assaults on the French Catholic Church are well known, his more hostile attitude toward the Jews, is not.
However, Voltaire strongly opposed intolerance and persecution of any minority group, Jews included. This illustrates the chief ambiguity Sutcliffe finds in the Enlightenment attitude toward Jews: As individuals they had rights, but as heirs and practitioners of Judaism they were blamed for just the sort of dogma, superstition and authoritarianism that Enlightenment thinkers were determined to uproot.
The French First Republic passed laws in 1790 and 1791 that started Jewish emancipation and swept away the legal, economic and bureaucratic regulations of Jewish society. Napoleon exported these laws across Europe. Sutcliffe sees those reforms as denials of Jewish identity and autonomy, and links them to the horrors of later centuries.
But his overall attitude is clear: “Justice, reason, toleration, self-actualization, freedom of thought and speech — provide the fundamental grounds on which the entitlements of minorities such as Jews are protected in modern societies.”
The book, brief but scholarly and erudite, is an important contribution to the history of Western ideas and Judaism. The viewpoints it quotes range from the surprisingly modern to the barbaric. The author’s interpretations are subtle and interesting, although controversial and at times obscure.
“Judaism and Enlightenment” by Adam Sutcliffe, (338 pages, Cambridge University Press, $60).