Nadene Goldfoot
"The Age of Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason or simply the Enlightenment) was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries." All of a sudden people were thinking, something not practiced much during the Dark Ages.
Religious commentary was a response to the preceding century of religious conflict in Europe, especially the Thirty Years' War. This was a military war. The Thirty Years' War was a conflict primarily fought in Central Europe from 1618 to 1648; estimates of total military and civilian deaths range from 4.5 to 8 million, mostly from disease or starvation. In some areas of Germany, it has been suggested up to 60% of the population died. The war originated in differences between German Protestants and Catholics, which were temporarily settled by the 1555 Peace of Augsburg but gradually undermined by political and religious tensions. In 1618, the Bohemian Estates deposed the Catholic Ferdinand II as King of Bohemia; they offered the Crown to the Protestant Frederick V of the Palatinate, who accepted. Regardless of religion, most German princes refused to support him and by early 1620 the Bohemian Revolt had been suppressed.
Theologians of the Enlightenment wanted to reform their faith to its generally non-confrontational roots and to limit the capacity for religious controversy to spill over into politics and warfare while still maintaining a true faith in God. For moderate Christians, this meant a return to simple Scripture. John Locke abandoned the corpus of theological commentary in favor of an "unprejudiced examination" of the Word of God alone. He determined the essence of Christianity to be a belief in Christ the redeemer and recommended avoiding more detailed debate.
In the Jefferson Bible, Thomas Jefferson went further and dropped any passages dealing with miracles, visitations of angels and the resurrection of Jesus after his death, as he tried to extract the practical Christian moral code of the New Testament.
Enlightenment scholars sought to curtail the political power of organized religion and thereby prevent another age of intolerant religious war. Spinoza, Jewish, determined to remove politics from contemporary and historical theology (e.g., disregarding Judaic law). Moses Mendelsson, Jewish, advised affording no political weight to any organized religion, but instead recommended that each person follow what they found most convincing. They believed a good religion based in instinctive morals and a belief in God should not theoretically need force to maintain order in its believers, and both Mendelssohn and Spinoza judged religion on its moral fruits, not the logic of its theology."
Since Christianity originally was a discarding of Judaism, of course they would want to discard more of it.
Many Jews welcomed the Enlightenment as they had long suffered antisemitism from religious groups. Many Jews expected the secularization of Europe to lead to a dramatic improvement in their status. Leaders of the Enlightenment called for greater human rights and fraternity that many people welcomed this besides the Jews.
It came about but not as they had expected. Equality came not to Jews per se but to individuals. Emancipation was conditional on their ending their identification as Jews. Jew-Hatred was not ended. Now the target no longer was G-d and Law, but to its peoplehood component.
There are Jews today, secular Jews, who believe that if all religion ended, that would be the end of anti-Semitism. We see that the past 20th Century, the most secular one yet, was the most anti-Semitic. Today we have as many anti-Semites who are as secular as their are religious anti-Semites. The hatred of Jews has been planted by the leaders of the Enlightenment of yesterday or those new ones of today, whatever they may be.
Voltaire of France: He was an anti-Semite. He was the father of Enightenment, too. Jews made up less than 1% in France then. Voltaire was obsessed with them. 30 of his 118 articles in Dictionnaire Philosophique dealt with Jews. He described them in consistently deprecating ways. In an article about Abraham, he describes the Jews as "our masters and our enemies...whom we detest". He defines Jews as "the most abominable people in the world". In another, he said "In short, they are a totally ignorant nation who, for many years, have combined contemptible miserliness and the most revolting superstition with a violent hatred of all those nations that have tolerated them. Nevertheless, they should not be burned at the stake."
By "1770, Voltaire appended to his entry on Jews that the Jews engage in ritual murder: Your priests have always sacrificed human victims with their sacred hands."
During the WWII, France was occupied by Germany and a history teacher, very anti-Semitic, at the Sorbonne, created a 250 page book of Voltaire's anti-Jewish writing, probably as a gift to the Germans. s picture on Wikipedia: The French philosopher Voltaire argued for religious tolerance, saying that "It does not require great art, or magnificently trained eloquence, to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. I, however, am going further: I say that we should regard all men as our brothers. What? The Turk my brother? The Chinaman my brother? The Jew? The Siam? Yes, without doubt; are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?" Such a 2-faced man! Even after all he has written!
Voltaire's anti-Semitism cannot be denied. He
despised the Jews and their religion. In his view, the
Jews possessed a vile nature, caused by Judaism and
its laws, which in turn reflected the hatred that Jews
feel for other people. He would attack the religion even
when he agreed with it!
So this was the best that the age of enlightenment
could do. Of course people would read Voltaire and copy his beliefs about
Jews, especially the Germans. The French, usually known to be for freed-
om, certainly didn't do Jews any favors this time.
Resource:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
Why The Jews? Dennis Prager & Joseph Telushkin
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