Voltaire e Os Judeus

Chisick / Voltaire’s Attitudes toward the Jews 577
E THICS ANDHISTORY IN VOLTAIRE’S

ATTITUDES TOWARD THE JEWS
Harvey Chisick
The question of Voltaire’s anti-Semitism has received considerable atten-

tion, partly because it suggests a paradox. Did one of the outstanding liberals and
humanitarians of the eighteenth century, who devoted great energy and enthusi-
asm to fighting the prejudices of the religion into which he was born, share at
least some of the prejudices of that religion? Having turned his back on the theo-
logically based Jew-hatred of the Middle Ages, did Voltaire then help to originate
a modern and secular form of anti-Semitism? Or, as some have maintained, did he
criticize the Hebrew Scriptures primarily to get at Christianity? Were his attacks
on the values and behavior of many of the protagonists of the Hebrew Bible
directed against Jews of his own time, or were they for the most part thinly veiled
criticisms of the Greek Scriptures and the Church militant?1
Formulated in these terms, the problem has no solution for the simple
reason that Voltaire can be quoted both saying things hurtful and insulting to
Jews and, less frequently, expressing sympathy for them. Arthur Hertzberg, who
sees Voltaire as the link between religiously based Jew-hatred and modern anti-
Semitism, recognizes this, and to avoid the futile project of citation and counter-
citation considers how Voltaire was understood by his contemporaries and later
generations.2 Hertzberg finds that Voltaire was cited frequently by authors hostile
to the Jews but virtually never by writers sympathetic to them. Whether this justifies
Hertzberg’s conclusion that Voltaire was therefore an anti-Semite is questionable.
First, a writer’s work can be used selectively or distorted by those who
borrow from it. Voltaire’s works contain a veritable storehouse of anti-Jewish
Harvey Chisick is the author of a number of books and articles on the social and intellectual
history of the eighteenth century.
Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no. 4 (2002) Pp. 577–600.

578 Eighteenth-Century StudieS 35 / 4
statements. Yet this is not the whole story. Second, as modern anti-Semitism did
not exist in Voltaire’s time, it is risky to associate him with it. Moreover, it is
difficult to determine whether later writers derived their anti-Semitism from Vol-
taire or simply found in his work a ready arsenal of cleverly expressed views
suitable to opinions they already held. It is not clear whether Voltaire contributed
to forming modern anti-Semitism or whether he was simply a convenient source
of memorable citations for writers whose opinions differed fundamentally from
his own. Certainly there are statements of openness toward and sympathy for
Jews in the writings of Voltaire that no anti-Semite would accept.
I wish to suggest that framing the question in terms of Voltaire’s attitudes
toward the Jews rather than his anti-Semitism may be a more useful way to ap-
proach the problem. These attitudes and the judgments that follow from them
depend in large part on Voltaire’s conceptions of good and evil. His ethics and the
assumptions on which they are based should offer a useful perspective from which
to consider the ambivalence of what he wrote about the Jews. In what follows I
will first consider Voltaire’s basic ethical assumptions. Then I will examine his
approach to the Hebrew Scriptures, for the most part using his important and
popular Dictionnaire philosophique as my point of reference. I will then examine
the importance of historiographical context to the issue under discussion and try
to evaluate the relative importance of his historiography and his ethics in deter-
mining his attitudes toward the Jews.
Voltaire’s basic ethical assumptions derived from two main sources. The
first is the Enlightenment’s paradigms of man and nature established by Locke
and Newton. The second is the classical tradition as expressed in the great works
of literature and philosophy of Greece and Rome, which formed the substance of
the curricula of the collèges, or secondary schools, of eighteenth-century France—
and indeed of all Europe—at that time.
It is probably fair to characterize the mainstream Enlightenment approach
to ethics as moral Newtonianism. Most Enlightenment thinkers assumed that the
moral universe was governed by a few simple, universally applicable principles,
just as Newton’s physics explained the working of the physical universe in terms
of the calculable interplay of a few basic forces. Lockean psychology, which re-
gards all human beings as initially equal, sentient, physical entities and treats the
development of the human mind as an empirically verifiable consequence of sense
experiences, also contributed to understanding humans in simple and regular rather
than mystical terms. The very simplicity and intelligibility of these approaches
had a liberating effect and tended to reinforce a newfound confidence in man’s
ability to comprehend and control the world. They also formed the basis for a
new and optimistic view of human nature.3
Nature, Voltaire believed, was regular in all its operations, for it was
governed by “general laws” (Dictionnaire philosophique, “Japanese Catechism,”
103).4 So too was human nature, for “[w]hen nature formed our species she gave
us a few instincts: self-esteem for our preservation, benevolence for the preserva-
tion of others, the love which is common to all species, and the inexplicable gift of
being able to combine more ideas than all animals put together” (DP, “Lois [des],”
287–8).5 Voltaire further asserts the existence of natural law “independent of all
human conventions” and describes its content as follows: “[T]he fruit of my labour
must be mine, I must honour my father and my mother, I have no right over the life
of my neighbour, and my neighbour has none over mine, etc.” (ibid., 285). Elsewhere
he describes the basic virtues as consisting in being “a good husband, a good father,
a good neighbour, a good subject, a good gardener [the speaker’s occupation]; I
don’t go beyond that” (DP, “Catéchisme du jardinier,” 105). Voltaire is consis-
tent in arguing that true virtue is other-regarding and social (DP, “Vertu,” 399).
The law of nature, by definition, is universally applicable. Distinguish-
ing between the ethical systems of different revealed religions and the objective
and universally valid morality in which he believed, Voltaire stated emphatically:
“It cannot be too often repeated that all dogmas are different, and that morality is
the same among all men who use their reason. Therefore morality comes from
God like light” (DP, “Morale,” 322). Similarly, he wrote, “Let us repeat every
day to all men: ‘Morality is one, it comes from God. Dogmas differ, they are
ours’” (DP, “Juste,” 273).6
The more forward-looking aspects of Voltaire’s ethics are based on the
model of Newtonian physics, the key feature of which is the law of universal
gravitation, and on Locke’s psychology, which treats human beings in purely nat-
uralistic terms. For both Newton and Locke, the world is conceived in terms of
regularities that admit of no significant or inexplicable deviations. Unlike expo-
nents of most physical and moral theories that preceded their work, Newton and
Locke conceive the world and mankind in truly comprehensive and universal
terms. The same cannot be said for classical antiquity.
The values of ancient Greece and Rome reflected the world of the polis,
or city-state, which in many ways laid the foundation for Western civilization. We
owe to the Greek polis and at least the republican phase of Roman history the
notion of the state as the means for realizing the full potential of the citizen, the
rule of law, and an ideal of civic life that includes the active commitment of the
citizen to the cultural, judicial, political, and military well-being of his communi-
ty.7 Admirable though the achievements of classical antiquity were, the values of
the Greeks and Romans reflected a world defined, structured, and represented by
the elites of particular Mediterranean civilizations.
In ancient Greece and Rome, relations of mastery and subordination were
taken for granted. In terms of class and gender, they were radically inegalitarian.
Aristocratic males, initially both warriors and leaders in civil life, dominated and
exploited the working population, elements of which were reduced to slavery.8
Women in the families of the elites obviously fared better than did the servants
and slaves over whom they had authority, but they were uniformly subordinated
to their fathers and husbands and were excluded from public life.9 Of course,
intelligence, competence, and refinement were also to be found in the way of life
of the aristocrats of these societies, and it is these qualities that, increasingly from
the Renaissance, informed the secular culture of the European elites.
Like his educated contemporaries, Voltaire absorbed the basic values of
classical culture from the Latin texts he studied as a youth. Classical literature
being the virtually exclusive product of aristocratic authors, it presented the val-
ues and assumptions of these authors as uncontested norms.10 Voltaire certainly
approved of the emphasis on politeness, learning, elegance, and liberality that
characterized the literature of classical antiquity and the manners of his aristo-
cratic contemporaries. Though a mentality of domination, classicism was also
thoroughly rationalistic. The application of reason allowed both a broader un-
derstanding of the world and a more effective manipulation of it. The elites were
not without their own superstitions, but progressively after the Renaissance they
overcame them and had increasing disdain for the superstitions of the masses.
Also, the hostility of classical authors to the demos, or people, and particularly
their criticism of its political competence, were readily absorbed in economic con-
ditions that were not significantly different from those of antiquity. With these
considerations in mind, we will be better able to understand Voltaire’s evaluation
of another culture that differed in fundamentals from the classical. In effect, the
universalism of the ethical assumptions Voltaire derived from the founders of the
Enlightenment was offset by the particularism of classical culture. But being so
widely shared by the educated elite, the particularism of the classics was not ap-
parent to its adherents.11
II
In the Dictionnaire philosophique Voltaire accords the most sympathetic

and respectful treatment to the Chinese, Japanese, and Hindu religions and to
deism. Treatment of the three great revealed religions and their scriptures ranges
from mildly critical to denunciatory. Given Voltaire’s universalist ethical assump-
tions and classical bias, his appreciation of the Hebrew Scriptures can hardly be
expected to be positive. At the same time, these values also caused him to relate
critically to the Greek Scriptures and the Koran.
In that biblical Judaism is an intensely particularistic religion, exponents
of universal religious and ethical systems were unlikely to find it congenial.12 The
Hebrew Scriptures tell the story of a specific tribe, or group of tribes, as it devel-
oped its religious consciousness and engaged in mostly acrimonious relations with
its neighbors—first in Mesopotamia, then as an extended family in Canaan, then
in Egypt, then again in Canaan as a tribe or confederacy of tribes, and finally as a
national monarchy unified under Saul, David, and Solomon, but subsequently
divided into the rival kingdoms of Judah and Israel. As might have been expected,
biblical Judaism developed and defined itself in conflict with the surrounding
civilizations. Abraham distanced himself from the Sumerian culture into which
he was born; the patriarchs would not intermarry with the populations of Canaan;
and Moses took his people away from the civilization and oppression of Egypt.
When the Israelites entered Canaan, it was with the intention of superseding the
native populations, not of settling beside them. Unlike Rousseau, who admired
Moses as one of the few lawgivers who had succeeded in forming a comprehen-
sive and durable culture, Voltaire was critical of him for establishing laws that
worked to separate the Hebrews from other peoples.13
Beyond this, Voltaire was intensely critical of the behavior of Moses and
the Hebrews. Utilitarianism makes the infliction or avoidance of pain and suffer-
ing the main criterion of right action. For the biblical Hebrews, pleasure and pain
were not of primary significance. The divine will was to be followed implicitly,
without regard to damage to property, pain, or loss of life. To Voltaire, the war of
extermination launched by the Hebrews against the seven nations inhabiting
Canaan and the Levites’ slaughter of the Israelites who had participated in the
worship of the golden calf were unjustifiable atrocities.14 They reflected the fa-
naticism and conflicts over incomprehensible categories with which he was only
too familiar from Church history.
If Voltaire returned repeatedly to the violence with which the Pentateuch
and the historical books of the Bible abound, he did so for two main reasons.
First, the Hebrew Scriptures reflect a revealed ideology beyond rational criticism,
and that ideology resulted in large-scale suffering and loss of life, directly negat-
ing the key Enlightenment values of humanité and toleration. Second, the para-
digm of Hebrew fanaticism and persecution was adopted by the Christians, whose
dogmatism and brutality Voltaire condemns every bit as harshly as he does simi-
lar instances among the Hebrews.15 By contrast, he commends the tolerance of
the Romans and Muslims.16
The main features of the ethical thought of classical antiquity also stood
in opposition to important aspects of biblical morality. The ethics of Plato, Aris-
totle, Cicero, and the Stoics were cast in rational terms, and the virtue to which
all aspired was conceived as a matter of acting in accordance with a good that
could be discovered by natural means and, with proper direction of the will, en-
acted in daily life. These were not categories in which the Hebrew Scriptures
worked. Doing right was there a matter of conforming to the will and carrying
out the commandments of a deity whose ways often defied human understand-
ing, whose ethical criteria were not utilitarian, and whose actions were not re-
stricted by the laws of physics.
Although Voltaire emphasized the value of honestas, the Hebrew Bible
did not. Voltaire enjoyed ridiculing accounts of sexual behavior in the Bible that
were foreign to contemporary sensibilities. He makes much, for example, of Abra-
ham’s posing as Sarah’s brother, of Jacob’s relations with his wives and concu-
bines, and of David’s lust for Bathsheba.17 Voltaire also criticizes the behavior of
biblical protagonists concerning property. In Jacob’s conflict with Laban over his
salary, for example, Voltaire is critical of Jacob, and in the matter of the newly
freed Hebrews despoiling the Egyptians, he is rather less sympathetic than Augus-
tine.
Another reason Voltaire found it difficult to relate positively to the He-
brew Scriptures was the broadly aristocratic worldview that he derived in part
from his social position and in part from his classical education. As noted above,
the authors of the Greek and Roman classics were uniformly aristocratic in out-
look. Their moral and political ideals varied from the heroic leader who was both
warrior and judge to the independent hoplite who was expected to serve his coun-
try in the field and to engage in debate and vote in public assemblies. Classical
authors accepted the necessity of slavery without questioning its moral legitima-
cy, and they were skeptical of the efficacy of democracy and of the intellectual
and moral capacities of the lower classes, whether termed “people,” “demos,” or
“plebs.” Voltaire rightly saw in the Hebrew Bible an account of how a people of
outsiders, nomads engaged in trade and animal husbandry, was reduced to sla-
very by a politically and technologically advanced civilization and then redeemed

from that slavery by a particularistic, supernatural agent prodigal of signs and
wonders and intolerant to an extreme. Under the guidance of a literal-minded,
heavy-handed, and self-effacing prophet, this people asserted its fundamental dif-
ference from all other peoples and, after a period of wandering in the desert, set
about the conquest of the land of Canaan. Though evolving from tribal organiza-
tion to monarchy, political authority among the ancient Hebrews remained fun-
damentally theocratic. If there were tensions in the ancient Hebrew polity, they
were between idolaters and monotheists or between priests and prophets, not
between philosophers and a religious establishment.
Voltaire found few protagonists of whom he approved in the Hebrew
Scriptures. Acts of military prowess are described there, such as Abraham’s rescue
of Lot, the victory of Deborah and Gideon over Sisra, and the exploits of Samson
and David. But in the biblical narrative it is never military victory that is praised.
In most cases victory was achieved by the weaker side in order to highlight the
moral truth that the race goes not always to the swift, and obedience to the divine
will is more important than military technology or competence. Indeed, the suc-
cesses of the David-like forces over superior ones are indications to Voltaire, who
placed his faith in the big battalions, that in these cases he was dealing more with
literature and myth than with history.18 Moreover, the Bible often presents the
biblical Hebrews as pathetically unheroic. Having just escaped from Egypt and
arrived at the Red Sea with the Egyptian army in pursuit, the people do not pre-
pare to fight—they only lament their fate. They are morally and psychologically
incapable of defending themselves, so the salvation at the Red Sea had to be car-
ried out by divine agency.
Though a consistent theme in Voltaire’s writing is antimilitarism, he did
not approve the cowardice or military incapacity of the biblical Hebrews. He saw
in these things the source of their political subservience to stronger peoples, from
the Egyptians to the Philistines to other local peoples and to the great powers of
Assyria and Babylonia. Such weakness was the source of vice, not virtue. Despite
his disdain for war and the suffering inseparable from it, Voltaire had great re-
spect for the Romans, certainly one of the most brutally militaristic peoples on
record. It was less the ability of the Romans to wage war effectively that Voltaire
admired than their toleration for the religions and cultures of other peoples and
their willingness to include them in their polity on a near-equal footing.19 In the
case of the biblical Hebrews, by contrast, the end of a war was more likely to be
the beginning of further cultural and religious conflict because of the exclusivist
and unbending nature of their religion.
In addition to the political inferiority of the Hebrews, Voltaire repeatedly
insisted on their cultural backwardness. He ascribed beliefs and customs of the
biblical Hebrews to the superior civilizations surrounding them and portrayed
biblical culture as derivative. The Hebrews are said to have borrowed their myth
of the creation of man from the Hindus (DP, “Adam,” 20; “Genèse,” 222), de-
rived the concept of angels from the Chaldeans (DP, “Ange,” 36), and imitated
“all the rites of the Egyptians” (DP, “Carême,” 77). In his treatment of ancient
Persia, Voltaire seeks to establish parallels between Persian religious practices
and beliefs and those of the Hebrew Bible, arguing the priority of the former
(Essai sur les moeurs, v, I, 248–54). Referring to the Jews as “this wretched peo-
ple,” he asks rhetorically: “Is it not probable in the highest degree that this peo-
ple, so new, wandering for so long, so recently known, established so late in Pal-
estine, took over the Phoenician fables with the Phoenician language, and
embroidered them still further, as do all crude imitators? So poor a people, so
ignorant, so unaware of all the arts, could it do anything but copy its neighbors?”
(DP, “Moïse,” 317, n. 1). To make matters worse, the Hebrews were not even
discriminating borrowers. The great surrounding civilizations of Egypt and Me-
sopotamia and the indigenous cultures of Canaan were priest-dominated and su-
perstition-ridden, and the Hebrews took the bad and the absurd along with the
rest.
Where local peoples had failed to develop central religious ideas, such
ideas were simply absent from ancient Judaism. The example Voltaire gives re-
peatedly is the Hebrew Scriptures’ lack of reference to the immortality of the soul
and to reward and punishment in the afterlife.20 He is of course right about this,
but it is debatable whether these notions were derived from the mystery religions
of Greece or were brought back from the east when the Jews returned from Baby-
lonian exile. That the doctrine of reward and punishment in the afterlife is of
great social utility, as Voltaire repeatedly asserts, is no doubt so. That it is essen-
tial to religious sensibility, as Voltaire also asserts, is questionable and points to
the limitations of his appreciation of the Hebrew Scriptures.
III
Some aspects of Voltaire’s criticism of biblical Judaism are convincing,

others less so. His strictures on the instances of violence and on lack of honestas
in the biblical narrative seem on the whole well founded in that most modern
Western societies would not endorse such actions or take them as models. Few
people today would regard the slaughter of those who worshiped the golden calf
as an appropriate response to a sinful action. Similarly, though modern societies
still engage in warfare, most agree that conquest of a land does not carry with it
either the right or the obligation to exterminate the vanquished.
It would make sense to charge Voltaire with anti-Semitism only if he held
that mass slaughter was normally an appropriate way to deal with religious and
political differences and made an exception of the biblical Jews—or if he explicit-
ly approved such actions in the cases of other peoples. But Voltaire is altogether
consistent in his criticisms of the inhumanity of warfare and the wrongness of
using force in matters of belief. His criticism of Christian or Muslim fanaticism
and violence is just as sharp as his criticism of these things among the Jews.21
There are, however, important elements of the Hebrew Bible to which
Voltaire is indifferent or simply fails to see. His sympathies lying with social elites
and aristocracies, he does not regard the common people as having moral or
intellectual integrity or as being entitled to better treatment than their economic
situation might determine. According to the biblical narrative, the Exodus of the
Israelites from Egypt, for example, was accompanied with signs and wonders
enough to offend the sense of order of most Newtonians—and with enough suf-
fering and loss of life to distress anyone adhering to a utilitarian ethic. Yet the
objective of the project was to end the institutionalized oppression of one people
by another and thus to establish the preconditions for the liberty of the oppressed,
and it was so perceived by other oppressed peoples.22 The Exodus was, in effect,
the war of liberation of the Hebrew slave-nation, which lacked an elite that could
achieve its emancipation by the usual military and diplomatic means. This kind of
liberty had no appeal to Voltaire, for hewers of wood and drawers of water, whether
Jewish, Chinese, or French, were not worthy of freedom, in his view.23 Further,
having been liberated from bondage, the Hebrews proceeded to accept a Law that
assured a form of structured freedom little to the philosophe’s liking.
Viewed from the perspective of Voltaire’s universalistic moral assump-
tions, the Mosaic code does not score high. But then Voltaire reaches this conclu-
sion in part by overlooking significant elements of the Hebrew Scriptures. A case
in point is the concept of justice, a value of central importance to Voltaire himself.
The article “Abraham” in the Dictionnaire philosophique questions the morality
of Abraham’s dealings with the kings of Egypt and of Gerar, mocks the ages as-
cribed to the patriarch and his wife, and questions the logic of Abraham’s many
journeys.24 But it simply ignores one of the most remarkable passages in world
literature, in which Abraham confronts God about the justice of destroying Sod-
om and attempts to negotiate the least stringent conditions possible to assure the
survival of the city.25 Nor, despite his extensive knowledge of the Hebrew Scrip-
tures, does Voltaire comment on the injunction “Justice, justice shalt thou pur-
sue.”26 And in his treatment of the prophets, Voltaire emphasizes incongruous or
apparently absurd and often altogether secondary features of the biblical narra-
tive rather than attempting to uncover the nature of the prophets’ calling, which
was in large part concerned with criticism of the authorities and involved de-
mands for social justice.27 It appears that Voltaire went out of his way to avoid
finding ethical merit in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Yet compared to the legal and moral systems obtaining in the ancient
Middle East, many of the laws of the Pentateuch represent a significant shift to-
ward a more humane conception of human relations. Negation of both human
sacrifice and temple prostitution was no small achievement.28 Nor was the ideal
of social justice that found expression in laws limiting the authority of masters
over slaves; in providing for widows, orphans, strangers, and the poor through
the rights of gleaning and leaving the edges of fields unharvested; and in a re-
markably egalitarian framework for litigation. Voltaire certainly never counte-
nanced gratuitous oppression of the poor and disadvantaged, but neither did he
believe in the dignity of ordinary men and women. And although he strove to rid
his society of abuses, he did not think it feasible to reorganize society thoroughly
in order to achieve a greater measure of social justice. Despite Voltaire’s compas-
sion and humanitarianism, social justice was largely absent from his worldview,
as it was from that of the authors of classical antiquity. To reduce superstition
and legal abuses and to instruct the elite of his day to become more enlightened,
humanitarian, and responsible were Voltaire’s main goals. Much beyond this he
did not think it practical to go.
In addition to ignoring much that was humane in the Mosaic code, Vol-
taire also missed the moderating role of the Talmud on Jewish law. This is partly
because he had little respect for that great compilation of legend, theology, and
law worked out over a period of nearly eight hundred years in Palestine and
Babylonia.29 Voltaire was of course intensely hostile to scholasticism and its reli-
ance on logic and abstract principles, and insofar as the Talmud shares some of
these characteristics and, further, contains significant supernatural and allegori-
cal elements, it is not surprising to find him hostile to it also.
The Talmud stands to the Pentateuch roughly as the Constitutions of the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic codes stand to the 1789 Declaration of
the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. On the one hand is the fairly brief and often
inspiring set of principles, on the other, the detailed, pedestrian, and utterly essen-
tial spelling out of those principles in laws applicable to the uninspiring business
of daily life. In general, the Talmud seeks to apply the principles of a fairly simple
nomadic society to the conditions of a much more complex civilization. In mak-
ing this adaptation, the rabbis of the Talmud in almost all cases sought to moder-
ate the harshness of biblical law.
The Bible, for example, requires that a “rebellious son” be executed.30
Without challenging the principle, the Talmud sets such comprehensive restric-
tions on this law that in practice it became impossible to carry out.31 And indeed
there is no recorded case of it ever having been put into practice. Similarly, the
explicit command for the extirpation of the nations inhabiting Canaan at the time
of the conquest is subjected to qualifications that make it inapplicable. Since by
the time of the compilation of the Talmud it had become impossible to trace the
ancestry of people back to the time of the conquest, this command was no longer
relevant. There are also instances of the Talmud reversing the sense of biblical
commands in order to modernize Judaism and adapt it to conditions very differ-
ent from those in which the Patriarchs and prophets lived.32 There was much in
the Talmud that softened the often harsh texture of biblical law.33 That Voltaire
was unable or unwilling to see it testifies not to his aversion to Jews but to the
limitations of his historical outlook.
Voltaire’s aesthetic values also contributed to his failure to appreciate the
Bible, or indeed other literatures of the East. A firm adherent of classicism, Vol-
taire had little appreciation of art forms that did not embody the principles of
order and regularity. He denies, for example, that the early chapters of Genesis
can properly be regarded as sublime (DP, “Genèse,” 217). As for Proverbs, it is
“a collection of trivial, low, incoherent maxims, made without taste, without se-
lection and without plan,” a mere “collection of oriental sayings” (DP, “Salomon,”
367–8). Voltaire’s evaluation of the Song of Songs is hardly more favorable: “The
style is like that of the Jewish works of eloquence, incoherent, without continuity,
full of repetitions, confused, ridiculously metaphorical; but there are passages
that breathe artlessness and love” (ibid., 373). And then Voltaire concedes, “a
Jew is not obliged to write like Virgil” (ibid., 372). Voltaire’s views on architec-
ture are reflected in the comment that the Temple in Jerusalem would not have
been to the taste of Bramante, Michelangelo, Palladio, or Soufflot (ibid., 367).
While this statement is likely correct, it tells us more about Voltaire than about
the ancient Hebrews.
It is not only Hebrew literature that Voltaire finds unsatisfactory because
it fails to conform to the standards of Aristotle and Boileau. He complains that
the Koran is full of “contradictions, absurdities, and anachronisms” and that it
exhibits a complete ignorance of science (EM, vii, I, 271). He concedes, however,

that “[a]mong the incoherent declarations with which this book is filled, in accor-
dance with oriental taste, one does not fail to find sections that may appear sub-
lime . . . “ (ibid.). Voltaire’s strict classicism also caused him to refer to Shakes-
peare’s tragedies as “monstrous farces” and to say that their author had “a strong
and fertile genius, full of naturalness and sublimity, without the slightest spark of
good taste or the least knowledge of the rules.”34 Again, this observation tells us
more about the critic than about the poet. While Voltaire’s classicism was widely
accepted in the eighteenth century, with many other critics sharing, for example,
his reservations about Shakespeare,35 some philosophes were able to achieve a
more evenhanded appreciation of nonclassical literatures.36
IV
One of the characteristics of racism in general, and of modern anti-Semit-

ism in particular, is a tendency to see things as all of a piece. From this perspective
Jews are seen as malevolent and noxious at all times and in all places; they appear
as the embodiment of some fixed essence. Such an outlook is both unhistorical
and inclines to a radical form of anti-Semitism. Traditional, theologically based
anti-Semitism generally took the view that Jews were in theological error but that
they could find redemption and social acceptance by embracing the dominant
faith. Modern anti-Semitism, on the other hand, often shifting its emphasis from
theology to biology and race, tends to regard the Jews as unchangeable, irredeem-
able, and hence forever unacceptable.37 Ironically, modern anti-Semitism appears
as a more essence-oriented and a less historical construct than theologically based
Jew-hatred, which held that there might be salvation for individuals who admit-
ted and corrected their errors.
One way of evaluating the relevance of the category of anti-Semitism to
Voltaire’s attitudes toward the Jews is to ask whether context plays a significant
part in them. Is Voltaire consistent in his statements about Jews throughout his
works, or does he modify his comments according to the situations he describes?
Do his moral judgments change when the same actions are inflicted on different
groups, or is he consistent in applying his core values in different situations?
In the Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire’s treatment of the Jews focus-
es on the Hebrew Bible, and his attitude there is consistent. In the Essai sur les
moeurs, however, Voltaire also has occasion to treat the Jews as victims of perse-
cution and discrimination. In these cases he generally is less sympathetic toward
the Jews than one might have expected, but he is far from approving or justifying
acts of injustice or brutality toward them. In describing the slaughter of Jews in
France and Germany during the Third Crusade, for example, Voltaire points out
that among the crusaders were many women, priests, peasants, and schoolchil-
dren, groups in his eyes distinguished for their superstition and fanaticism; this
crowd, “believing that they were going to defend Jesus Christ, imagined that it
was necessary to exterminate all the Jews they met along the way” (EM, liv, I,
560–1). Voltaire notes that there were many Jews on the borders of France and
that they controlled the commerce of the country. Clearly, “all these unfortu-
nates” (ibid., 561) were victims of superstition and fanaticism that he condemned
wherever he found them.
Voltaire describes the expulsion of the Jews from France in similar terms.
On the one hand, the Jews did practice usury;38 on the other, they were undeserv-
ing of such treatment. Philip the Fair is said to have decided to expel the Jews in
order to solve his financial problems by an act of spoliation: “Philip punished
usury by an injustice. The people believed themselves avenged, and the king was
rich” (EM, lxv, I, 657). While Voltaire expresses only limited sympathy for Jewish
victims of mass slaughter and expulsion, he portrays these actions as crimes mo-
tivated by superstition, fanaticism, and greed, and he is far from justifying them
on the grounds that they are directed against a people for whom he cared little.39
There are two other instances in which Voltaire considers the role of Jews
in European history: the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the curious episode of
messianic expectation around the figure of Shabbetai Tzvi in the middle of the
seventeenth century. In both cases Voltaire’s attitudes are ambivalent. The out-
standing modern historian of Shabbetai Tzvi has argued that he was a manic-
depressive of some learning and impressive character, but that he lacked disci-
pline and consistency.40 Born in Smyrna in 1626, he proclaimed himself the Messiah
in 1648, during the Chmielnicki massacres of the Jews of Poland and the Ukraine.
In the following decades the Jewish communities of eastern Europe and the Mid-
dle East were in a state of acute anxiety and expectation. The spread of kabbalism
heightened these feelings, but Shabbetai Tzvi did not attract a mass following
until the talented and decisive Nathan of Gaza recognized him as the Messiah in
1665. The movement then acquired a huge following and flourished until, forced
to choose in 1666 between conversion to Islam or death, Shabbetai chose conver-
sion. The movement collapsed, although a small sect continued to believe in him.
It is probably fair to see the movement inspired by Shabbetai Tzvi, as
well as other messianic movements that preceded and followed it, as expressions
of hope and despair on the part of Jewish communities caught in impossible con-
ditions. For Voltaire, the episode represented an instance of superstition and fa-
naticism that, happily, ended without great suffering or loss of life. He treats it in
the comic mode.
Voltaire points out that the year 1666 was fraught with millenarian ex-
pectations among Christians because the figure 666 appears in the Apocalypse
and that messianic expectations increased among Jews at this time (EM, cxci, II,
759). He then observes that messiahs usually have their prophets, modeled on the
biblical Elijah, and he gives examples from recent history that include the Protes-
tants of the Cévennes and the Jansenist convulsionaries of Paris. In his own words:
“Almost all fanatics await an Elijah” (ibid., 760). Nathan became Shabbetai’s
prophet, and together they exploited the messianic longings of their people, prom-
ising imminent redemption and giving the impression of working wonders (ibid.,
761). As Shabbetai appeared to pose a threat to the stability of the Ottoman
Empire, the Sultan had him arrested. Voltaire implies that the Turks cynically
exploited the willingness of Sbbetai’s followers to pay large sums of money to
visit him (ibid., 762).
Voltaire’s account of Shabbetai’s conversion under threat of death sug-
gests that the false messiah did not share the delusions of his followers (ibid.,
763). The episode involved neither persecution nor loss of life, thanks largely to
the tolerant and enlightened grand vizier, Ahmed Caprogli, who emerges as the
hero of the whole sorry affair (ibid., 762–4). For Voltaire this is a case of the
masses being carried away by superstition and irrationalism, but exceptionally
being saved from the consequences of their folly by an enlightened and humani-
tarian ruler. Voltaire concludes his account of the episode: “The character of those
who rule everywhere makes for times of gentleness or of cruelty” (ibid., 764).
There is no sympathy here for the tensions and sufferings that drove the Jews of
the time to embrace the false messiah, but neither is there any suggestion that the
Jews behaved worse than any other people in the grip of superstition and mass
delusion.
In his account of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Voltaire is critical
of both the Jews and the Spanish crown. Modern historians tend to regard the
Jews as victims of a policy common at the time that demanded religious confor-
mity within the state41 and of Machiavellian methods of state building.42 But this
is not Voltaire’s view of the matter. On the one hand, Voltaire sees the motives of
Ferdinand and Isabella as no better than those of Philip the Fair; expulsion was
the means to expropriation (EM, cii, II, 57–8). On the other hand, Voltaire sug-
gests, the Jews had largely invited their fate.
According to Voltaire, the Jews had taken over all commercial functions
in the country and rendered themselves indispensable to the Spanish, who had
ceased cultivating anything but the military arts. Voltaire states that “ . . . the
Jews had drawn all the money in the country to themselves by means of com-
merce and usury” and had become “this foreign nation, so odious and so neces-
sary” (ibid., 57). Ferdinand and Isabella believed the Jews were exercising a “veiled
tyranny” over the country and decided to expel and rob them (ibid.). The Muslim
population of Spain was treated just as brutally and subjected to the same dis-
criminatory legislation. The result was that “[a]s many Moslems as Jews took
refuge in Africa, though one cannot well pity either these Arabs who had so long
subjugated Spain, or these Hebrews who had for so long pillaged it” (ibid., 59).
Although Voltaire does not condone this act of persecution, he explicitly denies
sympathy to the victims. This antipathy on Voltaire’s part is the more noteworthy
in that the main authority on Jewish history after the fall of the Second Temple,
Jacques Basnage, a Huguenot living in Holland and a friend of Pierre Bayle, was
broadly sympathetic toward the Jews, and Voltaire had Basnage’s history in his
library.43 However, elsewhere in the Essai sur les moeurs Voltaire denied that the
Jews of Spain posed any danger to the state and asserted that their commercial
activities inclined them toward “a pacific spirit.”44
Voltaire did not normally regard wealth as presumptive evidence of crime.
He did, however, consider usury and brokerage as questionable forms of econom-
ic activity, and he further found the concentration of commerce in the hands of
Jews objectionable. But these were not in themselves sufficient grounds to explain
the hostility he felt towards the Jews. Voltaire points out that the Banians of India
were, in their religious distinctiveness, their social coherence, and their economic
activities, similar to the Jews, yet the Banians were readily accepted by host na-
tions despite their religion, while “ . . . only the Jews are regarded with horror by
all peoples among whom they are admitted” (ibid., 58).
In one place Voltaire ascribes the “horror” with which Jews were univer-
sally regarded as a consequence of the practice of usury (EM, ciii, II, 63). He then
elaborates on the theme of the general dislike of Jews and gives a broader cultural
explanation for it. On the one hand, they are said to have a propensity for making
up and spreading “ridiculous fables” (EM, cii, II, 58); Voltaire writes that “ . . . in
all times the Jews have disfigured the truth by absurd fables . . . ” (ibid.), and
they have gone so far as to fabricate false documents to achieve their ends, a
practice of which he also finds evidence in the history of the Church.45 Beyond
this, Voltaire maintains, the core values of Jewish culture dispose them against
other peoples, and so other peoples can hardly respond except with hostility to
them. Jewish law being exclusivist and radically negating the values of other reli-
gions, Jews find themselves “ . . . by their very law natural enemies of these na-
tions, and finally of mankind” (EM, ciii, II, 64). They would not, Voltaire contin-
ues, abandon their “absurd” politics, and their superstition increased in proportion
to their misfortunes. “They kept all their customs,” he writes, “which are precise-
ly the opposite of sociable; they were therefore with justice treated as a nation
opposed to all the others; serving them from avarice, detesting them from fanati-
cism, and making of usury a sacred duty” (ibid.). To this litany of complaints,
altogether typical of the anti-Jewish writings of classical antiquity, Voltaire then
adds: “And these are our fathers!” (ibid.).
Here we find the other side of Voltaire’s attitudes toward the Jews. Al-
though he frequently refers to the Jews throughout the Essai sur les moeurs, there
is only one chapter in the work devoted specifically to them. This is chapter ciii,
entitled “Of the Condition of the Jews in Europe,” which immediately follows
the chapter on the expulsion from Spain. Chapter ciii contains the passionate
denunciation of Jews cited above, but it begins with the assertion that “[t]his
people should interest us, for we have our religion from them as well as several of
our laws and practices, and we are only, at bottom, Jews with foreskins” (EM,
ciii, II, 61). Despite his distaste for the exclusivism, fanaticism, and economic
practices of the Jews, Voltaire does not dissociate himself or his culture from
“[t]hese . . . our fathers.” After outlining medieval legislation discriminating against
and dishonoring Jews, Voltaire notes that their situation in Europe had improved
significantly in more recent times, especially in Holland and England. Indeed, in
the British Isles they very nearly received the right of citizenship [bourgeoisie]
around 1750, but even with that right withheld, “the Jews contented themselves
with being rich and free” (ibid., 63). Dutch and English Jews, at least, enjoyed
secure possession of their property and “all the rights of humanity, of which no
one should be deprived” (ibid.). The question arises, then, How could Voltaire on
occasion recognize that Jews, like all other men, were entitled to fundamental
human rights, while at other times he described them as a pariah people who
deserved that status? The answer would appear to lie in Voltaire’s being a better
moralist than historian.
Like most Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire insisted on the consistency

and regularity of natural phenomena and on their being subject to invariable
scientific laws. However, his assertion that all men are brothers, cited above, is
based not on biology, but on the theological or metaphysical precept that they are
all equally children of the same divine Father. Voltaire seems not to have been
convinced that all men were biologically equivalent, and he expressed views that
would today be considered racist.
He says of the Chinese that they appear “an entirely different species” by
their physical characteristics “and perhaps even more so by their spirit [génie]”
(EM, cxlv, II, 335); with respect to the failure of the Chinese to make progress in
the arts and sciences after founding them, “It seems that nature had given this
species [espèce] of men, so different from our own, organs made for discovering
all at once what was necessary for them, but incapable of proceeding further”
(EM, i, I, 215). According to Voltaire, “[T]he race of Negroes is a species of men
different from ours” (EM, cxli, II, 305), and after commenting on certain physio-
logical differences between blacks and whites he offers the opinion that “ . . . if
their intelligence is not of a different kind [espèce] from our understanding, it is
very inferior” (ibid., 306). He further states that it is as a result of their fixed
spirit [génie] and character that “Negroes are the slaves of other men” (EM, cxlv,
II, 335). Voltaire also asserts that “experience,” in the form of conquest, demon-
strated the superiority of Europeans to the Indians of the Americas (ibid.) and
that “[i]t seems that men have become feeble and cowardly in India to the degree
that they were subjugated” (EM, iv, I, 243). Voltaire adhered to the theory of
polygenesis, which maintains, against the Bible, that different races had been cre-
ated separately.46 Although he did not consider the Jews to be racially distinct
from other Europeans, he observed that the Romans looked upon the Jews “with
the same eye that we see Negroes with, as an inferior species of men” (EM, viii, I,
278). His doubts about biological equality, however, were overcome by his con-
viction that there existed an objective, universally valid, natural morality.47
If the principles of natural morality were immanent in the order of things,
this did not mean that men might not diverge from them in their social organiza-
tion and values. The voice of nature could be, and too often was, overcome by
passion, ambition, fanaticism, greed, or mere ignorance. For Voltaire the Jews are
the prime example of a society organized according to principles inimical to nat-
ural law. And they adhered to their religion with a persistence that aroused his
wonder as well as his wrath. The universal hostility to Jews of which Voltaire
maintained he found evidence in the historical record was for him the natural
response of other peoples to the narrow and irrational particularism of this peo-
ple. So long as the Jews clung to what Voltaire regarded as their asocial and
predatory religion, they could not expect to be accepted into the family of na-
tions. And Voltaire could see little evidence that the Jews of his time were willing
to abandon what, in his eyes, was their irredeemably flawed faith.
In his ethics Voltaire is consistently universalist, humanitarian, and utili-
tarian. Nevertheless, his treatment of the Jews in history is often hostile, and
rarely, even where the Jews are clearly victims of persecution, sympathetic. For
this there are a number of reasons.
First, though Voltaire may have made significant contributions to the
critical study of the Bible, he did poorly in evaluating the vital core of the Hebrew
Scriptures. Second, the set of values and practices that he defines as Judaism forms
a pretty nasty package. But as he chose what to put into that package and what to
exclude from it, this construct tells us more about Voltaire than about the religion
he describes. So closely does Voltaire identify Judaism with superstition and com-
merce that he postulates that the Jews would simply disappear if they ever achieved
a degree of enlightenment and if the nations of the world learned to manage their
own commercial interests. Wealthy Jews would voluntarily abandon their ances-
tral superstitions, while the rest, deprived of leadership and estranged from their
cultural heritage, would be absorbed into “the dregs of other nations” (EM, civ,
II, 66–7).
This is an important passage for understanding Voltaire’s basic assump-
tions as a historian. It follows a section on the gypsies in which their culture is
defined in similarly essentialist terms as a set of outdated superstitions. As society
has become more reasonable, he notes, the number of gypsies has declined, and
he fully expects them to disappear as this process continues (EM, civ, II, 66).
Voltaire then makes a parallel analysis of the decline of the Jewish people. Jacob
Katz finds the significance of this passage in the vision of a world free of Jews.48
Possibly, however, the importance of the passage is the degree to which Voltaire
tends to work in essentialist categories and to perceive a progressive development
in history.
Third, Voltaire’s definition of Judaism is often strangely weighted and his
awareness of the evolution of the Jewish religion extremely limited. Voltaire treats
Judaism as an unvarying set of values and practices that was not significantly
modified by the extensive changes in social and political organization, economic
frameworks, and cultural contexts that Jewish communities experienced over the
ages.49 In doing so he ignores his own observation that in history, all is movement
and change (EM, xiii, I, 318). Voltaire seems unaware of the dramatic shift in-
volved in adapting the Jewish religion from a sacrificial cult centered on a Temple
to a more internalized and intellectualized form of observance in which the syna-
gogue and house of study were the main institutions. Nor does he recognize the
fundamental changes involved in moving from the pastoral and primitive agricul-
tural societies of the Bible to the sophisticated world of urban commerce reflected
in the Talmud. Further, his insistence on Jewish exclusivity does not allow him to
see the remarkably rich cultural interaction between Muslims and Jews during
the Middle Ages. And his assertion of the primacy of business in Jewish culture
leads him to assert that those who entered the rabbinate did so because they were
unfit for business (EM, cii, II, 158), a situation that did not obtain in fifteenth-
century Spain, or, for that matter, elsewhere.
The inadequacies of Voltaire’s treatment of Jewish history are not, how-
ever, typical of his historiography. Most scholars who have examined his histori-
cal work have found it generally sound. The great Scottish historian and Vol-
taire’s contemporary, William Robertson, was impressed with the accuracy and
reliability of the Essai sur les moeurs, and such outstanding Voltaire scholars as
Theodore Besterman and H. T. Mason concur.50 René Pomeau checked the accu-
racy of citations from sections of the Essai and found them to be generally reli-
able, with errors decreasing as Voltaire moved from the ancient to the modern
world.51 However, an anonymous contemporary specializing in Arab history found
Voltaire’s chapters on that civilization to be seriously flawed, and Nonnotte’s
Erreurs de M. de Voltaire, despite its poor style, caused Voltaire not only to write
a number of refutations, but also to correct and rework significant sections of the
Essai.52
The Essai sur les moeurs has rightly been seen as a ground-breaking work
and the first important attempt at a secular universal history. It is of course unrea-
sonable to expect the same standards of accuracy from a work that ranges across
all of the world’s major civilizations as one would demand from a specialized
monograph. But errors of detail are not the problem. J. B. Black has called the
Essai “a philosophy of history rather than a history in the proper sense of the
term,” and J. H. Brumfitt has said that it is primarily “a work of reinterpretation
of the accepted facts.”53 A significant part of Voltaire’s philosophy of history is
bound up with his rationalist and naturalist perspective and with the humanitarian
polemic integral to it. Haydn Mason has argued that Voltaire’s secularism prevent-
ed him from forming a just appreciation of religion and that “[i]t is this tenden-
tiousness that deforms the work as history.”54 Nowhere is this truer than in Voltaire’s
treatment of the Jews, where his secular outlook and polemical intent coincide.
While Voltaire’s universalist ethics led him to express sympathy for the
Jews and to include them in the family of humanity, his seriously flawed historical
understanding of this people offered him a rare example of a culture consistently
setting itself against the precepts of a universal morality that for Voltaire, no less
than for Rousseau, was engraved in the hearts of all men. This was not something
that was unique to Jews. They simply embodied the tendencies toward supersti-
tion, fanaticism, and exclusiveness to a higher degree and more consistently than
did other peoples. Voltaire was no more forgiving of religious persecution carried
out by Christians, or indeed by anyone else. Scholars who have argued that Vol-
taire’s criticism of Judaism is an integral part of his assault on the obscurantism,
fanaticism, and persecution that he saw in the religion into which he was born
have, I think, a sound case.55 And Voltaire did see the Jews as the source of the
religious fanaticism and intolerance that cast such a long and ugly shadow on the
history of the West.56
Voltaire, it should be noted, was generally pessimistic, seeing in greed,
fanaticism, and lust for power the dominant forces in history.57 For him the com-
mon people lived perpetually in fear and superstition, were easily manipulated by
self-interested and Machiavellian priests and rulers, and contributed significantly
to making human history the sorry record of folly, crime, and brutality that it
was. Moments of historical reprieve occurred rarely, usually under the auspices of
enlightened or fortunate rulers such as Augustus, the Medici, Henry IV of France,
or Louis XIV. In the absence of such figures, regression to violence and barbarity
was inevitable. Among the forces of darkness and mere competitors for power
Voltaire had no favorites. While the attitude embodied in the phrase “a plague on
both their houses” is not a very high form of wisdom, it did at least allow Voltaire
to avoid the pitfall of praising one side in a conflict where either there was no
right or it was divided. This attitude also explains the numerous places in the
Essai sur les moeurs where Voltaire is critical both of the Jews’ persecutors and of
the Jews themselves.
VI
Arguably, the main negative features of Voltaire’s portrayal of the Jews

and Judaism rest on flawed history that subserves a humanitarian polemical func-
tion. Just how flawed Voltaire’s historical accounts of the Jews and Judaism are
have not, perhaps, been fully appreciated. It would not be fair, however, to judge
Voltaire’s ability and achievements as a historian on the case of the Jews, because
he had already formed his views on the Hebrew Scriptures and the Jews early in
his career in his study of the English and French critical deists and carried those
views over into his history. A glance at the clandestine manuscript literature of
the early eighteenth century, or at Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, which
inspired much of this literature, shows what Voltaire’s intellectual affiliations are,
and, moreover, demonstrates the lack of originality of his views on the biblical
Hebrews. Far from standing at the head of a particularly harsh rhetoric directed
against the Hebrew Scriptures, Voltaire can better be seen as popularizing in print
and bringing before a wider public the views that were commonplace in the clan-
destine manuscripts that circulated discreetly among elites in the first part of the
century, quietly and effectively subjecting Judaism, and with it Christianity, to a
withering rationalist criticism.58 His ethical theory, though, is another matter. I
would argue that Voltaire’s more positive treatments of the Jews are rooted in his
moral vision, which is both universalist and pluralist—and more fundamental to
his outlook than are his history or polemics.
The first point to note about Voltaire’s ethics is that they do not anathe-
matize Jews. Indeed, he explicitly refuses to conceptualize Jews as radically other
and insists, instead, that they are part of a broader humanity. More than this,
they have a family relationship to European and Christian societies. In the Traité
sur la tolérance, he writes “ . . . I tell you that we must regard all men as our
brothers. What, the Turk my brother? the Chinese my brother? the Jew? the
Siamese? Yes, without a doubt; are we not all children of the same father, the
creatures of the same God?” (TT, xxii, 138). Here the argument is from a genu-
inely universalistic deism. In the Essai sur les moeurs Voltaire has recourse to an
argument from history to show that the Jews are related to Christians, concluding
a severe denunciation of the Jews with the assertion: “ . . . these are our fathers!”
(EM, ciii, II, 64). The assertion of descent from the Jews, like the previous asser-
tion of universal fraternity, precludes regarding the Jews as basically “other” and
so is incompatible with a basic assumption of anti-Semitism. So too, of course, is
Voltaire’s description of his fellow Christians as “Jews with foreskins.”59
The second relevant point about Voltaire’s ethics is that they are genuine-
ly universal. On the one hand, if Judaism as a cultural construct could be con-
structively modified—or abandoned—the individual or group could be welcomed
into the community of the enlightened. On the other hand, Voltaire is consistent
in the application of his moral principles. He condemned fanaticism and persecu-
tion whether they were propagated by heathens, Jews, or Christians. Voltaire
blamed or praised actions, not the national or religious identities of those who
performed them. For example, he criticized Jews for beginning as and remaining
intolerant, denounced the Christians for having begun practicing toleration and
then shifting to repression, and praised the Muslims for having begun as intoler-
ant but then adopting broadly tolerant attitudes. And when he considered the
persecution to which the Jews had been and still were subjected, as in the Sermon
du Rabbin Akib, he showed great sympathy for them.
It has been suggested that universalism is or can be used repressively to

delegitimize difference.60 It should therefore be emphasized that Voltaire advo-
cated a pluralistic and liberal form of universalism. Voltaire believed that there
existed a universally binding morality that consisted in little more than refraining
from doing harm to one’s neighbor; respecting one’s parents; recognizing a Su-
preme Being; and as far as possible, acting in accordance with the beneficence of
this Being. The rules of this code were both “engraved in the hearts” of all human
beings and accessible through reason. The core of this ethic is utilitarian and
liberal, in that it emphasizes the negative obligation to avoid inflicting pain or
injury where this did not compromise one’s right to self-preservation. But it does
not go much beyond that.
Provided that they do not do harm, Voltaire is content to leave people to
their own devices. His ethical concerns focus on the person and property of the
individual. He will appeal to law and invoke coercion to preserve these, as in his
view they are essential to the existence of any ordered society. But in the private
sphere, which for him includes religion, he is thoroughly liberal. In the Lettres
philosophiques, for example, he praises the civil society of England, where at the
London stock exchange “ . . . all nations gathered together for the utility of men.
Here Jew, Mohammedan, and Christian deal with each other as though they were
all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bank-
rupt.”61 Voltaire constructively devalues ritual, treating it as meaningless in itself
and leaving it as much to individual taste and as he does fashion. It may or may
not be ridiculous to wear or not to wear buttons on one’s sleeves or lace on one’s
hat, but these are questions that are not, and should not be, actionable at law.
Voltaire was prepared to accept unlimited cultural diversity, provided it did not
disrupt civil order.
One of Voltaire’s letters written in 1762 to Isaac Pinto, a Jew of Amster-
dam, has been much discussed in the debate on how Voltaire saw the Jews. In it
Voltaire addresses Pinto as follows: “Remain a Jew, since you are one—you will
not slaughter 42,000 men for having pronounced ‘shibboleth’ badly, nor 24,000
for having slept with Midianite women—but be a philosopher; that is the best
that I can wish for you in this short life” (D10600). The literal sense of this
passage is, I think, to assert the possibility of being both a Jew and a philosopher.
Other historians have found here precisely the opposite, namely an implicit deni-
al of the compatibility of Judaism and Enlightenment, on the grounds that En-
lightenment requires the abandonment of central tenets of Judaism.62 I read Vol-
taire as asserting here that if we devalue metaphysics and ritual, and if we avoid
fanaticism and superstition, it will be possible to establish a civil society in which
respect for the lives and property of all members are made the focus of publicity
and state responsibility, and particularist customs, such as circumcision and bap-
tism, are relegated to the private sphere and the understanding of individuals and
groups with which they associate. It is such a vision that Voltaire evokes at the
end of the sixth of the Lettres philosophiques, when he describes the members of
the London Stock Exchange going at the end of the day’s business, some “ . . . to
the Synagogue, and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath
in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, that one has his son’s foreskin cut
and has some Hebrew words he doesn’t understand mumbled over the child, oth-
ers go to their church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and
everybody is happy.”63
There is, then, a distinct tension in Voltaire’s statements on and attitudes
toward the Jews. In his criticism of the Bible he is at his harshest and, I suggest,
his worst. He had no knowledge of Hebrew (though his occasional use of Hebrew
terms implied that he did), no sympathy for or understanding of ancient Hebrew
religious sensibility, and no appreciation of the other cultures of the ancient Mid-
dle East. What critical intelligence without real understanding of ancient Hebrew
culture could achieve, Voltaire accomplished. But the polemical intent of so much
of his writing on positive religions skewed his understanding of those religions,
and especially of Judaism, which he tended to view as the source of much of the
fanaticism and persecution against which he protested so strongly in his own
culture. And it is well known that he condemned the slaughter of Saint Bartho-
lomew’s Day every bit as much as he condemned those described in the Hebrew
Scriptures.
Probably the question of Voltaire’s anti-Semitism has been misformulat-
ed. There are, as Bertram Schwarzbach has pointed out, no recommendations for
actions against Jews in Voltaire’s entire corpus.64 Nor does Voltaire condone in
other nations the things he criticizes in the Jews. Despite his fundamental misun-
derstanding of Jewish history, Voltaire’s ethics were admirable. He believed in
humanity and applied that value universally. There were forms of behavior that
were incompatible with humanity, and these Voltaire condemned wherever and in
whatever culture he found them. But there was no people that he excluded from
the great family of humanity. Voltaire wrote of the Quakers that “ . . . if Penn and
his companions erred in theology, this inexhaustible source of quarrels and mis-
fortunes, they rose above all other peoples by their morality” (EM, cliii, II, 383).
We might similarly say of Voltaire with respect to the Jews that if his history was
seriously flawed, his ethics were good, and it is the latter that are, in the end,
decisive.
NOTES
I wish to thank Bertram Schwarzbach and Menahem Kellner for having helpfully commented on an
earlier version of this article.
1. Peter Gay, “Voltaire’s Anti-Semitism,” in his Party of Humanity: Essays in the French En-
lightenment (New York: Knopf, 1964), 97–108; Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and
the Jews (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968); Jacob Katz, “Le Judaïsme et les Juifs vus par
Voltaire,” Dispersion et Unité 18 (1978), 135–49; Roland Desné, “Voltaire était-il antisémite?” La
Pensée 203 (1979): 70–81; Frank E. Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism through Christian Eyes
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992); Allan Arkush, “Voltaire on Judaism and Christian-
ity,” AJS Review: The Journal of. The Association for Jewish Studies 18 (1993), 223–43; Charles
Porset, “Voltaire et les Juifs,” in L’Affaire Dreyfus: Juifs en France. Symposium International de
Mulhouse (Besançon: Cêtre, 1994), 79–104; Arnold Ages, “Tainted Greatness: The Case of Vol-
taire’s Anti-semitism. The Testimony of the Correspondence,” Neohelicon 21 (1994), 357–67; B. E.
Schwarzbach, “Voltaire et les Juifs: bilan et plaidoyer,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth
Century 358 (1998), 27–91; Adam Sutcliffe, “Myth, Origins, Identity: Voltaire, the Jews, and the
Enlightenment Notion of Toleration,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 39 (1998),
107–26; and Ronald Schechter, “Rationalizing the Enlightenment: Postmodernism and Theories of
Anti-Semitism,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 25 (1999), 279–306.
2. Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, 285–6.
3. On Newton and Locke as founders of Enlightenment thought and their subsequent influence,
see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York; Knopf, 1967–69), vol. 2, chaps. 3–
4; Alfred Cobban, In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History (New
York: Braziller, 1960), chaps. 3 and 7; and Georges Gusdorf, Les Principes de la pensée au siècle des
Lumières (Paris: Payot, 1971), part 2, chaps. 1–3.
4. Theodore Besterman points out that the line “God never acts by partial will, but by general
laws” is borrowed by Voltaire from Pope’s Essay on Man (Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, The-
odore Besterman, ed. and trans. [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971], 103 n. 3). Subsequent references
to the Dictionnaire philosophique will be abbreviated DP, followed by the title of the article and the
page number(s) of the Besterman translation. References to the Essai sur les moeurs will be abbrevi-
ated EM, followed by the chapter of that work and the volume and page number(s) of the two-
volume Pomeau edition (Paris: Garnier, 1990); the Philosophie de l’histoire, which is printed before
the Garnier edition of the Essai sur les moeurs as the “Introduction” will be abbreviated PH, fol-
lowed only by the chapter and page number(s). References to the Traité sur la tolérance will be
abbreviated TT, followed by the chapter number and page number(s) of the Pomeau edition (Paris:
Flammarion, 1989). Translations from the EM and TT are my own unless otherwise indicated.
5. Voltaire similarly asserts, “Man is not born wicked; he becomes wicked. . . . Collect all the
children of the universe, and you will see in them only innocence, gentleness, and fear” (DP, “Méchant,”
299). Though in many ways critical of Rousseau, Voltaire agrees with him in asserting, as Locke had,
that not only was man born uncorrupted and neutral, but that he had in the physiologically deter-
mined sentiment of pity or sympathy a natural predilection for goodness. In the Second Discourse
Rousseau makes pity the only innate human characteristic other than self-interest.
6. For other assertions of universally valid moral principles, see DP, “Credo,” 161, and “Ezéchiel,”
200, where Voltaire characteristically states, “Nature is the same everywhere and customs are every-
where different.” The same sentiment is expressed in EM, v, I, 250, as reflecting the wisdom of
ancient Persia.
7. For instructive elaborations of the ideals of classical culture, see, for example, Werner Jaeger,
Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, 3 vols., trans. Gilbert Highet (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1945–47); H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (London: Penguin, 1964); C. M. Bowra, The Greek Experi-
ence (London: Cardinal, 1973); and Moses Hadas, The Greek Ideal and Its Survival (New York:
Harper Colophon, 1966).
8. On the complexity of classical slavery as a social, economic, and legal institution, see W. L.
Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia: American Philosoph-
ical Society, 1955); M. I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (London: Pelican, 1983); and
D. B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966).
9. The ground-breaking work in the history of women in antiquity is Sarah B. Pomeroy’s God-
desses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (New York: Schocken, 1975). For useful recent syntheses, see P. S.
Pantel, G. Duby, and M. Perrot, eds., A History of Women in the West: I. From Ancient Goddesses
to Christian Saints, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994; 1990),
and P. Veyne, P. Ariès, and G. Duby, eds., A History of Private Life: I. From Pagan Rome to Byzan-
tium, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), chaps. 1–3.
10. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. W. R. Track (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), 131–3.
11. In what is still one of the best syntheses on the Enlightenment, Peter Gay has argued that the
philosophes used the Greco-Roman classics to combat the official Judeo-Christian culture of their
own time (The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism). This is a
fruitful thesis that has much to recommend it. My point here, however, concerns not the dialectic of
classicism interacting with Christianity, but certain features of the classical tradition.
12. Biblical Judaism does of course have its universalistic elements, and it is often and rightly
asserted that it is a religion characterized by a fundamental and unresolved tension between particu-
larism and universalism. One does not, however, find sustained emphasis on the universalist aspects
of the religion, such as lions cohabiting peacefully with lambs, or a vision of the end of days in which
all men will come to worship the same deity, until well into the books of the prophets. The Pen-
tateuch and historical books show little universalism. In that Voltaire was familiar with the whole of
the Hebrew Bible, it cannot be maintained that he was unaware of the universalist strain to be found
there. It is clear, however, that he did not think it significant, and he generally avoids comment on it.
This makes his treatment of the Hebrew Bible less balanced than it might otherwise have been. The
basic studies of Voltaire’s treatment of the Hebrew Scriptures are B. E. Schwarzbach, Voltaire’s Old
Testament Criticism (Geneva: Droz, 1971) and David Levy, “Voltaire et son exégèse du Pentateuque:
critique et polémique,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 130 (1975). Also important
here are Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Development of Voltaire (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1969), chap. 9; René Pomeau, La Religion de Voltaire, part 3, chap. 4 (Paris: Nizet, 1969); and the
articles of Arnold Ages, “Voltaire’s Biblical Criticism: A Study in Thematic Repetitions,” Voltaire
Studies 30 (1964), 205–21, “Voltaire, Calmet, and the Old Testament,” Voltaire Studies 41 (1966),
87–187, and “Voltaire and the Old Testament: The Testimony of his Correspondence,” Voltaire
Studies 50 (1967), 43–63.
13. Rousseau compares Moses’ work as a lawgiver to that of Lycurgus and Numa and credits
Moses with having made of the servile and disparate horde that left Egypt “a political body, a free
people” (“Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne,” chap. 2, Oeuvres complètes de Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, eds. [Paris: Pleïade, 1964–69], 3: 956).
For a similar appreciation of Moses, see “Fragments politiques,” ibid., 499. In Emile, Rousseau
shows himself sensitive to the position of inferiority in which the Jews found themselves because of
their minority status and denies that it was possible for them to express their true opinions in such a
situation (Oeuvres complètes 4:620–1). Compare Voltaire’s article “Moïse” in the DP.
14. On the golden calf, see DP, “Moïse,” 321; PH, xli, 146; and TT, xii, 91. For examples of
Voltaire’s criticism of extreme violence in the Hebrew Scriptures, see DP, “David,” 169; EM, vi, I,
261; and TT, xii, 92–3, and xviii, 122–3.
15. DP, “Athée,” 60; EM, x, I, 299; TT, x, 79–80, and xi, 82.
16. DP, “Athée,” 50, and “Christianisme,” 132; EM, viii, I, 278–83; vi, I, 262; viii, I, 274; and
cxl, II, 296–7.
17. DP, “Abraham,” 18, and “David,” 170.
18. Voltaire asserts that the acts of violence that play so large a role in the story of David “would
make us shudder with horror were they not incredible” (DP, “David,” 170).
19. See, for example, DP, “Christianisme,” 132, and PH, l, 181–2.
20. DP, “Ame,” 24–7, “Athée,” 54–5, “Catéchisme chinois,” 85, and “Religion,” 349–50; PH,
xl, 140–1; EM, ii, I, 221; and TT, xiii, 97–8.
21. For examples of criticisms of Christian intolerance and persecution, see DP, “Christianisme,”
137; EM, x, I, 299; and TT, x, 78–9, and xi, 82. Voltaire praises Islam for having moved from an
initial ethic of violence and fanaticism to one of indulgence and toleration (EM, vi, I, 262, and vii, I,
274) and criticizes his own religion for having followed the reverse course (EM, vii, I, 275). Howev-
er, he commends the Anabaptists for having moved from a brutal fanaticism to a gentle and morally
admirable form of faith (EM, cxxxii, II, 240). Judaism, in his view, is distinguished by having begun
with an ethic of fanaticism and violence and having maintained it without modification.
22. As, for example, the French Protestants of the late seventeenth century and the black slaves of
the United States. See Jonathan M. Elkin, “Jacques Basnage and the History of the Jews: Anti-Cath-
olic Polemic and Historical Analogy in the Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53
(1992), 604, and Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979). Sobel cites cases of black clerics speaking in terms of a “black
Messiah” and a “black Moses” and states that “Bible history—the history of the Hebrew slaves and
their redemption—became the black Baptist’s sacred past” (ibid., 204 and 125). According to Albert
Raboteau in Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” of the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1978), “[S]laves prayed for the future day of deliverance to come, and they kept hope
alive by incorporating as part of their mythic past the Old Testament exodus of Israel out of slavery.
The appropriation of the Exodus story was for the slaves a way of articulating their sense of histor-
ical identity as a people.” For American slaves, “Exodus functioned as an archetypal event” (311). I
wish to thank Mechal Sobel for bringing these citations to my attention.
23. Voltaire stated that “[m]en seldom deserve to govern themselves” (DP, “Etats,” 193) and
repeated this notion with slight variation in DP, “Paul,” 129, and EM, lxviii, I, 667). He character-
ized the people of Egypt, in the sense of the lower classes, as “always turbulent, seditious, and
cowardly” (TT, ix, 73) and the people of Rome as “always vain, always extreme in [their] violent
and passing opinions, incapable of seeing anything, and capable of saying everything, of believing
everything and of forgetting everything (TT, n. 46, 164). As for the people of the provinces, they
were “always harder, more superstitious, and more intolerant than those of the capital” (EM, viii, I,
282). In general, the “common people” were “always fanatical and always barbarous” (DP, “Chis-
tianisme, 134).
24. Representing one’s wife as one’s sister is not altogether straightforward, in that it is an in-
stance of an ethics of extremes. This would not be one’s first choice today, but neither was it Abra-
ham’s first choice. He was confronted with situations in which he feared for his life and the well-
being of Sarah. In the event, his response to an impossible situation was endorsed by divine intervention,
a dimension of the narrative to which Voltaire could relate only with difficulty. Abraham seems to
have spent many of the most significant moments of his life faced with situations so extreme as to fall
outside the purview of normal ethics. This was no doubt the point of much of the biblical narrative
concerning him.
25. Gen. 18:17–33.
26. Deut. 16: 20.
27. For a good example of Voltaire’s treatment of the prophets, see the article “Ezéchiel” in DP.
According to Arnold Ages, Voltaire discusses the Book of Ezekiel more frequently than any other
book of the Bible. See “Voltaire’s Biblical Criticism,” 206–10.
28. Voltaire perversely takes the cases of Jephtah’s daughter and Agag, king of the Amalekites, to
argue that the Biblical Hebrews continued to practice human sacrifice. Agag was definitely murdered
but just as definitely was not sacrificed (1 Sam. 15:32–4), and the text of the Bible is not explicit
about the fate of Jephtah’s daughter (Judg. 11:34–40). For Voltaire’s allegations that the ancient
Hebrews practiced human sacrifice, see, for example, TT, xxii, 92; EM, cxlvii, II, 349; and DP,
“Juifs.” The article “Juifs,” which is not included by Besterman in his edition of the DP and which
Voltaire did not publish during his lifetime, appears in the Kehl edition of his works and was com-
piled from a minor publication of 1756 and apparently from his notes. On this article, see Desné,
“Voltaire était-il antisémite?” 71–72.
29. Voltaire derisively compares the Talmud to the Thousand and One Arabian Nights (EM, i, I,
209).
30. Deut. 21:18–21.
31. Talmud, Sanhedrin, fol. 71.
32. One example of this trend is giving permission to take interest on loans, even though this was
explicitly forbidden in the Pentateuch. Without credit and the interest it requires, it is virtually im-
possible to function in a commercial society.
33. This point is also made by Schwarzbach in “Voltaire et les Juifs,” 81.
34. Voltaire, Letters on England, trans. L. Tancock (Reading: Penguin, 1986), Letter 18, 92.
35. George R. Havens, The Age of Ideas: From Reaction to Revolution in Eighteenth-Century
France (New York: Holt, 1955), 172–3.
36. A case in point is Diderot. See Leon Schwartz, Diderot and the Jews (London and Toronto:
Associated Univ. Presses, 1981), 19, 71–2, and 97–8.
37. D. J. Goldhagen argues for the existence of what he calls eliminationist anti-Semitism in the
first three chapters of Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New
York: Knopf, 1996).
38. Voltaire criticizes the Jews for engaging in usury and finds the source of this practice in Deu-
teronomy. Nowhere does he consider what other economic opportunities the Jews had open to them.
In the posthumously published article “Juifs,” Voltaire does express some appreciation of the com-
mercial functions traditionally performed by Jews, and indeed he had also done so in the Essai, cxl,
II, 297. While Voltaire discusses legal disabilities the feudal system imposed on Jews (EM, ciii, II, 62–
3), he does so in largely formal terms—and without taking into account the broader social and
economic situation of the Jews.
39. Voltaire’s reticence to express sympathy with Jewish victims of massacre and state expropria-
tion is uncongenial to the modern reader. It is relevant to observe in this context that Voltaire’s view
of history is generally pessimistic. Ignorance, superstition, ambition, greed, and stupidity make of
human history a sorry spectacle of largely self-inflicted suffering and destruction in which the Jews
have their share, but not much more than their share. Voltaire tends to record the catastrophes with
which history is strewn with wry comments on their implicit causes, but without lamentation. He
describes the scene in a way that makes clear what the appropriate reaction is, but he leaves the
reaction to the reader. According to Frank E. Manuel, Voltaire’s fascination with violence reflects an
“innate cruelty” (The Broken Staff, 197).
40. The basic study here is Gershom Scholem’s Sabbetai Sevi, the Mystical Messiah, trans. R. J. Z.
Werblowsky (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989; 1973).
41. This was the principle on which the Treaty of Augsburg (1555) was based, and it was the
assumption underlying the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685, a law that has
been regarded as regressive by liberals but was well received by the Catholic majority at the time. It
is unusual to find theoretical defenses of toleration much before Locke and Bayle at the end of the
seventeenth century, and it is only with the Enlightenment that toleration becomes a central value.
Voltaire’s Traité sur la tolérance (1763), though directly deriving from his efforts to rehabilitate
Calas, is an important statement of this value. H. T. Mason has shown that Voltaire’s Traité sur la
tolérance owed little if anything to Locke’s Letter on Toleration or Bayle’s Commentaire philosophique
sur ces paroles de Jésus-Christ “Contrains-les d’entrer” (“La Tolérance chez Locke, Bayle, et Vol-
taire: fausses influences?” in Études sur le Traité sur la tolérance de Voltaire, ed. Nicholas Cronk
[Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000], 7–11). Adam Sutcliffe has argued that the philosophical bent
of Spinoza, which favored unfettered rational inquiry to law and authority, and the distinctively
Protestant emphasis on freedom of conscience in Locke and Bayle, resulted in an implicitly hostile
attitude toward Judaism (“Enlightenment and Exclusion: Judaism and Toleration in Spinoza, Locke,
and Bayle,” Jewish Culture and History II [1999], 26–43).
42. See, for example, Abraham Leon Sachar, A History of the Jews (New York: Knopf, 1966),
chap. 14, and H. H. Sasson, ed., A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1976), 518–9 and 612–3.
43. On Basnage and his sympathy for Jews, especially when victims of persecution, see Jonathan
M. Elkin, “Jacques Basnage and the History of the Jews,” 606–8. See also Pomeau, La Religion de
Voltaire, 367, and Schwarzbach, “Voltaire et les Juifs,” 47, n. 46.
44. EM, cxl, II, 297. Voltaire observes here that “[t]he Jews did not appear more dangerous in
Spain [than in Poland or Holland], and the taxes that could have been imposed on them were an
assured resource for the government: it is therefore difficult to attribute to a wise policy the persecu-
tion which they experienced.” This passage may have been meant as an indirect criticism of the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
45. For Voltaire’s comments on the supposed Donation of Constantine, see EM, x, I, 300–2, and
for another such fabrication, EM, xxiii, I, 377.
46. Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières (Paris: Maspero, 1971), 282
and 286–8.
47. Assumptions about a universally valid morality did not prevent thinkers of the Enlightenment
from making statements about differences in cultures or peoples when they believed empirical evi-
dence justified this. A case in point is Hume’s famous footnote to his essay “Of National Charac-
ters,” on which see John Immerwahr, “Hume’s Revised Racism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53
(1992), 481–6.
48. Katz, “Le Judaïsme,” 149.
49. René Pomeau comments succinctly, “The religious evolution of the Jewish people escapes
him” (La Religion de Voltaire, 376).
50. Robertson is cited in J. B. Black, The Art of History: A Study of Four Great Historians of the
Eighteenth Century (New York: Crofts, 1926), 72. Theodore Besterman asserts that in the Essai
Voltaire “is amazingly just, impartial, and accurate (within the limits of contemporary knowledge,
obviously) in his factual narrative.” Voltaire (London: Longmans, 1969), 408. See also Haydn Ma-
son, Voltaire (New York: St. Martin’s, 1975), 46.
51. Pomeau, “Introduction” to EM, I, xxiii-xxiv.
52. Dieter Gembicki, “La polémique autour de l’Essai sur les moeurs (de Bury, Vernet, Non-
notte)” in Voltaire et ses combats, eds. Ulla Köllving and Christiane Mervaud (Oxford: Voltaire
Foundation, 2 vols., 1997), vol. II, 1289–1304. Gembicki finds the standard of reliability in the
Essai to be acceptable (ibid., 1303). Frank E. Manuel is one of the few scholars who have considered
the matter to charge Voltaire with sloppy scholarship (The Broken Staff, 198). J. H. Brumfitt com-
ments, “ . . . Voltaire is a rapid, but perhaps not always a careful reader” and denies that Voltaire has
a historical method beyond common sense and a healthy skepticism (Voltaire Historian, Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), 135 and 139–41). Gibbon said damningly of Voltaire, “He follows some
compilation, varnishes it over with the magic of his style, and produces a most agreeable, superficial,
and inaccurate performance.” Cited by Roy Porter, Edward Gibbon: Making History (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 68–69.
53. Black, The Art of History, 71, and Brumfitt, Voltaire Historian, 135.
54. Mason, Voltaire, 46.
55. See, for example, Peter Gay, “Voltaire’s Anti-Semitism,” 106–8; Katz, “Le Judaïsme,” 135;
Levy, Voltaire et son exégèse du Pentateuch, 223–4 and 235; Porset, “Voltaire et les Juifs,” 102;
Manuel, The Broken Staff, 195 and 197; Schwarzbach, “Voltaire et les Juifs,” 79–84; and Schechter,
“Rationalizing the Enlightenment,” 292–4.
56. In “Voltaire on Judaism and Christianity,” Allan Arkush agues provocatively, and on the
whole convincingly, that for Voltaire Christianity was a worse and more harmful form of religion
than Judaism.
57. Henry Vyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard Univ. Press, 1958), 172–5; Brumfitt, Voltaire Historian, 68; and Duchet, Anthropologie et his-
toire, 312.
58. Wade, The Intellectual Development of Voltaire, 511–35, and Adam Sutcliffe, “Voltaire in
Context: The Emergence of Anti-Judaic Rhetoric in the French Early Enlightenment,” forthcoming.
59. Assertions that Jews were properly relations of Christians occur throughout Voltaire’s long
career. In his notebooks written while in England he observed, “When I see Christians, cursing Jews,
methinks I see children beating their fathers” (cited in Levy, Voltaire et son exégèse du Pentateuch,
247). In the Sermon du Rabbin Akib he has the rabbi assert that “we must regard all men as broth-
ers” and that the Jews with respect to Christians are “the fathers of your fathers” (Jacques Van den
Heuvel, ed., Voltaire: Mélanges, [Paris: Pléiade, 1965], 450 and 451). The same metaphor recurs
repeatedly in the article “Juifs” in the Kehl edition of the DP.
60. This perspective is derived from the influential work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Ador-
no, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1998; 1944). Adorno
and Horkheimer, while concerned about the repressive potential of instrumental reason and narrow
empiricism, do not associate Voltaire with this trend. Indeed, Voltaire hardly appears in the book. In
a short note devoted to him (218–9), the authors show appreciation of his critical attitude toward
authority.
61. Voltaire, Letters on England, Letter 6, 41.
62. Adam Sutcliffe, “Can a Jew Be a Philosophe? Isaac de Pinto, Voltaire, and Jewish Participa-
tion in the European Enlightenment,” Jewish Social Studies 6 (2000), 31–51.
63. Voltaire, Letters on England, Letter 6, 41.
64. Schwarzbach, “Voltaire et les Juifs,” 29.

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Chisick / Voltaire’s Attitudes toward the Jews 577

E THICS ANDHISTORY IN VOLTAIRE’S

The question of Voltaire’s anti-Semitism has received considerable atten-

Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no. 4 (2002) Pp. 577–600.

In the Dictionnaire philosophique Voltaire accords the most sympathetic

very by a politically and technologically advanced civilization and then redeemed

Some aspects of Voltaire’s criticism of biblical Judaism are convincing,

exhibits a complete ignorance of science (EM, vii, I, 271). He concedes, however,

One of the characteristics of racism in general, and of modern anti-Semit-

Like most Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire insisted on the consistency

Arguably, the main negative features of Voltaire’s portrayal of the Jews

It has been suggested that universalism is or can be used repressively to

2. Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, 285–6.

17. DP, “Abraham,” 18, and “David,” 170.

25. Gen. 18:17–33.

26. Deut. 16: 20.

30. Deut. 21:18–21.

31. Talmud, Sanhedrin, fol. 71.

48. Katz, “Le Judaïsme,” 149.

51. Pomeau, “Introduction” to EM, I, xxiii-xxiv.

54. Mason, Voltaire, 46.

61. Voltaire, Letters on England, Letter 6, 41.

63. Voltaire, Letters on England, Letter 6, 41.

64. Schwarzbach, “Voltaire et les Juifs,” 29.

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