echoing the Enlightenment view of a Judaeo-Christian rapprochement in which each party would water down their respective exclusiveness to establish a kind of Jesus-the-Jew common ground. Church and synagogue would thus be of the same family and so would Simon and his sons. But this was an optimistic delusion. It echoed, somewhat, the friendships established through the indispensability of Hebrew to rabbis and Christian theologians alike. But the latter seldom if ever abandoned their ultimate goal of conversion, and this would be true of nineteenth-century philo-Semites as well. And Christian
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