History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

and, at bottom, hostile to religion as such. This posed a problem. Much was permitted to clever writers in eighteenth-century France, but direct attacks on the Catholic Church were dangerous. It was at this point that they found Spinoza’s work particularly useful. Concerned to develop a rationalist approach to Biblical truth, he had inevitably exposed the superstitions and obscurantism of rabbinical religion. He had pointed the way to a radical critique of Christianity too, but in doing so he had assembled the materials for an indictment of Judaism. The French philosophes were willing to follow him in the first, but they found it safer to do so by concentrating on the second. Thus they turned on its head the old Augustinian argument that Judaism was a witness to the truth of Christianity. It was, rather, a witness to its inventions, superstitions and sheer lies. They saw Judaism as Christianity taken to the point of caricature, and it was on this ugly travesty that they concentrated. Here, they insisted, was an example of the distorted effects that the enslavement of religion can produce on