Although he was an advocate of religious toleration, the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, like his counterparts in Germany, fervently opposed religion altogether in the name of reason. He was thus no friend of the Jews, believing that their “impertinent fables,” which were at permanent odds with reason, might one day make them “deadly to the human race.” Tracing the history of Enlightenment attitudes toward the Jews through the lens of attitudes toward religion, Gertrude Himmelfarb explains why, by contrast, Jews have fared so well in America:

If Americans can take any comfort in [the history of European philosophers’ anti-Semitism], it is in the thought of how exceptional (as we now say) American history has been—among other things, how different the American Enlightenment and Revolution were from those of the French. Far from seeing reason as antithetical to religion, American thinkers and statesmen, before and after the Revolution, believed reason to be entirely compatible with religion and religion an integral part of society. It was just eight years before Bruno Bauer’s [essay] “The Jewish Question,” [which also took Judaism as the most pernicious example of the evils of religion], that Alexis de Tocqueville decisively refuted it, at least with respect to America.

Unlike the philosophes, he wrote, who believed that “religious zeal .  .  . will be extinguished as freedom and enlightenment increase,” Americans thought religion an ally of both freedom and enlightenment. The first thing that struck Tocqueville on his arrival in the United States was the religious nature of the country. “Among us [the French] I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions. Here I found them united intimately with one another; they reigned together on the same soil.” The country where Christianity was most influential, he noted, was also “the most enlightened and free.”

Tocqueville, without ever mentioning Jews, may have had the last word on the Jewish question, as he did on so many others.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.