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.
Read more on Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-jewish-question/article/2002778