In 1968, the New York Review of Books—now well established as a clearinghouse of anti-Israel vituperation—published a review by the eminent Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper of Arthur Hertzberg’s seminal The French Enlightenment and the Jews. In that review, Trevor-Roper takes issue with the book’s argument that anti-Semitism is embedded in the framework of the French Enlightenment, and is given particular voice in the writings of Voltaire. Hertzberg contends that Voltaire’s various attacks on the Jews—about whom the great philosophe was generous enough to caveat that “it is not necessary to burn them”—were not incidental or anomalous, but part and parcel of his worldview. Revisiting this debate, Bernard Harrison writes:

A “charge that Voltaire repeated obsessively,” [writes Hertzberg], “was that the Jews hate all other men.” . . . Voltaire locates the reason for this hatred, as did Cicero, Apion, and other ancient writers, in the possession by the Jews not merely of a special body of law and custom, but of one intrinsically opposed to the general increase of reason and progress in Western civilization that Voltaire believed to have been set in motion by the classical world [of Greece and Rome], and which he saw it as the role of Enlightenment to reanimate and bring to fruition. The Jews, in his view, had contributed nothing to the march of reason.

There were indeed aspects of culture Voltaire considered specific to the Jews, but they consisted, in his opinion, mainly in a fanatical attachment to a benighted religion and an equally passionate attachment to money—[what he describes in his Philosophical Dictionary as] “their stubbornness, their new superstitions, and their hallowed usury.” Of these, perhaps the most salient for Voltaire is the stubbornness of the Jews: their rooted resistance to principles and rules of conduct deemed compelling by all rational men.

Harrison goes on to note what Voltaire’s thoughts on this subject have in common with those of other writers who found the Jews to present an especially stubborn obstacle to their particular political visions:

Europe has known a number of vast cultural-cum-political projects each aimed at some form of redemption of society or mankind. The Enlightenment, in the minds of its supporters, was one such. Such projects require their more radically inclined supporters to believe that a total reformation of society, or mankind at large, along the lines proposed by the project is within its grasp. That belief is invariably threatened by the many fissures—social, moral, and religious—that actually divide any nation, let alone the larger human world.

Thus, Harrison argues, “political enthusiasts” like Voltaire are “predisposed” toward anti-Semitism due to “the failure of the Jews, over many centuries of Diaspora, to assimilate totally and without remainder to any of the many matrix cultures that have hosted Jewish communities. This, of course is the ‘continuing Jewish way of life’ which Trevor-Roper regards as constituting ‘an objective basis for anti-Semitism.’”

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.