Voltaire and the Jews

Voltaire believed that Western Europe should emulate the greatness and reasonableness of Classical Greece and Rome. Yet, in his view, the Jews were outside this tradition, entirely alien, for they were what he called “Asiatic.” According to Voltaire, the beliefs of the Jews were absurd, stemming from a people who were slaves to the Egyptians and had slavishly copied the evil practices of their masters.

Not being Christian, Voltaire rejected the theological anti-Jew rhetoric. Whether Jews were “Christ killers” or “Christ rejecters” was of no concern to him. Voltaire hated them not for their refusal to accept Jesus, but for their innate, degraded character. Voltaire saw their character as ultimately dangerous to society. In his, “Lettre de Memmius a Ciceron,” Voltaire adopted the pose of a classic Roman, Memmius, who praises Cicero for an anti-Semitic oration and adds:

"They are all of them born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the
Bretons and the Germans are born with blonde hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race".

And to the Jews themselves Voltaire wrote boldly: You seem to be the maddest of the lot. The Kaffirs, the Hottentots, the Negroes of Guinea are much more reasonable and more honest people than your ancestors, the Jews. You have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct,
and in barbarism. You deserved to be punished, for this is your destiny.

Again and again, Voltaire insisted that the Jews borrowed everything from other cultures, were ignorant of the arts and sciences, and were morally inferior to the Greeks. “The Jews were inveterate plagiarizers and there is not a single page of the Jewish books that was not stolen mostly from Homer.”

Paradoxically one of the major anti-Jewish writers before Voltaire was himself a Jew: Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). Spinoza’s Theological, Political Tractate was the first book to analyze the Bible as a secular text. Spinoza denied the miracles of the Bible and declared that the Pentateuch was written for a people recently slaves with all the superstitions of the Egyptians. Spinoza downgraded the morality of the Bible and the status of the Jews in history.

Spinoza wrote:
"The Jews were entirely unfit to frame a wise code of laws and to keep the
sovereign power vested in the community; they were all uncultivated and sunk in a wretched slavery."

Attacked by both Christians and Jews, Spinoza gave the eighteenth-century philosophers, a contempt for the Biblical Jew. Moreover, his idea that Jews had slavishly followed the Egyptian and were outside Greek culture became an important rallying point to counter the European respect for JudeaChristian
roots.

Another important influence on Voltaire’s philosophy of the Jews was Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud who in the 1769 published a collection of the views of Greek and Roman writers on the Jews. Mirabaud’s Opinions des Anciens sur les Juifs is a compendium of anti-Jewish beliefs by pagan writers, arguing that the misery of the Jews was not because of their rejection of Jesus for the Jews were despised in antiquity, long before Jesus was born. The Jews were despised in Roman times because they haughtily believed their god above all others, and because they hated the whole human race.
Voltaire had championed the idea of the Jew as irrevocably degenerate.

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