Hitler and his God

A Less Prejudiced Attitude

How, then, did the next stage in Europe’s history, the Enlightenment, treat the Jews? Its principle was a radical questioning of all certainties and dogmas formerly held to be unquestionable. The field of questioning was broadened constantly by discoveries of new lands and peoples, and the religious and political dogmas had already suffered a severe shaking in the atrocious wars of religion among supposedly civilized countries. Moreover, science had changed the way men looked at the cosmos and, in consequence, the idea they made of its Maker. Copernicus had long been accepted, Galileo had discovered new heavenly bodies, and Newton’s laws suggested a universe hardly compatible with the Biblical stories of creation. Besides, scholars like Richard Simon had shown that the Bible, when philologically examined like any other literary document, proved to be a much less consistent document than could be expected of the Word of God.

England, the country of origin of the Enlightenment, was the exemplar of tolerance. Names like John Toland, John Locke and David Hume, willing to draw the last consequences of the enlightening but fallible human reason, are an ornament to its culture. In France there was Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), “the great apostle of tolerance”, who in still very intolerant times had to flee to Holland, the continental haven of intellectual freedom at that time. His Historical Dictionary, composed in Rotterdam, “remains one of the most devastating indictments ever of the shameful behaviour and the mental confusion of men”, while his Treaty on Tolerance set the tone for a less prejudiced attitude.

But then there is the case of that other philosophe, as the thinkers of the Enlightenment were called, Jean-Marie Arouet, alias Voltaire. Strange to say, this man, who was one of the prominent champions of the new ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, was also “a vicious anti-Semite” (Weiss). The many barbs against the Jews in his Philosophical Dictionary are there for all to read, e.g. “the Jews, our teachers and our enemies, whom we believe and detest”, or: “The Jews thus treat history and ancient fables as their old-clothes-men threat their worn garments: they turn them and sell them for new at the highest possible price.” Etc. 561 The English editor and translator of the Dictionary tries to defend his author: “This sort of thing is common form in Voltaire, and the legend of his anti-Semitism has persisted … He did not dislike the Jews on ‘racial grounds’, but only because they were the people of the Old Testament and the precursors of Christianity” – which looks like a curious reason for his dislike. 562

“I therefore ask, gentlemen, for the Protestant French as for all non-Catholics of the Kingdom, what you demand for yourselves: freedom, the equality of rights. I ask this also for that people torn from Asia, always on the move, always outlawed, always persecuted during more then eighteen centuries, which would take up our ways and customs if it were incorporated into us by our laws, and to which we do not have to reproach its morals, since they are the result of our own barbarism and of the humiliation to which we have condemned it unjustly!” 563 Thus resounded the voice of a Deputy in the French National Assembly during the Revolution. The Jews, not without wrangling, were legally emancipated on 27 September 1791. Napoleon based his Napoleonic Code (1804) on the principle that all citizens were equal before the law and implemented it in the lands he conquered, breaking with the tradition of ages and giving their peoples a first taste of equality in freedom. Like all new beverages it tasted strange and some rejected it. The ideals of the French Revolution pervaded the minds and the political practice only gradually, in the advancing and retiring waves of the nineteenth century revolutions with repercussions in all European countries. Hitler and Nazism, arisen on a soil which remained inimical to these ideals, attempted the ultimate effort to counteract and annul them.