SOURCE: Schechter, Robert. “Rationalizing the Enlightenment: Postmodernism and Theories of Anti-Semitism.” Historical Reflections 25, no. 2 (summer 1999): 279-306.

In the following essay, Schechter examines the roots of anti-Semitic thought, beginning with François-Marie Voltaire in the Enlightenment and continuing into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Jews of France did not wait for postmodernism before criticizing the Enlightenment. In response to an anti-Jewish libelist who in 1786 accused the Jews of being “superstitious,” Isaiah Berr Bing of Metz defended himself and his coreligionists in a published letter:

I do not know what you call superstitious; is it to show the most inviolable attachment to a religion in which you do not dare ignore the mark of divinity? Is it to observe very scrupulously all that it prescribes? If it is in that that we appear superstitious to you, I shall willingly admit that we are, that I hope quite sincerely that...