DEISTS

DEISTS, adherents of a rationalist movement that arose in the 17th and 18th centuries as an attempt to explain the Bible and create a theology based on the rules of logic and the sciences. Deism arose in the middle of the 17th century out of the rationalist criticism of the past, and especially the religious past, which had been one element of the thinking of the Renaissance and the Reformation. It was also a result of the inevitable de-emphasis on the uniqueness of Christian Europe and its special revelation, as corollary to increasing scientific and geographical discovery, which emphasized the multiplicity of cultures and man's reason and power. The Englishman who founded Deism, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), made the fundamental distinction between "natural religion" and the various positive faiths, which were judged by its standards (De Religione Gentilium, 1663). In 1670 baruch spinoza published in Amsterdam his Tractatus theologico-politicus… (Treatise on Religious and Political Philosophy) which subjected the Bible and even the New Testament to criticism in the name of universal principles of reason and morality available to any man by his very nature. In this debate about the Bible, others and especially Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), in articles such as his famous Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (Rotterdam, 1697), helped establish as a first principle of the European Enlightenment not only that the Bible was not unique but that indeed it was morally and culturally inferior and obnoxious. In England the immediate followers of Lord Herbert argued on the grounds of comparative religion, a discipline of which they were the founders, that the basic customs of Judaism had been taken over from the Egyptians. This question, whether the Jews had taught the Egyptians or the Egyptians had taught the Jews, had been at issue in antiquity between Hellenistic Jewish writers and such of their detractors as manetho . Learned men such as John Spencer (1630–1693) argued against the originality of the Jews and used all the remarks in the sacred literature of both Jews and Christians that attacked the "stiff-neckedness" of the biblical Jews to paint them in the most negative colors and to suggest that their laws were a punishment visited upon them (De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus, Cambridge, 1685). The sources in classic antiquity of this negative estimate of the biblical Jews are even more pronounced in the work of Charles Blount (1654–1693), who renewed the ancient charge of Greco-Roman antisemites that the Jews had been expelled from Egypt as lepers. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), declared that the Jews "were naturally a very cloudy people" (Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 1 (London, 1711), 29); "they had certainly in Religion, as in everything else, the least Good Humor of any People in the world" (ibid., 3 (1711), 116). The attack on the credibility of the Bible and the character of the Jews was continued in England in the 18th century by such figures as Anthony Collins (1676–1729), who, in his Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713), devastated the belief in biblical prophecy and repeated that the Jews were "such an illiterate, barbarous, and ridiculous people," "crossgrained brutes," in dealing with whom God had to "use craft rather than reason" (ibid., 157). Such opinions were held by most of the other spokesmen of Deism in England, including Thomas Chubb (1679–1747), Thomas Morgan (d. 1743), and Peter Annet (1693–1769). They were repeated by Henry St. John, first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), the English Deist by whom voltaire pretended to be most influenced. The judgment of this whole school of thought was given by its most redoubtable figure in the 18th century, Matthew Tindal (c. 1655–1733). In his Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730) the Jews are no longer depicted as being merely ignorant and barbaric; he suggests that human sacrifice was part of their religion and that the immorality of utterly destroying the Canaanites was indicative of their true character. All of these attacks were leveled at the biblical Jews, and their function was primarily to discredit Christianity, but this Deistic criticism of the Bible had important effects on enlightened thinking about the estate of the contemporary Jew. The century of Enlightenment, and especially the Deistic believers in universal laws of nature, held that human character was continuous, and the Jews of today were therefore as their ancestors were held to have been. English Deistic thinking had substantial influence on the most important intellectual figure of the 18th century, Voltaire, and on such other figures as Nicolas Freret (1688–1749) and Baron Paul d'Holbach . A post-Christian seemingly rational and historical outlook in the name of which Jews could be despised was thus defined. Even on Deistic foundations anti-Jewish conclusions were not the only possible ones. John Locke was not a Deist, but he was close to such figures as Bayle, he was the tutor of Bolingbroke in his youth, and Anthony Collins regarded himself as Locke's disciple. As early as 1689 Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, had announced that no one, not even a Jew, "ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion." Locke was followed in these pro-Jewish views by his Deistic disciple john toland , who accepted the opinion that Mosaic legislation was borrowed from the Egyptians, but that did not prevent him from arguing that the Code   of Moses was the ideal civil constitution and that because of it the Jews had withstood their long exile to the present. Toland knew Jews personally, and as early as 1714 he published a work entitled Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland on the same foot with all other Nations, Containing also a Defence of the Jews against all vulgar Prejudices in all Countries. Five years later, in Nazarenus (London, 1718, Appendix 1), he suggested, in one of the early "Zionist" statements, that the powers of the world ought to help restore the Jews to their own land. It was thus possible to see virtue in the ancient Jews and regard what was wrong with the modern ones as created by the persecution which had been visited upon them and hence to suggest that a change in their conditions would uncover the same universal human nature which is common to all men. This was the view of men such as gotthold ephraim lessing , the leading German Deist and man of letters in his time, and of a wide variety of people such as comte de mirabeau the Younger, who helped create the atmosphere for the emancipation of the Jews in France by the french revolution . The other opinion, that the character of the Jews was lasting and incorrigible, was the legacy of Deistic biblical criticism, especially in its recension by Voltaire, to modern secular antisemitism. With few exceptions, notably that of Toland, no one who followed Deism, or was seriously influenced by 17th–18th century rationalistic and critical currents, had any doubt that the Jews as they had been molded needed to be freed of their characteristics and traditions in order to join universal culture (which, despite its universalist self-image, was then really a Western classicizing paganism). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: S. Ettinger, in: Zion, 29 (1964), 182–207; L. Poliakov, Histoire de l'antisémitisme, 3 (1968), 73–85; A. Hertzberg, French Enlightenment and the Jews (1968); N.L. Torrey (ed. and tr.), Voltaire and the Enlightenment (1931); L. Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (1876, 19624). (Arthur Hertzberg)