Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

La Peyrère, the Abbé Grégoire, and the Jewish Question in the Eighteenth Century

1975; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sec.1975.0020

1938-6133

Richard H. Popkin,

European Political History Analysis

La Peyrere, the Abbe Gregoire, and the Jewish Question in the Eighteenth Century RICHARD H. POPKIN The discussions of Jewish ‘Emancipation’ from the French Revolution up to Napoleon’s decrees deal mostly with the social, political, and economic motives and problems involved, and with the Enlightenment ideology that furthered the extension of the rights of man to everyone, regardless of reli­ gious creed.1 It is only to a lesser extent that religious issues have been treated, and that the forces pressing for Jewish ‘Emancipation’ have been placed in the context of either Christian or Jewish eschatology of the time.2 When Jews first became citizens of a modern Western state, in the newly formed United States of America in the beginning of 1789, no serious politi­ cal or religious debate preceded the event, and no significant implications were seen in either the Jewish or Christian worlds.3 However, a few months later, when at the outset of the French Revolution the abbe Gregoire pro­ posed that French Jews should be made citizens, many voices anticipated all sorts of far-reaching consequences, both to Christian and Jewish theologies, and to political and social structures.4 As has been pointed out in studies of Gregoire, most recently in Ruth Necheles’ biography of him, the good abbe’s interest and concern with the Jewish problem arose principally from his Jansenist millenarianism. The 209 210 / RICHARD H. POPKIN ‘Emancipation’ of the Jews for Gregoire was a crucial step that had to be achieved before the commencement of the Messianic Age would or could begin.5 What I want to examine, in this paper is the role played by a special French Messianic theory, that of Isaac La Peyrere, in providing the rationale for Gregoire’s views and actions, and later, for Napoleon’s, with regard to the Jews. Gregoire’s first, and basic statement of his views appeared in his contri­ bution to the question posed by the Society of the Sciences and Arts of Metz, “How to make the Jews happy and useful in France? ” Gregoire’s Essai sur la regeneration physique, morale et politique des Juifs of 1787, presented his case. There, he sees the state of the Jews since the dispersion after the Fall of the Temple as deplorable. Most of the sad situation that had led to the present degenerate state of the Jews he believes to be the result of Christian actions—anti-semitic legislation, maltreatment of Jews, miserable living condi­ tions in ghettoes, unworthy marginal occupations like money-lending forced upon them, precarious political existence, and so on. His solution is to make the Jews citizens and abolish anti-semitic regulations so as to give Jews the opportunity to live healthy, decent French lives and to bring about a regener­ ation of them in most respects. The Jews, Gregoire sees as slightly responsible for their own situation since they were keeping themselves in ignorance and superstition through their concentration or rabbinic fantasies and of false Messianic expectations. Enlightenment education would break the bonds of their self-imposed moral and intellectual degeneracy. Gregoire argues that the cases of the Dutch economist, Isaac de Pinto, and the German philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, already had shown the creative Jewish genius that could emerge from the liberation of Jews from their ghetto mentality.6 What Gregoire saw as the outcome of Jewish emancipation was a crucial stage in the march towards the Messianic kingdom. Prior to the Revolution, Jansenist millenarians had written lots of works on the Recall or Return of the Jews as the crucial antecedent event to the Second Coming, and they were offering schemes for bringing the Jews back to the mainstream of Euro­ pean life through conversion by love, not force, to Christianity. The reunion of Jews and Christians was believed to be critical to the culmination of human history.7 Gregoire appears to be on the extreme edge of this move­ ment in wanting to prepare the ground for the end of the world by making the Jews citizens and by encouraging their self-liberation through Enlighten­ ment education. The first two measures Gregoire pressed for in the Revolu­ tion were Jewish citizenship and state control of...