Can a Jew Be a Philosophe? Isaac de Pinto, Voltaire, and Jewish Participation in the European Enlightenment
2000; Indiana University Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/jss.2000.0014
ISSN1527-2028
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval and Classical Philosophy
ResumoThere was very little serious intellectual interaction between Jews and Christians in Western Europe during the eighteenth century. The debate--or self-styled "friendly conversation"--between the leading Dutch Remonstrant Phillip van Limborch and the Sephardic physician and polemicist Orobio de Castro, which took place in Amsterdam in the early 1680s, was the last prominent respectful theological encounter between a Christian and a Jew until the acceptance of Moses Mendelssohn into the circles of the German Enlightenment more than two generations later. 1 Textual scholarship, above all on the Hebrew Bible, remained an important field of contact between Jews and Christians. 2 In the fashionable intellectual circles of the Enlightenment, however, Christian Hebraist erudition no longer commanded the respect that it had widely held in the previous century. For many of the self-defined members of the Republic of Letters, it was a commonplace to adopt a denigratory attitude toward Jewish culture and learning, which was typically figured as the quintessence of pedantic insularity.
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