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Explaining Voltaire’s Anti-Semitism

By Rob Goodman

It can be puzzling, even shocking, that such a well-known avatar of tolerance as Voltaire expended such effort on a lifelong project of intolerance. But Voltaire’s anti-Semitism is difficult to minimize or to explain away—and its sheer volume can be quantified by a number of metrics. In World War II-era France, for instance, Sorbonne professor Henri Labroue curried favor with the occupying German regime by compiling a volume of Voltaire’s anti-Jewish writings; it ran to nearly 250 pages.1 Another mark of his “obsession” with Jews came in his 1764 Philosophical Dictionary, a work of purportedly wider scope: some thirty out of its 118 articles attack Jews, and the article “Jew” is the single longest.2 Remarkably, a search by Ronald Schechter of the ARTFL database of French literature shows Voltaire accounting for 922 separate mentions of “juif[s]” or “juive[s],” nearly forty percent of the database’s total over the entire eighteenth century.3

To be sure, not all of Voltaire’s references to Jews are negative. For instance, his 1761 pamphlet “Sermon of Rabbi Akiba” puts in the mouth of a Jewish speaker a denunciation of the Portuguese Inquisition.4 The Dictionary entry on “Jew”—after allowing that the Jews are “an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched”—charitably concludes: “Still, we ought not to burn them.”5 And in an exchange with the Sephardic Jewish writer Isaac de Pinto, Voltaire conceded that a minority of assimilated Jews might qualify as philosophers.6

Yet, despite his opposition to violent persecution of religious minorities, it is still fair to examine Voltaire as a fundamentally anti-Semitic thinker. In one respect, as Arnold Ages argues, it is a question of volume: Voltaire’s moments of tolerance are “an almost barely discernible background radiation when compared to the vastness of his verbal assaults on Jews and Judaism.”7 More to the point, Voltaire was regarded as France’s leading intellectual anti-Semite by his own contemporaries. Arthur Hertzberg, for instance, investigates a wide range of French writings on the “Jewish question”: while eighteenth-century anti-Semites borrowed liberally from Voltaire’s arguments, a number of pro-toleration pamphlets—including works by Pinto and by the Catholic priest Antoine Guénée—criticized Voltaire harshly and directly. As Hertzberg concludes, “overwhelming evidence shows that both Jews and gentiles...unanimously regarded Voltaire as the enemy not only of biblical Judaism but of the struggling Jews of his own day.”8 Given the centrality of such themes to Voltaire’s work—especially, as I will argue, to his position on commerce—it is difficult to disagree with the summation offered by Shmuel Feiner: “Judaism fills such a central place in Voltaire’s thought and politics that one cannot relegate it to the sidelines.”9

Still, the question remains: exactly what place? Efforts to locate the source Voltaire’s anti-Semitism, and to situate it within his broader thought, could be classified on a scale from more to less forgiving. A comparatively forgiving interpretation argues that Voltaire, secularist though he was, was simply the product of a religious education of the kind that made suspicion of Jews a common European currency.10 Difficult as this claim is to disprove, it still raises the question of why Voltaire, far more than most contemporary writers to receive a similar upbringing, dealt so exhaustively with Jewish topics. Perhaps, then, his animosity grew from bad personal experiences with Jews: in 1726, for instance, he lost 20,000 francs when his Jewish banker went bankrupt, and in 1750-51, he was involved in an acrimonious financial dispute and lawsuit with a Jewish investor in Berlin.11 But while these incidents may have added intensity to Voltaire’s prejudice, they are also an insufficient explanation: for one, Voltaire’s anti-Semitic writing predates his 1726 loss; further, Voltaire himself claimed that he had easily forgiven larger losses at the hands of gentile bankers.12

Among non-biographical explanations, the more forgiving account offered by Peter Gay insists that “Voltaire struck at the Jews to strike at the Christians.”13 In other words, Voltaire’s writing on Jews sometimes served as a coded attack on the Church, and was sometimes intended to undermine Christianity’s biblical foundations in the Old Testament. Yet Voltaire was unafraid to criticize the Church openly and vociferously, casting doubt on his need for any such coding; his recently published letters, too, show that anti-Semitism was a private conviction, not just a public posture. And while a great deal of Voltaire’s attacks on Jews were conducted in the form of biblical mockery, he also attacked the contemporary Jewish people in racial terms, frequently resorting to the “opinion that Jews of every generation are tainted by the same defects as their forefathers.14 Rather than concluding, then, that Voltaire simply used Judaism to carry on a theological argument with the Church, it is essential that we place his anti-Semitism in the context of his secular politics; as Hertzberg puts it, Voltaire “provided the fundamentals of the rhetoric of secular anti-Semitism.”15 In this persuasive and influential reading, the Jews” major failing in Voltaire’s eyes was their “backwards” particularism, which stood against the universalizing Enlightenment project as he saw it.

I have dwelled on these competing explanations in an effort to demonstrate that Voltaire’s anti-Semitism was important to his political thought—and not simply a biographical or theological incidental. But canvassing these accounts also shows that a crucial explanation has been largely overlooked or downplayed: the Jewish role in the growth of commerce. Strategic anti-Semitism was central to Voltaire’s impassioned defense of commerce, just as their participation in a debased form of commerce was central to Voltaire’s perception of the Jews. While Voltaire certainly attacked Jews on non-commercial grounds—Jacob Katz, for instance, classifies his attacks as moral, religious, cultural, and political—the connection between Jews and commerce ought to be foregrounded for two reasons.16

First, for Voltaire, commerce was not incidental to the Jewish identity, but essential—even more defining than religion. In his Dictionary history of the Jews he wrote that “the sect of the Jew had long been spread in Europe and Asia; but its tenets were entirely unknown...The Jews were known only as the Armenians are now known to the Turks and Persians, as brokers and traders.” The Jews may have been fond of their temple, “but were still fonder of their money.” Similarly, Voltaire wrote that “the Jews have ever considered as their first two duties, to get money and children.” In fact, the Jewish people was literally born in usury. Here is how Voltaire describes the exodus from Egypt: “You stole to the amount of upwards of nine millions in gold...reckoning interest at forty per cent. which was the lawful rate.”17 Despite his claims to historical objectivity, Voltaire wrote Jewish history by projecting his perception of modern-day Jews—a grasping nation of usurers—back through time.18 Jews, commerce, and usury were so closely linked in Voltaire’s mind that we can best make sense of his attitudes on these subjects by considering them together.

Second, this close identification of Jews and commerce was not unique to Voltaire, but formed part of the climate of thought within which he worked: the context to which I now turn.

Note