Voltaire's Jews and modern Jewish identity: rethinking the Enlightenment

Abstract

i. Introduction: Enlightenment and Its Discontents ii. Voltaire Sets the Terms of the Debate: Emancipation as an Exit Strategy iii. The Changing Contours of the Enlightenment Part 1 1.Spinoza, Bayle, and Voltaire: Issues in Contention 2. Images, Imagination, Tolerance and the Uses of Reason 2.1 The Power of Images and Imagination 2.2 Spinoza and the Imagination 2.3 Images of Jews 2.4 Human Improvement and the Limitations of Reason 3. Voltaire's Jews Among the World's Peoples and Nations 3.1 Human Nature and Human Culture 3.2 The Essai sur les moeurs as Universal History 4. Voltaire's Jews in the World of Commerce and Their Capacity for Critical Thought and Social Inclusion 5. Voltaire and the Old Testament 5.1 Voltaire's Old Testament Sources 5.2 Myths, Fables, Legends and History 5.3 Allegory and Symbolism in the Old Testament 5.4 More the Polemicist than the Historian 5.5 Rousseau as a Counter-Example Part 2 6. Judaism Reinvented the Enlightenment Disputed 6.1 The Aftermath of French Emancipation 6.2 Enlighteners and Anti-Enlighteners 6.3 Anti-Enlighteners Outside France 7. Modern Jewish Identity and the Jewish Question: The Power of Ancestral Voices in a Post-Enlightenment Age 7.1 Out of the Ghetto, Into the Nation-State 7.2 1944: Recognition and Reckoning 7.3 Ernst Cassirer and Leo Strauss Debate Judaism 7.4 Judaism and Jewishness: Essence and History 8.Conclusion. Bibliography