220
ROBERT S. WISTRICH
bers, as in late medieval Spain, the descendants of the converts were re–
garded with hostility and suspicion, leading to the Inquisition and
"purity of blood" statutes that pointed the way to modern racial anti–
Semitism. Not even the rise of humanism during the Renaissance and
Reformation could successfully throw off the impact of the medieval
image of the Jew. A reformer like Erasmus never dreamed of applying his
humanist teachings on toleration
to
the Jews, who simply remained
beyond the pale as far as he was concerned. Martin Luther, for his part,
reiterated all the medieval myths about Jews, reinforcing rather than
undermining them with an apocalyptic fury and vehemence all his own.
Thus Luther's assault on the Papacy and the whole fabric of the Catholic
Church, instead of liberating the Jews made his Protestant followers more
suspicious of them. Had they not refused to convert even after the great
German Reformer had revealed to them the pure, unadulterated word of
God? Were they not secretly encouraging the "Judaizng" Christian sects
in Central Europe? Were not the stubborn Jews in league with the
Muslim Turks and perhaps even with Rome in seeking to destroy the
New Church from within?
If the Reformation failed to bring any diminution of anti-Semitism,
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment offered, at least on the face of
things, a more promising prospect. There were Enlightenment writers
who condemned the persecution of Jews as a way of attacking Christian
intolerance. Their anti-clericalism and concern for universal principles of
human rights led them to a new conception of the status of the Jews,
which found expression in the French Revolution of 1789. The Jews
were not to be emancipated as a community but as
individual
human be–
ings, the assumption being that, once oppression was removed, their dis–
tinctive group identity would disappear. There was no sympathy among
the French revolutionaries for Judaism as such, which was generally
viewed in Voltairean terms as a barbarous superstition.
The Enlightenment and the French Revolution demonstrated that
anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism did not require a specifically Christian
source of inspiration and could even be animated by anti-Christian sen–
timents. Enlightened Europeans and their radical successors in the nine–
teenth century, on the left as well as the right, were nevertheless still in–
fluenced by Christian stereotypes when they attacked Judaism or de–
nounced the 'Jewish" origins of Christianity. Even wholly secularized
anti-Semites like Voltaire, Bruno Bauer, Richard Wanger and Eugen
Diihring always assumed that Christianity was a superior religion to Ju–
daism and did not hesitate to draw on Christian teachings to reinforce
their own cultural or racist perspectives. They inherited the pervasiveness
of the Christian antagonism to Jewry while no longer believing in its
scheme of salvation, which had still retained an overriding commitment
