Adam Sutcliffe

Identity, Space and Intercultural Contact in the Urban Entrepôt: The Sephardic Bounding of Community in Early Modern Amsterdam and London

(2004). Identity, Space and Intercultural Contact in the Urban Entrepot: The Sephardic Bounding of Community in Early Modern Amsterdam and London. Jewish Culture and History: Vol. 7, No. 1-2, pp. 93-108.

The Origins of Jewish Secularization in 18th Century Europe

Shmuel Feiner is the leading Haskalah historian of his generation, having written both a major monograph (Haskalah and History, 2002) and a commanding survey (The Jewish Enlightenment, 2004) on this key intellectual movement. His latest book shares the central strengths of his earlier work: it is boldly wide-ranging and erudite, rooted in an extremely thorough knowledge of the primary source material. However, The Origins of Jewish Secularization also in several respects marks a break from these two previous books. Feiner here shifts his geographical focus from the Ashkenazic heartlands of eastern Europe to six major cities in western and central Europe: London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, Breslau and Prague. More fundamentally, this is essentially a work of social history rather than intellectual history. Building on the work of earlier historians such as Azriel Shochet and, more recently, Steven Lowenstein and Deborah Hertz on Berlin, Todd Endelman and David Ruderman on London, and Yosef Kaplan on Amsterdam, Feiner tells the story of the decline of religious observance and the rise of a new, more individualistic and pleasure-oriented value system among the more affluent Jews in these urban centres over the course of the eighteenth century. This secularizing trend, he emphasizes, emerged in advance of the Haskalah, and developed independently from it. This is a significant narrative of Jewish cultural change, and Feiner tells it well. Is this really, though, the story of “the origins of Jewish secularization”? And what precisely should we understand by that phrase? Feiner explicitly rejects the theoretical work by José Casanova, Charles Taylor and others that has influentially challenged the widespread assumptions that secularization is a philosophically transparent phenomenon and that it is closely identified with modernity (p. xii). Several distinct (though frequently overlapping) phenomena are woven into Feiner’s secularization tapestry: assimilation into local elite and bourgeois cultures; acculturation to prevalent consumption habits and fashions; philosophical freethinking and antinomianism; physical pleasureseeking and sexual libertinism. In the eyes of the religiously Orthodox these deviations from traditional norms of righteousness were, as he points out, part of one undifferentiated ‘epicurean’ peril. However, this was a polemical conflation, not a documentary one. It is important to distinguish carefully between the varied self-understandings of eighteenth-century Jewish coffeehouse habitués, Deist would-be philosophers, and anti-rabbinical polemicists, and the rather simplistic unitary picture of Jewish dissent offered by those who denounced it. Many of the individuals who figure in Feiner’s argument would not have recognized themselves as secular. Meyer Schomberg, for example—an Ashkenazic doctor whose

Spinoza, Bayle, and the Enlightenment Politics of Philosophical Certainty

This article explores the complex and contested intellectual relationship between two of the key thinkers of the Early Enlightenment: Spinoza and Bayle. The key issue of contention between them is not, it is argued, the question of the existence and nature of God, but their profoundly contrasting visions of the nature of philosophy as a politically emancipatory practice. The article analyzes Bayles rejection of Spinozas systemic certainty, and the significance of this rejection in relation to Bayles own anti-systemic philosophy of openness and incompletion. This contrast between Bayle and Spinoza is deployed to clarify the interpretation of Bayles theory of toleration and of his late writings.

Judaism and the Politics of Enlightenment

This article explores the political and philosophical significance of Judaism in the thought of the European Enlightenment and the resonance of these debates in Western thought since the 18th century. Judaism and the Jews persistently served as a troublesome limit case, a destabilizing challenge, and a probing test for enlightenment rationalism. Attempts to divide the Enlightenment into “anti-Semitic” and “philosemitic” strands are doomed to failure; rather, the intellectual relationship is inescapably complex and unstable. Because of this, Judaism can provide a unique bulwark against univocal rationalist authoritarianism.

Friendship in the European Enlightenment: The Rationalization of Intimacy?

The volume “Conceptualizing Friendship in Time and Place” brings together reflections on the meaning and practice of friendship in a variety of social and cultural settings in history and in the present time, focusing on Asia and the Western world.

Spinoza and Friends: Religion, Philosophy and Friendship in the Berlin Enlightenment

The topic of friendship was widely and vigorously discussed during the eighteenth century, but it was a subject on which no clear Enlightenment consensus emerged.1 The unrestrained intensity of the Renaissance ideal of friendship — most famously expressed in Michel de Montaigne’s elegiac essay, in which he describes his deceased friend as so close to him as to have been barely distinguishable from his own self2 — could no longer easily be sustained in the eighteenth century, when both changing gender relations and the competitive vigour of commercial society complicated the imagined innocence of intimacies between men. Michel Foucault has argued that it was in this century that homosexuality became a problem in Europe, concomitantly with the decline of traditional models of male friendship and the rise of modern institutions that sought to discipline these intimacies.3 For Alan Bray, too, it was in this period, in England at least, that premodern traditions of friendship were almost extinguished by the modern rationalization of interpersonal relations demanded by Kantian ethics.4 The increasing visibility of the pursuit of commercial self-interest also seemed to threaten the selflessness and mutuality on which authentic bonds of friendship were traditionally assumed to be based. Bernard Mandeville’s provocative argument, in his Fable of the Bees (1723), that ‘private vices’ produce ‘public benefits’ was an enduring provocation for the next fifty years, in particular to the leading thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, almost all of whom wrestled with Mandeville in their attempts to reconcile a theory of beneficent friendship with a positive analysis of commercial society.5

Judaism in the Anti-Religious Thought of the Clandestine French Early Enlightenment

It has already been noted that Jewish anti-Christian arguments, circulating clandestinely, were a notable inspiration of radical Enlightenment critiques of Christianity. Judaism itself, however, was simultaneously also a prime target of irreligious polemic, most prominently in the work of Voltaire. This paper explores the tension between these two strands of critique, through an examination of the highly ambiguous and unstable status of Judaism in the French clandestine philosophical literature of the early eighteenth century, which were an important source for Voltaire. These texts highlight the intricate dynamics of fascination and hostility that characterized early Enlightenment attitudes towards Jewish difference.