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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2019
Despite its immense popularity at the time of publication in the 1730s, the marquis d'Argens's (Jean-Baptiste de Boyer) Lettres juives is largely overlooked by contemporary political theorists and the history of political thought. The Lettres’ contribution is noteworthy in its multilayered literary presentation incorporating many of the polemics and paradoxes of Enlightenment ideas. It is also significant as an early example of one way that post-Christian thought made use of imagined Jews and Judaism to articulate, debate, and popularize philosophical and political ideas. In this paper, I submit that d'Argens appropriated Christian figural Judaism in the service of secular philosophical inquiry. D'Argens's imagined “Jew in speech” proved to be a fertile ground upon which to conceptualize and debate post-Christian ideas about human nature and secular politics that subsequent diverse thinkers would make use of in the centuries that followed.
With gratitude to Ronnie Biener for his invaluable response to the original manuscript and to Ruth Abbey whose editorial guidance was both masterful and generous. Thanks to Seth N. Jaffe for a final read-through, to Clifford Orwin, and to the anonymous reviewers whose comments were supremely helpful.
1 de Boyer, Jean-Baptiste, d'Argens, marquis, Lettres juives, ed. Marx, Jacques, 3 vols. (Paris: Champion, 2013), L 26, 332Google Scholar. References to the Lettres will henceforth be given parenthetically in the text. Translations are my own.
2 de Boyer, Jean-Baptiste, d'Argens, marquis, La philosophie du bon sens, ed. de Gurbert, Guillaume Pigeard (Paris: Champion, 2002), 56Google Scholar.
3 Erich Auerbach's discussion of figura analyzes the key hermeneutical and cosmological work done by Christian figural interpretation of the Bible: “Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses and fulfils the first” (Auerbach, , Scenes from the Drama of European Literature [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984], 58Google Scholar). The position of the Jew as both prefiguration of Christ's new covenant and warning of the consequences of rejecting it made the figural Jew particularly powerful in Christian discourses and thought, taking on a life of its own well beyond the biblical text (Nirenberg, David, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition [New York: Norton, 2013]Google Scholar). See, for example, the myriad ways that the Jew is invoked in medieval sermons (Gregg, Joan Young, Devils, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval Sermon Stories [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997]Google Scholar).
4 Geller, Jay, The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Traversa, Enzo, The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate, 1843–1943 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1994)Google Scholar; Judaken, Johnathan, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Yovel, Yirmiyahu, Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Fine, Robert and Spencer, Philip, Antisemitism and the Left: On the Return of the Jewish Question (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Arendt, Hannah, introduction to Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin (New York: Schocken Books, 1968)Google Scholar, as well as Arendt, , The Jew as Pariah (New York: Grove, 1978)Google Scholar.
5 See, e.g., Mack, Michael, German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-semitism of Philosophy and the German Jewish Responses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Israel, Jonathan I., Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 586–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Hertzberg, Arthur, The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 278–80Google Scholar.
8 Wertheim, David J., The Jew as Legitimation (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hammerschlag, Sarah, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and others discussed below.
9 Sutcliffe, Adam, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 210Google Scholar.
10 Ibid., 211.
11 An excellent example of this kind of analysis with regard to contemporary thought is Sarah Hammerschlag's exegesis of Badiou, , “Bad Jews, Authentic Jews, Figural Jews,” in Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology, ed. Rashkover, Randi and Kavka, Martin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 221–39Google Scholar; Baker, Cynthia M. provides a genealogy of the term itself in Jew (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.
12 Lyotard, Jean-François (Heidegger et «les juifs» [Paris: Galilée, 1988])Google Scholar uses the form “jews,” in quotation marks and lowercase, to flag that he is speaking of a figural Judaism specifically. His work not only comments on the place of figural Judaism in thought, but also self-consciously makes use of it. As this article seeks to do only the former, I occasionally use quotation marks to flag that I am not attempting any sort of ethnographic analysis of real-world Judaism or Jews, but I have generally kept the capitalized proper noun throughout.
13 Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama, esp. 51–60.
14 Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 464.
15 Ibid., esp. 80–134.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 117–18.
18 Augustine's letter Against Faustus, quoted in Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 130.
19 Ecclesia and Synagoga were feminine figural representations of Christianity and Judaism (the church and the synagogue) popular in medieval art. See Haynes, Stephen, Jews and the Christian Imagination (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 33–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parkes, James, The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 181–82Google Scholar; cf. Robert Chazan's discussion of Christian philosemitism, “Philosemitic Tendencies in Medieval Western Christendom,” in Philosemitism in History, ed. Sutcliffe, Adam and Karp, Johnathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
20 See Nelson, Eric, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beiner, Ronald, “James Harrington on the Hebrew Commonwealth,” Review of Politics 76 (2014): 169–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Meirav and Shain, Yossi, “Modern Sovereignty and the Non-Christian, or Westphalia's Jewish State,” Review of International Studies 43, no. 5 (2017): 918–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Schechter, Ronald, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 7Google Scholar.
22 Ibid., 8.
23 Mack, German Idealism and the Jew, 23–41.
24 Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 464.
25 D'Argens wrote of his own misadventures and heartbreak in his 1735 Mémoires du marquis d'Argens avec quelques lettres sur divers sujets. At least one biographer has attempted to unsettle the reputation for libertinage that d'Argens acquired, but whether his tales of attempted temporary “wife”-swapping and dealings with “Jewish” pimps in Constantinople are exaggerations, his youthful adventures were clearly at odds with prevailing religious and societal norms. See Gasper, Julia, The Marquis d'Argens: A Philosophical Life (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014)Google Scholar.
26 Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 586–87.
27 Gasper, Marquis d'Argens, 121–26.
28 Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 43.
29 The Lettres is ripe for a more detailed literary analysis than I will have time to do here. For example, d'Argens's choice of names is undoubtedly significant. Isaac, the favored son who inherits his brother's birthright, is a nod to Christian interpretations of Isaac as a prefiguration of Christ. Aaron, the first high priest of Israel and progenitor of the priestly line, is ironically the character whose criticisms of the fantasies and “chimeras” of religion are the most biting. Aaron's last name, Monceca, is likely a nod in the direction of the minor character, Fonseca, in Don Quixote, assumed to be named after a known “Spanish” Jewish doctor.
30 Said, Edward W., Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin Books, 1995)Google Scholar; Pucci, Suzanne L., “Orientalism and Representations of Exteriority in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes,” The Eighteenth Century 26, no. 3 (1985): 263–79Google Scholar; Lowe, Lisa, “Rereadings in Orientalism: Oriental Inventions and Inventions of the Orient in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes,” Cultural Critique, no. 15 (1990): 115–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 For discussions of Orientalism with regard to Jews and Judaism, see Kalmar, Ivan Davidson and Kalmar, Derek J. Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005), esp. xiii–xviii and 49–50Google Scholar; Librett, Jeffrey S., Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
32 Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment, 210.
33 D'Argens's argument that violent, oppressive institutions can have a profoundly damaging effect on the character and cognition of the people in whose name they operate anticipates by more than two centuries Arendt's critique of what totalitarian violence can do to the ability of an entire people to “think” in the proper sense.
34 Aaron describes rabbinic law as “mistaken” (L 29, 347), “ridiculous opinions” (L 24, 320); even delving into the kinds of banal anti-Jewish charges of greed and materialism that recur until today, writing that “the purpose of our [the Jews] prayers is wealth, abundance, and earthly goods” (L 29, 348).
35 Karaism is a minority sect of Judaism that did not accept the authority of rabbinic Judaism that developed following the destruction of the second temple. Karaites reject the “oral law” (i.e., the Mishnah and Gemarrah and commentaries that make up the Talmud).
36 Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 46.
37 Hertzberg, French Enlightenment and the Jews, 279.
38 D'Argens appears to be influenced by Bayle (L 26). Diderot railed against the ancient Hebrews yet praised elements of the Hebrew Bible. See Schwartz, Leon, Diderot and the Jews (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickenson University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. Voltaire was less willing to grant any value to Judaism, though he did claim that he could in theory tolerate a Jew who had renounced Judaism. See Sutcliffe, Adam, “Can a Jew Be a Philosophe? Isaac de Pinto, Voltaire, and Jewish Participation in the European Enlightenment,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 3 (200): 31–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Arnold Ages concludes that Enlightenment thinkers, unaware of the Talmudic distinction between halachic (legal) discussions and aggadic (tales/lore) stories, dismissed the Talmud and rabbinic Judaism in toto as fanciful and irrational (Ages, , French Enlightenment and Rabbinic Tradition (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1970)Google Scholar.
39 Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment , 211.
40 Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 43.
41 The nature of sovereignty and d'Argens's defense of absolute sovereignty located with a benign monarch (very much echoing Bodin) is another fascinating aspect of the Lettres and deserves a longer treatment of its own, which is beyond the scope of this paper.
42 “Tous les pays ont l’équivalent des molinistes et des jansénistes. Il y a en Angleterre des Anglicans et des papistes, en Espagne des prêtes et des moines, en Italie des ecclésiastiques, et en Turquie des dervis. Tous ces gens-là font servir la religion à leurs fins et n'abusent que trop indignement du nom sacré de la Divinité pour tromper le peuple crédule et pour autoriser les choses les plus contraires à la loi naturelle” (L 199, 1559; translation not entirely literal, but nonetheless faithful, I believe).
43 See Israel's discussion of d'Argens in Radical Enlightenment.
44 For a review of some of the efforts to move beyond this dichotomy, see Adam Sutcliffe and Johnathan Karp, introduction to Philosemitism in History, esp. 4–6.
45 Post–World War II examples include Jean Paul Sartre's returning to the “Jewish Question” throughout his lifetime, most famously, but not at all limited to, his Anti-Semite and the Jew (New York: Schocken Books, 1995)Google Scholar; Arendt's notion of “pariah Judaism,” in The Jew as Pariah (New York: Grove, 1978)Google Scholar; Deutcher's, Isaac The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (London: Merlin, 1981)Google Scholar; and Derrida's judéités (see esp. his introductory remarks in Cohen, Joseph D. and Zagury-Orly, Raphael, Judéités [Paris: Galilée, 2003]Google Scholar). See Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew, on progressive uses of figural Judaism by Derrida and Levinas.