The Intellectual Challenge Essay Example for Free

The Intellectual Challenge EssayThe intellectual challenge was equally unprecedented. From the starting of the modern age, there were significant segments of the intellegentsia which did non content themselves with any of the newly fashi one and only(a)d apologies for Judaism. They accepted the ideals of the outside liberalism, nationalism, and, later, socialism not because they had supposedly originated in Judaism nevertheless because they had not. What made these values attractive was that they promised to fashion a new secular world which would transcend and destroy all aspects of medievalism. The assimilationists, those Jews who consciously strove to give up their stimulate identity entirely in order to become undifferentiated individuals in the modern world, were thus truly messianic. The very completeness and unconditionality of their surrender to the dominant values of the majority were a program for the final solution of the Jewish question let the Jew become like everybody else, yielding up his claim to chosenness and being relieved of his component ruin as scapegoat.Let society run on its universal and immutable principles, rooted in reason and natural law, which know neither positive nor ban exceptions for the Jew. Above all, let him disappear from the center of the stage, his own and the worlds, to be one among many equally important small incidents in the history of man kind. This was a kind of messianism that could have arisen only out of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, for it was fundamentally at variance with both the Jewish and the Christian concepts of such an age.Jew is equally important to the traditional Christian mutation of the end of days he is not chosen just now damned, but that is negative chosenness he is doomed to wandering and suffering, because he once rejected Jesus, but the indispensable preamble to the Second Coming and the end of days is his conversion. It is beyond doubt that the long-standing Christian desire to convert the Jews was a significant aspect of the climate of opinion toward the end of the eighteenth century which prepared the ground for their emancipation.Liberal Christians believed that this would be a short cut to the devoutly desired result. So the Abbe Gregoire, the drawing card of this school of thought in revolutionary France, argued in a famous essay written in 1787 and published two years later, as the delegates were fabrication to the meeting of the Estates-General in Paris, that the granting of religious liberty to the Jews would be a great step forward in reforming and in converting them, for truth is most persuasive when it is gentle. What is eve more apparent is that many of the philosophies of the Enlightenment, despite the ethical universalism and the vague deism or atheism in religion with which they were consciously subverting Christianity, were most reluctant to part with old-fashioned anti-Semitism.In fear of censorship and the Bastille, they may , indeed, have had to shoot their arrows of ridicule at Moses instead of the Apostles, in order to conduct their war against the Church in Aesopian language but there is an edge and a nastiness to Voltaires comments on the Jews, an insistence that it is hardly conceivable that tear down reason can reform them, which sets one of the patterns for modern anti-Semitism to uphold a universal and secular ideal e. g. , liberalism, nationalism, or socialism but to exclude the Jews from its purview and effect.Nonetheless, at its most ideologically consistent, the Enlightenment proposed full acceptance of the Jew in the new society of which it dreamed. His faults which even pro-Jewish writers like Dohm, Mirabeau, and Gregoire waxed eloquent in describing were, they maintained, not innate but caused by his unfortunate estate, and his claims to chosenness could be disregarded as a psychological defense the Jew found it necessary to cultivate to relieve the misery of his enslavement.All thi s would disappear, transmuted into good civisme even among this, the most difficult group to usher into the life of the modern world, once all of society is reformed. It is therefore true, as Nordau once observed that the Emancipation came to the Jews not out of humanitarian fervor, not as a reconciliation of age-old conflicts, but for the sake of the abstractions, reason and natural law. But the Jewish enthusiasts of assimilation chose to pretermit that the Emancipation was not essentially conceived out of tender regard for the Jews they preferred to accept it with passion as the totally messianic era that it purported to be.