Jacques Basnage and the History of the Jews: Anti-Catholic Polemic and Historical Allegory in the Republic of Letters

Elukin, Jonathan

doi:10.2307/2709940

Cited by 9 publications

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“…Despite its covert messagewhich, accordingt os ome scholars, aimeda tc onverting the Jews in view of the second comingo fC hrist -Basnage'so euvrew as immenselyi nfluential (cf. Elukin 1992;Yardeni 2008;VidalNaquet 1977). At the start of the eighteenth century,h istory of Judaism and earlyC hristianity, not to mention Church history, werew elle stablished, even upholding,a tt imes, theological implications.…”

Section: T He Problematic Couple: Judaism and Christianitymentioning

confidence: 99%

History and Religion

Otto¹,

Rau²,

Rüpke³

2015

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Section: T He Problematic Couple: Judaism and Christianitymentioning

confidence: 99%

History and Religion

Otto¹,

Rau²,

Rüpke³

2015

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show abstract

“…Indeed, mysticism had led to the atheism of Spinoza. 75 Graetz might have found in Basnage a way to systematize his own thinking about mysticism. Of course, he could not accept Basnage's indictment of the larger rabbinic tradition.…”

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A New Essenism: Heinrich Graetz and Mysticism

Elukin¹

1998

jhi

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Since the Reformation, European Christians have sought to understand the origins of Christianity by studying the world of Second Temple Judaism. These efforts created a fund of scholarly knowledge of ancient Judaism, but they labored under deep-seated pre judices about the nature of Judaism. When Jewish scholars in nineteenth-century Europe, primarily in Germany, came to study their own history as part of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, they too looked to the ancient Jewish past as a crucia l element in understanding Jewish history. A central figure in the Wissenschaft movement was Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891). 1 In his massive history of the Jews, the dominant synthesis of Jewish history until well into the twentieth century, Graetz constructed a narrative of Jewish history that imbedded mysticism deep within the Jewish past, finding its origins in the first-cen tury sectarian Essenes. 2 Anchoring mysticism among the Essenes was crucial for Graetz's larger narrative of the history of Judaism, which he saw as a continuing struggle between the corrosive effects of mysticism [End Page 135] and the rational rabbinic tradition. An unchanging mysticism was a mirror image of the unchanging monotheistic essence of normative Judaism that dominated Graetz's understanding of Jewish history. Ironically, this narrative model of the history of mystic ism may have been influenced by Christian attacks on Judaism itself, a point which I can briefly take up at the conclusion of the article. First let us turn to the role that the Essenes played in Graetz's historical ideology of mysticism. Graetz inherited a long intellectual tradition about the identity of first-century sectarians. Ever since the fourth-century historian Eusebius asserted that the therapeutae, a group mentioned by Philo, were actually Christian monks, the religious identity of these Alexandrian sectarians-distinct from the Essenes-had been the subject of constant debate. 3 Were they Jews or Christian ascetics? During the Middle Ages the tradition articulated by Eusebius gave the Church an additional claim for the antiquity of one of its central institutions. The religious identity of the Essenes, a seemingly similar sectar ian group mentioned by Josephus and other ancient historians, also became a point of dispute. 4 The secluded, monastic life of the Essenes made them equally likely candidates to be proto-Christians. The dispute over the alleged Christian nature of the therapeutae and the Essenes would survive, after generations of Catholic and Protestant sch olarly polemic, into nineteenth-century scholarship on late antique Judaism. 5 It was in the work of Graetz that the Essenes and their putative relationship to Christianity received the fullest treatment by a Jewish historian. 6 Since the only documented therapeutae were in Alexandria, they could not be considered [End Page 136] likely sources-even if they were Jewish-for a nascent Palestinian Christianity. The Essenes offered more fertile ground to explore the relationship between Judaism and early...

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Anti-Judaism

Elukin¹

2020

Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism

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Jacques Basnage and the History of the Jews: Anti-Catholic Polemic and Historical Allegory in the Republic of Letters

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

History and Religion

History and Religion

A New Essenism: Heinrich Graetz and Mysticism

Anti-Judaism

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