A PROTESTANT ANALYZES THE JEWISH WORLD: History of the Jews by Gaston BASNAGE
by Hubert Hannoun
The time is, at present, to celebrate the righteous, those who, in all simplicity, all goodness, or all logic, rose up against antisemitic words and deeds. Some are recognized and honored. That is well. Others — and not the least of them — remain in the shadow of a history that must not be extinguished.
A life of struggle for liberty and tolerance.
Jacques BASNAGE DE BEAUVAL is one of those fighters who must not be lost from view. Born in 1653, in the middle of the grand siècle, he dies in 1772, in a time when ideas, in whatever domain, were already beginning to show a certain turbulence.
He belongs to a Protestant family that urges him to study theology first in Geneva, then in Sedan. At the end of these studies, he is a minister of worship in Rouen, which he must flee in 1675, his temple having been closed by order of the king. He then settles in Rotterdam, a city of liberty if ever there was one at the time, and devotes himself, in addition to his religious activities, to the political tasks dictated to him by his demand for freedom of thought and religious tolerance. It is on this ground that he will confront the great figures of the Church of his time, such as Bossuet or Jurieu.
A HISTORY OF THE JEWS of courage and clearsightedness.
It is in 1766 that BASNAGE DE BEAUVAL publishes his Histoire des Juifs (History of the Jews), a work that prepares and announces the action of the Abbé Grégoire, which was to lead, during the Revolution, to the emancipation of the Jews of France.
Antisemitism as pretext.
In the first place, this work is an act of courage on the part of its author. It serves to recall that at the beginning of the European 18th century, antisemitism is a way of living and thinking commonly accepted, and that certain minds regarded as among the greatest gave in to this current — the example of Voltaire, a little later, is not unique of its kind.
The method employed by BASNAGE to analyze the situation of the Jews of his time means to be at once historical and critical. It is founded on facts: the author notes all the accusations of which the Jews are the object in popular belief, those fables all the more horrible in that they are the more readily believed. What is their origin? Do not someone — or some few — have an interest in spreading the rumor? That is indeed what BASNAGE thinks. These dramatic fables are there only to justify a priori, or even to provoke, the persecutions of the Jews in the name of a religion for which love of neighbor no longer has any meaning: “I find it hard to believe,” he writes (Ed. 1706 — Vol. 6 — 1681-1682), “that one is led to violent actions when no interest impels men to them and when prudence and humanity oppose them. I fear that these crucifixions of young Christians have often been so many pretexts that have been used to stir up against them — the Jews — peoples and kings.”
The flaws common to all religions.
BASNAGE, in his defense of the Jews, rejects religious anti-Judaism, emphasizing that religious absurdities are not their exclusive preserve. To Jewish superstitions correspond just as many Christian superstitions; the Jewish Pharisees have nothing to envy the Christian traditionalists, and the astonishing commentaries of certain Talmudists have their mirror in certain fancies of St. Augustine. In doing so, BASNAGE castigates the cult of Saints in Catholicism — which he considers an idolatrous behavior — the mortifications that are, for him, only marks of pride, or the false miracles whose belief is maintained by the great of the church.
Against the confusion of powers.
In his Histoire des Juifs, BASNAGE already prefigures what will be one of the leading figures of the secular thought of the 19th century: the separation of spiritual power and temporal power. Their confusion is a source of deception, he observes, for the church’s grip on the thought of the people, through fear and superstition, has no other objective than the reinforcement of its political power over them.
Before Voltaire, an apology for tolerance.
BASNAGE’s Histoire des Juifs is a veritable apology for religious tolerance. Religious persecutions, he says — in a time when they are so frequent — are scandalous insofar as one persecutes, mortifies, assassinates in the name of God, a flagrant contradiction against which BASNAGE will fight all his life. Tolerance, by contrast, is the condition of the love of all men, of peace, and the means of deepening the biblical texts through exchanges among their different approaches.
H.H.