The Jewish example has a strange but significant place in Rousseau's political thought. In book IV, chapter 8, of the Social Contract, “On Civil Religion,” “Moses … and the Hebrew people” stand between the pagan and Christian worlds. They “sometimes,” like pagans, concede that gods other than their own have jurisdiction over other nations. And like the pagan gods, the Jewish God favors one people.Footnote ¹ But like Christians, Rousseau observes, Jews refuse to abandon the single God who alone is worthy of their worship.Footnote ² His sovereignty survives the conquest of the Jews. By the time we reach book IV, chapter 8, Rousseau has restored in a modern context some elements of the ancient republic, but ancient religion is beyond restoration and flawed, while Christianity, though it brings a morality Rousseau admires into the world, is ill suited to politics.Footnote ³ One is therefore tempted to explore the possibility that a religion modeled on Rousseau's Jewish example, because it shares much with both ancient religion and Christianity, may succeed where they separately fail. This possibility is explored no further in the Social Contract, and one must look elsewhere to fill out Rousseau's account of the Jews. But that account is so unfamiliar that before I discuss it, I will need to establish that there is something to discuss.

In the spring of 1760, the young poet Christian Felix Weisse sought out Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Rousseau's country retreat. He came bearing gifts: Moses Mendelssohn's translation of Rousseau's own Discourse on Inequality as well as Mendelssohn's Phaedo. The poet reports that after Rousseau heard all about Mendelssohn “he wanted to have Mendelssohn's observations translated, so that he might read them, because they came from a Jew; for otherwise, there was not a book in the world he would read.”Footnote ⁴

In The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism, Arthur Hertzberg denies that Rousseau had anything of note to say about the Jews. Rousseau's “only important statement about Jews derived consciously and directly” from a passage in Pierre Charron's De la Sagesse. Even though the Charron passage in question asserts only that one is born into one or another revelation by chance (so that it hardly seems fair or likely that one would be rewarded or punished for believing in the particular revelation one grew up with), and even though a cursory inspection of Rousseau's statements about the Jews demonstrates that this claim does not begin to cover what he has to say about them, commentators have for the most part followed Hertzberg in neglecting the use Rousseau makes of the Jewish example. It is no exaggeration to say that almost nothing has been written on this subject.Footnote ⁵

Yet Weisse's report is not all we have on Rousseau's interest in the Jews. Rousseau's book on education, Emile, includes a long speech on revealed religion. While Rousseau has one of the characters in this novelistic work, an unorthodox priest, deliver this speech rather than delivering it in his own name, there is no reason to believe that the priest differs from Rousseau on the point we are about to consider. The priest asks, “do you know many Christians who have taken the effort to examine with care what Judaism alleges against them?” In answering his own question, he observes that such an effort would be useless, since the Jews dare not say what they think in non-Jewish polities, in which “the tyranny practiced against them makes them fearful”: “I shall never believe that I have seriously heard the arguments of the Jews until they have a free state, schools, and universities. Only then will we be able to know what they have to say.”Footnote ⁶

We cannot conclude from this striking comment that Rousseau is a proto-Zionist. Indeed, Rousseau has very little to say about modern Jews, except, as we will see, insofar as their existence as a distinct people confirms the staying power of Mosaic legislation. By referring to the context of Rousseau's sympathetic remarks, one can demonstrate that their purpose is more to undermine the authority of revealed religion than to champion the cause of the Jews in particular, however just that cause may be. The Jews are merely one example of a people whose opinion must be examined before one can be confident that one's own religion is the right one, “if indeed there is a right one. … They must all be examined, and in any matter whatsoever one must not condemn without hearing.” Similarly, although the priest observes that the Jewish religion, which accepts only one of three revelations, “appears to be most certain,” he makes that observation mainly to have a joke at the expense of Christianity. The Jews are on firm ground because their revelation is accepted as such by all three of the principal European religions. The Mohammedans are at least consistent, since they accept all three revelations. Only the Christians, oddly, take two out of three. He comments, “the one which accepts two and rejects the third may very well be the best, but it has all the prejudices against it. The inconsistency leaps to the eyes.”Footnote ⁷

Of course, the priest's argument, which assumes that it is inconsistent to believe one revelation if you don't believe them all, tends to undermine revelation. The priest himself, while affirming the majesty of the Bible and allowing that proofs can be adduced in favor of the proposition that it is the revealed word of God, nonetheless pronounces himself a skeptic, on the grounds that equally good proofs can be adduced against that proposition.Footnote ⁸ Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike are foolish to believe so confidently and exclusively in distant hearsay. “Each detests and curses the other two, accusing them of being blind, hardhearted, opinionated, and dishonest.”Footnote ⁹ What appears to be a praise of Jews, then, is really a blame, in which Jews are implicated along with Christians and Muslims, of those who profess to be certain that they alone know what God demands of human beings.

It is sometimes supposed that Voltaire attacks Jews mainly in order to attack Christians, who share much with them. Having observed that Rousseau's apparent support for a Jewish state amounts to a veiled attack on revelation, we are tempted to suppose that Rousseau praises Jews mainly to attack Christians, who persecute them even though Christianity and Judaism rest on equally shaky ground. But I will argue that there is more to Rousseau's praise of the Jews. Judaism as Rousseau conceives it surpasses both paganism and Christianity in its nondogmatic, this-worldly emphasis on compassion and justice.

My intent is only to discuss how Rousseau makes use of the Jewish example. I will not try to argue that Rousseau spent much of his intellectual life reflecting on the Jews or that what he has to say about them is accurate or comprehensive. To be sure, Rousseau was “a lifelong reader of the Bible.”Footnote ¹⁰ His works abound with references not only to the Gospels but also to the Hebrew Bible. And perhaps, if Weisse's report is accurate, Rousseau was interested in reading Jewish authors. But he could not make much of a claim to book knowledge of Jewish things, nor, as far as I know, could he claim to know even one Jewish person. Rousseau, Leo Damrosch reports, did meet at least four Jews, but of those four, one had converted to Catholicism, two were pretending to be Moors, and one was forbidden to talk to him.Footnote ¹¹

We can begin our inquiry into Rousseau's use of the Jewish example by acknowledging that praising the Jews to undermine Christianity, as Rousseau did, and blaming them to undermine Christianity, as Voltaire may well have done, are two different strategies. The choice of the former strategy calls for an explanation, especially when that choice is made in an intellectual atmosphere that, though in important ways ambivalent toward the Jews, is on the whole hostile to them.Footnote ¹² Such an explanation is especially called for in Rousseau's case, not only because he goes to the great length of suggesting a free state for the Jews but also because his praise of Jews has a broader sweep than I have indicated thus far.

Oddly, commentators cannot agree even on how much Rousseau wrote about the Jews. Hertzberg, as I have already noted, claims that he wrote next to nothing about them, and Adam Sutcliffe agrees that Rousseau “wrote virtually nothing on Judaism.”Footnote ¹³ Ronald Schechter, on the other hand, asserts that Rousseau “directed his attention to the Jews on numerous occasions and in some of his most prominent works.”Footnote ¹⁴

When it comes to word count, Sutcliffe and Hertzberg have a case. The words Rousseau devotes to the Jews do not make up a significant percentage of Rousseau's published or unpublished words, and, as Schechter freely acknowledges, Rousseau stands out more for saying little about the Jews in a time and place in which intellectuals are fascinated with them than he does for being a major commentator on Judaism. Nonetheless, Rousseau puts the Jews in important company—namely the healthy republics of Sparta and Rome—and, just as Schechter claims, does so in major works, such as Emile and the Social Contract. The topics the Jewish example addresses are undoubtedly central to Rousseau's political thought. In particular, Rousseau groups Jewish examples with Greek and Roman ones in insisting on the superiority of ancient to modern rhetoric. He also groups Moses with the classical lawgivers, Lycurgus and Numa, in insisting on the superiority of ancient to modern lawmakers. Indeed, in an unpublished fragment, Rousseau even claims that the Mosaic legislation surpassed that of Numa and Lycurgus because it lasted: the “laws of Solon, of Numa, of Lycurgus are dead; those of Moses, far more ancient, are still alive.”Footnote ¹⁵

In addition to referring to Jews in his major works, Rousseau wrote the Levite of Ephraim, a free adaptation of the last three chapters of the Book of Judges, in which the ancient Jews,Footnote ¹⁶ while hardly coming off as simply good, prove in some ways superior to modern Christians. Though Rousseau did not write nearly as much about the Jews as some of his contemporaries, he wrote enough to make the almost complete neglect of his treatment of Judaism surprising.

Let me return, then, to the question of why Rousseau chooses to praise the Jews when, if his main objective was to attack Christianity, he could have attacked them instead. One plausible explanation for Rousseau's choice, which is suggested by his putting the Jews alongside the highest classical republican examples, is that Rousseau's praise of the Jews follows from his attack on modernity. If the Jews are cast by Voltaire and others as “the polar opposite of enlightened rationalism,”Footnote ¹⁷ so much the better for them. Rousseau first makes his name with the First Discourse, the thesis of which can be summed up like this: “our souls have been corrupted in proportion to the advancement of our Sciences and Arts to perfection.”Footnote ¹⁸ Sparta and republican Rome alike are praised for consciously rejecting art, science, and philosophy.Footnote ¹⁹ In a reply to a critic of the First Discourse, who alleges that enlightenment supports religion, Rousseau responds: “The people God chose never cultivated the sciences and it was never advised to study them.”Footnote ²⁰ In short, Rousseau praises the Jews for the same reason he praises certain other ancient peoples—they self-consciously resisted the kind of enlightenment that makes moderns unhappy human beings and poor citizens.

Another plausible explanation, which is suggested by Rousseau's grouping of Moses with Lycurgus and Numa, is that Rousseau's praise of the Jews follows from his embrace of nationalism. Rousseau complains in the Government of Poland that “there are no longer any French, Germans, Spanish, even English; there are only Europeans.” Modern lawmakers have neglected the distinctive manners, mores, and customs that bind the hearts of citizens to their country even more than good laws can. He who would reform the government of Poland must give Polish “souls a national physiognomy which will distinguish them from other peoples.”Footnote ²¹ Moses, along with Numa and Lycurgus, is a model for the Poles in precisely this regard:

In short, Rousseau praises the Jews for the same reason he praises other distinctive nations—they are bound together by stronger ties than are those Germans, French, Spanish, and English who have been permitted to become bland Europeans.Footnote ²³ In this sense, the context of his remark notwithstanding, the priest in Emile, speaking for Rousseau in this case, may have been in earnest, if not much invested, in suggesting a free state, schools, and universities for the Jews.

But Rousseau has reasons to leave the Jews out, however fine an addition they might otherwise make to his Greek and Roman examples. Indeed, if the Jews are merely one more example for Rousseau to add to these classical ones, he arguably loses more than he gains by including them. First, Rousseau himself concedes that the biblical Jews, at least, are barbaric. Since Rousseau's assault on modernity sometimes leads him to praise barbarism, I hasten to add that he considers them barbaric and not in a good way. Consider the Levite of Ephraim, in which a pastoral beginning is interrupted by “the furies of barbarism.” A Levite's concubine is brutally raped by other Jews, “barbarians unworthy of the name of men.” The Levite (“the barbarous man”), enraged to the point of feeling neither love, regret, nor pity, cuts her body into pieces and sends a piece to each of the twelve tribes.Footnote ²⁴ When the Benjaminites will not give the rapists up, the other tribes form an army and ultimately kill nearly twenty-six thousand on a “day of anger and … murder” on which Benjamin's women, children, and animals are put to death “without mercy being given to any.” Afterwards the Jews regret their excesses, but they are bound by an oath they have taken never to give their own daughters to a Benjaminite. When they decide to find the surviving Benjaminites wives, this “fierce people,” “meditating new carnage,” commits “still greater” murders, inflicting on every inhabitant of Jabesh Gilead, except for the virgin women, a “barbarous death,” on the grounds that its people, out of reluctance to shed “fraternal blood,” had failed to show up to fight the Benjaminites. When there are still not enough wives for the surviving Benjaminites, “that people, cruel even in its pity and for whom the blood of its brothers cost so little, would perhaps have thought of making new widows,” had an old man not intervened.Footnote ²⁵

We will return to this intervention later. For now, it suffices to note that the biblical Jews, at least in the Book of Judges, are not obviously exemplary human beings. As Bazcko has noted, there is this disjunction between Rousseau's praise of the Greeks and Romans and his praise of the Jews: whereas Rousseau praises not only Lycurgus and Numa but also the Spartan and Roman peoples, Rousseau praises Moses while frequently disparaging the Jewish people.Footnote ²⁶ The Mosaic founding may have survived, but the Jewish people, which Moses finds a “servile troop,” “without talents, without virtues, without courage,” is, by the time of the Maccabees, too corrupted to be restored to the Mosaic law and, by the time of Jesus, is evidently “a people incapable of every virtue.”Footnote ²⁷

Second, Judaism, with its multiplicity of laws, seems incompatible with the stripped down religion that Rousseau appears to favor.Footnote ²⁸ Civil religion, the religion of the citizen, should be characterized by a few simple dogmas, including the existence of a providential God, the afterlife, the happiness of the just, and the punishment of the wicked.Footnote ²⁹ Natural religion, the religion of the human being, is derived from just three articles of faith, that the universe is moved by a will, that the will is intelligent, and that human beings are free and moved by an immaterial substance.Footnote ³⁰ It is hard to see how Rousseau, who praises a religion with which a Jefferson or Franklin might have been content, can praise Judaism, which appears to encompass and demand so much more than the religion he otherwise endorses.

To flesh out this problem, it is helpful to consider Christopher Bertram's analysis of Rousseau's task in the chapter on civil religion in the Social Contract. Simply put, Rousseau is concerned both to foster “social unity” and to accommodate “a good measure of confessional disagreement.”Footnote ³¹ Bertram, plausibly, gives us a relatively liberal Rousseau in which citizens publicly affirm a modest and simple code, compatible with a wide variety of faiths, and otherwise adopt whatever religion they care to adopt.Footnote ³² But, as we observed when we considered Rousseau's nationalism, Rousseau praises Moses especially for overburdening the Jewish people with distinctive rites, practices, and ceremonies. While an elaborate set of religious practices is not incompatible with simple and modest religious doctrines, political sponsorship of such practices seems at first glance to cut sharply against Rousseau's attempt to strip civil religion down to elements any believer can easily adopt.

I do not think we can get around the problem by observing that the Social Contract's civil religion chapter seems to reject the religion of the citizen. It is true that Rousseau claims that the religion of the citizen—and Judaism falls at least in part under this heading along with other ancient religions—has serious flaws, including “empty ceremonial.”Footnote ³³ It is also true that Rousseau thinks “there is no longer and can never again be an exclusive national Religion.”Footnote ³⁴ However, the religion of the citizen and the religion of man, a kind of pure Christianity, are the only two types of religion Rousseau seriously considers as possible supports for good politics, and, as it turns out, the candidacy of pure Christianity fails decisively; there is “nothing more contrary to the social spirit” than the religion of man, which detaches its practitioners from worldly things.Footnote ³⁵ If exclusive national religion is now impossible, that is because Jesus separated “the theological system from the political system,” which ultimately led to “a perpetual conflict of jurisdiction that has made any good polity impossible in Christian states.”Footnote ³⁶ So the religion of the citizen, whatever its flaws, is the only variety of religion that does not undermine politics.

The only plausible solution to this problem is to “preserve or reestablish the ancient system,” or to “propose the reunification of the two heads of the eagle, and the complete return to political unity.” This reunification, which Hobbes proposed, proved hopeless because of the “dominating spirit of Christianity.”Footnote ³⁷ Rousseau's task in the chapter on civil religion, then, appears to be to restore some approximation of the ancient system without committing a frontal assault on Christianity. So the few simple dogmas that constitute any civil religion according to Rousseau are perfectly compatible with Christianity. And like Christianity but unlike exclusive national religion, they can be expected to be the same in all nations that adopt Rousseau's teaching. In this sense Rousseau's civil religion accommodates itself to a Christian Europe in which religion is expected to be universal. But insofar as ancient religious founders—and especially Moses—remain models for modern polities like Poland, we can expect that these core dogmas will be manifested in distinctive national cults:

Needless to say, while Rousseau urges Poland to follow the spirit of ancient institutions, he does not and certainly could not recommend that the Poles establish a new, exclusive religion. However, Rousseau is mindful of the extent to which a “people's heart follows its eyes and how impressed it is with the majesty of ceremony”Footnote ³⁹ and insists that Poles follow the Jews (and Romans and Spartans) in cultivating numerous practices that distinguish them from foreigners.Footnote ⁴⁰ So we have good reason to think that whatever Rousseau's doubts about national religion may be, they cannot get us around this difficulty: although Rousseau appears to advocate a stripped down civil religion that any believer can easily adopt, Judaism is proposed as a model not despite overburdening, but because it overburdens Jews with rites, ceremonies, and practices that emphatically distinguish them from non-Jews.Footnote ⁴¹

I will begin with the first problem: why was Rousseau not content to stay with the Greek and Roman models, given that he praises the Greek and Roman peoples but offers no comparable praise of the Jews and even depicts them as barbarians? Consider, first, the Levite of Ephraim, which contains our most important example of Jewish barbarism in Rousseau's writings. In that work, Rousseau begins by anticipating and, in part, criticizing, the disgust of his contemporaries at the actions he is about to depict: “O you easy-going men, enemies of every inhumanity; you who for fear of contemplating the crimes of your brothers prefer to let them go unpunished, what picture am I going to offer to your eyes?” Although Rousseau will go on to criticize the excesses of the Jewish people in punishing the Benjaminites, he nonetheless observes that the urge to punish stems from a more genuine humanity than his contemporaries have: “Sacred people, assemble yourself; pronounce on this horrible act and discern the price it has merited. He who averts his glance from such infamy is a coward, a deserter from justice; genuine humanity contemplates it in order to know it, to judge it, to detest it.”Footnote ⁴² So it is not altogether true that Rousseau withholds his praise from the Jewish people. They, unlike Rousseau's contemporaries, are horrified by injustice and determined to punish wrongdoers.

This is not the place to go into detail about the reasons Rousseau's contemporaries, though professing to be humane, are indifferent to justice. But, briefly, Rousseau lays some of the blame on modern political thinkers who “talk only of business and money” in contrast to ancient ones who “incessantly talked about morals and virtue.”Footnote ⁴³ The attempt to constitute society on the basis of enlightened self-interest, so “that each man gains by serving the others,” fails because “wrong done to one's neighbor is always more lucrative than services.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Self-interested people have an interest only in pretending to do right by others, in the hope of tricking others into obliging them. It is therefore no surprise that Rousseau's contemporaries, even as they pursue their own advantage, engage in “perpetual demonstrations of goodwill” and participate in “that tumultuous competition of men of all ages and conditions who seem anxious to oblige one another from Dawn to Dark.”Footnote ⁴⁵

But Rousseau's suggestion in the Levite that his contemporaries actually fear contemplating the crimes of their brothers brings to mind another object of Rousseau's criticism, namely the Christian, for whom “Christian charity makes it hard to think ill of one's neighbor.” The Christian is, in his way, as indifferent to justice, at least on this Earth, as the selfish children of modern political thought. As Rousseau understands it, Christianity is a “totally spiritual religion, uniquely concerned with heavenly matters.” While the Christian is willing to do his duty, “he does it with profound indifference for the good or bad outcome of his efforts. As long as he has nothing to reproach himself for, it matters little to him whether things go well or badly here on earth.” Rousseau here is criticizing the political influence of Christianity, but his criticism plainly extends to the Christian's concern with this-worldly justice altogether. The Christian, unlike the Levite, is at least as likely to recognize the wicked as “the rod with which God punishes his children” as he is to demand that the wicked be punished in this world.Footnote ⁴⁶

Judaism, then, as it is depicted in the Levite, surpassed both Christianity and modern political thought in its attachment to this-worldly justice.Footnote ⁴⁷

One might add that Rousseau's concern with a particular kind of injustice, the exploitation of the weak by the strong, and his championing of compassion as a modern virtue, point toward the Jews, more than the Greeks or Romans, as exemplary figures. Again, this is not the place to go into detail about Rousseau's critique of modernity, but no one contests the assertion that Rousseau draws more attention than any major figure in the history of political philosophy who preceded him to that condition in which “a handful of powerful and rich men at the height of grandeur and fortune” stuff themselves “while the crowd grovels in obscurity and misery.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Needless to say, neither imperialistic Rome nor Sparta, the slave state, is a useful example for Rousseau's purpose here, which is to champion the weak and poor.Footnote ⁴⁹ Certainly, Rousseau cannot and does not pretend that classical polities are characterized by or support compassion for those unfortunates. Rousseau's Jews, in contrast, whatever their excesses and cruelties, remain capable, in a way neither classics nor moderns are, of being moved by and acting on pity. After defeating the Benjaminites, “the victorious Tribes seeing the blood they had shed felt the wound they had made” and are “moved with compassion for the Benjaminites.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Though they are sometimes moved by “unjust pity,” like the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead, and sometimes mingle pity and cruelty, as when they destroy Jabesh-Gilead to save the tribe of Benjamin, the Jews prove to be more than an additional exemplar of the characteristics Rousseau finds in other ancient peoples. They are capable of serving as a model in a way that other ancient peoples are not.Footnote ⁵¹

To be sure, Christianity, whatever its defects with respect to this-worldly justice, also promotes compassion, or at least “deeds of charity,” in a way that the ancients did not. Indeed, for all the political blame Rousseau heaps on it, he asserts that Christianity “made [modern] governments less sanguinary. … This is proved by actually comparing them to ancient governments.”Footnote ⁵² However, the final two examples of the charitable and conciliatory spirit Rousseau first attributes solely to Christianity are Jewish and Mohammedan. The Jews and the Mohammedans,Footnote ⁵³ both of whom are praised for successful political foundings in the Social Contract, have precisely the same advantage as Christians have over the Greeks and Romans:

Although Rousseau finds Christian charity worthy of praise, he also finds that there is no need to depart from Judaism in order to practice mercy. Since Judaism does not entail the dire political consequences that follow from Christianity's extreme otherworldliness, it appears at least potentially to capture much of what is good in Christianity without sacrificing the political health Rousseau associates with classical republics.

This finding concerning Judaism is also illustrated by the Levite of Ephraim. In that work, as we have already seen, the tribes are moved, first by horror at injustice, then by compassion, to committing horrific acts of violence. After Jabesh Gilead is destroyed, and there are still not enough wives for the Benjaminites, an old man intervenes to prevent the tribes from committing more murders: “When will your hands be weary of the murder of innocents?”Footnote ⁵⁵ Admittedly, he proposes another act of violence, the abduction of two hundred women of Shiloh. However, rather than urge the destruction of Shiloh, he proposes that when the fathers and brothers of the women come to complain, the tribes should appeal to their compassion and their wish to avoid being guilty of a kind of crime, the destruction of the Benjaminite tribe: “we shall say to them: have pity on them for love of us and of yourselves who are their brothers; since we have not been able to provide for them after this war and have not been able to give them our daughters against the oath, we shall be guilty of their loss if we leave them to perish without descendants.” This strategy nearly works; when the parents of the abducted women attempt to get their daughters back, the elders “[make] their voices heard, and the people, moved by compassion for the Benjaminites, took an interest in their behalf.”Footnote ⁵⁶

However, the strategy fails because the people of Shiloh are also capable of being moved by appeals to justice. They are consequently not deaf to the demand, “Will the daughters of Israel be subjected and treated as slaves beneath the eyes of the Lord?” The assembly finds itself “torn between justice and pity” and leaves the choice up to the women. Ultimately, the decision of one woman, Axa, to marry a Benjaminite brings the others along. Axa turns out to be the daughter of the very same old man who had proposed the strategy to the tribes in the first place. Although he himself has chosen a husband for her who would have been “the consolation of his aged days,” he urges Axa to think of “the salvation of [her] people” as well as his own honor: “Do your duty, my daughter, and save me from opprobrium among my brothers, for I have counseled everything that has been done.” Axa “kisses his head” and, looking into his eyes which “[say] more than his mouth,” she gives up her beloved; “half dead, she falls into the arms of the Benjaminite.”Footnote ⁵⁷ This story suggests that a turn to a novel, otherworldly religion is hardly needed to tame violence. Indeed, the same feelings, compassion and hatred of injustice, that move the Jews in the Levite to commit outrageous acts of violence can be tamed. A people capable of acting, however excessively, on its hatred of injustice and of compassion, is also capable of being torn between justice and pity, as the assembly at Shiloh is, of performing heroic acts of duty, as Axa does, and of being moved by them, as the women of Shiloh are.Footnote ⁵⁸

This capacity to act on and be moved by justice and compassion, as we have already seen, distinguishes the Jews from Rousseau's easygoing contemporaries. In Emile, Rousseau puts this point almost as sharply as it can be put. He explicitly declares his preference for fanaticism, which can at least be tamed, to modern philosophic egoism, which, because it is deaf to appeals to compassion and justice, is virtually without remedy. “Bayle has proved very well that fanaticism is more pernicious than atheism, and that is incontestable. But … fanaticism, although sanguinary and cruel, is nevertheless a grand and strong passion which elevates the heart of man, makes him despise death, and gives him a prodigious energy that need only be better directed to produce the most sublime virtues.” In contrast, “the reasoning and philosophic spirit in general … causes attachment to life, makes souls effeminate and degraded, concentrates all the passions in the baseness of private interest … and thus quietly saps the true foundations of every society.”Footnote ⁵⁹

As Rousseau understands them, the Jews surpass moderns, Christians, and Spartans and Romans because they exemplify a piety that attaches them to compassion and justice without radically detaching them from politics and justice in this world. Yet the character of that piety raises another concern. As we have already noticed, Rousseau's accounts of the most desirable religion, whether civil or private, suggest that it should consist of a few, very simple dogmas. Judaism, with its multitude of laws impinging on every aspect of daily life, appears to go well beyond either civil or natural religion as Rousseau describes them.

This objection can be answered,Footnote ⁶⁰ but it requires us to notice a peculiar feature of Rousseau's understanding of tolerance. While Rousseau thought that the “dogmas of the civil religion ought to be simple” and “few in number,” he did not insist on the same criterion for “morals,” “laws,” and “rites”; in these areas, Rousseau considers it a good that Moses “constrained” the Jewish people not in one or two but “a thousand ways.”Footnote ⁶¹ Consider the priest in Emile again: although he does not think any form of public worship essential for salvation, he is content to follow the practices of the Church: “I carefully follow all the rites, I recite attentively, I take care never to omit the least word or the least ceremony.” It does no violence to the priest's reason or conscience to acknowledge, alongside universal religion, which prescribes no specific form of worship, “all the particular religions,” including the one he practices, “as so many salutary institutions which prescribe in each country a uniform manner of honoring God by public worship.”Footnote ⁶²

As Christopher Kelly points out, Rousseau takes the surprising position that “compulsion of uniform worship … requires no violation of toleration” because the particular form rituals and ceremonies take, however useful such rituals and ceremonies may be politically and as aids to worship, are properly a matter of indifference to the believer. So “nonbelievers can cheerfully participate in the ceremonies required by a national church without feeling that their religious freedom has been violated.” As Kelly also points out, this claim will not be easy to swallow for anyone—perhaps one of the very Jews Rousseau praises—who thinks that “ceremonies and other observances are of the essence of religion.”Footnote ⁶³

In any case, this insistence on uniform practice does not go beyond the right that political sovereigns have, which “does not exceed … the limits of public Utility.” In contrast, the insistence on uniform dogmas, aside from the very small number common to most religions that cause people to love their duties, does violence to reason and conscience. Not only does it insist that we need, in order to be saved, to believe in what neither reason nor conscience plainly establishes, but it also goes beyond what sovereigns can legitimately insist on from the standpoint of public utility.Footnote ⁶⁴ For Rousseau, even those dogmas that a citizen can be asked to profess are to be understood as a “purely civil profession of faith” or as “sentiments of sociability,” and the sovereign's inquiry into the belief of citizens appears, outside of the citizen's willingness to offer a profession of faith, to be limited to inquiring whether the citizen's actions are consistent with his profession—i.e., whether or not he does his duty as a citizen.Footnote ⁶⁵

It is not only unreasonable but also disturbing the peace to claim that, in order to be saved, we need to believe what reason and conscience do not plainly establish. Christianity, once it departed from its original simplicity and began to defend itself against pagan philosophy, began to “split hairs on all the dogmas; everyone wanted to maintain his opinion, no one wanted to yield.” The division of Christians into sects, driven by the ambition of the learned, led to persecution and its attendant evils.Footnote ⁶⁶

To be sure, theological intolerance is not the only motive for persecution—the pagans persecuted the Christians for less lofty motives, and the Jews “began their establishment by destroying seven nations according to the express order they had received to do so”Footnote ⁶⁷—but it is an especially potent motive for two reasons. First, the ambition of the learned to distinguish themselves from each other and the rabble leads them to concoct increasingly sophisticated and senseless doctrines. “The zeal for the salvation of men is not the cause of persecutions. It is amour-propre and pride that are the cause.” Since no reasonable person could take these doctrines to be essential articles of faith, “reason then becomes the greatest crime” and “it is necessary to intimidate and frighten men ceaselessly.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Second, for those whose reason has been subjugated in such a way as actually to believe that such dogmas are necessary for salvation, it is impossible not to become obsessed with the beliefs of one's neighbors. “It is impossible to live in peace with people whom one believes are damned. To love them would be to hate the God who punishes them. They must absolutely be either brought into the faith or tormented.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The insistence that we must believe what reason and conscience do not plainly establish in order to be saved leads swiftly to the wish “to control the interior of consciences” where man is “unable to penetrate,” a wish that, once pursued, leaves no one in peace.Footnote ⁷⁰ Although the Jews have shown themselves capable of killing on God's orders, their religion, with its many rites, ceremonies, and laws, is superior to modern Christianity, with its many dogmas.Footnote ⁷¹ In this sense, our objection to Rousseau's praise of Judaism actually proves to be an additional explanation for it. Judaism is a model for Rousseau not only because it, more than either Christianity or the classical republic, supports compassion and care for justice in this world but also because it is less inclined toward dogma than Christianity. To put it another way, Judaism as Rousseau presents it—unlike the classical republic—embodies everything Rousseau finds good in religion without—unlike Christianity—destroying what Rousseau finds good in republican politics.

In accordance with this view, Rousseau asserts that Jesus did not at first intend to establish a new religion. “The profound study he made of the law of Moses, his efforts for reawakening in hearts enthusiasm and love for it, showed his purpose.” It is only when he fails to “make a revolution among his people” that he wants to make one, “through his disciples, in the Universe.” Rousseau offers two reasons for Jesus's failure in his “first plan,” the baseness of the Jewish people and “the too great gentleness of his own character.”Footnote ⁷² Since the too great gentleness of Christ's character would bear none of the blame for his failure if the Jews were irredeemably corrupt, it seems safe to assume that Rousseau thinks that the numerous evils to which Christianity has subjected politics could have been avoided had Jesus only been capable, as Moses was, of turning a “servile” people “without virtues” into a “free people.”Footnote ⁷³ We should not mistake this observation for a serious endorsement of the Laws of Moses, any more than we should overstate the importance of Rousseau's relatively casual endorsement of a state for the Jews. Rousseau, after all, says almost nothing about the content of those laws. However, I trust I have said enough to show that the Jewish example, because it is irreducible to any of Rousseau's other examples, is more important in Rousseau's thought than it has appeared.