Volume 11, Number 3 · August 22, 1968
Some of My Best Friends Are Philosophes
By Hugh Trevor-Roper
The French Enlightenment and the Jews
by Arthur Hertzberg
Columbia University Press, 420 pp., $12.50
The 'emancipation' of the Jews began with the French Revolution. By two enactments of 1790 and 1791 the revolutionary assembly granted to the Jews of France those full rights of citizenship which the Jews of Great Britain would not acquire for another half-century. Napoleon, as heir to the Revolution, carried emancipation to continental Europe; and the revolutions of the nineteenth century apparently secured it. In our own days it has been painfully reversed, and its reversal has been generally regarded as part of a reactionary movement, the reversal of all those liberal ideas which were launched in 1789 and which had been matured, before 1789, by the French philosophers of the Enlightenment.
Review, 3626 words
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