Volume 36, Number 7 · April 27, 1989
A Lost Chance to Save the Jews?
By Conor Cruise O'Brien
For many centuries, the grand legitimizer of hatred in our culture was called Religion. Then, after the great surfeit of the Wars of Religion, the power of religion to legitimize war and persecution began to fade. The more optimistic among the thinkers of the Enlightenment—and even the less optimistic in their more optimistic moments—were inclined to believe that war, persecution, and the spirit of intolerance would fade away along with the authority which had legitimized these things. The Age of Reason would, of its very nature, be an Age of Tolerance.
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