Language:
English
Year of publication:
2001
Titel der Quelle:
Eighteenth-Century Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
34,4 (2001) 577-600
Keywords:
Burke, Edmund,
;
Antisemitism History 1500-
;
Antisemitism Philosophy
Abstract:
Deals with antisemitic elements in Edmund Burke's classical political work "Reflections on the Revolution in France" (1790). Asks how Burke's political and theological antisemitism can be squared with his tolerance and sympathy for the oppressed. Burke viewed the Jews as revolutionary dissenters, he accepted the traditional stereotype that linked Jews with money, and there was no place for Jews in his image of England and the English. Burke associated the Jews, as deicides, with political regicides and also with his bugaboo, Christian millenarians, whom he saw as bringing apocalypse rather than the utopia they promised. From a modern perspective, his defense of prejudice and limited religious toleration also tarnish his image. Concludes that his exploitation of anti-Jewish feeling as a rhetorical weapon against the French Revolution opened "an intellectual Pandora's box from which others were to conjure worse malevolence."
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