One of the terms the sociologist Robert Merton, who died last week, was known for was the self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s a lot of the sort of thing about. All the endless assuring each other, for instance, that rationality, secularism, skepticism, atheism are all wrong and mistaken and harmful and stupid because humans have a Deep Need for religion. We have a Longing for ‘spirituality,’ a Hunger for myth, a nostalgia for a Big Daddy to protect us. There is a god-shaped hole at the center of our consciousness and all the silly pointless time-wasting things we do are efforts to fill it. This review of Adam Sutcliffe’s Judaism and Enlightenment, for example, says as much (paraphrasing the argument of … Read the rest

I’ve been pondering this business of confusing or blurring the boundaries (see this week’s Bad Moves) between a religion and a group of people, between Judaism and Jews, Islam and Muslims, that I touched on in yesterday’s Note and Comment.

It all has to do with Identity Politics, I suppose, which is a large subject, and one we will be exploring in the future. It’s partly a generational matter. All those children of assimilated Jews who turned on their parents with cries of indignation at having been denied their heritage, their background, their identity, and turned into bland inoffensive no ones in particular when they could have been real Jews. It’s an understandable reaction, and yet it has some … Read the rest

There are some strange assumptions in this review of Adam Sutcliffe’s Judaism and the Enlightenment. For one thing there’s a confusion throughout between Jews and Judaism. For another and related thing, there is a confusion between Judaism as a religion and Jewishness as nationality or ‘ethnic’ ‘identity’. As a result, there is a confusion between criticising a religion and hating people or a people.

There is also a lot of familiar and none the less annoying sneering at the Enlightenment.

The British-born historian is not the first writer to knock Enlightenment thinkers off their pedestals. The period’s “dark side” has been a recurring theme for more than a century now. Critics (among them Friedrich Nietzsche, the Romantic poets, and