Jews in Voltaire's Candide (Critical Essay)

MOST Voltaire scholars insist that he hated Jews. They quote various writings to show his hostility to the Old Testament and the absurdities of Jewish religious dogma and fanaticism and his contempt for Jews, both as depicted in the Bible and in their contemporary European lifestyle to the extent he was familiar with it. They argue that he retained resentments dating from a time when former business partners who were Jewish merchants or bankers had cheated him or gone bankrupt, despising wealthy Jews for their alleged obsession with money and poor Jews for their rumored unkemptness, primitive superstitions, insularity, and failure to develop a substantive cultural identity. (1) Usually, scholars quote from Voltaire's corpus of erudite, semi-scholarly writings, such as the Essai Sur Les Moeurs and the Dictionnaire Philosophique, his multi-volume Correspondance, and obscure pamphlets that focus particularly on the Jewish religion's shortcomings and the violent, barbaric history of the Jewish people as literally depicted in the Old Testament, to reveal his irrational prejudice against the so-called Chosen People. Occasionally, however, Voltaire's well-known masterpiece, Candide, is brought into the argument to "prove" the ubiquity of his antipathy toward the Jews.