different between Africans, Americans, and Europeans. In fact, Black Africans or Native Americans are merely Europeans in a different setting.17 This radical universalism enabled the non-European Other, and especially the savage Other, to assume an exceptional philosophical position. It allowed the philosophers of the Enlightenment to turn the non-European world into a kind of metaphysical laboratory, in which various European norms of behavior could be empirically tested. Eighteenth-century authors utilized the exotic setting as a means to discuss such issues as gender and sexuality, women’s rights, family, and class, or as a vehicle to deliver their political sympathies. But the most common norm to be tossed into the philosophical Petri dish offered by the non-European world was religion. Indeed, while it is true that the eighteenth century saw the gradual secularization of science and philosophy, it should be remembered that early Enlightenment discourse was still dominated to a great extent by religious interests and theological agendas. Throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century, religion remained a prime marker of difference between Europe and its Others, and it maintained a prominent place in anthropological descriptions, both in scientific as well as in philosophical works. It is therefore hardly surprising that religious debate was one of the primary functions of the eighteenth-century exotic. Savage idolators, American atheists, African infidels, Chinese philosophers, or Indian Brahmins served as a platform to promote various (often conflicting) religious agendas. Often, these messages were of a deistic or even atheistic nature (such as in the writings of Voltaire or Diderot); other times they were messages directed against deism, such as in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
And indeed, it is religion that stands at the heart of Horowitz’s book. The intricate three-way dialogue offered in Amudey beyt Yehudah constitutes an ambitious attempt to justify Jewish faith, tradition, and commandments by use of reason. Horowitz’s theological use of the image of the noble savage is inspired by a belief in a kind of universal religious intuition, a natural capacity for faith that is instilled even in the wildest savages. God, he wrote in Amudey beyt Yehudah, “has granted us the means to elevate any soul from its sordid state.… And you will not find anyone who questions His existence amongst peoples of faith from India to Kush, and not one who will deny the wonders He has done in sea and in land and in desert” (AMBY, 27b–28a). This was an extremely widespread approach during the eighteenth century. As an observant David Hume wrote in 1777: “What truth [is] so obvious, so certain, as the being of a God[?]”18 Hume’s question may have been asked in irony, but many eighteenth-century thinkers would have agreed. Mendelssohn, for instance, believed that “all peoples admit the existence of God blessed be He, and even those peoples who worship other gods will admit that the greatest power and abilities are held by the Lord God.… The tales of heaven and earth are understood by all, and there is not one thing in them that cannot be understood by any man anywhere.”19 Similar notions were expressed by other maskilim such as Wessely, Isaac Satanov, or David Frisenhausen, who asserted that Christianity and Islam had already banished polytheism almost completely, since “as the pagans heard even a tincture of either of these two faiths, which are based on teachings of the law of Moses, and as they learned how easy it is to follow their commandments, they did not hesitate for a moment but tossed away their idols, which had already become repulsive in their eyes.”20
But the eighteenth century also saw a growing awareness of other modes of living and other systems of belief, and Enlightenment thinkers were required to grapple with increasing reports of idolatry or even atheism amongst non-European peoples. One popular solution was to claim that such reports were merely false, the outcome of anthropological negligence, or even intentional deception.21 The English maskil Abraham Tang, for example, explained that the existence of God is a universally accepted fact, and those wild atheists of which one could read in the period’s travel literature were merely figments of the travelers’ imaginations, or a simple outcome of the language barrier. In reality, claimed Tang, atheism is simply against human nature “which is instilled in every Kushite, or in every man everywhere.”22 Another means of coping with the purported atheism of non-European or ancient peoples was offered by Mendelssohn. The latter shared Tang’s skepticism concerning the reports on atheistic nations and tribes, and in his magnum opus Jerusalem (Berlin, 1783) he urged travelers to take caution when reporting the norms and behaviors of other peoples.23 However, contrary to Tang, Mendelssohn did not view the denial of a single God an absolute impossibility. Rather, he claimed, following works of William Warburton, that idolatry is often the result of the misuse of a pictorial script such as hieroglyphs. Pictographs, explained Mendelssohn, tend to confuse men, and it is not long before the symbolic value of the sign is forgotten and the reader confuses the signifier with the signified. Thus, an eagle, a fox, or a lion, which had initially been used to symbolize moral traits, slowly become deities.24 This theory was shared by many of Mendelssohn’s contemporaries, such as the maskilic rabbi Elyakim ben Avraham (Hart), or the German sign-language instructor Samuel Heinicke, who doubted the possibility of delivering abstract ideas to the deaf.25 But Mendelssohn went a step farther than these thinkers, claiming that even the European alphabetic script is not pure of theological hazards. Roman script, he argued, suffers from a tendency to “displa[y] the symbolic knowledge of things and their relations too openly on the surface [and] creat[e] too wide a division between doctrine and life.”26 It is here that Mendelssohn identifies the advantage of Judaism over all other religions. The ceremonial aspect inherent in Judaism inscribes religious faith into the daily life of the believer, and prompts him to inquire after the spirit and purpose of his beliefs.
The question of ceremonial law is one of the core questions with which Enlightenment and particularly maskilic thought was burdened. Whereas most thinkers would have agreed that the existence of God is a universally recognized fact that can be easily deduced by use of natural reason, the reasonability of the dictates of religion was a much more complex and demanding issue. Some writers shared Mendelssohn’s view that there is reason to the commandments. Thus, for instance, Isaac Satanov wrote that while the motivation behind each and every commandment is not always immediately accessible to the mind, still the commandments are never truly contrary to reason. More radical in his commitment to the rationality of religion was Mordecai Gumpel Schnaber Levison, who claimed that the tendency to refrain from a rationalistic discussion of religious commandments leads inadvertently to epicureanism.27 But other writers were less convinced. German pedagogue Joachim Heinrich Campe, whose works were extremely popular amongst the maskilim, offers a valuable example. In his 1791 rendition of story of the English “discovery” of Palau, Campe stressed that “there exists a theology of the heart [which is] independent of external expressions, and is the only one worthy of its holy name.”28 Campe’s book was translated by the Polish maskil Menachem Mendel Lefin in 1818; however, Lefin chose to omit Campe’s somewhat subversive observations on Palauan religion, which bordered on deism, and made no mention of Campe’s “theology of the heart.”29 And yet, no few maskilim would have agreed with Campe’s observations. Amongst these were deists such as Salomon Maimon or Ephraim Kuh, who dismissed the importance of practical religion completely.30 Others exhibited a more ambivalent approach. Tang, for instance claimed that real religious practice is achieved not through the observance of ceremonial law but through the adherence to universal morals and thought.31
A particularly instructive example of the attempt to grapple with the reasonability of the commandments is offered by the Copenhagen-born maskil Isaac Euchel, one of the central figures of the late eighteenth-century Haskalah. In a series of fictional letters published in Ha-measef in 1789–1790, Euchel introduced his readers to the image of a Jewish Syrian traveler in Europe by the name of Meshulam ben Uriah ha-Ashtemoy [משולם בן אוריה האשתמועי]. In similar vein to Horowitz before him, Euchel utilized his naïve observer as a means to scrutinize the shortcomings of European society, such as intolerance, greed, and the marginalization of women. And yet, once again like Horowitz’s Ira, Euchel’s exotic traveler was first and foremost preoccupied with questions concerning religion. In his letters, Meshulam took a stand against religious intolerance, Jewish separatism, and the rabbinical neglect of secular knowledge. Meshulam’s observations on these matters were often subversive, at times bordering on the radical. His observations on the Marannos of Madrid offer an interesting case in point. Most of them, writes Meshulam,