ABSTRACT
Of all the philosophical building-bricks of the post-Enlightenment edifice of modem liberal democracy, the foundation stone of toleration is perhaps particularly vulnerable to cracking under strain. While toleration is today almost universally celebrated as a key moral good, Western political culture is simultaneously haunted by a fear of descent into an ethically anchorless world of permissiveness and cultural relativism. This chapter focuses on the question of the status of Judaism within the most significant Early Enlightenment texts in support of toleration. The Jews were numerically an extremely small group in Western Europe, and were a marginal issue within the toleration debates of the period, the practical concern of which was the acceptability or otherwise of diversity in Christian worship. In contrast with Christianity, Judaism, for Spinoza, represents the unambiguous and total subjection of a people to God's authority. Like Spinoza, Locke constructs the Judaism of the Old Testament as antithetical to his own positive values.
