ABSTRACT
The texts on the Jewish question in eighteenth-century France call for a re-evaluation of the relationship between Enlightenment and Jews. If Enlightenment rationality made it difficult to accept the Jews as an incommensurable other, rationality as value in and rarely invoked in evaluations of the Jews and their level of morality. On the contrary, the Jews tended to receive praise insofar as they appeared 'natural' and 'sensitive' and criticism insofar as observers judged them to be calculating and clever. Considering the differences between The French Enlightenment and the Jews and Dialectic of Enlightenment, one might question the wisdom of examining them together in an essay intended to contribute to a discussion on postmodernism. Both Hertzberg and the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment share the belief that it was the extreme rationalism of the Enlightenment that anti-Semites could use as a weapon against the Jews. In some cases this rationalism appears simply as horror of and desire to eliminate difference.
