ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a comprehensive account of Wollaston's thought, with special focus on the sources he used, his religion of nature and moral rationalism and his views on God and humanity. As regards the most original aspect of Wollaston's work, namely the combination of deistic and Jewish concepts in his theory of natural religion, Alexander Altmann's article, William Wollaston, English Deist and Rabbinic Scholar, comes to the fore. William Wollaston was a very original figure in the context of eighteenth-century British philosophy. He lived in a time when Locke's empiricism and various innovative methods of biblical interpretation and historical research were largely used, and modified. His interpretation of Jewish rationalism and of Judaism in general was neither unprejudiced nor based on advanced historical-critical, hermeneutical or philological methods. In the early modern era, the study of Jewish hermeneutical and philosophical traditions mainly aimed at confirming, reformulating or better understanding some Christian ideas.
