The interest of the Malabar widow, who burns herself with the corpse of

her husband, is to recover him in another world, and be there more happy

even than the fakir. For, together with their metempsychosis, the

Indians have another world; they resemble ourselves; their system admits

of contradictions.

Were you ever acquainted with any king or republic that made either war

or peace, that issued decrees, or entered into conventions, from any

other motive than that of interest?

With respect to the interest of money, consult, in the great

"Encyclopædia," the article of M. d'Alembert, on "Calculation," and that

of M. Boucher d'Argis, on "Jurisprudence." We will venture to add a few

reflections.

1. Are gold and silver merchandise? Yes; the author of the "Spirit of

Laws" does not think so when he says: "Money, which is the price of

commodities, is hired and not bought."

It is both lent and bought. I buy gold with silver, and silver with

gold; and their price fluctuates in all commercial countries from day to

day.

The law of Holland requires bills of exchange to be paid in the silver

coin of the country, and not in gold, if the creditor demands it. Then I

buy silver money, and I pay for it in gold, or in cloth, corn, or

diamonds.

I am in want of money, corn, or diamonds, for the space of a year; the

corn, money, or diamond merchant says--I could, for this year, sell my

money, corn, or diamonds to advantage. Let us estimate at four, five, or

six per cent., according to the usage of the country, what I should lose

by letting you have it. You shall, for instance, return me at the end of

the year, twenty-one carats of diamonds for the twenty which I now lend

you; twenty-one sacks of corn for the twenty; twenty-one thousand crowns

for twenty thousand crowns. Such is interest. It is established among

all nations by the law of nature. The maximum or highest rate of

interest depends, in every country, on its own particular law. In Rome

money is lent on pledges at two and a half per cent., according to law,

and the pledges are sold, if the money be not paid at the appointed

time. I do not lend upon pledges, and I require only the interest

customary in Holland. If I were in China, I should ask of you the

customary interest at Macao and Canton.

2. While the parties were proceeding with this bargain at Amsterdam, it

happened that there arrived from St. Magliore, a Jansenist (and the fact

is perfectly true, he was called the Abbé des Issarts); this Jansenist

says to the Dutch merchant, "Take care what you are about; you are

absolutely incurring damnation; money must not produce money, '_nummus

nummum non parit_.' No one is allowed to receive interest for his money

but when he is willing to sink the principal. The way to be saved is to

make a contract with the gentleman; and for twenty thousand crowns which

you are never to have returned to you, you and your heirs will receive a

thousand crowns per annum to all eternity."

"You jest," replies the Dutchman; "you are in this very case proposing

to me a usury that is absolutely of the nature of an infinite series. I

should (that is, myself and heirs would) in that case receive back my

capital at the end of twenty years, the double of it in forty, the

four-fold of it in eighty; this you see would be just an infinite

series. I cannot, besides, lend for more than twelve months, and I am

contented with a thousand crowns as a remuneration."

THE ABBÉ DES ISSARTS.--I am grieved for your Dutch soul; God forbade the

Jews to lend at interest, and you are well aware that a citizen of

Amsterdam should punctually obey the laws of commerce given in a

wilderness to runaway vagrants who had no commerce.

THE DUTCHMAN.--That is clear; all the world ought to be Jews; but it

seems to me, that the law permitted the Hebrew horde to gain as much by

usury as they could from foreigners, and that, in consequence of this

permission, they managed their affairs in the sequel remarkably well.

Besides, the prohibition against one Jew's taking interest from another

must necessarily have become obsolete, since our Lord Jesus, when

preaching at Jerusalem, expressly said that interest was in his time

one hundred per cent.; for in the parable of the talents he says, that

the servant who had received five talents gained five others in

Jerusalem by them; that he who had two gained two by them; and that the

third who had only one, and did not turn that to any account, was shut

up in a dungeon by his master, for not laying it out with the

money-changers. But these money-changers were Jews; it was therefore

between Jews that usury was practised at Jerusalem; therefore this

parable, drawn from the circumstances and manners of the times,

decidedly indicates that usury or interest was at the rate of a hundred

per cent. Read the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew; he was

conversant with the subject; he had been a commissioner of taxes in

Galilee. Let me finish my argument with this gentleman; and do not make

me lose both my money and my time.

THE ABBÉ DES ISSARTS.--All that you say is very good and very fine; but

the Sorbonne has decided that lending money on interest is a mortal sin.

THE DUTCHMAN.--You must be laughing at me, my good friend, when you cite

the Sorbonne as an authority to a merchant of Amsterdam. There is not a

single individual among those wrangling railers themselves who does not

obtain, whenever he can, five or six per cent, for his money by

purchasing revenue bills, India bonds, assignments, and Canada bills.

The clergy of France, as a corporate body, borrow at interest. In many

of the provinces of France, it is the custom to stipulate for interest

with the principal. Besides, the university of Oxford and that of

Salamanca have decided against the Sorbonne. I acquired this information

in the course of my travels; and thus we have authority against

authority. Once more, I must beg you to interrupt me no longer.

THE ABBÉ DES ISSARTS.--The wicked, sir, are never at a loss for reasons.

You are, I repeat, absolutely destroying yourself, for the Abbé de St.

Cyran, who has not performed any miracles, and the Abbé Paris, who

performed some in St. Médard....

3. Before the abbé had finished his speech, the merchant drove him out

of his counting-house; and after having legally lent his money, to the

last penny, went to represent the conversation between himself and the

abbé, to the magistrates, who forbade the Jansenists from propagating a

doctrine so pernicious to commerce.

"Gentlemen," said the chief bailiff, "give us of efficacious grace as

much as you please, of predestination as much as you please, and of

communion as little as you please; on these points you are masters; but

take care not to meddle with the laws of commerce."

INTOLERANCE.

Read the article on "Intolerance" in the great "Encyclopædia." Read the

treatise on "Toleration" composed on occasion of the dreadful

assassination of John Calas, a citizen of Toulouse; and if, after that,

you allow of persecution in matters of religion, compare yourself at

once to Ravaillac. Ravaillac, you know, was highly intolerant. The

following is the substance of all the discourses ever delivered by the

intolerant:

You monster; you will be burned to all eternity in the other world, and

whom I will myself burn as soon as ever I can in this, you really have

the insolence to read de Thou and Bayle, who have been put into the

index of prohibited authors at Rome! When I was preaching to you in the

name of God, how Samson had killed a thousand men with the jawbone of an

ass, your head, still harder than the arsenal from which Samson obtained

his arms, showed me by a slight movement from left to right that you

believed nothing of what I said. And when I stated that the devil

Asmodeus, who out of jealousy twisted the necks of the seven husbands of

Sarah among the Medes, was put in chains in upper Egypt, I saw a small

contraction of your lips, in Latin called _cachinnus_ (a grin) which

plainly indicated to me that in the bottom of your soul you held the

history of Asmodeus in derision.

And as for you, Isaac Newton; Frederick the Great, king of Prussia and

elector of Brandenburg; John Locke; Catherine, empress of Russia,

victorious over the Ottomans; John Milton; the beneficent sovereign of

Denmark; Shakespeare; the wise king of Sweden; Leibnitz; the august

house of Brunswick; Tillotson; the emperor of China; the Parliament of

England; the Council of the great Mogul; in short, all you who do not

believe one word which I have taught in my courses on divinity, I

declare to you, that I regard you all as pagans and publicans, as, in

order to engrave it on your unimpressible brains, I have often told you

before. You are a set of callous miscreants; you will all go to gehenna,

where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched; for I am right,

and you are all wrong; and I have grace, and you have none. I confess

three devotees in my neighborhood, while you do not confess a single

one; I have executed the mandates of bishops, which has never been the

case with you; I have abused philosophers in the language of the

fish-market, while you have protected, imitated, or equalled them; I

have composed pious defamatory libels, stuffed with infamous calumnies,

and you have never so much as read them. I say mass every day in Latin

for fourteen sous, and you are never even so much as present at it, any

more than Cicero, Cato, Pompey, Cæsar, Horace, or Virgil, were ever

present at it--consequently you deserve each of you to have your right

hand cut off, your tongue cut out, to be put to the torture, and at last

burned at a slow fire; for God is merciful.

Such, without the slightest abatement, are the maxims of the intolerant,

and the sum and substance of all their books. How delightful to live

with such amiable people!

INUNDATION.

"Was there ever a time when the globe was entirely inundated? It is

physically impossible.

It is possible that the sea may successively have covered every land,

one part after another; and even this can only have happened by very

slow gradation, and in a prodigious number of centuries. In the course

of five hundred years the sea has retired from Aigues-Mortes, Fréjus,

and Ravenna, which were considerable ports, and left about two leagues

of land dry. According to the ratio of such progression, it is clear

that it would require two million and two hundred and fifty thousand

years to produce the same effect through the whole circuit of the globe.

It is a somewhat remarkable circumstance that this period of time nearly

falls in with that which the axis of the earth would require to be

raised, so as to coincide with the equator; a change extremely probable,

which began to be considered so only about fifty years since, and which

could not be completed in a shorter period of time than two million and

three hundred thousand years.

The beds or strata of shells, which have been discovered at the distance

of some leagues from the sea, are an incontestable evidence that it has

gradually deposited these marine productions on tracts which were

formerly shores of the ocean; but that the water should have ever

covered the whole globe at once is an absurd chimera in physics,

demonstrated to be impossible by the laws of gravitation, by the laws

of fluids, and by the insufficient quantity of water for the purpose. We

do not, however, by these observations, at all mean to impeach the truth

of the universal deluge, related in the Pentateuch; on the contrary,

that is a miracle which it is our duty to believe; it is a miracle, and

therefore could not have been accomplished by the laws of nature.

All is miracle in the history of the deluge--a miracle, that forty days

of rain should have inundated the four quarters of the world, and have

raised the water to the height of fifteen cubits above the tops of the

loftiest mountains; a miracle, that there should have been cataracts,

floodgates, and openings in heaven; a miracle, that all sorts of animals

should have been collected in the ark from all parts of the world; a

miracle that Noah found the means of feeding them for a period of ten

months; a miracle that all the animals with all their provisions could

have been included and retained in the ark; a miracle, that the greater

part of them did not die; a miracle, that after quitting the ark, they

found food enough to maintain them; and a further miracle, but of a

different kind, that a person, by the name of Lepelletier, thought

himself capable of explaining how all the animals could be contained and

fed in Noah's ark naturally, that is, without a miracle.

But the history of the deluge being that of the most miraculous event of

which the world ever heard, it must be the height of folly and madness

to attempt an explanation of it: it is one of the mysteries which are

believed by faith; and faith consists in believing that which reason

does not believe--which is only another miracle.

The history of the universal deluge, therefore, is like that of the

tower of Babel, of Balaam's ass, of the falling of the walls of Jericho

at the sound of trumpets, of waters turned into blood, of the passage of

the Red Sea, and of the whole of the prodigies which God condescended to

perform in favor of his chosen people--depths unfathomable to the human

understanding.

JEHOVAH.

Jehovah, the ancient name of God. No people ever pronounced it "Geova,"

as the French do; they pronounced it "Iëvo"; you find it so written in

Sanchoniathon, cited by Eusebius, Prep., book x.; in Diodorus, book ii.;

and in Macrobius, Sat., book i. All nations have pronounced it _ie_ and

not _g_. This sacred name was formed out of the vowels _i_, _e_, _o_,

_u_, in the east. Some pronounced _ïe_, _oh_, with an aspirate, _i_, _e

o_, _va_. The word was always to be constituted of four letters,

although we have here used five, for want of power to express these four

characters.

We have already observed that, according to Clement of Alexandria, by

seizing on the correct pronunciation of this name a person had it in his

power to produce the death of any man. Clement gives an instance of it.

Long before the time of Moses, Seth had pronounced the name of

"Jehovah," as is related in the fourth chapter of Genesis; and,

according to the Hebrew, Seth was even called "Jehovah." Abraham swore

to the king of Sodom by Jehovah, chap. xiv. 22.

From the word "Jehovah," the Latins derived "_Jove_," "_Jovis_,"

"_Jovispeter_," "_Jupiter_." In the bush, the Almighty says to Moses,

"My name is Jehovah." In the orders which he gave Him for the court of

Pharaoh, he says to him: "I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as

the mighty God, only by my name, Adonai,' I was not known to them, and I

made a covenant with them."

The Jews did not for a long time pronounce this name. It was common to

the Phœnicians and Egyptians. It signified, that which is; and hence,

probably, is derived the inscription of Isis: "I am all that is."

JEPHTHAH.

SECTION I.

It is evident from the text of the Book of Judges that Jephthah promised

to sacrifice the first person that should come out of his house to

congratulate him on his victory over the Ammonites. His only daughter

presented herself before him for that purpose; he tore his garments and

immolated her, after having promised her to go and deplore in the

recesses of the mountains the calamity of her dying a virgin. The

daughters of Israel long continued to celebrate this painful event, and

devoted four days in the year to lamentation for the daughter of

Jephthah.

In whatever period this history was written, whether it was imitated

from the Greek history of Agamemnon and Idomeneus, or was the model from

which that history was taken; whether it might be anterior or posterior

to similar narratives in Assyrian history is not the point I am now

examining. I keep strictly to the text. Jephthah vowed to make his

daughter a burnt offering, and fulfilled his vow.

It was expressly commanded by the Jewish law to sacrifice men devoted to

the Lord: "Every man that shall be devoted shall not be redeemed, but

shall be put to death without remission." The Vulgate translates it: "He

shall not be redeemed, but shall die the death."

It was in virtue of this law that Samuel hewed in pieces King Agag,

whom, as we have already seen, Saul had pardoned. In fact, it was for

sparing Agag that Saul was rebuked by the Lord, and lost his kingdom.

Thus, then, we perceive sacrifices of human blood clearly established;

there is no point of history more incontestable: we can only judge of a

nation by its own archives, and by what it relates concerning itself.

SECTION II.

There are, then, it seems, persons to be found who hesitate at nothing,

who falsify a passage of Scripture as intrepidly as if they were quoting

its very words, and who hope to deceive mankind by their falsehoods,

knowing them perfectly to be such. If such daring impostors are to be

found now, we cannot help supposing, that before the invention of

printing, which affords such facility, and almost certainty of

detection, there existed a hundred times as many.

One of the most impudent falsifiers who have lately appeared, is the

author of an infamous libel entitled "The Anti-Philosophic Dictionary,"

which truly deserves its title. But my readers will say, "Do not be so

irritated; what is it to you that a contemptible book has been

published?" Gentlemen, it is to the subject of Jephthah, to the subject

of human victims, of the blood of men sacrificed to God, that I am now

desirous of drawing your attention!

The author, whoever he may be, translates the thirty-ninth verse of the

first chapter of the history of Jephthah as follows: "She returned to

the house of her father, who fulfilled the consecration which he had

promised by his vow, and his daughter remained in the state of

virginity."

Yes, falsifier of the Bible, I am irritated at it, I acknowledge; but

you have lied to the holy spirit; which you ought to know is a sin which

is never pardoned.

The passage in the Vulgate is as follows:

"_Et reversa est ad patrem suum, et fecit ei sicut voverat quæ ignorabat

virum. Exinde mos increbruit in Israel et consuetudo servata est, ut

post anni circulum conveniant in unum filiæ Israel, et plangant filiam

Jephte Galaaditæ, diebus quatuor._"

"And she returned to her father and he did to her as he had vowed, to

her who had never known man; and hence came the usage, and the custom is

still observed, that the daughters of Israel assemble every year to

lament the daughter of Jephthah for four days."

You will just have the goodness, Mr. Anti-philosopher, to tell us,

whether four days of lamentation every year have been devoted to weeping

the fate of a young woman because she was consecrated?

Whether any nuns (_religieuses_) were ever solemnly appointed among a

people who considered virginity an opprobrium?

And also, what is the natural meaning of the phrase, he did to her as he

had vowed--"_Fecit ei sicut voverat?_"

What had Jephthah vowed? What had he promised by an oath to perform? To

kill his daughter; to offer her up as a burnt offering--and he did kill

her.

Read Calmet's dissertation on the rashness of Jephthah's vow and its

fulfilment; read the law which he cites, that terrible law of Leviticus,

in the twenty-seventh chapter, which commands that all which shall be

devoted to the Lord shall not be ransomed, but shall die the death:

"_Non redimetur, sed morte morletur_."

Observe the multitude of examples by which this most astonishing truth

is attested. Look at the Amalekites and Canaanites; look at the king of

Arvad and all his family subjected to the law of devotion; look at the

priest Samuel slaying King Agag with his own hands, and cutting him into

pieces as a butcher cuts up an ox in his slaughter-house. After

considering all this, go and corrupt, falsify, or deny holy Scripture,

in order to maintain your paradox; and insult those who revere the

Scripture, however astonishing and confounding they may find it. Give

the lie direct to the historian Josephus, who transcribes the narrative

in question, and positively asserts that Jephthah immolated his

daughter. Pile revilings upon falsehoods, and calumny upon ignorance;

sages will smile at your impotence; and sages, thank God, are at present

neither few nor weak. Oh, that you could but see the sovereign contempt

with which they look down upon the Rouths, when they corrupt the holy

Scripture, and when they boast of having disputed with the president

Montesquieu in his last hour, and convinced him that he ought to think

exactly like the Jesuits!

JESUITS; OR PRIDE.

The Jesuits have been so much a subject of discourse and discussion

that, after having engaged the attention of Europe for a period of two

hundred years, they at last begin to weary and disgust it, whether they

write themselves, or whether any one else writes for or against that

singular society; in which it must be confessed there have been found,

and are to be found still, individuals of very extraordinary merit.

They have been reproached, in the six thousand volumes that have been

written against them, with their lax morality, which has not, however,

been more lax than that of the Capuchins; and with their doctrine

relating to the safety of the person of kings; a doctrine which after

all is not to be compared with the horn-handled knife of James Clement;

nor with the prepared host, the sprinkled wafer, which so well answered

the purpose of Ange de Montepulciano, another Jacobin, and which

poisoned the emperor Henry VII.

It is not versatile grace which has been their ruin, nor the fraudulent

bankruptcy of the reverend Father Lavalette, prefect of the apostolic

missions. A whole order has not been expelled from France and Spain and

the two Sicilies, because that order contained a single bankrupt. Nor

was it affected by the odious deviations of the Jesuit

Guyot-Desfontaines, or the Jesuit Fréron, or the reverend father Marsy,

so injurious, in the latter instance, to the youthful and high-born

victim. The public refused to attend these Greek and Latin imitations of

Anacreon and Horace.

What is it then that was their ruin?--_pride_, What, it may be asked by

some, were the Jesuits prouder than any other monks? Yes; and so much so

that they procured a _lettre de cachet_ against an ecclesiastic for

calling them monks. One member of the society, called Croust, more

brutal than the rest, a brother of the confessor of the second

dauphiness, was absolutely, in my presence, going to beat the son of M.

de Guyot, afterwards king's advocate (prêteur-royal) at Strasburg,

merely for saying he would go to see him in his convent.

It is perfectly incredible with what contempt they considered every

university where they had not been educated, every book which they had

not written, every ecclesiastic who was not "a man of quality." Of this

I have myself, times without number, been a witness. They express

themselves in the following language, in their libel entitled "It is

Time to Speak Out": "Should we condescend even to speak to a magistrate

who says the Jesuits are proud and ought to be humbled?" They were so

proud that they would not suffer any one to blame their pride!

Whence did this hateful pride originate? From Father Guinard's having

been hanged? which is literally true.

It must be remarked that after the execution of that Jesuit under Henry

IV., and after the banishment of the society from the kingdom, they were

recalled only on the indispensable condition that one Jesuit should

always reside at court, who should be responsible for all the rest.

Coton was the person who thus became a hostage at the court of Henry

IV.; and that excellent monarch, who was not without his little

stratagems of policy, thought to conciliate the pope by making a hostage

of his confessor.

From that moment every brother of the order seemed to feel as if he had

been raised to be king's confessor. This place of first spiritual

physician became a department of the administration under Louis XIII.,

and moreso still under Louis XIV. The brother Vadblé, valet de chambre

of Father La Chaise, granted his protection to the bishops of France;

and Father Letellier ruled with a sceptre of iron those who were very

well disposed to be so ruled. It was impossible that the greater part of

the Jesuits should not be puffed up by the consequence and power to

which these two members of their society had been raised, and that they

should not become as insolent as the lackeys of M. Louvois. There have

been among them, certainly, men of knowledge, eloquence, and genius;

these possessed some modesty, but those who had only mediocrity of

talent or acquirement were tainted with that pride which generally

attaches to mediocrity and to the pedantry of a college.

From the time of Father Garasse almost all their polemical works have

been pervaded with an indecent and scornful arrogance which has roused

the indignation of all Europe. This arrogance frequently sank into the

most pitiful meanness; so that they discovered the extraordinary secret

of being objects at once of envy and contempt. Observe, for example, how

they expressed themselves of the celebrated Pasquier, advocate-general

of the chamber of accounts:

"Pasquier is a mere porter, a Parisian varlet, a second-rate showman and

jester, a journeyman retailer of ballads and old stories, a contemptible

hireling, only fit to be a lackey's valet, a scrub, a disgusting

ragamuffin, strongly suspected of heresy, and either heretical or much

worse, a libidinous and filthy satyr, a master-fool by nature, in sharp,

in flat, and throughout the whole gamut, a three-shod fool, a fool

double-dyed, a fool in grain, a fool in every sort of folly."

They afterwards polished their style; but pride, by becoming less gross,

only became the more revolting.

Everything is pardoned except pride; and this accounts for the fact that

all the parliaments in the kingdom, the members of which had the greater

part of them been disciples of the Jesuits, seized the first opportunity

of effecting their annihilation; and the whole land rejoiced in their

downfall.

So deeply was the spirit of pride rooted in them that it manifested

itself with the most indecent rage, even while they were held down to

the earth by the hand of justice, and their final sentence yet remained

to be pronounced. We need only read the celebrated memorial already

mentioned, entitled "It is Time to Speak Out," printed at Avignon in

1763, under the assumed name of Anvers. It begins with an ironical

petition to the persons holding the court of parliament. It addresses

them with as much superiority and contempt as could be shown in

reprimanding a proctor's clerk. The illustrious M. de Montclar,

procureur-général, the oracle of the Parliament of Provence, is

continually treated as "M. Ripert," and rebuked with as much consequence

and authority as a mutinous and ignorant scholar by a professor in his

chair. They pushed their audacity so far as to say that M. de Montclar

"blasphemed" in giving an account of the institution of the Jesuits.

In their memorial, entitled "All Shall be Told," they insult still more

daringly the Parliament of Metz, and always in the style of arrogance

and dictation derived from the schools.

They have retained this pride even in the very ashes to which France and

Spain have now reduced them. From the bottom of those ashes the serpent,

scotched as it has been, has again raised its hostile head. We have seen

a contemptible creature, of the name of Nonnotte, set himself up for a

critic on his masters; and, although possessing merely talent enough for

preaching to a mob in the church-yard, discoursing with all the ease of

impudence about things of which he has not the slightest notion. Another

insolent member of the society, called Patouillet, dared, in the

bishop's mandates, to insult respectable citizens and officers of the

king's household, whose very lackeys would not have permitted him to

speak to them.

One of the things on which they most prided themselves, was introducing

themselves into the houses of the great in their last illness, as

ambassadors of God, to open to them the gates of heaven, without their

previously passing through purgatory. Under Louis XIV. it was considered

as having a bad aspect, it was unfashionable and discreditable, to die

without having passed through the hands of a Jesuit; and the wretch,

immediately after the fatal scene had closed, would go and boast to his

devotees that he had just been converting a duke and peer, who, without

his protection, would have been inevitably damned.

The dying man might say: "By what right, you college excrement, do you

intrude yourself on me in my dying moments? Was I ever seen to go to

your cells when any of you had the fistula or gangrene, and were about

to return your gross and unwieldy bodies to the earth? Has God granted

your soul any rights over mine? Do I require a preceptor at the age of

seventy? Do you carry the keys of Paradise at your girdle? You dare to

call yourself an ambassador of God; show me your patent and if you have

none, let me die in peace. No Benedictine, Chartreux, or Premonstrant,

comes to disturb my dying moments; they have no wish to erect a trophy

to their pride upon the bed of our last agony; they remain peacefully in

their cells; do you rest quietly in yours; there can be nothing in

common between you and me."

A comic circumstance occurred on a truly mournful occasion, when an

English Jesuit, of the name of Routh, eagerly strove to possess himself

of the last hour of the great Montesquieu. "He came," he said, "to bring

back that virtuous soul to religion;" as if Montesquieu had not known

what religion was better than a Routh; as if it had been the will of God

that Montesquieu should think like a Routh! He was driven out of the

chamber, and went all over Paris, exclaiming, "I have converted that

celebrated man; I prevailed upon him to throw his 'Persian Letters' and

his 'Spirit of Laws' into the fire." Care was taken to print the

narrative of the conversion of President Montesquieu by the reverend

father Routh in the libel entitled "The Anti-Philosophic Dictionary."

Another subject of pride and ambition with the Jesuits was making

missions to various cities, just as if they had been among Indians or

Japanese. They would oblige the whole magistracy to attend them in the

streets; a cross was borne before them, planted in the principal public

places; they dispossessed the resident clergy; they became complete

masters of the city. A Jesuit of the name of Aubert performed one of

these missions to Colmar, and compelled the advocate-general of the

sovereign council to burn at his feet his copy of "Bayle," which had

cost him no less than fifty crowns. For my own part, I acknowledge that

I would rather have burned brother Aubert himself. Judge how the pride

of this Aubert must have swelled with this sacrifice as he boasted of it

to his comrades at night, and as he exultingly wrote the account of it

to his general.

O monks, monks! be modest, as I have already advised you; be moderate,

if you wish to avoid the calamities impending over you.

JEWS.

SECTION I.

You order me to draw you a faithful picture of the spirit of the Jews,

and of their history, and--without entering into the ineffable ways of

Providence, which are not our ways--you seek in the manners of this

people the source of the events which that Providence prepared.

It is certain that the Jewish nation is the most singular that the world

has ever seen; and although, in a political view, the most contemptible

of all, yet in the eyes of a philosopher, it is, on various accounts,

worthy consideration.

The Guebers, the Banians, and the Jews, are the only nations which exist

dispersed, having no alliance with any people, are perpetuated among

foreign nations, and continue apart from the rest of the world.

The Guebers were once infinitely more considerable than the Jews, for

they are castes of the Persians, who had the Jews under their dominion;

but they are now scattered over but one part of the East.

The Banians, who are descended from the ancient people among whom

Pythagoras acquired his philosophy, exist only in India and Persia; but

the Jews are dispersed over the whole face of the earth and if they were

assembled, would compose a nation much more numerous than it ever was in

the short time that they were masters of Palestine. Almost every people

who have written the history of their origin, have chosen to set it off

by prodigies; with them all has been miracle; their oracles have

predicted nothing but conquest; and such of them as have really become

conquerors have had no difficulty in believing these ancient oracles

which were verified by the event. The Jews are distinguished among the

nations by this--that their oracles are the only true ones, of which we

are not permitted to doubt. These oracles, which they understand only in

the literal sense, have a hundred times foretold to them that they

should be masters of the world; yet they have never possessed anything

more than a small corner of land, and that only for a small number of

years, and they have not now so much as a village of their own. They

must, then, believe, and they do believe, that their predictions will

one day be fulfilled, and that they shall have the empire of the earth.

Among the Mussulmans and the Christians they are the lowest of all

nations, but they think themselves the highest. This pride in their

abasement is justified by an unanswerable reason--viz., that they are in

reality the fathers of both Christians and Mussulmans. The Christian and

the Mussulman religion acknowledge the Jewish as their parent; and, by a

singular contradiction, they at once hold this parent in reverence and

in abhorrence.

It were foreign to our present purpose to repeat that continued

succession of prodigies which astonishes the imagination and exercises

the faith. We have here to do only with events purely historical, wholly

apart from the divine concurrence and the miracles which God, for so

long a time, vouchsafed to work in this people's favor.

First, we find in Egypt a family of seventy persons producing, at the

end of two hundred and fifteen years, a nation counting six hundred

thousand fighting men; which makes, with the women, the children and the

old men, upward of two millions of souls. There is no example upon earth

of so prodigious an increase of population; this people, having come out

of Egypt, stayed forty years in the deserts of Stony Arabia, and in that

frightful country the people much diminished.

What remained of this nation advanced a little northward in those

deserts. It appears that they had the same principles which the tribes

of Stony and Desert Arabia have since had, of butchering without mercy

the inhabitants of little towns over whom they had the advantage, and

reserving only the young women. The interests of population have ever

been the principal object of both. We find that when the Arabs had

conquered Spain, they imposed tributes of marriageable girls; and at

this day the Arabs of the desert make no treaty without stipulating for

some girls and a few presents.

The Jews arrived in a sandy, mountainous country, where there were a few

towns, inhabited by a little people called the Midianites. In one

Midianite camp, alone, they took six hundred and seventy-five thousand

sheep, seventy-two thousand oxen, sixty-one thousand asses, and

thirty-two thousand virgins. All the men, all the wives, and all the

male children, were massacred; the girls and the booty were divided

between the people and the sacrificers.

They then took, in the same country, the town of Jericho; but having

devoted the inhabitants of that place to the anathema, they massacred

them all, including the virgins, pardoning none but Rahab, a courtesan,

who had aided them in surprising the town.

The learned have agitated the question whether the Jews, like so many

other nations, really sacrificed men to the Divinity. This is a dispute

on words; those, whom the people consecrated to the anathema were not

put to death on an altar, with religious rites; but they were not the

less immolated, without its being permitted to pardon any one of them.

Leviticus (xxvii., 29) expressly forbids the redeeming of those who

shall have been devoted. Its words are, "They shall surely be put to

death." By virtue of this law it was that Jephthah devoted and killed

his daughter, that Saul would have killed his son, and that the prophet

Samuel cut in pieces King Agag, Saul's prisoner. It is quite certain

that God is the master of the lives of men, and that it is not for us to

examine His laws. We ought to limit ourselves to believing these things,

and reverencing in silence the designs of God, who permitted them.

It is also asked what right had strangers like the Jews to the land of

Canaan? The answer is, that they had what God gave them.

No sooner had they taken Jericho and Lais than they had a civil war

among themselves, in which the tribe of Benjamin was almost wholly

exterminated--men, women, and children; leaving only six hundred males.

The people, unwilling that one of the tribes should be annihilated,

bethought themselves of sacking the whole city of the tribe of Manasseh,

killing all the men, old and young, all the children, all the married

women, all the widows, and taking six hundred virgins, whom they gave to

the six hundred survivors of the tribe of Benjamin, to restore that

tribe, in order that the number of their twelve tribes might still be

complete.

Meanwhile, the Phœnicians, a powerful people settled in the coasts

from time immemorial, being alarmed at the depredations and cruelties of

these newcomers, frequently chastised them; the neighboring princes

united against them; and they were seven times reduced to slavery, for

more than two hundred years.

At last they made themselves a king, whom they elected by lot. This king

could not be very mighty; for in the first battle which the Jews fought

under him, against their masters, the Philistines, they had, in the

whole army, but one sword and one lance, and not one weapon of steel.

But David, their second king, made war with advantage. He took the city

of Salem, afterwards so celebrated under the name of Jerusalem, and then

the Jews began to make some figure on the borders of Syria. Their

government and their religion took a more august form. Hitherto they had

not the means of raising a temple, though every neighboring nation had

one or more. Solomon built a superb one, and reigned over this people

about forty years.

Not only were the days of Solomon the most flourishing days of the Jews,

but all the kings upon earth could not exhibit a treasure approaching

Solomon's. His father, David, whose predecessor had not even iron, left

to Solomon twenty-five thousand six hundred and forty-eight millions of

French livres in ready money. His fleets, which went to Ophir, brought

him sixty-eight millions per annum in pure gold, without reckoning the

silver and jewels. He had forty thousand stables, and the same number of

coach-houses, twelve thousand stables for his cavalry, seven hundred

wives, and three hundred concubines. Yet he had neither wood nor workmen

for building his palace and the temple; he borrowed them of Hiram, king

of Tyre, who also furnished gold; and Solomon gave Hiram twenty towns in

payment. The commentators have acknowledged that these things need

explanation, and have suspected some literal error in the copyist, who

alone can have been mistaken.

On the death of Solomon, a division took place among the twelve tribes

composing the nation. The kingdom was torn asunder, and separated into

two small provinces, one of which was called Judah, the other

Israel--nine tribes and a half composing the Israelitish province, and

only two and a half that of Judah. Then there was between these two

small peoples a hatred, the more implacable as they were kinsmen and

neighbors, and as they had different religions; for at Sichem and at

Samaria they worshipped "_Baal_"--giving to God a Sidonian name; while

at Jerusalem they worshipped "_Adonai_." At Sichem were consecrated two

calves; at Jerusalem, two cherubim--which were two winged animals with

double heads, placed in the sanctuary. So, each faction having its

kings, its gods, its worship, and its prophets, they made a bloody war

upon each other.

"While this war was carried on, the kings of Assyria, who conquered the

greater part of Asia, fell upon the Jews; as an eagle pounces upon two

lizards while they are fighting. The nine and a half tribes of Samaria

and Sichem were carried off and dispersed forever; nor has it been

precisely known to what places they were led into slavery.

It is but twenty leagues from the town of Samaria to Jerusalem, and

their territories joined each other; so that when one of these towns was

enslaved by powerful conquerors, the other could not long hold out.

Jerusalem was sacked several times; it was tributary to kings Hazael and

Razin, enslaved under Tiglath-Pileser, three times taken by

Nebuchodonosor, or Nebuchadnezzar, and at last destroyed. Zedekiah, who

had been set up as king or governor by this conqueror, was led, with his

whole people, into captivity in Babylonia; so that the only Jews left in

Palestine were a few enslaved peasants, to sow the ground.

As for the little country of Samaria and Sichem, more fertile than that

of Jerusalem, it was re-peopled by foreign colonies, sent there by

Assyrian kings, who took the name of Samaritans.

The two and a half tribes that were slaves in Babylonia and the

neighboring towns for seventy years, had time to adopt the usages of

their masters, and enriched their own tongue by mixing with it the

Chaldæan; this is incontestable. The historian Josephus tells us that he

wrote first in Chaldæan, which is the language of his country. It

appears that the Jews acquired but little of the science of the Magi;

they turned brokers, money-changers, and old-clothes men; by which they

made themselves necessary, as they still do, and grew rich.

Their gains enabled them to obtain, under Cyrus, the liberty of

rebuilding Jerusalem; but when they were to return into their own

country, those who had grown rich at Babylon, would not quit so fine a

country for the mountains of Cœlesyria, nor the fruitful banks of the

Euphrates and the Tigris, for the torrent of Kedron. Only the meanest

part of the nation returned with Zorobabel. The Jews of Babylon

contributed only their alms to the rebuilding of the city and the

temple; nor was the collection a large one; for Esdras relates that no

more than seventy thousand crowns could be raised for the erection of

this temple, which was to be that of all the earth.

The Jews still remained subject to the Persians; they were likewise

subject to Alexander; and when that great man, the most excusable of all

conquerors, had, in the early years of his victorious career, begun to

raise Alexandria, and make it the centre of the commerce of the world,

the Jews flocked there to exercise their trade of brokers; and there it

was that their rabbis at length learned something of the sciences of the

Greeks. The Greek tongue became absolutely necessary to all trading

Jews.

After Alexander's death, this people continued subject in Jerusalem to

the kings of Syria, and in Alexandria to the kings of Egypt; and when

these kings were at war, this people always shared the fate of their

subjects, and belonged to the conqueror.

From the time of their captivity at Babylon, the Jews never had

particular governors taking the title of king. The pontiffs had the

internal administration, and these pontiffs were appointed by their

masters; they sometimes paid very high for this dignity, as the Greek

patriarch at Constantinople pays for his at present.

Under Antiochus Epiphanes they revolted; the city was once more

pillaged, and the walls demolished. After a succession of similar

disasters, they at length obtained, for the first time, about a hundred

and fifty years before the Christian era, permission to coin money,

which permission was granted them by Antiochus Sidetes. They then had

chiefs, who took the name of kings, and even wore a diadem. Antigonus

was the first who was decorated with this ornament, which, without the

power, confers but little honor.

At that time the Romans were beginning to become formidable to the kings

of Syria, masters of the Jews; and the latter gained over the Roman

senate by presents and acts of submission. It seemed that the wars in

Asia Minor would, for a time at least, give some relief to this

unfortunate people; but Jerusalem no sooner enjoyed some shadow of

liberty than it was torn by civil wars, which rendered its condition

under its phantoms of kings much more pitiable than it had ever been in

so long and various a succession of bondages.

In their intestine troubles, they made the Romans their judges. Already

most of the kingdoms of Asia Minor, Southern Africa, and three-fourths

of Europe, acknowledged the Romans as their arbiters and masters.

Pompey came into Syria to judge the nation and to depose several petty

tyrants. Being deceived by Aristobulus, who disputed the royalty of

Jerusalem, he avenged himself upon him and his party. He took the city;

had some of the seditious, either priests or Pharisees, crucified; and

not long after, condemned Aristobulus, king of the Jews, to execution.

The Jews, ever unfortunate, ever enslaved, and ever revolting, again

brought upon them the Roman arms. Crassus and Cassius punished them; and

Metellus Scipio had a son of King Aristobulus, named Alexander, the

author of all the troubles, crucified.

Under the great Cæsar, they were entirely subject and peaceable. Herod,

famed among them and among us, for a long time was merely tetrarch, but

obtained from Antony the crown of Judæa, for which he paid dearly; but

Jerusalem would not recognize this new king, because he was descended

from Esau, and not from Jacob, and was merely an Idumæan. The very

circumstance of his being a foreigner caused him to be chosen by the

Romans, the better to keep this people in check. The Romans protected

the king of their nomination with an army; and Jerusalem was again taken

by assault, sacked, and pillaged.

Herod, afterwards protected by Augustus, became one of the most powerful

sovereigns among the petty kings of Arabia. He restored Jerusalem,

repaired the fortifications that surrounded the temple, so dear to the

Jews, and rebuilt the temple itself; but he could not finish it, for he

wanted money and workmen. This proves that, after all, Herod was not

rich; and the Jews, though fond of their temple, were still fonder of

their money.

The name of king was nothing more than a favor granted by the Romans; it

was not a title of succession. Soon after Herod's death, Judæa was

governed as a subordinate Roman province, by the proconsul of Syria,

although from time to time the title of king was granted, sometimes to

one Jew, sometimes to another, for a considerable sum of money, as under

the emperor Claudius, when it was granted to the Jew Agrippa.

A daughter of Agrippa was that Berenice, celebrated for having been

beloved by one of the best emperors Rome can boast. She it was who, by

the injustice she experienced from her countrymen, drew down the

vengeance of the Romans upon Jerusalem. She asked for justice, and the

factions of the town refused it. The seditious spirit of the people

impelled them to fresh excesses. Their character at all times was to be

cruel; and their fate, to be punished.

This memorable siege, which ended in the destruction of the city, was

carried on by Vespasian and Titus. The exaggerating Josephus pretends

that in this short war more than a million of Jews were slaughtered. It

is not to be wondered at that an author who puts fifteen thousand men in

each village should slay a million. What remained were exposed in the

public markets; and each Jew was sold at about the same price as the

unclean animal of which they dare not eat.

In this last dispersion they again hoped for a deliverer; and under

Adrian, whom they curse in their prayers, there arose one Barcochebas,

who called himself a second Moses--a Shiloh--a Christ. Having assembled

many of these wretched people under his banners, which they believed to

be sacred, he perished with all his followers. It was the last struggle

of this nation, which has never lifted its head again. Its constant

opinion, that barrenness is a reproach, has preserved it; the Jews have

ever considered as their two first duties, to get money and children.

From this short summary it results that the Hebrews have ever been

vagrants, or robbers, or slaves, or seditious. They are still vagabonds

upon the earth, and abhorred by men, yet affirming that heaven and

earth and all mankind were created for them alone.

It is evident, from the situation of Judæa, and the genius of this

people, that they could not but be continually subjugated. It was

surrounded by powerful and warlike nations, for which it had an

aversion; so that it could neither be in alliance with them, nor

protected by them. It was impossible for it to maintain itself by its

marine; for it soon lost the port which in Solomon's time it had on the

Red Sea; and Solomon himself always employed Tyrians to build and to

steer his vessels, as well as to erect his palace and his temple. It is

then manifest that the Hebrews had neither trade nor manufactures, and

that they could not compose a flourishing people. They never had an army

always ready for the field, like the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians,

the Syrians, and the Romans. The laborers and artisans took up arms only

as occasion required, and consequently could not form well-disciplined

troops. Their mountains, or rather their rocks, are neither high enough,

nor sufficiently contiguous, to have afforded an effectual barrier

against invasion. The most numerous part of the nation, transported to

Babylon, Persia, and to India, or settled in Alexandria, were too much

occupied with their traffic and their brokerage to think of war. Their

civil government, sometimes republican, sometimes pontifical, sometimes

monarchial, and very often reduced to anarchy, seems to have been no

better than their military discipline.

You ask, what was the philosophy of the Hebrews? The answer will be a

very short one--they had none. Their legislator himself does not

anywhere speak expressly of the immortality of the soul, nor of the

rewards of another life. Josephus and Philo believe the soul to be

material; their doctors admitted corporeal angels; and when they

sojourned at Babylon, they gave to these angels the names given them by

the Chaldæans--Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel. The name of Satan is

Babylonian, and is in somewise the Arimanes of Zoroaster. The name of

Asmodeus also is Chaldæan; and Tobit, who lived in Nineveh, is the first

who employed it. The dogma of the immortality of the soul was developed

only in the course of ages, and among the Pharisees. The Sadducees

always denied this spirituality, this immortality, and the existence of

the angels. Nevertheless, the Sadducees communicated uninterruptedly

with the Pharisees, and had even sovereign pontiffs of their own sect.

The prodigious difference in opinion between these two great bodies did

not cause any disturbance. The Jews, in the latter times of their

sojourn at Jerusalem, were scrupulously attached to nothing but the

ceremonials of their law. The man who had eaten pudding or rabbit would

have been stoned; while he who denied the immortality of the soul might

be high-priest.

It is commonly said that the abhorrence in which the Jews held other

nations proceeded from their horror of idolatry; but it is much more

likely that the manner in which they at the first exterminated some of

the tribes of Canaan, and the hatred which the neighboring nations

conceived for them, were the cause of this invincible aversion. As they

knew no nations but their neighbors, they thought that in abhorring them

they detested the whole earth, and thus accustomed themselves to be the

enemies of all men.

One proof that this hatred was not caused by the idolatry of the nations

is that we find in the history of the Jews that they were very often

idolaters. Solomon himself sacrificed to strange gods. After him, we

find scarcely any king in the little province of Judah that does not

permit the worship of these gods and offer them incense. The province of

Israel kept its two calves and its sacred groves, or adored other

divinities.

This idolatry, with which so many nations are reproached, is a subject

on which but little light has been thrown. Perhaps it would not be

difficult to efface this stain upon the theology of the ancients. All

polished nations had the knowledge of a supreme God, the master of the

inferior gods and of men. The Egyptians themselves recognized a first

principle, which they called Knef, and to which all beside was

subordinate. The ancient Persians adored the good principle, named

Orosmanes; and were very far from sacrificing to the bad principle,

Arimanes, whom they regarded nearly as we regard the devil. Even to this

day, the Guebers have retained the sacred dogma of the unity of God. The

ancient Brahmins acknowledged one only Supreme Being; the Chinese

associated no inferior being with the Divinity, nor had any idol until

the times when the populace were Jed astray by the worship of Fo, and

the superstitions of the bonzes. The Greeks and the Romans,

notwithstanding the multitude of their gods, acknowledged in Jupiter the

absolute sovereign of heaven and earth. Homer, himself in the most

absurd poetical fictions, has never lost sight of this truth. He

constantly represents Jupiter as the only Almighty, sending good and

evil upon earth, and, with a motion of his brow, striking gods and men

with awe. Altars were raised, and sacrifices offered to inferior gods,

dependent on the one supreme. There is not a single monument of

antiquity in which the title of sovereign of heaven is given to any

secondary deity--to Mercury, to Apollo, to Mars. The thunderbolt was

ever the attribute of the master of all, and of him only.

The idea of a sovereign being, of his providence, of his eternal

decrees, is to be found among all philosophers and all poets. In short,

it is perhaps as unjust to think that the ancients equalled the heroes,

the genii, the inferior gods, to him whom they called "the father and

master of the gods," as it would be ridiculous to imagine that we

associate with God the blessed and the angels.

You then ask whether the ancient philosophers and law-givers borrowed

from the Jews, or the Jews from them? We must refer the question to

Philo; he owns that before the translation of the Septuagint the books

of his nation were unknown to strangers. A great people cannot have

received their laws and their knowledge from a little people, obscure

and enslaved. In the time of Osias, indeed, the Jews had no books; in

his reign was accidentally found the only copy of the law then in

existence. This people, after their captivity at Babylon, had no other

alphabet than the Chaldæan; they were not famed for any art, any

manufacture whatsoever; and even in the time of Solomon they were

obliged to pay dear for foreign artisans. To say that the Egyptians, the

Persians, the Greeks, were instructed by the Jews, were to say that the

Romans learned the arts from the people of Brittany. The Jews never were

natural philosophers, nor geometricians, nor astronomers. So far were

they from having public schools for the instruction of youth, that they

had not even a term in their language to express such an institution.

The people of Peru and Mexico measured their year much better than the

Jews. Their stay in Babylon and in Alexandria, during which individuals

might instruct themselves, formed the people to no art save that of

usury. They never knew how to stamp money; and when Antiochus Sidetes

permitted them to have a coinage of their own, they were almost

incapable of profiting by this permission for four or five years;

indeed, this coin is said to have been struck at Samaria. Hence, it is,

that Jewish medals are so rare, and nearly all false. In short, we find

in them only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the

most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most

invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and

enriched. Still, we ought not to burn them.

SECTION II.

_The Jewish Law._

Their law must appear, to every polished people, as singular as their

conduct; if it were not divine, it would seem to be the law of savages

beginning to assemble themselves into a nation; and being divine, one

cannot understand how it is that it has not existed from all ages, for

them, and for all men.

But it is more strange than all that the immortality of the soul is not

even intimated in this law, entitled "Vaicrah and Addebarim," Leviticus

and Deuteronomy.

In this law it is forbidden to eat eels, because they have no scales;

and hares, because they chew the cud, and have cloven feet. Apparently,

the Jews had hares different from ours. The griffin is unclean, and

four-footed birds are unclean, which animals are somewhat rare. Whoever

touches a mouse, or a mole is unclean. The women are forbidden to lie

with horses or asses. The Jewish women must have been subject to this

sort of gallantry. The men are forbidden to offer up their seed to

Moloch; and here the term seed is not metaphorical. It seems that it was

customary, in the deserts of Arabia, to offer up this singular present

to the gods; as it is said to be usual in Cochin and some other

countries of India, for the girls to yield their virginity to an iron

Priapus in a temple. These two ceremonies prove that mankind is capable

of everything. The Kaffirs, who deprive themselves of one testicle, are

a still more ridiculous example of the extravagance of superstition.

Another law of the Jews, equally strange, is their proof of adultery. A

woman accused by her husband must be presented to the priests, and she

is made to drink of the waters of jealousy, mixed with worm-wood and

dust. If she is innocent, the water makes her more beautiful; if she is

guilty, her eyes start from her head, her belly swells, and she bursts

before the Lord.

We shall not here enter into the details of all these sacrifices, which

were nothing more than the operations of ceremonial butchers; but it of

great importance to remark another kind of sacrifice too common in those

barbarous times. It is expressly ordered, in the twenty-seventh chapter

of Leviticus, that all men, vowed in anathema to the Lord, be immolated;

they "shall surely be put to death"; such are the words of the text.

Here is the origin of the story of Jephthah, whether his daughter was

really immolated, or the story was copied from that of Iphigenia. Here,

too, is the source of the vow made by Saul, who would have immolated his

son, but that the army, less superstitious than himself, saved the

innocent young man's life.

It is then but too true that the Jews, according to their law,

sacrificed human victims. This act of religion is in accordance with

their manners; their own books represent them as slaughtering without

mercy all that came in their way, reserving only the virgins for their

use.

It would be very difficult--and should be very unimportant--to know at

what time these laws were digested into the form in which we now have

them. That they are of very high antiquity is enough to inform us how

gross and ferocious the manners of that antiquity were.

SECTION III.

_The Dispersion of the Jews._

It has been pretended that the dispersion of this people had been

foretold, as a punishment for their refusing to acknowledge Jesus Christ

as the Messiah; the asserters affecting to forget that they had been

dispersed throughout the known world long before Jesus Christ. The books

that are left us of this singular nation make no mention of a return of

the twelve tribes transported beyond the Euphrates by Tiglath-Pileser

and his successor Shalmaneser; and it was six hundred years after, that

Cyrus sent back to Jerusalem the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, which

Nebuchodonosor had brought away into the provinces of his empire. The

Acts of the Apostles certify that fifty-three days after the death of

Jesus Christ, there were Jews from every nation under heaven assembled

for the feast of Pentecost. St. James writes to the twelve dispersed

tribes; and Josephus and Philo speak of the Jews as very numerous

throughout the East.

It is true that, considering the carnage that was made of them under

some of the Roman emperors, and the slaughter of them so often repeated

in every Christian state, one is astonished that this people not only

still exists, but is at this day no less numerous than it was formerly.

Their numbers must be attributed to their exemption from bearing arms,

their ardor for marriage, their custom of contracting it in their

families early, their law of divorce, their sober and regular way of

life, their abstinence, their toil, and their exercise.

Their firm attachment to the Mosaic law is no less remarkable,

especially when we consider their frequent apostasies when they lived

under the government of their kings and their judges; and Judaism is

now, of all the religions in the world, the one most rarely

abjured--which is partly the fruit of the persecutions it has suffered.

Its followers, perpetual martyrs to their creed, have regarded

themselves with progressively increasing confidence, as the fountain of

all sanctity; looking upon us as no other than rebellious Jews, who have

abjured the law of God, and put to death or torture those who received

it from His hand.

Indeed, if while Jerusalem and its temple existed, the Jews were

sometimes driven from their country by the vicissitudes of empires, they

have still more frequently been expelled through a blind zeal from every

country in which they have dwelt since the progress of Christianity and

Mahometanism. They themselves compare their religion to a mother, upon

whom her two daughters, the Christian and the Mahometan, have inflicted

a thousand wounds. But, how ill soever she has been treated by them, she

still glories in having given them birth. She makes use of them both to

embrace the whole world, while her own venerable age embraces all time.

It is singular that the Christians pretend to have accomplished the

prophecies by tyrannizing over the Jews, by whom they were transmitted.

We have already seen how the Inquisition banished the Jews from Spain.

Obliged to wander from land to land, from sea to sea, to gain a

livelihood; everywhere declared incapable of possessing any landed

property, or holding any office, they have been obliged to disperse, and

roam from place to place, unable to establish themselves permanently in

any country, for want of support, of power to maintain their ground, and

of knowledge in the art of war. Trade, a profession long despised by

most of the nations of Europe, was, in those barbarous ages, their only

resource; and as they necessarily grew rich by it, they were treated as

infamous usurers. Kings who could not ransack the purses of their

subjects, put the Jews, whom they regarded not as citizens, to torture.

What was done to them in England may give some idea of what they

experienced in other countries. King John, being in want of money, had

the rich Jews in his kingdom imprisoned. One of them, having had seven

of his teeth drawn one after another, to obtain his property, gave, on

losing the eighth, a thousand marks of silver. Henry III. extorted from

Aaron, a Jew of York, fourteen thousand marks of silver, and ten

thousand for his queen. He sold the rest of the Jews of his country to

his brother Richard, for the term of one year, in order, says Matthew

Paris, that this count might disembowel those whom his brother had

flayed.

In France they were put in prison, plundered, sold, accused of magic, of

sacrificing children, of poisoning the fountains. They were driven out

of the kingdom; they were suffered to return for money; and even while

they were tolerated, they were distinguished from the rest of the

inhabitants by marks of infamy. And, by an inconceivable whimsicality,

while in other countries the Jews were burned to make them embrace

Christianity, in France the property of such as became Christians was

confiscated. Charles IV., by an edict given at Basville, April 4, 1392,

abrogated this tyrannical custom, which, according to the Benedictine

Mabillon, had been introduced for two reasons:

First, to try the faith of these new converts, as it was but too common

for those of this nation to feign submission to the gospel for some

personal interest, without internally changing their belief.

Secondly, because as they had derived their wealth chiefly from usury,

the purity of Christian morals appeared to require them to make a

general restitution, which was effected by confiscation.

But the true reason of this custom, which the author of the "Spirit of

Laws" has so well developed, was a sort of "_droit d'amortissement_"--a

redemption for the sovereign, or the seigneurs, of the taxes which they

levied on the Jews, as mortmainable serfs, whom they succeeded; for they

were deprived of this benefit when the latter were converted to the

Christian faith.

At length, being incessantly proscribed in every country, they

ingeniously found the means of saving their fortunes and making their

retreats forever secure. Being driven from France under Philip the Long,

in 1318, they took refuge in Lombardy; there they gave to the merchants

bills of exchange on those to whom they had entrusted their effects at

their departure, and these were discharged.

The admirable invention of bills of exchange sprang from the extremity

of despair; and then, and not until then, commerce was enabled to elude

the efforts of violence, and to maintain itself throughout the world.

SECTION IV.

_In Answer to Some Objections._

_Letters to Joseph, Ben, Jonathan, Aaron, Mathatai, and David Wincker._

FIRST LETTER.

Gentlemen: When, forty-four years ago, your countryman Medina became a

bankrupt in London, being twenty thousand francs in my debt, he told me

that "it was not his fault; that he was unfortunate"; that "he had never

been one of the children of Belial"; that "he had always endeavored to

live as a son of God"--that is, as an honest man, a good Israelite. I

was affected; I embraced him; we joined in the praise of God; and I lost

eighty per cent.

You ought to know that I never hated your nation; I hate no one; not

even Fréron.

Far from hating, I have always pitied you. If, like my protector, good

Pope Lambertini, I have sometimes bantered a little, I am not therefore

the less sensitive. I wept, at the age of sixteen, when I was told that

a mother and her daughter had been burned at Lisbon for having eaten,

standing, a little lamb, cooked with lettuce, on the fourteenth day of

the red moon; and I can assure you that the extreme beauty that this

girl was reported to have possessed, had no share in calling forth my

tears, although it must have increased the spectators' horror for the

assassins, and their pity for the victim.

I know not how it entered my head to write an epic poem at the age of

twenty. (Do you know what an epic poem is? For my part I knew nothing of

the matter.) The legislator Montesquieu had not yet written his "Persian

Letters," which you reproach me with having commented on; but I had

already of myself said, speaking of a monster well known to your

ancestors, and which even now is not without devotees:

_Il vient; le fanatisme est son horrible nom;_

_Enfant dénaturé de la religion;_

_Armé pour la défendre, il cherche à la détruire,_

_Et reçu dans son sein, l'embrasse et le déchire,_

_C'est lui qui dans Raba, sur les bords de l'Arnon_

_Guidait les descendans du malheureux Ammon,_

_Quand à Moloch leur dieu des mères gémissantes_

_Offraient de leurs enfans les entrailles fumantes._

_Il dicta de Jephté le serment inhumain;_

_Dans le cœur de sa fille il conduisait sa main._

_C'est lui qui, de Calchas ouvrant la bouche impie_

_Demanda par sa voix la mort d'Iphigénie._

_France, dans tes forêts il habita long-temps,_

_À l'affreux Tentatès il offrit ton encens._

_Tu n'a point oublié ces sacres homicides,_

_Qu' à tes indignes dieux présentaient tes druides._

_Du haut du capitole il criait aux Païens._

_"Frappez, exterminez, déchirez les chrétiens."_

_Mais lorsqu'au fils de Dieu Rome enfin, fut soumise,_

_Du capitole en cendre il passa dans l'Eglise;_

_Et dans les cœurs chrétiens inspirant ses fureurs,_

_De martyrs qu'ils étaient les fit persécuteurs._

_Dans Londres il a formé la secte turbulente_

_Qui sur un roi trop faible a mis sa main sanglante;_

_Dans Madrid, dans Lisbonne, il allume ces feux,_

_Ces buchers solennels où des Juifs malheureux_

_Sont tous les ans en pompe envoyés par des prêtres,_

_Pour n'avoir point quitté la foi de leurs ancêtres._

He comes; the fiend Fanaticism comes--

Religion's horrid and unnatural child--

Armed to defend her, arming to destroy--

Tearing her bosom in his feigned embrace.

'Twas he who guided Amnion's wretched race

On Anion's banks, where mothers offered up

Their children's mangled limbs on Moloch's altars.

'Twas he who prompted Jephthah's barbarous oath,

And aimed the poniard at his daughter's heart.

'Twas he who spoke, when Calchas' impious tongue

Called for the blameless Iphigenia's death.

France, he long revelled in thy forest shades,

Offering thy incense to the grim Tentâtes,

Whetting the savage Druid's murderous knife

To sate his worthless gods with human gore.

He, from the Capitol, stirred Pagan hearts

To exterminate Christ's followers; and he,

When Rome herself had bowed to Christian truth,

Quitted the Capitol to rule the church--

To reign supreme in every Christian soul,

And make the Pagans martyrs in their turn.

His were in England the fierce sect who laid

Their bloody hands on a too feeble king.

His are Madrid's and Lisbon's horrid fires,

The yearly portion of unhappy Jews,

By priestly judges doomed to temporal flames

For thinking their forefathers' faith the best.

You clearly see, then, that even so long ago I was your servant, your

friend, your brother; although my father and mother had preserved to me

my fore-skin.

I am aware that virility, whether circumcised or uncircumcised, has

caused very fatal quarrels. I know what it cost Priam's son Paris, and

Agamemnon's brother Menelaus. I have read enough of your books to know

that Hamor's son Sichem ravished Leah's daughter Dinah, who at most was

not more than five years old, but was very forward for her age. He

wanted to make her his wife; and Jacob's sons, brothers of the violated

damsel, gave her to him in marriage on condition that he and all his

people should be circumcised. When the operation was performed, and all

the Sichemites, or Sechemites, were lying-in of the pains consequent

thereupon, the holy patriarchs Simeon and Levi cut all their throats one

after another. But, after all, I do not believe that uncircumcision

ought now to produce such abominable horrors; and especially I do not

think that men should hate, detest, anathematize, and damn one another

every Saturday and Sunday, on account of a morsel more or less of flesh.

If I have said that some of the circumcised have clipped money at Metz,

at Frankfort on the Oder, and at Warsaw (which I do not remember) I ask

their pardon; for, being almost at the end of my pilgrimage, I have no

wish to embroil myself with Israel.

I have the honor to be (as they say),

Yours, etc.

SECOND LETTER.

_Antiquity of the Jews._

Gentlemen: I have ever agreed, having read a few historical books for

amusement, that you are a very ancient people, and your origin may be

dated much farther back than that of the Teutones, the Celts, the

Slavonians, the Angles, and Hurons. I see you assembling as a people in

a capital called, sometimes Hershalaïm, sometimes Shaheb, on the hill

Moriah, and on the hill Sion, near a desert, on a stony soil, by a

small torrent which is dry six months of the year.

When you began to-establish yourselves in your corner, I will not say of

land, but of pebbles, Troy had been destroyed by the Greeks about two

centuries.

Medon was archon of Athens. Echestratus was reigning in Lacedæmon.

Latinus Sylvius was reigning in Latium; and Osochor in Egypt. The Indies

had been flourishing for a long succession of ages.

This was the most illustrious period of Chinese history. The emperor

Tchin-wang was reigning with glory over that vast empire; all the

sciences were there cultivated; and the public annals inform us that the

king of Cochin China, being come to pay his respects to this emperor,

Tchin-wang, received from him a present of a mariner's compass. This

compass might have been of great service to your Solomon, for his fleets

that went to the fine country of Ophir, which no one has ever known

anything about.

Thus, after the Chaldæans, the Syrians, the Persians, the Phoenicians,

the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Indians, the Chinese, the Latins, and the

Etruscans, you are the first people upon earth who had any known form of

government.

The Banians, the Guebers, and yourselves, are the only nations which,

dispersed out of their own country, have preserved their ancient rites;

if I make no account of the little Egyptian troops, called Zingari in

Italy, Gypsies in England, and Bohemians in France, which had preserved

the antique ceremonies of the worship of Isis, the sistrum, the cymbals,

the dance of Isis, the prophesying, and the art of robbing hen-roosts.

These sacred troops are beginning to disappear from the face of the

earth; while their pyramids still belong to the Turks, who perhaps will

not always be masters of them--the figure of all things on this earth

doth so pass away.

You say, that you have been settled in Spain ever since the days of

Solomon: I believe it, and will even venture to think that the

Phœnicians might have carried some Jews thither long before, when you

were slaves in Phœnicia, after the horrid massacres which you say

were committed by the robber Joshua, and by that other robber Caleb.

Your books indeed say, that you were reduced to slavery under

Chushan-Rashataim, king of Mesopotamia, for eight years; under Eglon,

king of Moab, for eighteen years; then under Jabin, king of Canaan, for

twenty years; then in the little canton of Midian, from which you had

issued, and where you dwelt in caverns, for seven years; then in Gilead,

for eighteen years--notwithstanding that Jair, your prince, had thirty

sons, each mounted on a fine ass--then under the Phœnicians (called

by you Philistines), for forty years--until at last the Lord Adonai sent

Samson, who tied three hundred foxes, one to another by the tails, and

slew a thousand Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass, from which

issued a fountain of clear water; which has been very well represented

at the Comédie Italienne.

Here are, by your own confession, ninety-six years of captivity in the

land of promise. Now it is very probable that the Syrians, who were the

factors for all nations, and navigated as far as the great ocean, bought

some Jewish slaves, and took them to Cadiz, which they founded. You see

that you are much more ancient than you think. It is indeed very likely

that you inhabited Spain several centuries before the Romans, the Goths,

the Vandals, and the Moors.

I am not only your friend, your brother, but moreover your genealogist.

I beg, gentlemen, that you will have the goodness to believe, that I

never have believed, I do not believe, and I never will believe, that

you are descended from those highway robbers whose ears and noses were

cut off by order of King Actisanes, and whom, according to Diodorus of

Sicily, he sent into the desert between Lake Sirbo and Mount Sinai--a

frightful desert where water and every other necessary of life are

wanting. They made nets to catch quails, which fed them for a few weeks,

during the passage of the birds.

Some of the learned have pretended that this origin perfectly agrees

with your history. You yourselves say, that you inhabited this desert,

that there you wanted water, and lived on quails, which in reality

abound there. Your accounts appear in the main to confirm that of

Diodorus; but I believe only the Pentateuch. The author does not say

that you had your ears and noses cut off. As far as I remember, (for I

have not Diodorus at hand), you lost only your noses. I do not now

recollect where I read that your ears were of the party; it might be in

some fragments of Manetho, cited by St. Ephraem.

In vain does the secretary, who has done me the honor of writing to me

in your name, assure me that you stole to the amount of upwards of nine

millions in gold, coined or carved, to go and set up your tabernacle in

the desert. I maintain, that you carried off nothing but what lawfully

belonged to you, reckoning interest at forty per cent., which was the

lawful rate.

Be this as it may, I certify that you are of very good nobility, and

that you were lords of Hershalaïm long before the houses of Suabia,

Anhalt, Saxony, and Bavaria were heard of.

It may be that the negroes of Angola, and those of Guinea, are much more

ancient than you, and that they adored a beautiful serpent before the

Egyptians knew their Isis, and you dwelt near Lake Sirbo; but the

negroes have not yet communicated their books to us.

THIRD LETTER.

_On a few Crosses which befell God's People._

Far from accusing you, gentlemen, I have always regarded you with

compassion. Permit me here to remind you of what I have read in the

preliminary discourse to the "Essay on the Spirit and Manners of

Nations," and on general history. Here we find, that two hundred and

thirty-nine thousand and twenty Jews were slaughtered by one another,

from the worshipping of the golden calf to the taking of the ark by the

Philistines--which cost fifty thousand and seventy Jews their lives, for

having dared to look upon the ark, while those who had so insolently

taken it in war, were acquitted with only the piles, and a fine of five

golden mice, and five golden anuses. You will not deny that the

slaughter of two hundred and thirty-nine thousand and twenty men, by

your fellow-countrymen, without reckoning those whom you lost in

alternate war and slavery, must have been very detrimental to a rising

colony.

How should I do otherwise than pity you? seeing that ten of your tribes

were absolutely annihilated, or perhaps reduced to two hundred families,

which, it is said, are to be found in China and Tartary. As for the two

other tribes, I need not tell you what has happened to them. Suffer then

my compassion, and do not impute to me ill-will.

FOURTH LETTER.

_The Story of Micah._

Be not displeased at my asking from you some elucidation of a singular

passage in your history, with which the ladies of Paris and people of

fashion are but slightly acquainted.

Your Moses had not been dead quite thirty-eight years when the mother

of Micah, of the tribe of Benjamin, lost eleven hundred shekels, which

are said to be equivalent to about six hundred livres of our money. Her

son returned them to her; the text does not inform us that he had not

stolen them. The good Jewess immediately had them made into idols, and,

according to custom, built them a little movable chapel. A Levite of

Bethlehem offered himself to perform the service for ten francs per

annum, two tunics, and his victuals.

A tribe (afterwards called the tribe of Dan) searching that neighborhood

for something to plunder, passed near Micah's house. The men of Dan,

knowing that Micah's mother had in her house a priest, a seer, a

diviner, a rhoë, inquired of him if their excursion would be lucky--if

they should find a good booty. The Levite promised them complete

success. They began by robbing Micah's chapel, and took from her even

her Levite. In vain did Micah and his mother cry out: "You are carrying

away my gods! You are stealing my priest!" The robbers silenced them,

and went, through devotion, to put to fire and sword the little town of

Dan, whose name this tribe adopted.

These freebooters were very grateful to Micah's gods, which had done

them such good service, and placed them in a new tabernacle. The crowd

of devotees increasing, a new priest was wanted, and one presented

himself. Those who are not conversant with your history will never

divine who this chaplain was: but, gentlemen, _you_ know that it was

Moses' own grandson, one Jonathan, son of Gershom, son of Moses and

Jethro's daughter.

You will agree with me, that the family of Moses was rather a singular

one. His brother, at the age of one hundred, cast a golden calf and

worshipped it; and his grandson turned chaplain to the idols for money.

Does not this prove that your religion was not yet formed, and that you

were a long time groping in the dark before you became perfect

Israelites as you now are?

To my question you answer, that our Simon Peter Barjonas did as much;

that he commenced his apostleship with denying his master. I have

nothing to reply, except it be, that we must always distrust ourselves;

and so great is my own self-distrust, that I conclude my letter with

assuring you of my utmost indulgence, and requesting yours.

FIFTH LETTER.

_Jewish Assassinations. Were the Jews Cannibals? Had their Mothers

Commerce with Goats? Did their Fathers and Mothers Immolate their

Children? With a few other fine Actions of God's People._

Gentlemen,--I have been somewhat uncourteous to your secretary. It is

against the rules of politeness to scold a servant in the presence of

his master; but self-important ignorance is revolting in a Christian who

makes himself the servant of a Jew. I address myself directly to you,

that I may have nothing more to do with your livery.

_Jewish Calamities and Great Assassinations._

Permit me, in the first place, to lament over all your calamities; for,

besides the two hundred and thirty-nine thousand and twenty Israelites

killed by order of the Lord, I find that Jephthah's daughter was

immolated by her father. Turn which way you please--twixt the text as

you will--dispute as you like against the fathers of the Church; still

he did to her as he had vowed; and he had vowed to cut his daughter's

throat in thanksgiving to God. An excellent thanksgiving!

Yes, you have immolated human victims to the Lord; but be consoled; I

have often told you that our Celts and all nations have done so

formerly. What says M. de Bougainville, who has returned from the island

of Otaheite--that island of Cytherea, whose inhabitants, peaceful, mild,

humane, and hospitable, offer to the traveller all that they

possess--the most delicious of fruits--the most beautiful and most

obliging of women? He tells us that these people have their jugglers;

and that these jugglers force them to sacrifice their children to apes,

which they call their gods.

I find that seventy brothers of Abimelech were put to death on the same

stone by this Abimelech, the son of Gideon and a prostitute. This son of

Gideon was a bad kinsman, and this Gideon, the friend of God, was very

debauched.

Your Levite going on his ass to Gibeah--the Gibeonites wanting to

violate him--his poor wife violated in his stead, and dying in

consequence--the civil war that ensued--all your tribe of Benjamin

exterminated, saving only six hundred men--give me inexpressible pain.

You lost, all at once, five fine towns which the Lord destined for you,

at the end of the lake of Sodom; and that for an inconceivable attempt

upon the modesty of two angels. Really, this is much worse than what

your mothers are accused of with the goats. How should I have other than

the greatest pity for you, when I find murder and bestiality established

against your ancestors, who are our first spiritual fathers, and our

near kinsmen according to the flesh? For after all, if you are descended

from Shem, we are descended from Japhet. We are therefore evidently

cousins.

_Melchim, or Petty Kings of the Jews._

Your Samuel had good reason for not wishing you to have kings; for

nearly all your kings were assassins, beginning with David, who

assassinated Mephibosheth, son of Jonathan, his tender friend, whom he

"loved with a love-greater than that of woman"; who assassinated Uriah,

the husband of Bathsheba; who assassinated even the infants at the

breast in the villages in alliance with his protector Achish; who on his

death-bed commanded the assassination of his general Joab and his

counsel Shimei--beginning, I say, with this David, and with Solomon, who

assassinated his own brother Adonijah, clinging in vain to the altar,

and ending with Herod "the Great," who assassinated his brother-in-law,

his wife, and all his kindred, including even his children.

I say nothing of the fourteen thousand little boys whom your petty king,

this mighty Herod, had slaughtered in the village of Bethlehem. They

are, as you know, buried at Cologne with our eleven thousand virgins;

and one of these infants is still to be seen entire. You do not believe

this authentic story, because it is not in your canon, and your Flavius

Josephus makes no mention of it. I say nothing of the eleven hundred

thousand men killed in the town of Jerusalem alone, during its siege by

Titus. In good faith, the cherished nation is a very unlucky one.

_Did the Jews Eat Human Flesh?_

Among your calamities, which have so often made me shudder, I have

always reckoned your misfortune in having eaten human flesh. You say

that this happened only on great occasions; that it was not you whom the

Lord invited to His table to eat the horse and the horseman, and that

only the birds were the guests. I am willing to believe it.

_Were the Jewish Ladies Intimate with Goats?_

You assert that your mothers had no commerce with he-goats, nor your

fathers with she-goats. But pray, gentlemen, why are you the only people

upon earth whose laws have forbidden such commerce? Would any legislator

ever have thought of promulgating this extraordinary law if the offence

had not been common?

_Did the Jews Immolate Human Victims?_

You venture to affirm that you have never immolated human victims to the

Lord. What, then, was the murder of Jephthah's daughter, who was really

immolated, as we have already shown from your own books?

How will you explain the anathema of the thirty-two virgins, that were

the tribute of the Lord, when you took thirty-two thousand Midianitish

virgins and sixty-one thousand asses? I will not here tell you, that

according to this account there were not two asses for each virgin; but

I will ask you, what was this tribute for the Lord? According to your

Book of Numbers, there were sixteen thousand girls for your soldiers,

sixteen thousand for your priests, and on the soldiers' share there was

levied a tribute of thirty-two virgins for the Lord. What became of

them? You had no nuns. What was the Lord's share in all your wars, if it

was not blood? Did not the priest Samuel hack in pieces King Agag, whose

life King Saul had saved? Did he not sacrifice him as the Lord's share?

Either renounce your sacred books, in which, according to the decision

of the church, I firmly believe, or acknowledge that your forefathers

offered up to God rivers of human blood, unparalleled by any people on

earth.

_The Thirty-two Thousand Virgins, the Seventy-five Thousand Oxen, and

the Fruitful Desert of Midian._

Let your secretary no longer evade--no longer equivocate, respecting the

carnage of the Midianites and their villages. I feel great concern that

your butcher-priest Eleazar, general of the Jewish armies, should have

found in that little miserable and desert country, seventy-five thousand

oxen, sixty-one thousand asses, and six hundred and seventy-five

thousand sheep, without reckoning the rams and the lambs.

Now if you took thirty-two thousand infant girls, it is likely that

there were as many infant boys, and as many fathers and mothers. These

united amount to a hundred and twenty-eight thousand captives, in a

desert where there is nothing to eat, nothing to drink but brackish

water, and which is inhabited by some wandering Arabs, to the number of

two or three thousand at most. You will besides observe, that, on all

the maps, this frightful country is not more than eight leagues long,

and as many broad.

But were it as large, as fertile, and as populous as Normandy or the

Milanese, no matter. I hold to the text, which says, the Lord's share

was thirty-two maidens. Confound as you please Midian by the Red Sea

with Midian by Sodom; I shall still demand an account of my thirty-two

thousand virgins. Have you employed your secretary to calculate how many

oxen and maidens the fine country of Midian is capable of feeding?

Gentlemen, I inhabit a canton which is not the Land of Promise; but we

have a lake much finer than that of Sodom, and our soil is moderately

productive. Your secretary tells me that an acre of Midian will feed

three oxen: I assure you, gentlemen, that with us an acre will feed but

one. If your secretary will triple the revenue of my lands, I will give

him good wages, and will not pay him with drafts on the

receivers-general. He will not find a better situation in all the

country of Midian than with me; but unfortunately this man knows no more

of oxen than he does of golden calves.

As for the thirty-two thousand maidenheads, I wish him joy of them. Our

little country is as large as Midian. It contains about four thousand

drunkards, a dozen attorneys, two men of sense, and four thousand

persons of the fair sex, who are not uniformly pretty. These together

make about eight thousand people, supposing that the registrar who gave

me the account did not exaggerate by one-half, according to custom.

Either your priests or ours would have had considerable difficulty in

finding thirty-two thousand virgins for their use in our country. This

makes me very doubtful concerning the numberings of the Roman people, at

the time when their empire extended just four leagues from the Tarpeian

rock, and they carried a handful of hay at the end of a pole for a

standard. Perhaps you do not know that the Romans passed five hundred

years in plundering their neighbors before they had any historian, and

that their numberings, like their miracles, are very suspicious.

As for the sixty-one thousand asses, the fruits of your conquests in

Midian--enough has been said of asses.

_Jewish Children Immolated by their Mothers._

I tell you, that your fathers immolated their children; and I call your

prophets to witness. Isaiah reproaches them with this cannibalish crime:

"Slaying the children of the valleys under the clefts of the rocks."

You will tell me, that it was not to the Lord Adonai that the women

sacrificed the fruit of their womb--that it was to some other god. But

what matters it whether you called him to whom you offered up your

children Melkom, or Sadaï, or Baal, or Adonai? That which it concerns us

to know is, that you were parricides. It was to strange idols, you say,

that your fathers made their offerings. Well,--I pity you still more for

being descended from fathers at once both parricidal and idolatrous. I

condole with you, that your fathers were idolaters for forty successive

years in the desert of Sinai, as is expressly said by Jeremiah, Amos,

and St. Stephen.

You were idolaters in the time of the Judges; and the grandson of Moses

was priest of the tribe of Dan, who, as we have seen, were all

idolaters; for it is necessary to repeat--to insist; otherwise

everything is forgotten.

You were idolaters under your kings; you were not faithful to one God

only, until after Esdras had restored your books. Then it was that your

uninterruptedly true worship began; and by an incomprehensible

providence of the Supreme Being, you have been the most unfortunate of

all men ever since you became the most faithful--under the kings of

Syria, under the kings of Egypt, under Herod the Idumæan, under the

Romans, under the Persians, under the Arabs, under the Turks--until now,

that you do me the honor of writing to me, and I have the honor of

answering you.

SIXTH LETTER.

_Beauty of the Land of Promise._

Do not reproach me with not loving you. I love you so much that I wish

you were in Hershalaïm, instead of the Turks, who ravage your country;

but who, nevertheless, have built a very fine mosque on the foundations

of your temple, and on the platform constructed by your Herod.

You would cultivate that miserable desert, as you cultivated it

formerly; you would carry earth to the bare tops of your arid mountains;

you would not have much corn, but you would have very good vines, a few

palms, olive trees, and pastures.

Though Palestine does not equal Provence, though Marseilles alone is

superior to all Judæa, which had not one sea-port; though the town of

Aix is incomparably better situated than Jerusalem, you might

nevertheless make of your territory almost as much as the Provencals

have made of theirs. You might execute, to your hearts' content, your

own detestable psalmody in your own detestable jargon.

It is true, that you would have no horses; for there are not, nor have

there ever been, about Hershalaïm, any but asses. You would often be in

want of wheat, but you would obtain it from Egypt or Syria.

You might convey merchandise to Damascus and to Said on your asses--or

indeed on camels--which you never knew anything of in the time of your

Melchim, and which would be a great assistance to you. In short,

assiduous toil, to which man is born, would fertilize this land, which

the lords of Constantinople and Asia Minor neglect.

This promised land of yours is very bad. Are you acquainted with St.

Jerome? He was a Christian priest, one of those men whose books you do

not read. However, he lived a long time in your country; he was a very

learned person--not indeed slow to anger, for when contradicted he was

prodigal of abuse--but knowing your language better than you do, for he

was a good grammarian. Study was his ruling passion; anger was only

second to it. He had turned priest, together with his friend Vincent, on

condition that they should never say mass nor vespers, lest they should

be too much interrupted in their studies; for being directors of women

and girls, had they been moreover obliged to labor in the priestly

office, they would not have had two hours in the day left for Greek,

Chaldee, and the Jewish idiom. At last, in order to have more leisure,

Jerome retired altogether, to live among the Jews at Bethlehem, as Huet,

bishop of Avranches, retired to the Jesuits, at the house of the

professed, Rue St. Antoine, at Paris.

Jerome did, it is true, embroil himself with the bishop of Jerusalem,

named John, with the celebrated priest Rufinus, and with several of his

friends; for, as I have already said, Jerome was full of choler and

self-love, and St. Augustine charges him with levity and fickleness: but

he was not the less holy, he was not the less learned, nor is his

testimony the less to be received, concerning the nature of the wretched

country in which his ardor for study and his melancholy confined him.

Be so obliging as to read his letter to Dardanus, written in the year

414 of our era, which, according to the Jewish reckoning, is the year of

the world 4000, or 4001, or 4003, or 4004, as you please.

"I beg of those who assert that the Jewish people, after the coming out

of Egypt, took possession of this country, which to us, by the passion

and resurrection of our Saviour, has become truly a land of promise--I

beg of them, I say, to show us what this people possessed. Their whole

dominions extended only from Dan to Beersheba, about one hundred and

sixty miles in length. The Holy Scriptures give no more to David and to

Solomon.... I am ashamed to say what is the breadth of the land of

promise, and I fear that the pagans will thence take occasion to

blaspheme. It is but forty-six miles from Joppa to our little town of

Bethlehem, beyond which all is a frightful desert."

Read also the letter to one of his devotees, in which he says, that from

Jerusalem to Bethlehem there is nothing but pebbles, and no water to

drink; but that farther on, towards the Jordan, you find very good

valleys in that country full of bare mountains. This really was a land

of milk and honey, in comparison with the abominable desert of Horeb and

Sinai, from which you originally came. The sorry province of Champagne

is the land of promise, in relation to some parts of the Landes of

Bordeaux--the banks of the Aar are the land of promise, when compared

with the little Swiss cantons; all Palestine is very bad land, in

comparison with Egypt, which you say you came out of as thieves; but it

is a delightful country, if you compare it with the deserts of

Jerusalem, Sodom, Horeb, Sinai, Kadesh, etc.

Go back to Judæa as soon as you can. I ask of you only two or three

Hebrew families, in order to establish a little necessary trade at Mount

Krapak, where I reside. For, if you are (like us) very ridiculous

theologians, you are very intelligent buyers and sellers, which we are

not.

SEVENTH LETTER.

_Charity which God's People and the Christians should entertain for each

other._

My tenderness for you has only a few words more to say. We have been

accustomed for ages to hang you up between two dogs; we have repeatedly

driven you away through avarice; we have recalled you through avarice

and stupidity; we still, in more towns than one, make you pay for

liberty to breathe the air: we have, in more kingdoms than one,

sacrificed you to God; we have burned you as holocausts--for I will not

follow your example, and dissemble that we have offered up sacrifices of

human blood; all the difference is, that our priests, content with

applying your money to their own use, have had you burned by laymen;

while your priests always immolated the human victims with their own

sacred hands. You were monsters of cruelty and fanaticism in Palestine;

we have been so in Europe: my friends, let all this be forgotten.

Would you live in peace? Imitate the Banians and the Guebers. They are

much more ancient than you are; they are dispersed like you; they are,

like you, without a country. The Guebers, in particular, who are the

ancient Persians, are slaves like you, after being for a long while

masters. They say not a word. Follow their example. You are calculating

animals--try to be thinking ones.

JOB.

Good day, friend Job! thou art one of the most ancient originals of

which books make mention; thou wast not a Jew; we know that the book

which bears thy name is more ancient than the Pentateuch. If the

Hebrews, who translated it from the Arabic, made use of the word

"Jehovah" to signify God, they borrowed it from the Phoenicians and

Egyptians, of which men of learning are assured. The word "Satan" was

not Hebrew; it was Chaldæan, as is well known.

Thou dwelledst on the confines of Chaldæa. Commentators, worthy of their

profession, pretend that thou didst believe in the resurrection,

because, being prostrate on thy dunghill, thou hast said, in thy

nineteenth chapter, that thou wouldst one day rise up from it. A patient

who wishes his cure is not anxious for resurrection in lieu of it; but I

would speak to thee of other things.

Confess that thou wast a great babbler; but thy friends were much

greater. It is said that thou possessedst seven thousand sheep, three

thousand camels, one thousand cows, and five hundred she-asses. I will

reckon up their value:

LIVRES

Seven thousand sheep, at three livres ten

sous apiece 22,500

Three thousand camels at fifty crowns apiece 450,000

A thousand cows, one with the other, cannot

be valued at less than 80,000

And five hundred she-asses, at twenty francs

an ass 10,000

The whole amounts to 562,500

without reckoning thy furniture, rings and jewels.

I have been much richer than thou; and though I have lost a great part

of my property and am ill, like thyself I have not murmured against God,

as thy friends seem to reproach thee with sometimes doing.

I am not at all pleased with Satan, who, to induce thee to sin, and to

make thee forget God, demanded permission to take away all thy property,

and to give thee the itch. It is in this state that men always have

recourse to divinity. They are prosperous people who forgot God. Satan

knew not enough of the world at that time; he has improved himself

since; and when he would be sure of any one, he makes him a

farmer-general, or something better if possible, as our friend Pope has

clearly shown in his history of the knight Sir Balaam.

Thy wife was an impertinent, but thy pretended friends Eliphaz the

Temanite, Bildad the Shuite, and Zophar, the Naamathite, were much more

insupportable. They exhorted thee to patience in a manner that would

have roused the mildest of men; they made thee long sermons more

tiresome than those preached by the knave V----e at Amsterdam, and by so

many other people.

It is true that thou didst not know what thou saidst, when

exclaiming--"My God, am I a sea or a whale, to be shut up by Thee as in

a prison?" But thy friends knew no more when they answered thee, "that

the morn cannot become fresh without dew, and that the grass of the

field cannot grow without water." Nothing is less consolatory than this

axiom.

Zophar of Naamath reproached thee with being a prater; but none of these

good friends lent thee a crown. I would not have treated thee thus.

Nothing is more common than people who advise; nothing more rare than

those who assist. Friends are not worth much, from whom we cannot

procure a drop of broth if we are in misery. I imagine that when God

restored thy riches and health, these eloquent personages dared not

present themselves before thee, hence the comforters of Job have become

a proverb.

God was displeased with them, and told them sharply, in chap, xlii.,

that they were tiresome and imprudent, and he condemned them to a fine

of seven bullocks and seven rams, for having talked nonsense. I would

have condemned them for not having assisted their friend.

I pray thee, tell me if it is true, that thou livedst a hundred and

forty years after this adventure. I like to learn that honest people

live long; but men of the present day must be great rogues, since their

lives are comparatively so short.

As to the rest, the book of Job is one of the most precious of

antiquity. It is evident that this book is the work of an Arab who lived

before the time in which we place Moses. It is said that Eliphaz, one of

the interlocutors, is of Teman, which was an ancient city of Arabia.

Bildad was of Shua, another town of Arabia. Zophar was of Naamath, a

still more eastern country of Arabia.

But what is more remarkable, and which shows that this fable cannot be

that of a Jew, is, that three constellations are spoken of, which we now

call Arcturus, Orion, and the Pleiades. The Hebrews never had the least

knowledge of astronomy; they had not even a word to express this

science; all that regards the mental science was unknown to them,

inclusive even of the term geometry.

The Arabs, on the contrary, living in tents, and being continually led

to observe the stars, were perhaps the first who regulated their years

by the inspection of the heavens.

The more important observation is, that one God alone is spoken of in

this book. It is an absurd error to imagine that the Jews were the only

people who recognized a sole God; it was the doctrine of almost all the

East, and the Jews were only plagiarists in that as in everything else.

In chapter xxxviii. God Himself speaks to Job from the midst of a

whirlwind, which has been since imitated in Genesis. We cannot too often

repeat, that the Jewish books are very modern. Ignorance and fanaticism

exclaim, that the Pentateuch is the most ancient book in the world. It

is evident, that those of Sanchoniathon, and those of Thaut, eight

hundred years anterior to those of Sanchoniathon; those of the first

Zerdusht, the "Shasta," the "Vedas" of the Indians, which we still

possess; the "Five Kings of China"; and finally the Book of Job, are of

a much remoter antiquity than any Jewish book. It is demonstrated that

this little people could only have annals while they had a stable

government; that they only had this government under their kings; that

its jargon was only formed, in the course of time, of a mixture of

Phœnician and Arabic. These are incontestable proofs that the

Phœnicians cultivated letters a long time before them. Their

profession was pillage and brokerage; they were writers only by chance.

We have lost the books of the Egyptians and Phœnicians, the Chinese,

Brahmins, and Guebers; the Jews have preserved theirs. All these

monuments are curious, but they are monuments of human imagination

alone, in which not a single truth, either physical or historical, is to

be learned. There is not at present any little physical treatise that

would not be more useful than all the books of antiquity.

The good Calmet, or Dom Calmet (for the Benedictines like us to give

them their Dom), that simple compiler of so many reveries and

imbecilities; that man whom simplicity has rendered so useful to whoever

would laugh at antique nonsense, faithfully relates the opinion of those

who would discover the malady with which Job was attacked, as if Job was

a real personage. He does not hesitate in saying that Job had the

smallpox, and heaps passage upon passage, as usual, to prove that which

is not. He had not read the history of the smallpox by Astruc; for

Astruc being neither a father of the Church nor a doctor of Salamanca,

but a very learned physician, the good man Calmet knew not that he

existed. Monkish compilers are poor creatures!

BY AN INVALID,

At the Baths of Aix-la-Chapelle.