In that context, Enlightenment attitudes towards the Jews, a religious and cultural minority marginalized for centuries, showed what Zygmunt Bauman has called “allo-Semitism”. The Jews were still perceived as the others par excellence in a civilization that, emerging from and against a Christian worldview, was experiencing dramatic changes in its fundamental values and institutions and, thus, needed to redefine the position of those ‘internal strangers’. Therefore, the Jews became ‘good to think’ with regard to the integration of minorities into civil society, but the Enlightenment vision of emancipation stood uneasily alongside the identification of Judaism as contrary to all emancipatory values: this hindered a proper consideration of their actual aspirations, needs, and concerns.
Accordingly, such ‘progressive’ intellectuals as Christian von Dohm and Henri Grégoire regarded the Jews as well-suited to contribute to their own self-realization and to the cultural, social, and political advancement of European civilization only if they discarded their ‘obsolete’ lifestyle and accepted to conform to a new, ‘rational’ model of mankind. Thus, the Jews were required to assimilate into surrounding society, as actually happened in the emancipation process following the French Revolution.
The case of Jewish emancipation proves that the Enlightenment reflection on the inclusion of minorities was essentially insensitive to diversity and furthered the elimination of otherness through assimilation. The Enlightenment discourse of emancipation ultimately promoted the development of European society as a homogeneous super-personal entity, largely controlled by panoptical state structures.
