自然的にのみ --ジョン・トーランドとユダヤ人の問題-- (冨田恭彦教授 退職記念号)

Abstract

This paper focusses on John Toland's 1714 Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews [RNJ]-an important work which, nonetheless, has received comparatively little scholarly attention. Although the main focus in on RNJ, I also engage with Toland's wider 'Hebraica'; I hope that revealing certain links (or 'sutures') between RNJ and Toland's treatment of Jewish thought, culture and history, in other texts, can help to elucidate the significance of RNJ and of his overall intellectual effort. First, I establish how, combining insights from Locke, Jewish apologetics (drawn especially from Rabbi Simone Luzzatto) and broad-ranging historical survey, RNJ provides an important political statement, by displacing theological with civic principles: citizenship, Toland insists, should not be determined by confessional or ethnic identity. To make this case, Toland offers a 'deconstruction' of providentialism and religious essentialism, as well as a catalogue of European Christendom's profound anti-Semitism. Together, these constitute what Frank Manuel has described as "the most psychologically acute analysis of Judeophobia in the 18th century". However, what I also highlight is the context that this political injunction presupposes. By considering RNJ in terms of Toland's wider 'Judaica', especially the Origines Judaicae and Nazarenus, we find that its claims are irreducible to Christian condescension towards Judaism and far more radical than a plea for the tolerance of an alien people. Toland consistently seeks to show the universal, philosophical, significance of Europe's Mosaic heritage; and the influence of Luzzatto strongly suggests that the specific claims Toland makes in RNJ should be located in the context of the wider promulgation of a 'Hebraic Republic' (and the philosophical naturalism that, for Toland, it entails). Accordingly, I try to show, the civic recognition that RNJ urges is the 'logical outcome' of a wider, metaphysical, position, rather than a liberal tokenism. For Toland, it seems, political naturalization follows organically from a philosophical naturalism.