On the contrary, its aim is to free everyone from fear, so that they may live in security, so far as possible. According to Spinoza:īut its ultimate purpose is not to dominate or control people by fear or subject them to the authority of another. In his main political work, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1677), Spinoza opposed superstition, argues for tolerance and the subordination of religion to the state, and pronounces in favor of liberal democracy. In Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, Jonathan Israel, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, credits Spinoza as the originator of the core principles of modern thought. For his rejection of revelation in favor of reason, Spinoza is recognized as one of the early and seminal figures of the Enlightenment. John Robison, who wrote Proofs of a Conspiracy published in 1798, reported that in the systems of the higher degrees of the Illuminati the doctrines are the same as those the pantheism of Baruch Spinoza. They are only distinguished accordingly as they fulfil or reject their mission. It does indeed know conscientious and indifferent Jews, good Jews, bad Jews or baptised Jews all, nevertheless, Jews with a mission which they cannot cast off. It does not know Orthodox and Liberal Jews. It does not know a Mosaic, prophetic and rabbinic Judaism, nor Orthodox and Liberal Judaism. It conceives Judaism as one and indivisible. “Orthodox” Judaism does not know any varieties of Judaism. This name was at first resented by “old” Jews.
It was the modern “progressive” Jews who first applied this name to “old,” “backward” Jews as a derogatory term. It was not the “Orthodox” Jews who introduced the word “orthodoxy” into Jewish discussion. As Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch commented in 1854: Effectively, the Sabbateans invented the term “Orthodox Judaism,” to suggest that their heretical interpretations were just an evolution of the true faith, while rejecting the traditions it was founded upon, which were the Torah and the Talmud, in favor of the antinomianism of the Kabbalah. The Jewish Reform movement, that began in Hamburg, Germany, and was associated with the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite in Charleston, North Carolina, was inspired by the activities of Samuel Jacobson, who confessed to have been influenced by Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 1786), and his friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781).Īs a proponent of the thought of Spinoza, Mendelssohn was the father of the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, a movement supporting the adoption of Enlightenment values, and promoted an expansion of Jewish rights within European society. According to Isaac Mayer Wise (1819 – 1900), a Scottish Rite Freemason, “Masonry is a Jewish institution whose history, degrees, charges, passwords, and explanations are Jewish from the beginning to the end.” Wise, who was called “the foremost rabbi in America,” was a leading exponent of the Jewish Reform movement, which along with Conservative Judaism, according to Rabbi Antelman in To Eliminate the Opiate, was an expression of Sabbatian influence on Judaism.
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