Explanation:
By contrast, the Radical Enlightenment, starting with John Toland’s Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland (1714), tended to view the then-extremely-narrow occupation structure of the Jews, and their focus on petty trade and money-lending, as entirely the fault of the surrounding society, which had long imposed stifling and intolerant restrictions and disabilities on the Jews. For Radical Enlighteners, the narrow, cramped, disfigured character of eighteenth-century Jewish society in Europe was ultimately the responsibility of Christianity and the Christian clergy.
Admittedly, the radicals showed no more sympathy for rabbis, Talmud, traditional Judaism and Jewish community governance than did moderate enlighteners. But their rejection of Christian religious authority, and the existing monarchical-aristocratic form of society, led them to take a much greater interest than moderate enlighteners in emancipating the Jewish people legally, socially and politically, and dismantling all the devices that separated them from the rest of society. This stance attracted more than a few “enlightened” Jews to their ranks.
Consequently, starting with the French Revolution, there arose the phenomenon of the modern revolutionary Jew adopting the principles of this Radical Enlightenment. Figures such as Zalkind Hourwitz, Abrham Furtado, Jacob Pereyre, Junius Frey and Hartog de Hartog Lemon, and later Moses Hess and Heinrich Heine, became notable activists in revolutionary movements that viewed the task of emancipating the Jews and integrating them into democratic republican society, on the basis of full equality, as one of their chief objectives.
