Montaigne's "Jewishness"

We live in strange times. Too often, scholarship becomes the battle ground of our "culture wars" and identity politics. Even our dear Michel de Montaigne--who managed to safely navigate the cultural conflicts and civil strife of 16th century France--is, through insinuation, not argument, retrospectively recruited to score points on behalf of Catholic identity, or atheism, or Jewish identity. It is a sad state of affairs.

The facts are well known. Montaigne's mother was descended from Spanish Jews and a convert to Protestantism; Michel himself was raised as a Roman Catholic. His "scriptures," however, if by that term we mean the texts upon which he meditated constantly and that informed his thinking about the world, were composed by pagan intellectuals from classical Greece and Rome. Montaigne was an early modern humanist. He expressed personal loyalty to the faith of his baptism (Catholicism) but regarded his Catholic identity an accident of birth. He never felt moved to change his accidental confessional affiliation because, to put it bluntly, his broadly skeptical epistemology made him, for the most part, religiously apathetic. Besides, in his own time, confessional changes were political statements. To change one's confessional identity from Catholic to Protestant was revolutionary; to convert from Catholicism to Judaism would have been reckless; to declare oneself an atheist was just as dangerous as conversion to Judaism (if not moreso); converting to Islam would have been bizarre, and possibly suicidal; conversion to Hinduism, Buddhism or even Eastern Orthodoxy, simply unthinkable. His religious choices were really quite limited and, as far as he was concerned, the differences among the choices realistically available to him (Protestant or Catholic) were not differences worth losing one's life over.

The fact that he had "Jewish blood" as it has been termed by some commentators did not make him a humanist or a skeptic. It is reasonable to infer that the persecution his mother's family had faced made him sensitive to the problem of religious persecution more generally, but he lived in an age when religious persecution was pandemic--he did not require exposure to anti-semitism to be sensitive to the depth or scale of the problem.

"Jewish blood" (which is no different than any other type of human blood) did not determine Montaigne's thinking and, frankly, those who would make such a suggestion out of sympathy or bigotry have abandoned scholarship for the low road of cultural politics, if not racism.