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Allegory and Religious Pluralism: Biblical Interpretation in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract The Christian discourse of the literal and spiritual senses in the Bible was, in the long eighteenth century, no less tied to perceptions of Jewish interpretive abilities than it had been previously. However, rather than linking Jews with literalism, in many cases the early modern version of this discourse associated Jews with allegory. By touching upon three moments in the reception history of the Bible in the eighteenth century, this article exhibits the entanglement of religious identity and biblical allegory characteristic of this context. The English Newtonian, William Whiston, fervently resisted allegorical interpretations of the Bible in favor of scientific and literal explanations, and blamed Jewish manuscript corruption for any confusion of meaning. Johan Kemper was a convert whose recruitment to Uppsala University reveals an appetite on the part of university and governmental authorities for rabbinic and kabbalistic interpretive methods and their application to Christian texts. Finally, the German Jewish intellectual Moses Mendelssohn responded to challenges facing the Jewish community by combining traditional rabbinic approaches and early modern philosophy in defense of a multivocal reading of biblical texts. Furthermore, Mendelssohn’s insistence on the particularity of biblical symbols, that they are not universally accessible, informed his vision for religious pluralism. Each of these figures illuminates not only the thorny plight of biblical allegory in modernity, but also the ever-present barriers and passageways between Judaism and Christianity as they manifested during the European Enlightenment.