Deists and Anti-Semitism

McDermott ( Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths , 151) doesn’t exonerate orthodox Christianity from responsibility for modern anti-Semitism, but he points to the large role played by Deist attacks on the uniqueness of Israel and their decoupling of pure Christianity from the infection of Judaism:

“If the Jews were no different from their barbarous neighbors and in fact imported to Christianity unspiritual pagan notions, then it stood to deist reason that Christianity must be purged of its Jewish elements in order to get back to its original purity. As Morgan put it, Judaism was the foul source of everything in Christianity contrary to a pure, simple, and reasonable natural religion. An enormous distinction needed to be made between the gentle Christ and ‘the savage remnants of Judaism in Christian doctrines and practices.’ Little wonder that Frank Manuel traces the rise of “scientific” anti-Semitism at the end of the nineteenth century to deist attacks on Jewish religion a little less than two centuries earlier.”