On receipt of information just in from Lisbon about the burning of thirty-two Jews, two Muslims, and three Jesuits by the Inquisition, Voltaire adopts the guise of a rabbi to deliver his most scathing attack on anti-Semitism. It turned out that the report was erroneous: only the Jesuit Malagrida had been burned this time. He had been involved in an attempted assassination of the king of Portugal, but Voltaire is correct in reporting that the clergy did not burn him for that reason, but for absurd “theological errors.” Voltaire continued to reprint this biting defense of the Jews nonetheless. The assassination attempt, along with the racketeering of Father La Valette, the subject of the “Letter of Charles Gouju,” contributed heavily to the suppression of Jesuits in France in 1764, joined by Portugal, Spain, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. The Jesuit Order was restored by Pope Pius VII in 1815.

My Dear Brethren, We have learned of the human sacrifice of forty-two victims that the savages of Lisbon held in public in the month of etanim in the 1691th year1 after the destruction of Jerusalem. These savages call such executions acts of faith. My brothers, these are not acts of charity. Raise our hearts to the Eternal!

In this horrifying ceremony, three of what the Europeans call monks and what we call kalenders, two Muslims, and thirty-seven of our condemned brothers were burned.

We have no authentic accounts as yet, apart from the Accordao dos inquisidores contra o Padre Gabriel Malagrida jesuita. The rest is only known to us through the pitiful letters of our Spanish brothers.

Alas! First see in this Accordao to what state of depravity God has abandoned so many of the peoples of Europe. The Jesuit Malagrida was accused of complicity in the assassination of the King of Portugal. The Council of Supreme Justice, established by the king, had this kalender declared demented and convicted him of having exhorted the assassins in God's name to revenge themselves of an undertaking against their honor by the murder of this prince; of having encouraged the guilty through his confessional, in accordance with a custom only too common in parts of Europe; and of having told them expressly that it would not even be a venial sin to kill their sovereign.

In what country on earth would a man accused of such a crime not have been solemnly judged by the civil courts of this prince, confronted with his accomplices and condemned to death, according to the laws?

Who would believe it, my brothers! The King of Portugal does not have the right to have a kalender accused of patricide judged! He has to ask permission from a Latin rabbi in Rome,2 and this Latin rabbi refused it! This king was obliged to return the accused to the Portuguese kalenders who alone can judge crimes against God, they say, as if God had given them the sovereign right to decide what offends him, and as if there were any greater crime against God than to assassinate a sovereign we regard as his image on earth!

The kalenders did not even question Malagrida regarding his complicity in this parricide. It was a small worldly error, they said, absorbed in the immensity of the crimes committed against the divine majesty.³

Malagrida thus stands convicted of having said that “a woman named Annah⁴ had been blessed in her mother's womb in the days of yore, that her daughter had spoken to her before being delivered into this world, that Mary had received several visions of the archangel Gabriel, that there will be three Antichrists, that the last one will be born of a kalender and a kalendress in Milano, and that Malagrida is his John the Baptist.

And that is why this poor Jesuit was burned in public in Lisbon at the age of seventy-five. Raise our hearts to the Eternal!

If the Jesuit Malagrida alone had been condemned to the flames, we wouldn't be talking about it in this holy synagogue. Little does it matter to us that the kalenders have burned a Jesuit kalender. We know only too well how often these European aesthetes⁵ have deserved this fate. It is one of the woes attached to this sect of barbarians. Their histories are filled with the crimes of their dervishes and we know only too well to what extent their fanatic disputes have bloodied thrones. Every time we have seen a prince murdered in Europe, the superstitions of these people have always sharpened the dagger. The learned chaplain of the French Counselor to Smyrna counted ninety-four kings, emperors, and princes put to death by the quarrels of these wretches, either by the fakirs’6 own hands or by the hands of their penitents. As to the number of lords or citizens these superstitions have massacred, it is immense, and in all these horrible murders, there is not one that was not meditated, encouraged, and blessed by this sacrament they call confession.

The first Christians, as you know my brothers, originally imitated our praiseworthy custom of accusing ourselves of our faults before God and of confessing ourselves sinners in our temples. Six centuries after the destruction of this holy temple, the archimandrites⁷ of Europe thought up the idea of obliging their fakirs to confess to them in secret twice a year. A few centuries later, people of society were obliged to do the same. You may well imagine what dangerous authority this custom gave those who wished to abuse it. Family secrets were now in their hands. Husbands lost influence over their wives and fathers over their children. The flames of discord were ignited in civil wars by these confessors who took sides and refused what they call absolution to those on the opposite side.

At last, they persuaded their penitents that God commanded them to kill the princes who displeased their archimandrites. Yesterday, my brothers, the counselor's chaplain showed us, in the history of the little nation of Franks⁸ who live on a patch of land at the edge of the Occident and who are not without merit, the story of a fakir named Clément who received explicit orders in confession from his prior, named Bourgoin, to go assassinate his legitimate king, named Henri, I think.⁹ Quite frankly, in the little I've read myself regarding these neighboring nations, I felt as though I were reading the history of cannibals. Raise our hearts to the Eternal!

My brothers, besides the monk named Malagrida, the savages burned two other monks whose names and sins I do not know. May God take their souls.

And then two Muslims were burned. Charity demands that, seized with horror, we shrug our shoulders, and pray for them. You know that when the Muslims conquered all Spain with their scimitars that they molested no one, forced no one to change their religion, and treated the vanquished with humanity, just as they did us Israelis. Your eyes have witnessed with what kindness the Turks have treated the Orthodox Christians, the Nestorian Christians, the papist Christians, the Disciples of John, the ancient ignicole Parsis10 and ourselves, the humble servants of Moses. This example of humanity was unable to soften the hearts of these savages who inhabit the little tongue of land called Portugal. Two Muslims were delivered to the cruelest of tortures because their fathers and grandfathers had a little less foreskin than the Portuguese, because they wash three times a day instead of once a week like the Portuguese, because they call the Eternal Being Allah instead of Dios like the Portuguese, and because they put their thumbs by their ears while reciting their prayers. Ah, my brothers, what good reasons for burning a man!

The counselor's chaplain showed me a notice from a great rabbi in the land of the Franks, whose name ends in ic and who lives in a burg or town called Soissons.¹¹ This good rabbi says in his notice, entitled Mandate, that we must regard all men as brothers and that a Christian should love a Turk. Long life to the good rabbi!

May all of Adam's children, white, red, black, grey, tanned, bearded or beardless, castrated or whole, think like him forever! And may all fanatics, persecutors, and the superstitious become men! Raise our hearts to the Eternal!

My brothers, it is time to shed our tears over our thirty-seven Israelites burned in the act of faith. I do not say that they were all slowly burned to death. We are told that three were whipped to death and that two were sent to prison. That leaves us thirty-two consumed by flames in this savage sacrifice.

What was their crime? Only to have been born. Their fathers begot them in a religion that their forefathers have professed these past five thousand years. They were born Israelites. They celebrated Passover in their cellars. And that is the sole reason the Portuguese burned them. We haven't been told that all of our brothers were eaten after having been thrown in the flames, but we must presume it of two rather plump fourteen-year-old boys and a chubby little twelve-year-old girl who were very appetizing.¹²

Would you believe that while the flames were devouring these innocent victims, the inquisitors and the other barbarians were chanting our prayers? The Grand Inquisitor himself was intoning the makib,13 or psalm, of our good King David, which begins with these words: “Have pity on me, oh Lord, in accordance with your divine mercy!”

This is how these pitiless monsters invoke the God of clemency and goodness, the God of mercy, while committing the most atrocious and barbaric crimes, exercising cruelties that even raging demons would not wish to perform on their brother demons. This is how, in a contradiction as absurd as their furor is abominable, that they offer our makibs to God and borrow our religion itself while punishing us for having been raised in that same religion. Raise our hearts to the Eternal!

(The preceding may be regarded as the first point of Rabbi Akib's sermon; the following, as his second point.)

Oh Pious tigers! Fanatic panthers! who have such contempt for your sect that you think you can only maintain it with the help of executioners! If you could reason, I would interrogate you. I would ask you why you immolate us, the fathers of your fathers?

What could you reply if I said to you that your God was of our religion? He was born a Jew and he was circumcised like all the other Jews. He received his baptism, as you admit, from John the Jew, which was an antique Jewish custom, an ablution done in those days, a ceremony we used on our neophytes. He fulfilled all the duties of our ancient laws. He lived a Jew, died a Jew, and you burn us because we are Jewish.

I call your own books to witness. Did Jesus say anywhere that the Mosaic Law was bad or false? Did he repeal it? Were his first disciples not circumcised? Did Peter not abstain from the meat forbidden by our law when he ate with the Israelites? And did Paul, become an apostle, not himself circumcise a few of his disciples? Did this same Paul not sacrifice in our temple, according to your own books? What were you to begin with but part of ourselves, who separated from us after a time?

Unnatural children, we are your fathers and the fathers of the Muslims. A misfortunate and respectable mother has had two daughters, and these two daughters have chased her from her house. And you reproach us for no longer inhabiting this demolished house! You make a crime of our misfortune and you punish us for it! But these Parsis, these sages, more ancient than us, the first Persians who were our conquerors and masters in the olden days and who taught us to read and write, are they not dispersed over this earth like us? Are not the Banians,14 more ancient than the Parsis, also scattered all over the borders of India, Persia, and Tartary without ever mixing with other nations or marrying foreign women? What am I saying? Your Christians, who are living peacefully under the yoke of the great Padishah¹⁵ of lands, do they ever wed Muslim girls, or girls of the Roman Church? Just what superiority do you claim over the fact that we never integrate ourselves in the nations we live in?

Your dementia goes so far as to say that we were dispersed because our fathers condemned the man you adore to agony. How ignorant you are! Can you not see that he was condemned only by the Romans? We had no right to swords. We were governed then by Quirinus, Varus, and Pilate since, God be praised, we have almost always been slaves. The torture of the cross was not a custom of our people. You will not find in our histories a single example of a man being crucified, nor the slightest reference to this chastisement. So cease persecuting an entire nation for an event for which it cannot be held responsible.

I need only your own books to confound you. You admit that Jesus called our Pharisees and priests “a race of vipers” and “hypocrites”¹⁶ in public. If one of your own continually walked through the streets of Rome calling the pope and his cardinals vipers and hypocrites, would you suffer it? It is true that the Pharisees denounced Jesus to the Roman governor who made him perish by the usual Roman tortures. Is that a reason to burn Jewish merchants and their daughters in Lisbon?

I know that certain barbarians, to justify their cruelty, accuse us of having been able to recognize the divinity of Jesus Christ, and of not having done so. I appeal to the scholars of Europe, for there are some. In their Gospels, Jesus sometimes calls himself the son of God or the son of man, but never God. And Paul never gave him this title.

Son of man is a very common expression in our language. Son of God means a just man, just as Belial¹⁷ means a wicked one. For three hundred years, the Christians considered Jesus a mediator sent by God, the most perfect of His creatures. It was only at the Council of Nicaea that the majority of bishops certified his divinity, despite the opposition of three-quarters of the empire. If the Christians themselves denied his divinity for that long and if there are still Christian societies today who deny it,18 by what preposterous reversal of logic can we be punished for failing to recognize it? Raise our hearts to the Eternal!

We shall not recriminate herein the various sects of Christians. We leave them to the reproaches they make to each other for having falsified so many books and passages, for having forged oracles by the sibyls and so many miracles. Their various sects reproach each other's prevarications more than we could ever do.

I will confine myself to a single question I will ask them. If someone, just leaving his auto-de-fé, should tell me he is a Christian, I will ask him in what way he can be one. Jesus never practiced confession, nor had it practiced. His Easter, or Passover, was certainly not that of a Portuguese. Can religious orders or Extreme Unction be found in the Gospels? He instituted neither cardinals, popes, Dominicans, priests, or inquisitors. He had no one burned. He recommended only respect of the laws, love of God and our neighbors, following the example of our prophets. If he came back to earth today, would he recognize himself in a single one of those who call themselves Christians?

Our enemies today make a crime of the fact that we robbed the Egyptians and slit the throats of several small nations in the hamlets we seized long ago, that we sacrificed people and even ate a few, as Ezekiel says. I admit we were an ignorant, barbarous, superstitious, and absurd people. But would it be just today to go burn the pope and all the monsignori in Rome because the early Romans raped the Sabine women and despoiled the Samnites?

Let the prevaricators, who need so much indulgence regarding their own laws, therefore stop persecuting and exterminating those who, as men, are their brothers and who, as Jews, are their fathers.

Let each man serve God in the religion in which he was born, without wishing to tear his neighbor's heart out over disputes no one understands.

Let each man serve his prince and his country without ever claiming to obey God in order to disobey the laws. Oh Adonaï, who has created us all, who does not desire the woes of your creatures! God, the father of us all, God of mercy, grant that there be no more fanatics, no more persecutors on this tiny globe, the smallest of your worlds! Raise our hearts to the Eternal! Amen.