Antisemitism or clandestine Judeophobia? - The case of the Opinions des Anciens sur les Juifs

This clandestine manuscript, attributed to Mirabaud, follows the anti-Judaism of Hellenistic historians and geographers. Léon Poliakov, in L’Histoire de l’antisémitisme, notes that the observations of this text contain “a seed” of the arguments of future “racists.” In reality, this judgment does not take into account the philosophical context in which the author’s criticism takes place. The main polemical focus of the text is still in fact Christianity, with Judaism being referred to only as a historical background.