Enlightenment thinkers, both French and German, argued that the objectionable features of Judaism had to be erased before the Jew could be free: Jews… - Paul Johnson

Twain had it too and Alexander Woollcott. Stephen Spender and Barbara Skelton insisted Cyril Connolly had it, on rare occasions, when the word for it was “magnificent,” but I only heard faint echoes of this gigantic gift. Sir Isaiah Berlin had it, and I heard him: but the trouble was, once he got really going on a line of fantastic humor, he began to speak so fast, and his accent became so impenetrable, that the sense wasdifficult to grasp, though his evident delight in his fun was so furious that you laughed all the same.

He [Augustine] admitted: 'I am the sort of man who writes because he has made progress, and who makes progress by writing.'

The Koheleth, the writer of Ecclesiastes, shows himself torn between new foreign ideas and his inherited piety, between the critical spirit and conservatism. The impact of Hellenization on educated Jews was in many ways similar to the impact of the enlightenment on the eighteenth-century ghetto. It woke the Temple-state from its enchanted sleep. It was a destabilizing force spiritually and, above all, it was a secularizing, materialistic force.