Jesus was a learned Jew who said that learning was not necessary, who took the spirit and not the letter as the essence of the Law and who thus embra… - Paul Johnson

Moreover, if the Jews, by accepting the enlightenment, were to forfeit the particular claims of Judaism, it was by no means certain that they would get a quiet life in return. The country which came closest to Mendelssohn’s ideal was the United States, where the notions of the enlightenment rested on a solid basis of English parliamentarianism and tolerant religious pluralism. The very year Mendelssohn was writing Jerusalem, Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on Virginia (1782), argued that the existence of a variety of sensible, ethical religions was the best guarantee of material and spiritual progress, and of human freedom.

Brecht’s ‘basic laxity’ was one reason why, apart from his satellites and those tied to him by party bonds, he was generally unpopular with other writers. He was much despised by the academic writers of the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Horkheimer, etc.) as a ‘vulgar Marxist’. Adorno said that Brecht spent hours every day putting dirt under his fingernails so he looked like a worker.

Los judíos sencillamente suponen la preexistencia de un Dios omnipotente, que actúa pero al que nunca se describe ni caracteriza, y por lo tanto tiene la fuerza y la invisibilidad de la naturaleza misma: es significativo que el primer capítulo del Génesis, a diferencia de las restantes cosmogonías antiguas, armonice perfectamente, en esencia, con las explicaciones científicas modernas del origen del universo, y entre ellas con la teoría de la Gran Explosión.