On the European continent the situation was different, still rooted in the past, and in the eighteenth century that icon of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire, was repelled by the Jews' apparent medievalism.
In the infancy of the nineteenth-century, before Napoleon was prepared to guarantee the Jews of France the civic equality that had been ushered in by the French Revolution, Jewish leaders had to satisfy him that their people deserved French citizenship by meeting the requirements of modernity, assuring him, for example, of their repudiation of polygamy (which in fact had not been practised by European Ashkenazim since the early Middle Ages) and that their premier allegiance was to France.
This they were easily able to do, and integrated seamlessly into the fabric of France.
How ironic is the situation today, when in old England medievalism and segregation of the kind the Enlightenment swept away, and which had never existed in modern Britain, flourishes in pockets of the country.
Take, for example, Blackburn, Lancashire, where an seemingly inexorable population replacement is taking place by people who seem in many respects mired in medievalism. We glimpse men strutting ahead of their niqab-clad wives, and hear government adviser Dame Louise Casey fearlessly state what her masters in government apparently did not want to her to express.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnmI9eFzO9A
Islamophobic? In this video dating to 2016 Melanie Phillips effortlessly routs Roshan Muhammed Salih (who appears regularly on Iran's Press TV interviewing demonisers of the Zionist Entity such as Jenny Tonge) when he tries to compare "Islamophobia" to antisemitism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4Sr8MZNgDo
Fear of Islamofascism, says Melanie (around 7:05), is "based on evidence and truth; antisemitism is based on lies".
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