Religion et Politique: Saint-Simonians, Jews and the Jewish Paradigm

.This contribution offers a reflection on the use of Jewish paradigms in the Saint-Simonian school. The political movement of Count Saint-Simon united a number of European socialistic movements of the nineteenth century. In the cultural fervour that this essay is going to discuss, Jewish sources, and their political divulgence, constituted a dynamic and ecstatic push further encouraged by the readings of authors like romantic writer Josef Wroński, or Jewish scholar Joseph Salvador. Even before the school’s decline, due, among other things, to a turn towards a bizarre and questionable mysticism, Saint-Simonianism had showed a strong interest in religious issues and religious renewal. The school in itself was a sort of informal creed, whose fluid structure implied the rejection of mainstream social values, the construction of a new society based on novel economic and social approaches, and the development of a new, ethical Christianity that, first and foremost, questioned the Catholic Church.