134 Mark Washofs

writings of others ought to heighten our sensitivity to the stories that we ourselves tell as we search out the significance of the texts of Jewish law for our own religious lives.

Notes

1. An endnote may be a bad place for a lengthy excursus, but I need to say something about the periodization scheme of this article. By the“Enlightenment ” we generally mean the intellectual movement inspired by the 18™-century philosphes, whom Peter Gay describes as“a loose, informal, wholly unorganized coalition of cultural critics, religious skeptics, and political reformers from Edinburgh to Naples, Paris to Berlin, Boston to Philadelphia ”; The Enlightenment: An Interpretation . The Rise of Modern Paganism(New York : Knopf, 1966), 3. Characteristic of these thinkers was the desire to know, to pursue knowledge in an atmosphere of total freedom, and this included quite prominently freedom from the domination of religious authority. It is for this reason that we come to associate the intellectual and cultural era known as the“Enlightenment ” with the social fact of secularization. I do not claim that the roots of secularization lie entirely in the 18"­century Enlightenment . It is clear that the secular world-view, to say nothing of the Enlightenment itself, is heavily dependent upon the transformations wrought by the Renaissance and the Reformation, the religious wars that ravaged 17"-century Europe , and the intellectual revolution fomented by such thinkers as Newton, Leibniz , Hobbes and Spinoza who preceded the formal dates of the Enlightenment . (Of course, if we date the Enlightenment as do some scholars from 1650-1750, much of the periodization difficulty disappears.) What I do claim is that the habits of thought and outlook generated in the Enlightenment period are essential to the phenomenon of secularization(see in the text at notes 2 and 3).

2. Peter Berger , The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York : Doubleday, 1967), 107-108.

3. I have oversimplified for the sake of brevity.“Religious pluralism” began, in the modern West, with the Reformation, and it took some time for Catholics and Protestants to reach the conclusion that neither side possessed such a monopoly on religious truth. The Thirty Years War brought them to the realization that some sort of religious toleration was a necessity if the state were to survive. Gradually, this realization became an affirmation of the positive value of individual conscience and freedom of religious choice. The point is that, over time, the government removed itself from the business of coercing religious behavior.