GEN190 With the French Revolution at the end of the 18th-century, the emancipation of the Jews of western and central Europe began. Equality and citizenship came slowly and grudgingly, but the fact that they took place at all seemed almost miraculous to the Jews of the period.  Wherever freedom was made available, Jews avidly took advantage of it. In the process, Jews radically transformed their view of human nature and its battle between good and evil. The society in which Jews enthusiastically immersed themselves was one of extraordinary economic expansion and cultural creativity, of scientific and technological triumph, and thus, of apparently well-founded optimism. Human initiative, not tradition or revelation, was credited for making all this possible. Human reason was viewed as the engine that empowered longer, fuller lives; if applied to great social problems, it was believed that reason would soon eliminate many of humankind’s ancient ills.  This certainly affected society’s understanding of the evil that people did to each other.  The problems we for so long blamed on the devil were really our own inability to shake our outmoded, self-imposed superstition and dimwittedness.  Now that human progress had finally begun to show its genius, we saw evidence of its benefits everywhere. Modern Jewry had special reasons to espouse the optimism embraced by the general society. In this new freedom we personally experienced the benefits of reason; we perceived our emancipation as a modern-day reenactment of that classic redemptive experience of the Jewish people, the Exodus from Egypt. Only this time the mighty hand and the outstretched arm were not God’s but humanity’s, acting through the new political and social order. Disproportionately, Jews became the prophets of education, culture and social betterment. The yetzer ha-ra now seemed a nightmare of an impoverished premodern imagination; the yetzer ha-tov was seen as a primal aspect of modern rationality, as championed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. From early in the 19th century until the second half of the 20th century, Jewish teachers proclaimed the essential goodness of human nature and the benevolent power of human reasoning. They seized whatever rabbinic evidence they could find to convince those few who still doubted that we ourselves have the means to overcome the evil urge. For instance, “R. Samuel b. Nahman said: The words ‘Behold, it was good’ refer to the impulse to good, and the words “Behold, it was very good” [this verse] refer to the impulse to evil. But how can the impulse to evil be termed ‘very good’? Extraordinary! However, were it not for the impulse to evil, a man would not build a house, take a wife, or beget children. As Solomon said, ‘Again I considered all the labor and excellent work and found them to be the result of man’s rivalry with his neighbor’ [Ecclesiastes 4:4] Genesis Rabbah 9:5-11.  Judaism now taught that by using our God-given human intelligence, we could harness even the evil urge in the service of the good. BOROJMV 178-9