Witch-hunts peaked amid scientific advance, not rational backwardness

Evidence

I believe that the production of Jewish incongruity as a by-product of the self-constitution and self-reproduction of the Christian Church has been a major cause of the prominence of the Jews among those of Europe’s Inner Demons that Norman Cohn so vividly described in his memorable study of European witch-hunt. Most remarkable among Cohn’s findings (and one that has found ample confirmation in numerous other studies of the problem) is the apparent lack of correlation between the intensity of witch scare and irrational fears in general, and the advances of scientific knowledge and general level of daily rationality. As a matter of fact, the explosion of modern scientific method and the powerful strides towards the rationalization of daily life in the early years of modern history coincided with the most fierce and vicious episode of witch-hunting in history. It appears that the irrationality of witchcraft myths and witch persecution was very loosely related to the retardation of Reason. It was, on the other hand, most intimately related to the intensity of anxieties and tensions provoked or generated by the collapse of the ancien régime and the advent of the modern order. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 133

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the modern ‘both rational and irrational’ dynamic — how rationality’s advance coincides with irrational persecution — seems central to Bauman’s whole Modernity-and-the-Holocaust thesis.
• XREF: Foreshadows Bauman’s core later argument that the Holocaust was a product of modernity, not a relapse into barbarism — the opposite of the ‘once upon a time / civilizational regression’ reading. — connects to: Enlightenment science created monsters that were not theologically constructed.; Enlightenment rationalism generated new monsters instead of eradicating them — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 352

Related

• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.80)
• Enlightenment rationalism generated new monsters instead of eradicating them (similarity 0.79)
• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. (similarity 0.79)
• Modern civilization was a necessary but not sufficient condition of the Holocaust. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Enlightenment science created monsters that were not theologically constructed. #corroborates (0.85)
• Enlightenment rationalism generated new monsters instead of eradicating them #corroborates (0.82) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 352