Voltaire instinctively felt that this was an enemy that had to be dealt with.

In a lighter vein he had maintained in a well-known poem, Le Mondain, [Footnote: 1756.] the value of civilisation and all its effects, including luxury, against those who regretted the simplicity of ancient times, the golden age of Saturn.
O le bon temps que ce siecle de fer! Life in Paris, London, or Rome to-day is infinitely preferable to life in the garden of Eden.
D'un bon vin frais ou la mousse ou la seve Ne gratta point le triste gosier d'Eve.
La soie et l'or ne brillaient point chez eux.
Admirez-vous pour cela nos aieux?
Il leur manquait l'industrie et l'aisance: Est-ce vertu?
c'etait pure ignorance.
To return to the Essay, it flung down the gage of battle to that conception of the history of the world which had been brilliantly represented by Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle.

This work was constantly in Voltaire's mind.

He pointed out that it had no claim to be universal; it related only to four or five peoples, and especially the little Jewish nation which "was unknown to the rest of the world or justly despised," but which Bossuet made the centre of interest, as if the final cause of all the great empires of antiquity lay in their relations to the Jews.

He had Bossuet in mind when he said "we will speak of the Jews as we would speak of Scythians or Greeks, weighing probabilities and discussing facts." In his new perspective the significance of Hebrew history is for the first time reduced to moderate limits.
But it was not only in this particular, though central, point that Voltaire challenged Bossuet's view.