Abstract
In the milieu of the Czech basin and the culturally related areas the 1994 edition of Luciano Canfora's Storia della letteratura greca, once translated into Czech, has become an authoritative handbook of Greek literature. Canfora's discussion, therefore, if found in whatever way deficient, needs to be challenged.
This is the case of his subchapter on the Emperor Julian and the reception of his legacy (dropped from the later Italian editions) in which particular attention is paid to Voltaire. However, first of all, Canfora misreported the content of the article on Julian in the Dictionnaire philosophique, mistaking it for that in the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie par des amateurs.
Further, his accusation against Ammianus and Voltaire of anti-Semitism lacks clear foundation in the case of the former and is opposed by the approach of at least some of the specialists whose observations and findings cannot be disregarded in the case of the latter. Reviewing the actual content of Voltaire's article in the Dictionnaire philosophique, it is worth considering how Voltaire dismisses the claim of some Christian authors that Julian wanted to disprove Jesus' prophecy concerning the temple.
Not only is Voltaire's insisting on that Jesus had never banned the restoration of the Temple correct, but there even seems to be nothing to support the persuasion of some modern authorities that the prophecy was in Julian's time commonly understood that way. Only after his unsuccessful attempt such approach appeared.
Canfora's label "syncretically tolerant concept" coined for Julian's motivation to rebuild the Temple seems preferable to the opinion of many modern authorities according to whom Julian's motivation was, at least partly, anti-Christian. Hardly tenable, on the contrary, is the opinion of both Voltaire and Canfora that the rebuilding of the Temple had in fact never begun and nothing to support by can be adduced for another opinion of Voltaire, ventured only in the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, that Julian himself abandoned his idea, obviously fearing the Jewish prophecies that in the rebuilt Temple all nations would worship afterwards.