REINACH, SALOMON (1858–1932) was a French archaeologist and author of more than seventy books. Reinach is most widely known for his controversial writings in the area of the anthropological-ethnological comparative study of religions. He became conservator of the Musées Nationales in 1893, director of the Musée des Antiquités Nationales in Saint-Germain in 1901, and also served from the following year onward as professor at the École du Louvre in Paris. He was coeditor of the Revue archéologique, and from 1896 a member of the Académie des Inscriptions.

Although he branded eighteenth-century rationalism as a "paltry doctrine" seeking "to suppress religion without knowing its essence and without any clear idea of its origin and development" (Cultes, vol. 2, p. xviii, my translation), Reinach expressed his admiration for Voltaire, whose ideas about religion he did not share, but whose "incomparable gifts as a narrator" greatly inspired him (Orpheus...