July 14 is Bastille Day
Napoleon (1769-1821) tried to control the Jews and make them assimilate.
However, all his efforts had the opposite effect.
By breaking up the feudal trammels of mid-Europe
and introducing equality, he actually set them loose.
(See "1882: EUROPE'S CHRISTIAN LEADERS THROW IN THE TOWEL")
Napoleon: "The French government cannot look on with indifference as a vile, degraded nation capable of every iniquity takes exclusive possession of two beautiful departments of Alsace; one must consider the Jews as a nation and not as a sect. It is a nation within a nation."
THE JEWS, THE MASONS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
by Vladimir Moss
(Excerpt by henrymakow.com)
If the French revolution gave the Jews their first political victory, Napoleon gave them their second.
Napoleon now learned what many rulers before and after had learned: that kindness towards the Jews does not make them more tractable.
Nechvolodov writes: "Since the first years of the Empire, Napoleon I had become very worried about the Jewish monopoly in France and the isolation in which they lived in the midst of the other citizens, although they had received citizenship. The reports of the departments showed the activity of the Jews in a very bad light:
'Everywhere there are false declarations to the civil authorities; fathers declare the sons who are born to them to be daughters... Again, there are Jews who have given an example of disobedience to the laws of conscription; out of sixty-nine Jews who, in the course of six years, should have formed part of the Moselle contingent, none has entered the army.'
GYPSIES WITH PH.D'S
"By contrast, behind the army, they give themselves up to frenzied speculation.
(Jewish peddlers)
"'Unfortunately,' says Thiers, describing the entry of the French into Rome in his History of the Revolution, 'the excesses, not against persons but against property, marred the entry of the French into the ancient capital of the world... They began to pillage the palaces, convents and rich collections. Some Jews in the rear of the army bought for a paltry price the magnificent objects which the looters were offering them.'
"It was in 1805, during Napoleon's passage through Strasbourg, after the victory of Austerlitz, that the complaints against the Jews assumed great proportions. The principal accusations... concerned ...usury. As soon as he returned to Paris, Napoleon[declared]:
"'The French government cannot look on with indifference as a vile, degraded nation capable of every iniquity takes exclusive possession of two beautiful departments of Alsace; one must consider the Jews as a nation and not as a sect. It is a nation within a nation; I would deprive them, at least for a certain time, of the right to take out mortgages, for it is too humiliating for the French nation to find itself at the mercy of the vilest nation. Some entire villages have been expropriated by the Jews; they have replaced feudalism... It would be dangerous to let the keys of France, Strasbourg and Alsace, fall into the hands of a population of spies who are not at all attached to the country.'"[58, see link to original.]
Napoleon eventually ...convened a 111-strong Assembly of Jewish Notables in order to receive clear and unambiguous answers to the following questions: did the Jewish law permit mixed marriages; did the Jews regard Frenchmen as foreigners or as brothers; did they regard France as their native country, the laws of which they were bound to obey; did the Judaic law draw any distinction between Jewish and Christian debtors?
At the same time, writes Johnson, Napoleon "supplemented this secular body by convening a parallel meeting of rabbis and learned laymen, to advise the Assembly on technical points of Torah and Halakhah. The response of the more traditional elements of Judaism was poor. They did not recognize Napoleon's right to invent such a tribunal, let alone summon it..."[59]
However, if some traditionalists did not welcome it, other Jews received the news with unbounded joy.
"According to Abbé Lemann," writes Nechvolodov, "they grovelled in front of him and were ready to recognize him as the Messiah. The sessions of the Sanhedrin...took place in February and March, 1807, and the Decision of the Great Sanhedrin began with the words: 'Blessed forever is the Lord, the God of Israel, Who has placed on the throne of France and of the kingdom of Italy a prince according to His heart.... These ordinances will teach the nations that our dogmas are consistent with the civil laws under which we live, and do not separate us at all from the society of men...'"[60]
"The Jewish delegates," writes Platonov, "declared that state laws had the same obligatory force for Jews, that every honourable study of Jewish teaching was allowed, but usury was forbidden, etc. [However,] to the question concerning mixed marriages of Jews and Christians, they gave an evasive, if not negative reply. 'Although mixed marriages between Jews and Christians cannot be clothed in a religious form, they nevertheless do not draw upon them any anathema."[61]
On the face of it, the convening of the Sanhedrin was a great triumph for Napoleon, who could now treat Jewry as just another religious denomination, and not a separate nation, "appropriating for the state what had traditionally been a subversive institution".[62]
REPRESSIVE MEASURES
However, the Jews did not restrain their money-lending and speculative activities, as Napoleon had pleaded with them to do. On the contrary, ...when it became evident that their financial excesses were continuing, Napoleon was forced to adopt repressive measures against them.
As Tikhomirov points out, "no laws could avert the international links of the Jews. Sometimes they even appeared openly, as in Kol Ispoel Khaberim (Alliance Israélite Universelle), although many legislatures forbade societies and unions of their own citizens to have links with foreigners. The Jews gained a position of exceptional privilege. For the first time... they acquired greater rights than the local citizens of the countries of the dispersion.... the countries of the new culture and statehood became from that time a lever of support for Jewry."[64]
Indeed, the main result of the Great Sanhedrin, writes Nechvolodov, "was to unite Judaism still more. "
'Let us not forget from where we draw our origin,' said Rabbi Salomon Lippmann Cerfbeer on July 26, 1808, in his speech for ...the Sanhedrin:- 'Let it no longer be a question of "German" or "Portuguese" Jews; although disseminated over the surface of the globe, we everywhere form only one unique people.'"[65]
As we have seen, the emancipation of the Jews in France led to their emancipation in other countries. Even after the fall of Napoleon, on June 8, 1815, the Congress of Vienna decreed that "it was incumbent on the members of the German Confederation to consider an 'amelioration' of the civil status of all those who 'confessed the Jewish faith in Germany.'"[66] Gradually, though not without opposition, Jewish emancipation and Jewish power spread throughout Europe...
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