The Emancipation

Abstract

The French Revolution and its aftermath had profound reverberations for French Jews because it placed the diaspora community in a position it had not hitherto been required to consider. Up until the Napoleonic Sanhédrin the Jews of France never really had any problems of self-identification; they were simply Jews living in France just as their coreligionists lived elsewhere in Europe. Being a Jew, of course, also carried numerous disabilities, including the lack of civil rights. With the French Revolution, however, Jews were given the opportunity to become full-fledged members of society if they renounced their national or people-oriented traditions, Of course even this offer did not come without acrimonious debate in the National Assembly and might not have come to fruition had it not had the powerful backing of Mirabeau. Clermont-Tonnere summed up the pact offered French Jews when he said “To the Jews as Jews nothing; to the Jews as men everything”.

No sovereign has ever done what Napoleon has now affected for the people of God. A new career is open for us, and the doors which lead to it are unbarred: all the Hebrews residing in this vast empire, and in Europe, have their eyes fixed on us”. M. Lipman Cerf-Berr at the Napoleonic Sanhedrin, 1806.