Book excerpt: "Emancipation"

Editor's note: This is part one of a four-part series of excerpts from GlobalPost correspondent Michael Goldfarb's book "Emancipation: How liberating Europe's Jews from the ghetto led to revolution and renaissance."

For several decades now, European societies have been confronted with the terrible challenge of integrating immigrants who are primarily Muslim. In the last decade, as the global Islamic community has gone through convulsions this has become a more urgent task. Controversies about Muslim girls wearing the hijab to school, or radical preachers indoctrinating youngsters in the mosques have become a regular feature of life around Europe. Needless to say, there is nothing new under the sun about this, many of the precedents used to invoke laws and regulations on the Muslim community have their origin two centuries ago in this story:

In the ghetto of Ancona, a port city on the Adriatic Coast of Italy, the Jews knew their liberation was at hand and they were afraid. For months, Napoleon Bonaparte and his army had been on the rampage, bringing the French Revolution to Italy. In Turin and Milan, Napoleon had battered open the ghetto gates.

Now, in early 1797, the general was approaching Ancona. As news of Napoleon’s conquering army spread, Italians turned on their Jewish neighbors with murderous fury. Ancona’s Jews barricaded themselves behind the ghetto gates at the bottom of the Via Astagna and waited in fear for their liberation.

For Napoleon, Ancona was a strategic prize, so he sat with his army in the miserable, rainy February weather and slowly strangled the city’s resistance. It would fall, like a tree to a blunt axe, but there would be no glory. He wrote to this wife, Josephine, that he had never been “so bored as by this sorry campaign.”

The Ancona ghetto was the typical, formless warren of narrow lanes laced around one proper street, the Via Astagna. When the city was finally secured Napoleon sent a detachment of mostly Jewish soldiers to demolish the ghetto gates. When the gates were gone they marched up the empty street. Slowly people began to come out and look. A soldier called out in Hebrew to one of the gawkers, “Come here.” A gasp of surprise went through the crowd. “You Jewish?”

“Yes.”

Jews wearing the uniform of France was too much for the ghetto’s residents to comprehend. More chatter in Hebrew. Then a soldier reached over and took the yellow badge off one of the ghetto dweller’s caps, removed the red, white and blue revolutionary cockade from his own hat and placed it where badge had been. Another soldier repeated the gesture and then another. The Jews of Ancona were emancipated.

Throughout the Italian campaign, Napoleon’s troops broke down ghetto doors. Later, campaigning across northern and central Europe, he did the same thing. Nearly half a millennium of segregation and isolation were undone. Jews, an isolated minority, were granted the rights of citizens.

But simply granting a community rights doesn’t change it overnight. Traditions, ways of life and earning a living don’t suddenly become different. Napoleon himself changed more rapidly than Europe’s Jews. Success went to his head. Megalomania crept through every fiber of him. By the time he defeated the combined armies of Russia and Austria at the Battle of Austerlitz, he had convinced himself that he was a historical figure unrivaled since Roman times. On his way back from Austerlitz he stopped in Alsace. The locals filled his ears with complaints about Jews. They hadn’t changed at all since being given their rights. They were still usurers. They refused to integrate and wore strange clothes. The men didn’t shave. Most of their rabbis did not speak French. They were still a nation within the nation. Napoleon decided to do something about the situation. He demanded that the leaders of the community answer 12 questions about their way of living. He summoned them to Paris and called them the “Great Sanhedrin.” It suited his ego to claim he had reconvened a body that had not existed since the Roman emperor Titus had destroyed the Second Temple.

Having received answers to his 12 questions, he set out three decrees regulating Jewish life. First, the Jewish religion would be organized into a series of administrative bodies called consistories. The same had already been done for France’s Protestant minority. The consistory would appoint and license rabbis. They were given a decade to ensure that all rabbis were fluent in French. They were to organize school to teach Jewish Frenchmen useful trades to get them away from the money lending which had been the only real work they were allowed to do in France for centuries. Next, he canceled many debts owed to the Jewish communities. Finally, Jews were not permitted to hire a replacement when they were called up for military service … a common practice among the French who could afford it.

In July, one more decree was published. It concerned names. Jews throughout the French Empire were given three months to take a traditional family name and first name and register it with the authorities. No more calling yourself Moses ben Mendel, you would take the name Moses Mendelssohn.

Napoleon’s actions stunned the Jewish community. The only good thing about the “infamous decrees” as they were known is that they were subject to review after a decade.

Today in France, the same legal tradition is being used to hasten the assimilation of France’s Muslim community into society. When the French government bans young Muslim women from wearing the hijab in state schools, it is doing no more than Napoleon did 200 years ago to the first religious/ethnic minority French society that tried to integrate into its midst. When the Dutch government opens a school so that imams in the Netherlands can learn to speak Dutch and preach their sermons in Dutch it is merely following the template set out in the decrees of Napoleon’s reconvened “Great Sanhedrin.”

Was Napoleon’s approach successful? Well, the infamous decrees were not renewed. The Jewish community became thoroughly integrated. It might have been better in the long run if Napoleon had promulgated laws forbidding racial and religious hatred practiced by the majority. But the emperor has yet to be born who could make a law over what is in men’s hearts.

Read part two of this series, Emancipation: the Jewish reformation.

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