equal of the highest German minds of his time, he prepared the way for his fellow-Jews to acquire the open career; and by breaking down their prejudices against adopting European culture with which, during the preceding two centuries, Jews had failed to keep up, owing to their forced migrations, increased persecution, and social isolation, he enabled them to take advantage of the opportunities which were about to be offered to them.

CHAPTER IX

JEWS AND LIBERALISM

THE eighteenth century was the era of the "benevolent despots" like Frederick II, Joseph II, Catherine II, who adopted the ruling principle of the Welfare State that the object of government should be the good of the people, but considered that it could only be carried out for the people but not by them. The weakness of the principle consisted in the difficulty of securing a heritable succession of capable benevolence, and the collapse of Prussia at Jena and of Joseph II's well-meant but unreflective reforms led, in the nineteenth century, to the triumph of the principle, first enunciated in America and carried out in France, of government for the people by the people. The transition to the next stage, from religious toleration to religious liberty, is marked, as regards the Jews, by the tolerance edict of Joseph II in 1781, which, for the first time, threw open service in the army to the Jews, and placed them, to some extent, on the same level with other dissenters from the state Church of Austria.

But this was still toleration and not liberty, and was soon cast into the background by the full religious liberty granted by the French Revolution in 1791 in imitation of the clause in the American Constitution of 1787, which entirely separated State and Church. The granting of full religious liberty to Jews had previously been advocated by Mirabeau, and, though Rousseau's influence, which was all-important in the Revolution, still retained a touch of Genevan intolerance, Jews came within his religious requirements for citizenship by their belief in Providence and in future reward and punishment. It has to be remembered that in spirit, if not in will-power or influence, Louis XVI was of the school of the benevolent despots, and it was he who signed the edict of November 13, 1791, which placed, for the first time in European history, Jews on the same level as the adherents of all other creeds as regards civil and political qualifications. Holland was appropriately the first country to grant the same religious equality to its Jews.'

1

1It is perhaps worth while remarking that one of the most prominent leaders on the Jewish side in Holland, Herz Bromet, had lived as a free Burgher in Surinam for a long time, and that the example of America, especially New York State, was adduced in favor of the movement. (Graetz, xi, 230-1.)

The French Revolution, from our present standpoint, is the more remarkable inasmuch as it is the only great European movement on which Jews had absolutely no influence, direct or indirect, owing to their inappreciable numbers and insecure position in the chief centers, Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles; they were influenced by it, not it by them. As the Revolution principles spread into the neighboring countries with the French arms, in Venice the walls of the original ghetto, from which all the rest received their names, fell at once on the entry of Napoleon's troops. No wonder they welcomed with fervor the victories of the French troops; and we can catch in Heine echoes of the enthusiasm with which Napoleon was acclaimed as the Liberator.

Napoleon's own attitude was not so uniformly friendly to Jews. On his way back from Austerlitz, in 1805, he learnt, at Strassburg, of the wide distress caused in Alsace by the exactions of certain Jewish usurers in that province, and on his return to Paris issued edicts directed against the Alsatian Jews, restricting their usurious activity. It is fair to add that these enactments were obviously directed against the usury of these Alsatian Jews, and not against Jews in general, since

they were specifically declared not to apply to the Jews of Bordeaux in the South or Northern Italy then under Napoleon's control. It would indeed have been against the whole tendency of his career to have made the Jews an exception to that principle of the carrière ouverte aux talents, which was the keynote to his whole policy, as it is logically to all war-lords. It was by no accident that similar indifference towards the creed of their soldiers, or civil servants, was shown by William the Silent, Wallenstein, Cromwell, William III, and Frederick the Great.

Napoleon's attention having thus been drawn to the Jewish question, he proceeded, with characteristic energy, to solve it by summoning to Paris a representative assembly of the Jews of France, Germany, and Italy, who should determine on what terms Jews could be admitted into a modern Country-State, which had been freed from the shackles of the medieval Church-State, and only recognized a certain prerogative in the Church to which the majority of Frenchmen belonged (the Concordat of 1802). After summoning an assembly of Jewish notables for a preliminary inquiry, in 1806, a more formal Sanhedrin was summoned in the following year, to