Napoleon and the Jews

Was Napoleon Enlightened
in a Bigoted Era?

By Ben Weider

A product of the Revolution, Napoleon's enlightened attitudes toward the Jews were not untinged by prejudice; indeed, in an era where "national character traits" were believed as scientific facts, unflattering stereotypes and generalities about the Jews were widely held as truths. While Napoleon the philosopher may have believed in the Revolutionary ideals of equality and fraternity, Napoleon the ruler was a shrewd pragmatist. He hoped to address and quell many of the popular misconceptions about the Jews as well as to assure himself that they could be counted upon to become productive French citizens. Thus, he put several questions forth to the Sanhedrin, some of which included:

    1. Are Jews permitted to marry several wives?
    2. Is divorce allowed by the Jewish religion?
    3. Is a Jew allowed to marry a Christian?
    4. Are the Jews willing to regard Frenchmen as their brethren or aliens?
    5. Do Jews born in France recognize France as their fatherland?
    6. Are the Jews forbidden by their law to make usurious loans to their co-religionists? (That is, Napoleon wanted assurance that the Jews would not practice economic discrimination against non-Jews, a practice of which they were popularly believed to be guilty. The irony of that belief, that the Jews were the ones practicing discrimination, hardly needs comment.)

To Napoleon's credit, he recognized that the main reason for enduring anti-Semitism was the appalling conditions and occupational restrictions that had been forced upon the Jews throughout history; this made Napoleon one of the very first men to understand the effects of injustice in sustaining social prejudice. He felt that by granting Jews full citizenship, economic liberty, and organized religious leadership, that the Jews would win acceptance in France.

This is not to say that Napoleon was a paragon of wisdom and tolerance. For a time, Napoleon entertained a scheme to legally "encourage" one out of every three Jews to marry a non-Jew by restricting the granting of marriage licenses to that proportion, although he quickly understood that such measures might be heavy-handed and impractical. "When one out of three marriages is a mixed French-Jewish union," Napoleon wrote, "the Jewish blood will cease to have any distinctive characteristic." Here Napoleon reveals the limits of his time; he ruled in an era where social science was in its barest infancy, genetics had not been invented, and Charles Darwin had not yet been born. While any legislation regarding human breeding seems appalling to us now, Napoleon's proposal represents simply a rather naive failure to understand that assimilation was a cultural rather than biological problem.

Thus, Napoleon's overall plan of assimilation for the Jews stands as a remarkable and even visionary effort. No doubt that the Jews throughout the Empire — including those in such places as Munich, Warsaw, Madrid and Rome — would have greatly benefited had Napoleon's efforts to grant them equality come to full fruition. Needless to say, the success of the counter-revolution and Bourbon Restoration was a staggering set-back to hopes of Jewish assimilation in France and elsewhere.

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