received their name, fell at once on the entry of Napoleon's troops.
No wonder they welcomed with fervor the victories of the French
troops; we can catch, in Heine, echoes of the enthusiasm with which
Napoleon was acclaimed the Liberator.

_Napoleon's Recognition of the Jews_

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 the Alsatian Jews, and not against the 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 "carriere
ouverte aux talents," which was the key-note of his whole policy, as
it is logically to all war-lords. It was by no accident that similar
indifference toward 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 which twelve test questions were
submitted,--among them, whether the French Jews could regard France
as their Fatherland and Frenchmen as their brothers, and the laws of
the State as binding upon them. Further points were raised as to
polygamy, divorce, and mixed marriages; other questions related to the
position of Rabbis and the Jewish laws about usury.

All these problems were decided to the satisfaction of Napoleon,
though some of them aroused much searching of heart among the