The Allied Countries and the Jews

by H. G. Enelow

But all in all, the Jews have had a glorious history in France, crowned by the fact that she was the first country in Europe to give full civil and political rights to the Jews, as she did during the Revolution, on September 28th, 1791. France thus inaugurated a new era in Jewish history. Indeed, she thus brought about the modern rebirth of the Jew—the Jew's full entry into modern life. Therefore, when it is said that every man has two countries—his own and France, we may justly apply it in particular to the modern Jew.

Nor was the leadership of France in the modern emancipation of the Jew an accident. It was part of the liberal spirit which has found varied expression in France, and which could not ignore the Jew and the maltreatment that was meted out to him all over Europe.

When Montesquieu wrote his great work, The Spirit of the Laws, in the year 1748, he did not forget all the services that the Jews had rendered to civilization, nor did he fail to deplore the outrageous way the Jews were dealt with. The Christians, he affirmed, were treating their Jewish neighbors in a more inhuman way than the Japanese of those days treated the Christians. Readers of Montesquieu could not help remembering that remonstrance, and it is quite likely that Louis XVI was inspired by it to the abolition of the Jewish poll-tax, as well as to the appointment of a special commission, under the presidency of Malesherbes, for the study of Jewish conditions, with a view to their improvement.

But it is not commonly known that about forty years before Montesquieu issued his book, there appeared in France an epoch-making work, of which the leading Jewish historian, Graetz, has well said that it rendered an incalculable service to Judaism.

This work was the History of the Religion of the Jews, by Jacques Basnage de Beauval, a celebrated scholar and writer, published in the years 1707-11. It marked the first attempt to write a complete history of the Jews from the time of Christ to modern times, and was designed by the author as a continuation of the historical work of Josephus.

It was particularly noteworthy coming from a Christian theologian, seeing that the conventional Christian view was (and often still is) that the Jewish religion really ceased with the coming of Jesus. Christianity was supposed to have abolished and eliminated Judaism. Yet Basnage realized that the contrary was true. Judaism was not dead. The Jews were still alive.

For five years he gave himself to the task of collecting material, and he produced a work which, whatever its shortcomings, was remarkable as the first of its kind, aside from the enormous amount of scholarship that went into its composition. But there was more than scholarship in the work; behind it was a realization of the marvel of Jewish history and resentment of the brutality with which the Jew was treated. Let no one wonder, said the author, if we denounce certain charges made against the Jew. "In the course of the centuries people have developed a spirit of cruelty and barbarism toward the Jews. They have been accused of being the cause of all calamities and charged with all kinds of crimes which never entered their minds. Everywhere they have been mobbed and massacred. Nevertheless, by a miracle of Providence, they still exist today everywhere. The bush of Moses, encircled by flames, has always burnt without being consumed."

The liberal spirit of Montesquieu and Basnage found new expression, and, we may say its culmination, in the men of the Revolution. Mirabeau, who in Berlin came in contact with Mendelssohn and got to know Dohm's famous work on the Civil Improvement of the Jews, issued in 1781, wrote a warm plea for the emancipation of the Jews, under the title of Mendelssohn and the Political Improvement of the Jews. His plea was supported by Gregoire, a priest, and Duport, a Jacobin member of the National Assembly, and it finally resulted in the Assembly's abrogation of Jewish disabilities, and the invitation to the Jews to take the oath of citizenship.

Thus, on September 28th, 1791, the Jews of France were liberated, and the Jews of the world celebrated the beginning of a new era of freedom and of the opportunities that are bound up with freedom.

In the spiritual history of the Jew, also, France has played an illustrious part. In the middle ages there was no country where there was so large a number of brilliant and erudite scholars, and so energetic an activity, as in the numerous Jewish communities of France. North and South rivaled each other. Some of the most influential Jewish teachers of all times came from these French schools.