F. D. Kirwan, the English translator of the Parisian Sanhedrim, published in French by the French-Jewish editor, M. Diogène Tama (Appendix xlii), says, in his preface: “... The ultimate views which Bonaparte may have on the Jewish nation are, to this day, involved in obscurity; while the supposed advantages he so pompously conferred on them may reasonably be called in question. When we consider that the Jewish population of France and Italy is not calculated, by the deputies themselves, at more than one hundred thousand souls (a small number indeed when compared with the population of those countries), we are at a loss to see what great advantages could immediately result to Bonaparte from the Jews embracing zealously the profession of arms. We well know that his gigantic plans of ambition rest on the laws of conscription; but the Jews are already liable to them; they can hardly escape their excessive rigour; and even the whole of the Jewish youth, of the requisite age, would, in point of number, make but a contemptible reinforcement to the immense armies of France.
“These exhortations to embrace the profession of arms, so zealously repeated by the leading members of the French-Jews, are besides, always coupled with strong recommendations to follow mechanical trades and husbandry; in short, those professions without which a nation cannot exist by itself, but which are not more particularly useful than any others to a small given number of people, who consider as their country an Empire in which these professions abound.
“We find these same recommendations strongly inforced in the answer of M. Furtado to the commercial Jews of Frankfort, who hardly can have a choice of employment. ‘We have,’ says he, ‘too many merchants and bankers among us, and too few artificers and husbandmen,—and, above all, too few soldiers’: but if their countrymen thoroughly fill these branches of employment, what necessity is there for having husbandmen, artificers, and soldiers of their own?
“The Jewish deputies say that Bonaparte conceived the idea of their regeneration, or their political redemption, in the land of Egypt and on the banks of the Jordan. This we doubt not; and though we are almost ashamed to hazard the extravagant supposition, we feel a conviction that his gigantic mind entertains the idea of re-establishing them in Palestine, and that this forms a part of his plan respecting Egypt, which he is well known never to have abandoned.
“No one will contend that this idea is too wild for his conception; it is, on the contrary, perfectly consonant with his love for extraordinary, dazzling enterprises; he acts in this even with more than his usual foresight, by attempting to prepare the Jews for the new situation he intends for them. It is with this view that he encourages them to follow those professions which are necessary for men forming a distinct nation in a land of their own; for certainly, a body wholly composed of merchants and traders could never exist as such....
“The answer to the sixth question, by which the French Jews acknowledge France as their country, without any restriction whatever, is a still more heinous dereliction of the tenets of the Mosaic law; for they give up, by it, the hope of the expected Messiah, and of the everlasting possession of the promised land of Canaan, which they deem a part of the sacred covenant between God and His chosen people.
“While we thus inculpate the Jewish deputies, it cannot be expected that we shall lay too great a stress on the fulsome and frequently impious flattery which characterizes all their productions....
“But flattery is the opiate of the guilty conscience; it sooths the pangs of remorse;...”[¹]
[¹] Transactions of the Parisian Sanhedrim ... London, 1807. pp. (iii.), vii.–ix., xv.
A similar view was expressed with considerable eloquence by the Rev. James Bicheno (1751–1831), of Newbury, an [♦]Anabaptist minister who attained some distinction in his day through his works on the Prophecies, and of others on various subjects (Appendix xliii). He was the author of The Restoration Of The Jews: The Crisis Of All Nations;... 1800[¹] (Appendix xliv).