NAPOLEON’S SANHEDRIN AND THE HALAKHAH

Walter Jacob

Nugoreon brought Jews into the modern world with a stroke

of the pen in 1807; he began by summoning an Assembly of Notables on July 26, 1806' which was followed by a Great Sanhedrin on February 4, 1807. These bodies provided a carefully worded response to Napoleon ’s questions which balanced the halakhic tradition and Napoleonic pressure. Napoleon then reaffirmed the rights previously given to French Jews and extended them to the conquered territories. How extraordinary! An emperor involved in great battles, international treaties, and a massive restructuring of France and the newly conquered German lands, bothered to deal with this small fraction of the French population- and through the instrument of a Sanhedrin.

These events moved Jewish emancipation from slow debates among intellectuals and ineffective earlier political action to a long anticipated goal. This was not just emancipation, but an end to the corporate, semi-independent form of the Jewish community and so reset the boundaries of the halakhah. The halakhah had always acknowledged the laws of the lands in which Jews lived under the principle dina d’'malkhutah dina(“The law of the land is the law™).? This, however, went much further as Napoleon created a distinction between the eternal religious law and the temporal political inj unctions of the halakhah. Furthermore he coerced the Jewish community into internalizing the changes through a Sanhedrin, the only body capable of making basic changes in the halakhah.

This paper will deal with Napoleon ’s views of Jews and his motivations of dealing with them. It will then turn to the responses given to Napoleon ’s twelve questions and the halakhic justification which could have been given. Finally it will look at the traditions governing a Sanhedrin