THE SETTING
The elimination of disabilities for Jews in Europe began with The Austrian Emperor Joseph II in 1781 through the well known “Patent of Toleration ” and continued to move forward in his empire, though haltingly. Just a few years later in 1784 Louis XVI of France moved in the same direction through his removal of a body tax on Jews ,(the equivalent of a cow).” Actual citizenship was granted through a series of decrees in 1790 by the French Assembly and completed in one of its last acts in September of 1791.
France in this period only had a small Jewish population; the rights given to it in the autumn of 1791 were celebrated, but meant little as the Revolution was soon followed by the“Reign of Terror.” Through it the Jewish communities, now with most synagogues closed, laid low. Individuals and communities, nevertheless, suffered. The revolutionary body had not worked out a new organizational pattern for Jews as it had for Catholics and Protestants by 1801 and Napoleon did not seem in a hurry to deal with this matter.*
Napoleon had inherited the declaration of the earlier French regime which he could have ignored.” Furthermore that declaration had been reluctantly passed against strong opposition of philosophers and statesmen, including Voltaire . We should remember that for the previous half century French intellectuals as well as those in Germany had debated whether Jews were ready to be accepted as equal citizens. Were they not too different— an uneducated, and indigestible minority? Wilhelm Dohm, Gotthold Lessing and others fought against these opinions.’ A totally separate issue, the status of independent corporations and their powers, had been much debated in French society. Some felt that these were obstacles to the nation-state, while the Encyclopedist saw them as an obstacle to individual freedom. This was only incidentally a Jewish issue. In eighteenth. century France it had been the basis for the withdrawal of rights