Sunday Forum: Jewish history, Muslim reality
Share with others:
For several decades, European societies have been confronted with the challenge of integrating immigrants who are primarily Muslim. In the last decade, as the global Islamic community has gone through convulsions, this has become a more urgent task.
Controversies about Muslim girls wearing the hijab to school, or radical preachers indoctrinating youngsters in mosques, or the building of minarets or the protesting of how newspapers depict the Prophet Muhammad have become a regular feature of life in Europe.
There is nothing new under the sun, of course, and in this case, many of the precedents used to regulate Muslims in Europe have their origin two centuries ago in how Europe dealt with Jews.
In the ghetto of Ancona, a port city on the Adriatic coast of Italy, the Jews knew their liberation was at hand and they were afraid. For months, Napoleon Bonaparte and his army had been on the rampage, bringing the French Revolution to Italy. In Turin and Milan, Napoleon had battered open the ghetto gates.
Now, in early 1797, the general was approaching Ancona. As news of Napoleon's conquering army spread, Italians turned on their Jewish neighbors with murderous fury. Ancona's Jews barricaded themselves at the bottom of the Via Astagna and waited in fear for their liberation.
For Napoleon, Ancona was a strategic prize, so he sat with his army in the miserable, rainy February weather and slowly strangled the city's resistance. It would fall, like a tree to a blunt axe, but there would be no glory. He wrote to his wife, Josephine, that he had never been "so bored as by this sorry campaign."
Ancona's Jewish ghetto was the typical, formless warren of narrow lanes laced around one proper street, the Via Astagna. When the city was finally secured, Napoleon sent a detachment of mostly Jewish soldiers to demolish the ghetto gates. When the gates were gone the soldiers marched up the empty street. Slowly people began to come out and look. A soldier called out in Hebrew to one of the gawkers, "Come here." A gasp of surprise went through the crowd.
"You Jewish?"
"Yes."
Jews wearing the uniform of France was too much for the ghetto residents to comprehend. More chatter in Hebrew. Then a soldier reached over and took the yellow badge off one of the ghetto dweller's caps, removed the red, white and blue revolutionary cockade from his own hat and placed it where the badge had been. Another soldier repeated the gesture and then another. The Jews of Ancona were emancipated.
Throughout the Italian campaign and later, campaigning across northern and central Europe, Napoleon's troops broke down ghetto doors. Nearly half a millennium of segregation and isolation were undone. Jews, an isolated minority throughout Europe, were granted the rights of citizens.
But simply granting a community rights doesn't change it overnight. Ways of life and of earning a living don't suddenly become different.
Napoleon himself changed more rapidly than Europe's Jews. Success went to his head. Megalomania ensued. By the time he defeated the combined armies of Russia and Austria at the Battle of Austerlitz, he had convinced himself that he was a historical figure unrivaled since Roman times.
On his way back from Austerlitz, Napoleon stopped in Alsace. The locals filled his ears with complaints about Jews. They hadn't changed at all since being given their rights. They were still usurers. They refused to integrate and wore strange clothes. The men didn't shave. Most of the rabbis did not speak French. They were still a nation within the nation.
Napoleon decided to do something about the situation. He demanded that the leaders of the Jewish community answer 12 questions about their way of life. He summoned them to Paris and called them the "Great Sanhedrin." It suited his ego to claim he had reconvened a body that had not existed since the Roman emperor Titus had destroyed the Second Temple.
Having received answers to his 12 questions, he set out three decrees regulating Jewish life.
First, the Jewish religion would be organized into a series of administrative bodies called consistories, as had been done for France's Protestant minority. The consistory would appoint and license rabbis. They were given a decade to ensure that all rabbis were fluent in French. They were to organize schools to teach Jewish Frenchmen useful trades to get them away from the money-lending which had been the only real work they were allowed to do in France for centuries.
Next, Napoleon canceled many debts owed to Jews.
Finally, Jews were not permitted to hire stand-ins when they were called up for military service -- a common practice among the French who could afford it.
In July, one more decree was published. It concerned names. Jews throughout the French Empire were given three months to take a standard family and first name and register it with the authorities. No more calling yourself Moses ben Mendel; you would take the name Moses Mendelssohn.
Napoleon's actions stunned the Jewish community. The only good thing about the "infamous decrees," as they were known, is that they were subject to review after a decade.
Today in France, the same legal tradition is being used to hasten the assimilation of France's Muslim community into society.
When the French government bans young Muslim women from wearing the hijab in state schools, it is doing no more than Napoleon did 200 years ago to the Jews. When the Dutch government opens a school so that imams in the Netherlands can learn to preach in Dutch, or when the Swiss people vote to ban the construction of minarets, they are following the template set out in the decrees of Napoleon's "Great Sanhedrin."
As for Napoleon's approach to the Jews ... well, the infamous decrees were not renewed. The Jewish community became thoroughly integrated, although anti-Semitism remains at large in France and much of Europe.
It might have been better in the long run if Napoleon had promulgated laws forbidding racial and religious hatred practiced by the majority. But the emperor has yet to be born who could make a law over what is in men's hearts.
First Published December 6, 2009 12:00 am
