By Alan Hertz
Allen Z. Hertz was senior advisor in the Privy Council Office serving Canada’s Prime Minister and the federal cabinet. He formerly worked in Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department and earlier taught history and law at universities in New York, Montreal, Toronto and Hong Kong. He studied European history and languages at McGill University (B.A.) and then East European and Ottoman history at Columbia University (M.A., Ph.D.). He also has international law degrees from Cambridge University (LL.B.) and the University of Toronto (LL.M.).
While campaigning in Israel in 1799 did Napoleon write one or more proclamations to the Jews? In our own century, historians are evenly divided. But, the deeper story is not simply whether he did so while in Israel, but also his earlier proclamations to the Jews, similarly issued as propaganda to destroy the Ottoman Empire. Thus, a neglected Ottoman-Turkish source says there was already in the Muslim year 1212 (1797-1798) a revolutionary proclamation inviting Jews to “establish a Jewish government in Jerusalem”.
Based on April 1799 reports from Constantinople, at least seventeen European newspapers in May 1799 described a Napoleon proclamation inviting Jews to return to Jerusalem. This astonishing news was universally believed in 1799. Napoleon’s evocation of aboriginal restoration echoed for decades in relation to an age-old People that for millennia always kept demographic and cultural ties to the Holy Land. There is also much to suggest that Napoleon perhaps wrote the 1798 “Letter from a Jew to His Brothers” calling on world Jewry to organize itself in order to ask France to negotiate with Turkey, so that the Jews could return to their native land. Finally, first revealed in 1940 was a 1799 German-language translation of an alleged Napoleon letter recognizing the hereditary right of the “Israelites” to “Palestine.”
Preface
A. “The Great Nation” and the self-determination of Peoples
Jacques Godechot’s important book, La grande nation, l’expansion révolutionnaire de la France dans le monde 1789-1799 (The Great Nation: The Revolutionary Expansion of France in the World) was first published in 1956. In a thoughtful review, University of Paris, Professor of French History, Marcel Reinhard observed with regard to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1958):
The rights defined in 1789 were those of every man, of every citizen, and they were, despite some opposition, also recognized as applying to Jews and Blacks. And as such, they also passed onto the world stage. Thus, the concept of national sovereignty wasn’t simply the privilege of the French nation, but was a natural and imprescriptible right recognized for every nation.
Reinhard’s international assessment was not just an ex post facto judgment, but was often expressed in the 1790s. Then, it was integral to the key notion of la grande nation. This referred to the great French People which was literally big, because numbering 27 million at a time when the newborn United States had only 5.3 million and the British Isles 15.7 million.
Ideologically, la grande nation was deemed to be, spiritually and materially, older brother to other fraternal Peoples, including the Jewish People. And, the Revolutionary French Republic was imagined as entitled to senior status in relation to other actual or imminent sister republics. These satellite States might potentially include a Jewish Republic (République judaïque or hébraïque) in the Holy Land, and maybe also revolutionary regimes in Ireland and Canada.
The modern comparison would be to the global leadership once claimed by Soviet Russia among Communist countries. Moreover, the Soviet Marxists judged the eventual global triumph of communism to be an historical necessity. So too, the 18th-century French Revolutionaries believed that, both domestically and internationally, the march of history was inevitably in their preferred direction. According to Minister of External Relations, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand (February 14, 1798): “It is the spirit of liberty that spreads itself happily in all the States of Europe, and which, it seems to me, must entirely conquer them in a few years.”
Consider the example of the Corsican-born Greek Maniote, Dimo Stephanopoulos, whom Napoleon sent as revolutionary emissary to the Morea (Peloponnese), then under Turkish rule. There, Dimo expounded at a late 1797 secret meeting, at Marathonissi in the Mani, with patriots from several parts of Greece. According to Dimo, the French Revolution had universal meaning that extended not only to the Greeks, but also to all the other subject Peoples of the Ottoman Empire (1799):
Learn what has happened in the new Athens. The French People has destroyed its tyrants and has given itself laws. These laws propagate themselves with regard to all the Peoples. Man, they say, was born and must live in freedom (libre). We [the Peoples] are all equal and must constitute nothing less than a single family of brothers. […] Buonaparte will come all the way to Constantinople to plant the tree of liberty.
B. The French Revolution ends; Roman Catholicism returns
Just as China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping (???) brought an end to the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1978, so in November 1799 Napoleon terminated the decade-long French Revolution which had been bitterly anti-Roman Catholic. In France, some Catholics had stubbornly sustained regional insurrections against the revolutionary regime, throughout the period of the Directory (1795-9). For both Deng and Napoleon, ending the revolution meant an astonishing ideological evolution over a relatively short period of time.
Napoleon’s views of Jews, Judaism and the Jewish People were significantly different during and after the French Revolution. Historians have been unable to find any evidence that teenage Napoleon had negative attitudes towards Jews. For example, Jews feature factually, in an entirely neutral way, in the youthful notes that he wrote in his school workbooks. Later, as a revolutionary, he recognized the peoplehood of the Jews, just as he did that of the Greeks.
But, once the French Revolution was over, he mostly lost interest in Jews as a sovereign People with an ancient homeland, inter alia, because ending the revolution famously meant reconciling with Roman Catholics. Certainly, Napoleon understood that the Roman-Catholic Church theologically despised Jews and has historically always wanted Jerusalem for itself. To the point, Catholics have for many centuries claimed that, by virtue of Jesus, they had become the real “people Israel,” and thus there was no longer any divine covenant with Jews for the Holy Land (supersessionism).
C. Destruction of documents about Jews
Napoleon personally generated around 33,000 letters and myriad other papers. Although a great mass of his product survives, many items were lost in the normal course of events. In addition, for political and/or personal reasons, Napoleon was in the habit of purposely destroying or even falsifying documents. For example, First Consul Bonaparte ordered a great number of records removed from the archives in 1802. While he was Emperor (1804-1815), these and other documents were burned at his command, as in September 1807. Many of those disappeared pieces related to the 1798-9 Mideast campaign. Such destruction of historical material is directly pertinent, because his earlier expressions of sympathy for Jewish peoplehood and homeland, became for the new “Emperor of the French” an embarrassment to be cleverly spun, or even better, concealed and forgotten.
During the reign (1852-1870) of his nephew Napoleon III, some more of the uncle’s documents were intentionally destroyed, including because they were judged to be strongly offensive to Roman-Catholic feeling. A Catholic (perhaps even ultramontane) perspective was consistently championed by the devout Empress Eugénie who regularly attended cabinet meetings. She would probably have seen any archival confirmation of Napoleon the Great’s revolutionary proclamations promising Jews Jerusalem, as seriously damaging the Bonaparte dynasty’s brand among Catholics in France, Europe and the Mideast. If so, such a political calculation would have been rational. At that time, many Catholics worldwide still strongly believed that Jewish emancipation domestically and Jewish peoplehood internationally were subversive revolutionary principles attacking Christianity.
The very same logic had already been adopted by the Greek-Orthodox Church — not only with respect to Jewish emancipation, peoplehood and homeland — but also with regard to the popular rights of the Greeks themselves. Thus, as early as 1798, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople was energetically backing the Turks against pro-French, Hellenic revolutionaries like Rigas Feraios (????? ???????). Let it be remembered that the reactionary Austrians (the Habsburg Monarchy) arrested Rigas for “serious political crimes” and then heartlessly extradited him to Ottoman Belgrade, where the Turks killed him in June 1798.
Under the revolutionary slogan “liberty, equality and fraternity,” the historic, inflammatory Rigas proclamation was printed in Vienna in Greek (1797) by the thousands, and then widely read in the Ottoman Balkans. But, not a single one of this original printing can be found today. Several thousand of these proclamations were destroyed by the Habsburg authorities. And, the Orthodox Church systematically collected and burned the printed Rigas proclamations found in the Ottoman Empire. All that is now left to us of the text of the famous Rigas proclamation stems from one handwritten document. This is the police/judicial translation into German that is preserved in the Austrian State Archives. Can we be surprised if, as explained below, the text of Napoleon’s proclamations to the Jews met a similar fate in the grim struggle between revolution and reaction?
Here our answer must also be informed by the Habsburg intelligence service, the Polizeihofstelle in Vienna. On October 7, 1806, the Imperial Court Chamberlain and Police Minister, the arch-conservative Baron Joseph Thaddäus von Sumerau, ordered local officials throughout the Habsburg lands to gather for eventual burning, all materials relating to the invitations to the synagogues of Europe, to send delegates to Paris for Napoleon’s Grand Sanhedrin (February 9, 1807). Did this special Austrian police operation perhaps also net some copies of Napoleon’s earlier proclamations to the Jews? Or is this 1806 police effort just a contemporary example proving that, in those days, the Habsburg security services did in fact set about systematically collecting and destroying Napoleon documents addressed to the Jews?
@SEBASTIEN-
The book by Kobler and Corbet’s letter are fascinating finds. Yet this was in 1799, 2 years after Napoleon’s original effort. Another point, I find it surprising that Corbet’s letter was to Barras, and that he would address Napoleon so directly in a letter to another, even his patron. Why not write directly to Bonaparte??
Whilst the utterly corrupt Barras WAS his patron, gave him his cast-off mistress as a wife, and was responsible for getting him the Italian command, once he was there, he was in complete control, and was not being “instructed”, by Barras, whose military capacity was negligible.
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In those days he was known only as “General Bonaparte”. and by “Napoleon” only after his accession to the throne in 1804.
******I found that Chaim Farhi’s fate was the usual payment by Muslims towards Jews. Just imagine how the whole subsequent history of the Jews might have changed if Farhi was not so active against the best interests of his People ****.
However, I believe that without Sidney Smith’s vital aid, the city would have fallen after a month or perhaps two.
I have seen Napoleon’s Akko Hill.
@Allan Z. Hertz-
My comments, lavish though you might consider them, are not a tithe of what they deserve. Your work is a gem.
I am both surprised and delighted that it has at last been aired by
Israundit. I had sent it to several personal friends myself, who are slowly digesting its enormous implications. I still am awed by the unbelievable research, scholarship and inevitable revelations completely unknown to almost all today.
Since Bonaparte was in Italy at least from early 1796 until Campo Formio in late 1797, my speculation that the 1797 Proclamation was written in Italy is at least worth a thought. I know he occupied Rome in 1798, but am not sure if he’d returned to Paris during that period. I believe he must have, but not before Campo Formio. His frantic letters to Josephine show that he was more than fully occupied in Italy.
Perhaps the accepted data of that period casually issued in history books may be revised.. Another thought is that it would make a nice gift to the French Ambassador to Israel.
@Philippe-
My recollection is that the French did not retreat, but under General Kleber made a good agreement to evacuate in style and return to France. The British (truly perfidious Albion) broke this agreement but Kleber defeated their large army. He was shortly after assassinated, and eventually the army returned to France.
“Napoleon may have been influenced by a letter, written to Napoleon’s patron in February 1799 by an Irishman named Thomas Corbet, a devout protestant who rebelled against England and joined the French army together with his brother William. During his service, he wrote the letter to the leader of the French Directory, who at the time was Paul Barras, Napoleon’s patron. In the letter he details, in slightly poor French, a proposal saying
‘I recommend you, Napoleon, to call on the Jewish people to join your conquest in the East, to your mission to conquer the land of Israel.’”
https://jewsdownunder.com/2019/04/26/did-an-irishman-influence-napoleon-to-become-a-zionist/
@ Edgar G.:
Thank you for your lavish praise! Glad that you appreciate the effort to provide you with something new that is also revealing about what young Napoleon was doing in relation to the Jews in 1796-9. You are entirely correct to conclude that this effort is 95% based on printed sources from the late 18th century. And, many of those sources are new discoveries, e.g., from the contemporary European press. Why did I take the trouble to do this? There is so much accumulated bias coloring the accounts of Napoleon’s proclamations to the Jews. Thus, I wanted to start afresh by taking the account to a level of original historical proof that would both enlighten and prove the point. Recently, I have been thinking of adding some more material on “French Foreign Policy for Jewish Rights, 1796-9.” Seems that not only Napoleon, but revolutionary France itself was persistently championing Jewish rights at that time, as shown by French diplomacy in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Strange that the story of young Napoleon’s proclamations has mostly been told, without the contemporary context of the undoubted philosemitism of the French Department of External Relations. Truth be told, there is an abundance of late 18th-century printed proof that has been almost completely ignored. Needless to say, antisemitism and animus against Zionism has led many scholars to reject the idea that Napoleon issued invitations to the Jews to return to Eretz Israel. But without any exception, those who rejected the story (some of them big names) arrogantly did no serious and sustained research on the topic. Furthermore, none of the rejectionists grappled with the essential fact that, as head of State, Napoleon himself, from 1802 to 1807, carefully went through the French archives and systematically burned all the government documents relating to his Jewish proclamations of 1797-9. He burned the State papers, but he could not destroy all the French, British and German newspapers of the period. Denying the historicity of Napoleon’s proclamations was mostly about deriding Zionism and shaming the Jewish People. Thus, I am very proud to have found so much new evidence on this important topic.
@ Ted Belman:
For me it was/is, mainly interesting to read, because I have about 120 books on the Napoleonic era, and have read literally hundreds more. I knew of course, all about Boney and the conquest of Egypt from the Mamelukes, who had ruled that part of the Middle East for hundreds of years-actually became independent of Constantinople, except for a sort of left-handed acknowledgement of the Sublime Porte. They were able to be create their own dynasties without interference.
At least I “thought” I knew all about it, until I got into this masterpiece by Hertz. I paid little attention to his qualifications, passing them over, because of the subject matter. Part way through I went back and really looked at them., wondering “who IS this guy”… He must actually have read many of the sources personally, and not relied on the reports of other authors however expert.. At lest that’s my opinion….
You seem to have a habit of knowing people who write monumental books, possibly Jacques Gauthier also…? He seems never to be mentioned nowadays when discussing the experts (often the Edmond Levy Report) on “The Jewish Right to the Land”. But I regard Gauthier as by far the most important, detailed, and correct..
Thank you again..
@ Edgar G.:
That’s why I put his scholarly bio up front. I knew about him when I was in Canada. He now lives in China.
Sent it to memo, be a nice read on a plane trip or on the beach.
When I keyed in to this “article I was quite unprepared for what was to follow. I knew much already about Napoleon’s proclamations to the Jews, and his Sanhedrin in Paris.etc…also his conversion to Islam to cozy up to the Muslims in Egypt. I actually have an old print of Boney sitting cross-legged on a cushion at a camp fire, somewhere in my stored stuff.
But when I pressed “CONTINUE” I certainly as NOT prepared for what unfolded. This is a most remarkably researched, major volume., and Ted deserves our heartfelt thanks for bringing it to us. I am presently about 1/3rd 1/2 way through, and have spent over 3 hours on it so far. The research must have been ENORMOUS, the quotes form such a wide variety of sources is unparalleled in my experience. (I could be wrong here), Many of the names and sources mentioned I have come across before, but VERY many, I have not. He even mentions the 1799 refusal of the Ottomans to allow the “young Rabbi Nachman of Breslov” to land at Acre, believing him to be a French agent and spy..etc. (It’s generally accepted that he DID go on pilgrimage to Eretz Yisrael, but I wonder how he got in)
I had to take a break and post this. Highly recommended. It shows Boney as a perpetual-motion planner, schemer, propagandist, revolutionary, and, of course, genius, and makes some well founded assumptions as to the real authorship of major proclamations….like the “Letter to the Jews”…etc.
No point in my attempting a synopsis (really a half-synopsis).. one must read it oneself, to see (and appreciate) the vast scholarship, and detail, the collating of everything in it’s crrect time and pace,, not to mention the width of comprehension of the political currents of those highly volatile times.
The East is sinking, and the West is rising……One slowly, the other at break-neck speed, but so well planned that everything falls into place iike clockwork, .except for the disaster of The Battle of Aboukir Bay…….which brought the whole burgeoning, edifice tumbling down …
Bonaparte ‘s call to the jewish people ( 20th April 1799 ) during the french assault on Acre fortress is publicized later on 22 mai 1799 ( 3 Prairial An VII – since the french republic started a new era in 1792 ) .Le Moniteur Universel was the ” Gazette Nationale ” of the french republic . It is printed like that ” Politique Turquie ” Constantinople le 28 Germinal ; ( My citation of the context ) : Bonaparte has called upon the legitimate heirs of Palestine to raise their sentiment in order to catch back their lost independance . ( The exact text ) He invites jews of Africa and Asia to join the french army in Orient to re-establish the old Jerusalem .
Not bad at all for a start , but military failure in Acre then naval defeat in Aboukir ( Egypt ) precipitated the french retreat . And the jewish diasporas were rather hesitant to follow Bonaparte’s call