Napoleon's Grand Sanhedrin
And it came to pass in the days of the small emperor, who had broken the kingdoms of Europe and crowned himself with his own hand, that he turned his face to the children of Israel scattered through France and…
Biblical Narrative
And it came to pass in the days of the small emperor, who had broken the kingdoms of Europe and crowned himself with his own hand, that he turned his face to the children of Israel scattered through France and through the Rhineland and through northern Italy, and he said: let the Jews be summoned. In the year five thousand five hundred and sixty-six, in the city of Paris, beneath the chandeliers of a hall borrowed from the imperial bureaucracy, there gathered seventy and one elders, the like of which had not been seen since the days of the Second Temple — a Sanhedrin reborn at the bidding of a Corsican.
Twelve questions were placed before them, and the questions were sharp as flint. May a Jew marry a Christian? Are the French now to be considered brethren or strangers? Does Jewish law permit usury? Does it permit the trades and the soldiering of the kingdom? Will a Jew obey the laws of France even when they contradict the law of Moses? The elders sat. They debated. They knew that beneath the velvet of the question lay the steel of the demand: the price of citizenship is the surrender of the state-within-a-state.
And they answered with care and with sorrow and with wisdom. They said: France is our country. Our brethren are all who dwell beside us, Jew and Christian alike. The civil law of the land binds us; only the rituals belong to the synagogue. We will bear arms for France. We will not lend at usury to our French brothers as we would not to our Jewish brothers. The Sanhedrin signed its decisions, and the emperor was pleased, and he wrote them into the law, and the Jews of France received the citizenship that the Revolution had promised.
Yet there was a price. The community as a corporate body was dissolved; what remained was a faith, like the faith of the Lutherans or the Catholics, a private matter between a man and his God. The rabbinic court of Metz that had once judged its own no longer judged. The herem could no longer be enforced. A Jew was now a Frenchman of the Mosaic persuasion. The bargain that Mendelssohn had imagined, Napoleon now sealed in imperial decree — and the Jewish world from Paris to Krakow began to understand that the modern age had drawn its terms in ink that could not be erased.
We must consider Jews as Frenchmen — but as Frenchmen who profess Judaism — for the Nation makes no distinction between religious confessions.Speech of Abraham Furtado, President of the Paris Assembly of Jewish Notables, 1806
Archaeology · History · Genetics
Napoleon's Grand Sanhedrin was the culmination of a process that had begun in 1791 when the French National Assembly, on the motion of Adrien Duport and Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, granted full citizenship to the Jews of France. By the early 1800s, however, complaints from Alsace about Jewish moneylending and the persistence of corporate Jewish autonomy led Napoleon to reopen the question. Simon Schwarzfuchs's Napoleon, the Jews and the Sanhedrin (Routledge, 1979) remains the standard study; Ronald Schechter's Obstinate Hebrews (California, 2003) places the episode within the broader French Enlightenment imagination of Jewry.
On 30 May 1806 Napoleon issued the imperial decree convening an Assembly of Jewish Notables, which met in Paris from July 1806. This body of 111 deputies, presided over by the Bordeaux Sephardi merchant Abraham Furtado, received from the imperial commissioners — Mole, Portalis the younger, and Pasquier — the famous Twelve Questions covering intermarriage, usury, the relationship of Jewish law to French civil law, the legitimacy of the rabbinate, and the duty of military service. The Assembly drafted answers between August and October 1806.
To give these answers binding halakhic force, Napoleon then convened a Grand Sanhedrin, the first body to bear that name since the dissolution of the Jerusalem court in the fourth century. Meeting from 9 February to 9 March 1807 under the presidency of Rabbi David Sintzheim, with assistant nesi'im Joshua Benzion Segre of Vercelli and Abraham de Cologna of Mantua, the Sanhedrin issued nine doctrinal decisions in a bilingual Hebrew-French text. They affirmed civil law's supremacy over Jewish law in civil matters, declared France the patrie of its Jews, and forbade usury between French citizens — Jewish or Christian.
The institutional outcome was the consistorial system, established by imperial decree of 17 March 1808, which created a Central Consistory in Paris and regional consistories supervising synagogues, rabbis and Jewish education across the empire. The same decree, however, was paired with the so-called Decret infame of the same date, imposing a ten-year regime of restrictions on Jewish economic activity in Alsace. The consistorial system survived Napoleon's fall and shaped French Judaism — and through emulation, much of central European Judaism — until the separation of church and state in 1905.
The Sanhedrin was Napoleon's attempt to use Jewish self-government to abolish Jewish self-government — to obtain from the rabbis a halakhic warrant for their own redundancy as a public authority.Simon Schwarzfuchs, Napoleon, the Jews and the Sanhedrin (1979)