French Rights

Sermon Shabbat Chukat 5784

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

We had a genuine monsoon yesterday, which was refreshing, although today was back to 108 degrees.  That’s toasty—it’s a dry heat, but so is an oven.  It’s midsummer now in the Sonoran Desert, so it’s supposed to be this hot, more or less.  The fact that most of this country is experiencing super-hot weather now is small consolation, to be honest…

This being more or less midsummer also means that this Sunday will be Bastille Day, July 14th, the national independence day for France. And wouldn’t it be nice to be vacationing in France right now? 

So, close your eyes and think for a moment, about France… the Champs d’Elysee, the Arc de Triomphe, the bridges over the Seine, the Eiffel Tower, wine, cheese, croissants with jam and coffee, great food, great art, lovely countryside, bicycle riders, the tricolor flag, beautiful cities, and very rude people.  You know, France, far from the heat of a Western summer… a good place to be going, in time for Bastille Day.  And, this summer, it also has the Olympics.  And in spite of what everyone thought initially was going to happen, the fascist party founded by the antisemite Jean Marie Le Pen did not end up winning the recent election in France.

And you ask—Rabbi, just what possible Jewish meaning can this rhapsody about France have? 

Aha, I say—you may not know this, but the first nation in the old world to guarantee full citizenship to Jews was revolutionary France, and without the French Revolution of 1789 Jewish history in Europe would have been very different.  We are very grateful to our own country of America, whose 4th of July we celebrated last week; but we should retain respect for the country that created the first universal declaration of human rights, and which benefited our people in particular. 

My favorite weird historical question that most people don’t get is this: who broke down the walls of the ghettos in Europe, walls that had existed since the 1500’s?  Who emancipated the Jews of Western Europe?

And the answer is Napoleon Bonaparte.

You see, when Napoleon was conquering Europe in the 1790’s and early 1800’s his armies were fighting, at least in theory, for liberty, egality, and fraternity.  He had no love for religion in general, and certainly not for the old order of the church that had enforced so many terrible rules and constraints on Jews throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance and into early modern times.  And while Napoleon had no particular regard one way or the other for Jews—he was a non-commissioned officer from the island of Corsica, with little exposure to Jews—he had a very strong sense of the necessity to break down the Old, bad order.  As he said, “to the Jews as a commune—that is, a people—nothing; to the Jew as an individual citizen of France, all rights and privileges.”  Which was a very great change, and a great gift, at that time in that world.

As the French armies crossed Europe, conquering, plundering, and establishing their own governments everywhere, they also, almost as an afterthought, broke down the walls of every ghetto they encountered and let the Jews out. And they established, for at least some time, a new legal system, the Code Napoleon, which allowed Jews to go to universities for the first time, to serve in the military, to be part of the civil service, to be doctors and lawyers, to live wherever they wanted, to live as full citizens.

It was an extraordinarily important moment in Jewish history.  France enabled us to enter the modern world, at least wherever its armies had control, and the ghetto walls were never established in quite the same way, or with quite the same force, again until Hitler.

That meant that we Jews suddenly could experience all that the modern world had to offer.  And it made possible the extraordinary successes and accomplishments and experiences of modernity in Judaism.  It was while Napoleon controlled Germany in the early 1810s that Reform Judaism was born, an Enlightenment form of Jewish belief and practice that catalyzed all modern Judaism, either inspired by it or in reaction against it.  In the long run, emancipation made Zionism possible, and the State of Israel.  It was earth-shaking.

And it was all because of France.  Now Jewish history in France before the revolution in 1789—the taking of the Bastille, deposing and executing the king, etc.--wasn’t all pan de chocolat.  Nor was it that way even after emancipation, as we shall see.  And in that history there are some lesson for us here in America that have great relevance.

Jews first moved into what became of France in Roman times, and established important communities in places like Narbonne and Lyon and Provence.  But we were always on the fringes of acceptable society, no matter who was in charge, at the whim of kings, dukes, and counts, popes, cardinals and bishops.  While there were great Jewish figures in France—like Rashi in the 11th century—Jews were often persecuted, attacked, robbed, and expelled.  Because we were so important to the economy of France, the next king after the expulsion often invited the Jews back in—only to have them robbed and expelled again a few years later.  In one dizzying sequence, King Phillip the Fair expelled all the Jews of France in 1306—and after economic disaster followed his son invited them back in 1315, just nine years later.  That same see-saw experience was repeated several more times, confiscation of all property and expulsion, followed by the invitation to return.  Some French kings protected the Jews, but usually this was a temporary experience.

Only after the French revolution did things change dramatically for Jews in France—and as noted, Napoleon established Jews as full citizens, although it took until 1831, long after Napoleon was deposed and later died, for all the legal restrictions and limitations on Jews to finally be fully eliminated. 

And Jews did thrive as emancipated citizens of France, rising in all areas of society, business, government, literature, and the arts.  Of course, antisemitism did not disappear.  In fact, at the end of the 19th century the Dreyfuss trial shocked the world; in Paris, in the Belle Epoque, the glorious era of the Impressionists and the Paris Opera, the City of Light and the most advanced city in the world, a virulently antisemitic trial evoked ugly chants of “Death to the Jews” from the mobs in the Paris streets.  It was hearing those chants in the streets outside the courtroom that convinced a journalist from Vienna that we Jews finally needed to have our own nation.  His name was Theodore Herzl, and shortly thereafter he convened the Zionist congress that ultimately led to the creation of the State of Israel.

Jewish life in France after the Dreyfuss affair improved, and remained generally positive—until the Nazis conquered most of France, and French Jews suffered as so many Jews did all across Europe and North Africa.  And when Israel was founded, for the first twenty years of existence it had no stronger ally than France, which provided the jets that won the 6-Day War.  

And today?  Well, antisemitism in France now is real and dangerous.  While much of it is the result of the virulent and violent antisemitism of the Arab immigrant underclass from France’s former North African colonies, some of it also from the rising right-wing nationalism of the party founded by the neo-fascist Le Pen faction. Still, we do well to remember, in this challenging time, that it was France that first gave Jews the full rights of citizenship 235 years ago.  And that the national government of France has taken strong and powerful positions against any form of Antisemitism.  The current Prime Minister of France is a Jew of North African background, and there have been Jewish Presidents of France in the past, as well as recent presidents who have Jewish ancestry.

How does this relate to our own experience here in America, the other nation to give Jews full citizenship way back in the 18th century? 

I have always contended that antisemitism is in the very soil of Europe, and never seems to disappear no matter how much things may change superficially.  Like any poisonous weed, antisemitism always has the possibility of reviving there, and in today’s world it often takes the form of anti-Zionism, declaring that only Jews don’t have the right to our own nation.

We are fortunate that America does not have that same history of institutionalized antisemitism.  We did not need our government to turn from persecuting Jews to accepting us as citizens.  But America is also something of an amnesiac nation that tends to forget its own history as soon as it can.  And our long dedication to protecting the rights of minorities is being tested now, in an environment when Jews and Israel are under constant criticism and often unfair attack.

By the way, it emerged this week that some of the pro-Palestinian protest movement on American college campuses has been funded by Iran, in its continuing efforts to attack Israel and destabilize American politics.   

Still, here in the US we do not need a Napoleon to guarantee Jewish rights as full citizens.  We simply need leaders who believe in the ideals that America stands for, the rights enshrined in law that guarantee freedom of religion and that protect all minorities from persecution.  And we need officials with the courage to enforce those protections.

So enjoy watching the Tour de France, have a café au lait and pastry this weekend, play an Edith Piaf or Maurice Chevalier song, and salute the nation that first gave us full rights as citizens.  And remember that those rights exist for us here in America, and need to be asserted with pride, now more than ever.