Jewish Involvement in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions
The Threat of Equality to the Jewish Way of Life
WIM KLOOSTER
“We have celebrated the long-desired holiday that was established for the planting and erection of the Tree of Liberty: we have, with heartfelt joy, sung for and danced around that delightful Tree, whose sweet fruits we reap that will be our descendants’ main sustenance.”1 Thus Herman Bromet (1724–1812) began a speech in March 1795 in which he pronounced himself to be an unambiguous partisan of the Batavian and French Revolutions.2 The Tree of Liberty, he went on, has been erected to announce that human rights were no longer violated. Inequality of birth, slavery, and violent domination would soon be a thing of the past. Bromet was an Amsterdam resident who had lived in Suriname and was reinventing himself as a political activist. Two and a half years later he would become one of the two first Jewish members of parliament in European history. He tirelessly advocated for the rights of his coreligionists, whom he reminded in his speech of 1795 that in most of enlightened Europe they were equated with beasts, and in some parts even placed behind them. The current revolution, however, would change that, because they would retrieve their rights, which had been trampled on for so long. They would find their place again among humans.3
In this chapter, I will try to provide an overview of the Jewish political and ideological activism Bromet embodied in favor or against the many revolutions occurring on either side of the Atlantic in the half century that began with the American Revolution. How did Jews entangle themselves with the new ideas and practices? The historiography on Jews in this age of Atlantic revolutions has tended to focus on the revolutions’ impact on Jewish communities. What has been understudied is how Jews themselves participated in these revolutions with words and deeds, and there is no pan-Atlantic study of this question.
Table 8.1. Largest urban Jewish populations in Western, Central, and Southern Europe, late eighteenth century
Sources: Amsterdam: S. E. Bloemgarten, “De Amsterdamse joden gedurende de eerste jaren van de Bataafse Republiek (1795–1798) I,” Studia Rosenthaliana 1, no. 1 (1967): 67; London: Frederick Augustus Wendeborn, A View of England towards the Close of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1791), 2:468; Prague: Michael K. Silber, “The Making of Habsburg Jewry in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 7, The Early Modern Period, 1500–1815, ed. Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 768; Hamburg: Stefi Jersch-Wenzl, “Population Shifts and Occupational Structure,” in German-Jewish History in Modern Times, ed. Michael A. Meyer, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 2:57; Livorno: Carlo Mangio, “La communauté juive de Livourne face à la Révolution française,” in Les juifs et la Révolution française: Problèmes et aspirations, ed. Bernhard Blumenkranz and Albert Soboul (Toulouse: Edouard Privat, 1976), 191; Rome: Alan Charles Harris, “La Demografia del Ghetto in Italia,” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel, 3rd series, 33, no. 4 (1967): 41; Berlin and Frankfurt: Jersch-Wenzl, “Population Shifts and Occupational Structure,” 57; Bayonne: Frances Malino, A Jew in the French Revolution: The Life of Zalkind Hourwitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 222, n. 39; Fürth: Jersch-Wenzl, “Population Shifts and Occupational Structure,” 57; Metz: Pierre-André Meyer, “Démographie des Juifs de Metz (1740–1789),” Annales de démographie historique, 1993, 131, n. 20; Mantua: Harris, “La Demografia del Ghetto,” 39; Venice: Harris, “La Demografia del Ghetto,” 43; Ancona: Marina Caffiero, “Tra Chiesa e Stato: Gli ebrei italiani dall’età di Lumi agli anni della Rivoluzione,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 11, pt. 2, ed. Corrado Vivanti (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1997), 1095; Bordeaux: Malino, A Jew in the French Revolution, 40; Modena: Harris, “La Demografia del Ghetto,” 40; Trieste: Lois C. Dubin, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 21.
Table 8.2. Largest Jewish populations in the Americas, late eighteenth century
Sources: Suriname: Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie, Realm between Empires: The Second Dutch Atlantic, 1680–1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 133; Curaçao: Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998), 61; Jamaica: Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 58. United States: Ira Rosenswaike, “An Estimate and Analysis of the Jewish Population of the United States in 1790,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 50, no. 1 (1960): 34; Saint Eustatius: Judah M. Cohen, Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 11.
Note: All numbers for U.S. states are high estimates.
Jewish support for revolutionary change was limited in both Europe and the Americas. In much of Europe, the Jewish response to the presumed liberation offered by revolution and/or French invasion was mixed. In North America, Jews could be found in the revolutionary and loyalist camps, and some remained neutral as long as that was possible. Others may have changed their allegiance for practical reasons.4 While Jews in Charleston, Savannah, and Philadelphia almost unanimously chose the side of the rebels, those in New York were split, and those in Newport, Rhode Island, remained loyal to Britain.5
The main formal outcome for Jews residing in countries swept up in revolution was the acquisition of equal rights. If Jews had never asked for equal rights before the age of revolutions, they certainly came out to support equality once it had been introduced, and often to point out the gap between law and reality. In Europe, the first step in the direction of civil equality was the adoption by the French National Assembly of the Rights of Man and Citizen in August 1789, which enshrined the principle of equality. Just five days later, the Ashkenazi Jews from Alsace and Lorraine penned a request that asked the National Assembly for explicit civil rights. They realized that the Declaration did not have automatic emancipatory consequences for the country’s Jews. It would, indeed, take another two years for a formal law to be adopted by the National Assembly that ended formal regulations against Jews in France once and for all.
The full enjoyment of civil rights was also desired by the Jews of Pennsylvania. After the revolutionary war with Britain ended in 1783, the Mahamad (council of elders) of the congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia respectfully approached the Council of Censors—a committee that was tasked with defending the rights of the state’s citizens—to raise an issue that must have irked them since 1776. In that year, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had adopted a constitution that required the members of the House of Representatives to declare that they acknowledge “the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine Inspiration.” Their petition did not limit itself to the observation that the obligation to read this declaration would infringe on their civil rights, adding the arguments that limiting civil rights would make foreign Jews move to other states than Pennsylvania, that local Jews were economically active, that their religion was in consonance with the safety and happiness of the people of Pennsylvania, and that Jews had supported the Revolution and suffered the consequences of their support.6
While the American and French Revolutions were homegrown revolutions, many European Jews received equal rights after French invasions that spawned domestic revolutions, as was the case in the Batavian Republic. It also applied to the various Jewish communities in Italy, which must have experienced the three years of French military involvement in the peninsula that began in 1796 as a whirlwind. Historian Geoffrey Symcox has written that the Jews of Rome were
buffeted hither and thither by revolution and counter-revolution, invasion and counter-invasion. In February 1798, after the Jacobin Republic was established, the French dismantled the Roman ghetto, planted the customary liberty tree, gave the Jews tricolor cockades to wear in exchange for their yellow badges, and told them to enroll in the National Guard. Seven months later, in October, the Neapolitan army took Rome and closed them back into the ghetto. But after an interval of just over a month the French returned, declared the Jews free and equal, and opened the ghetto once more. Six months later, however, in the spring of 1799, the French garrison was forced out of Rome by the armies of the coalition, and the Jews were consigned to the ghetto for a third time.7
How to respond to such turmoil? During revolutions of which the outcome is uncertain, the Jewish intellectual David Nassy (1747–1806) wrote in Suriname around the same time, Jews must be peaceful bystanders in order not to become the victims of the triumphant party.8 Even keeping a low profile could not save them in Rome during the same French invasion of 1798. Before the French victory was secure, local mobs of religious fanatics went around massacring Jews, Frenchmen, and radicals. Numerous Jews were thrown alive into the Tiber River.9
Equality, at least on paper, put an end to the policy of tolerance that secular governments had pursued toward groups of Jews in their midst.10 A new stage in the relationship between European secular governments and their Jewish subjects had begun in the mid-eighteenth century when, both in countries where Jews already enjoyed some form of toleration and in those where they were persecuted, new laws were approved that were intended to improve their condition as well as that of other religious minorities. For the governments, Enlightenment values, fiscal exigencies, and the related goal of centralization all played a role in this process. Nowhere did it result in full-fledged civil equality, and rarely did amelioration amount to the recognition of political rights.11
The difference between tolerance and religious freedom was expressed by the “Jews, settled in France” (those from the northeast) in a petition to the National Assembly a few months after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen had been adopted. “The word tolerance,” they wrote, “which after so many centuries and so many intolerant acts seemed to be a word of humanity and reason, no longer suits a country that wishes to establish its rights on the eternal basis of justice. . . . To tolerate, indeed, is to suffer what one would have the right to prohibit.” Under the new conditions, they went on, the dominant religion has no right to prohibit another religion from humbly placing itself by its side.12 At the same time, the granting of equal rights could be seen as an expression of the Enlightenment notion of tolerance. That is how the politically active Jewish silversmith Moisè Formiggini (1756–1810) of Modena saw it initially.13 Eventually, however, he also based his insistence on Jewish equality on rights instead of privileges granted within the framework of tolerance.14
Economic Equality
Economic equality had already been obtained by France’s Jews—albeit not explicitly—on the eve of the revolution. In November 1787, King Louis XVI had issued the Edict of Tolerance, by virtue of which non-Catholics were allowed to enter all professions. In response to the measure, gentiles fearing rivalry from Jews consistently interpreted the edict to only have a bearing on Protestants.15 The next year, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of Bordeaux therefore asked to be allowed to engage in both wholesale and retail trade and to become apothecaries, surgeons, physicians, and obstetricians.16
Economic equality was also disputed by gentiles in the Batavian Republic because of the potential of Jewish competition with Christians. Such opposition did not deter two leading Jewish activists, who aimed to create professional opportunities in their fight against the grinding poverty of Amsterdam’s Jews, from pleading for equal rights. A few months into the Batavian Republic, Mozes Asser (1754–1826) railed against the guilds, labeling them privileged bodies that formed a state within a state. Some of the guilds, he added, prevented people from earning a living in an honest way. It was not until three years later, in 1798, that the Dutch guilds were finally abolished, and even then, it remained difficult for Amsterdam’s Jews to embark on a career as an artisan.17 At the same time, the Amsterdam parnassim may not have been eager to allow Jews to be trained in professions such as carpenter or bricklayer—at least, that is what they were accused of in a Yiddish periodical.18
Military Equality
Equal rights also implied financial parity: the special taxes that Jews paid were bound to come to an end. There were other advantages of civil equality, such as the ability to show one’s dedication to the revolution and its principles by taking up arms. The American Revolutionary War may have been the first in which Jews served on an equal basis, historian Samuel Rezneck writes.19 Whereas some Jewish males fought as volunteers in the Continental Army, others were incorporated in the militias irrespective of their preference. Few of these militiamen saw military action.20
In Europe, the Prussian bureaucrat Christian Wilhelm von Dohm had already advocated Jewish inclusion in armies and civil militias in his influential work Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (“On the Civil Improvement of the Jews,” 1781), written at the request of the Jews of Alsace. Such incorporation, he argued, would underline Jewish allegiance to their countries of residence. Dohm conceived of Jewish Emancipation, David Sorkin notes, “as a reciprocal process in which the Jews were to refashion themselves in exchange for rights.”21
More than a few gentiles loudly objected to this notion, presenting Jews as unreliable people who would make bad soldiers. The issue also divided the Jewish community, especially when it came to the question whether Jews should serve on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays.22 In Amsterdam in 1795, the (predominantly Jewish) Felix Libertate Society advocated the inclusion of Jews in the newly formed National Guard, but in a meeting with a representative of Amsterdam’s municipality, both the Ashkenazi and Portuguese chief rabbis stated that Mosaic law did not permit Jews to bear arms on the Sabbath. The members of Felix protested, pointing out that in other cities, the Jews were carrying out civil defense tasks. In a pamphlet, one member, the abovementioned Herman Bromet, supported the society’s position by arguing on the basis of historic precedents, statements by rabbis, and texts from the Bible, the Talmud, and other Jewish writings that Jews were allowed to carry arms on the Sabbath. They were forbidden to carry tools, Bromet remarked, but that ban did not apply to guns.
Jews would indeed be admitted to the armed forces, although by no means everywhere. Where they were, the Jews were filled with pride, as in Rome, where Isacho Baraffael was appointed major of the National Guard, in spite of protests from citizens who opposed the inclusion of any Jews in that force. Baraffael appeared on horseback at the head of his troops, which comprised many Jews.23 In Paris, an advocate for Jewish Emancipation asserted in 1790 that 150 of the 500 local Jews had enrolled in the National Guard.24 One of these men made himself heard by protecting the monarchist deputy Abbé Maury at the risk of his own life from a crowd of violent “patriots.” Ironically, Maury had not only consistently spoken out against Jewish equality in the National Assembly, he had also remarked that Jews would be of little use as soldiers: “I do not know of a single general in the world who would want to command an army of Jews on the day of the Sabbath.”25
Political Equality
What would have been highly unlikely anywhere in Europe was the kind of position that Francis Salvador (1747–76) and Mordecai Sheftall (1735–97) attained at the beginning of the American Revolution. In 1773, Salvador had moved from London to South Carolina, where he set up a plantation. He was elected to the state’s first and second Provincial Congress, was involved in the preparation of the state’s first constitution, and served in the state’s first General Assembly. Salvador died of wounds sustained as a militiaman in an encounter with Cherokee.26 Sheftall, a well-to-do merchant and landowner, served as chairman of Savannah’s equivalent of the Committees of Safety that sprang up all over the eastern seaboard to enforce the ban on trade with Britain.27 Unlike Salvador, Sheftall survived the revolution, although his allegiance to the patriot cause cost him dearly. He spent time in British captivity and lost all his property during the war.28
The tone was set in the Declaration of Independence, which spoke of the self-evident truth “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This was followed by the more concrete guarantee of political equality adopted in the Constitution of 1787 that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” On a state level, Jefferson’s declaration of 1776 was initially only echoed in the constitution of New York, where in colonial times Jews had already enjoyed more rights than elsewhere. Other states were slow to follow. In the states where Salvador and Sheftall settled, provisions that barred Jews from holding public office were not annulled until 1789 (Georgia) and 1790 (South Carolina).29 By 1840, Jews still waited to receive full Emancipation in Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Rhode Island.30
In a few parts of Europe, Jews had enjoyed political rights as a corporation, but it was not until the age of revolutions that they were granted individual political equality. If political self-abnegation had always been the rule, Jews could now manifest themselves on the political stage.31 The usual consequence was that a few Jewish men were admitted to positions of authority. In Frankfurt, for example, Mayer Amschel Rothschild became a member of an electoral college (in 1811), while the physician Josef Oppenheimer was granted a seat on the city council.32
Although theoretically, it may have been the most significant advance Jews made during this era, the extension of political rights received mixed reactions from the Jewish populations. In Amsterdam, home to twenty-three thousand Jews in the 1790s, which made it the city with the largest urban Jewish population in the world after Constantinople (table 8.1), the initial response was lukewarm at best. Local Jews were allowed to cast their vote when in February 1796 elections took place for the very first democratically elected National Assembly of the Netherlands. The country was divided into electoral districts, which each chose one representative for the assembly in The Hague. In one electoral district in Amsterdam, Jews made up 80 percent of the population, while in another one, almost half of the population was Jewish. Voters were therefore in a position to elect a Jewish delegate, but in the election week, they did not show up at the ballot box. In one subdistrict, only one Jew voted, while in another one, not a single Jew bothered to vote. And still, one Jewish candidate for the National Assembly was almost voted into office. Mozes Asser fell short by two votes, having received half of his votes from Christians.33 Eighteen months later, however, two Jews were installed as members of the Dutch National Assembly, the first Jewish members of any European parliament.
No Jews were represented at France’s highest political stage during the revolutionary decade, although some did occupy senior political posts on a local level. But whether or not they used the newly available political venues, French Jews did express their hopes and fears, which almost invariably were related to their own status. Such was the case with the Ashkenazim of northeastern France, who were not granted the voting rights that the wealthier and more established Portuguese Jews of Bordeaux had been granted. Most of these Ashkenazim did not dwell in cities. The vast majority of the more than twenty thousand Jews in Alsace lived in small communities that comprised one to twenty-five families in rural areas, while in Lorraine only 180 families had been allowed to live in a total of fifty-two communities prior to the revolution.34 What distinguished the Jews residing in Alsace and Lorraine from their coreligionists in Bordeaux was their goal to emancipate all Jews of France, while those from Bordeaux merely aimed to obtain citizenship for themselves, based on the privileges they had enjoyed during the ancien régime. Explicitly rejecting equality for the northeastern Jews, and actively lobbying for themselves at the National Assembly, the Bordeaux men succeeded in reaching their goal during the first months of the revolution, while their brethren had to wait until September 1791.
Autonomy
For a long time, Berr Isaac Berr (1744–1828), leader of the Jews of Nancy (Lorraine), was committed to the principle of toleration and the continuation of communal autonomy. In the course of the revolution, however, he changed direction, applauding and defending citizenship for Jews in his region. The consequence would be, he said in a speech given on July 2, 1791, when he swore a civic oath at the town hall of Nancy, that the only difference that remained between Christian and Jews was their religion. Jewish crimes were henceforth punished individually, as were those of other Frenchmen. “If a Jew should regrettably make himself reprehensible, the Jews in general should not be accused. May not a whole commune be accused if one of its members were to deviate from his duty.”35 Here Berr echoed what the Dutch-Jewish philosophe Isaac de Pinto had written in his Apologie des Juifs (1763): one should not condemn entire peoples. Are all Englishmen guilty of beheading King Charles I and all Frenchmen to be blamed for the St. Bartholomew’s Day’s massacre?
The logical corollary of the granting of individual civil rights was that Jewish self-government came to an end, which was precisely what Moses Mendelssohn had advocated only a few years before the outbreak of the French Revolution. Pleading for civil acceptance of Jews, the leader of the Haskalah broke ranks with Christian Wilhelm von Dohm. In his sketch of a possible future, Dohm had proposed not only to overturn the age-old prejudices of state and society against Jews, but to maintain existing Jewish institutions. Civil matters could be adjudicated in Jewish courts as before, and Jewish elders could continue to issue bans of excommunication. Mendelssohn disagreed. Jews should appear before state courts, and their leaders should have no authority over opinions held by fellow Jews.36 Where the movement for Emancipation was presented as logically linked to the liberation from the power of religious leaders, a wedge was driven between Jewish activists like Mendelssohn and the traditionalists in their communities, who tended to form the majority. That was as much true in Berlin as it was in areas more directly affected by revolution such as Amsterdam, Italy, and Alsace.
French Jews came out on both sides. Those residing in Paris embraced the end of autonomy, but then again, they had never really been organized as a self-governing entity. Hassidic Jews, on the other hand, viewed the French Revolution, no doubt in part because of the implication of the extension of civil rights that the Jewish community lost their autonomy, as a threat to their very existence.37 Many French Ashkenazim considered the abolition of community autonomy a new form of persecution. It was difficult for them to see a distinction between a Jewish life without community autonomy and assimilation to mainstream Christian society. In their address to the king in August 1789, the Jews from Alsace claimed that autonomy was “in the interest of morals, order, subordination and peace in the assemblies and even in the interior of each family.”38 On the other hand, some Jews assimilated to the point of apostasy, such as a rabbi in Paris and another one in Orange. In Carpentras, at the height of the antireligious campaign that marked the Terror, several Jews met with the authorities to present the keys to the synagogue. They told them: “The god in whom we believe . . . can be worshipped by all the earth. We will all meet together in the temple of reason, where all men are brothers, and we will pray to God together, longing for the prosperity of the Republic, one and indivisible.”39 How voluntary such acts were remains to be seen. Increasing pressure was exerted by gentile revolutionaries on Jewish men to shave their beards and women to take off their wigs.40
Ironically, the French authorities did not allow the Jewish communities of Alsace and Metz to dissolve. The reason was that both had debts that the state did not want to take on. In order to pay off the debts, the municipalities had to levy taxes, which required that their administrative structure remained intact, at least temporarily.41 Outside France, Jews usually ignored the news about the civil rights that their coreligionists had received in the land of revolution. In some places, the news did not even arrive or register. An Italian writer noticed during his travels in the peninsula in 1794 that the Jews of Rome reacted with surprise, and even dismay, when he told them that one goal of the revolution in France was to give equal rights to all people, regardless of their origin and religious affiliation. They did not believe him.42
On the other hand, he noted, the Jews of Tuscany had been informed about the momentous events in France. Those events did not exactly provoke an enthusiastic response, although some Jewish members of the lower class in Livorno expressed their joy at a liberty tree planted in their ghetto. Both the lay leaders (in Italy known as massari) and the vast majority of the Jewish community preferred maintaining the status quo to a transformation that included equal political and economic rights. Just how much the massari wanted to keep the newfangled ideas outside the door was shown by their exile of coreligionists who entangled themselves in the French Revolution. One of them was Juda Leone, who had gone to France, where he became a member of the National Guard of Bordeaux. In March 1791 he returned to Livorno, where he publicly extolled the principles of 1789, appearing in the theater in a French uniform that was adorned with the tricolor cockade. For this he was exiled from the Grand Duchy. Another local Jew returned from France in the same year after having served in the French army.43
In a journal article in 1799, the Livornese Jew Salomone Michell, a descendant of Jewish-Polish immigrants and one of the foremost intellectuals of his community, questioned the oligarchic structure of the Jewish community. He called on the French authorities to apply the principle of equality to the governance of the community and to reform it according to the new principles. However, the French did not feel the need to do so because they worked closely with the Jewish leaders after the beginning of the occupation.44 As in other occupied parts of Europe and in the so-called sister republics, practical considerations trumped principles.
In Amsterdam, the 1790s saw a more broadly based critique of their community’s oligarchic governance by a vociferous group of Jews.45 During the Patriot revolt of the previous decade—a slow-moving revolution based on some of the same principles guiding the American and later the French Revolution—the Jewish population of Amsterdam had overwhelmingly supported the Orangist regime of the stadholder, which represented the status quo. This loyalty angered the Patriots and led in October 1787 to the killing by a civil Patriot patrol of three Jews. Tensions between the two parties ran high that month because of an invasion by the Prussian army, which restored the stadholder’s authority. The gratitude of the Jewish population was expressed when a large number of them treated the Prussian soldiers to delicacies from the Jewish cuisine.46
FIGURE 8.1. Cartoon of a Patriot rider who jumped into a Jewish pancake booth. Anonymous print, 1787. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Although the Patriots’ return to power after the French invasion of 1795 was not accompanied by anti-Jewish violence, it did lead to major upheaval in the Jewish community. Almost immediately after the foundation of the Batavian Republic—the Dutch revolutionary regime under French auspices that was installed after France’s military victory—a group of educated Jews founded Felix Libertate, the abovementioned society that would manifest itself as a pressure group that aimed to give the Dutch Jews equal rights according to the French model. Basing themselves on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, they targeted the parnassim of the two congregations in Amsterdam, those of the Ashkenazi and Portuguese Jews. At their insistence, the revolutionary Committee of Vigilance, whose task it was to control the town council, summoned the parnassim of both municipalities to the town hall and ordered them to read and affix the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the synagogues. The Portuguese parnassim tacitly ignored this request, if only because the declaration was made in Yiddish, but they could also afford to do so because of the complete lack of revolutionary fervor among its members. The Ashkenazi leaders, however, defended themselves. Their chief rabbi stated that they could not agree to the declaration of rights since the religious freedom enshrined in it would mean that from now on everyone could do “as he pleased, and there would no longer be any priority for the God-fearing over the renegade.”47
This resistance in turn led to a fierce protest on the part of Felix Libertate, whose members stuck a proclamation in Yiddish to the doors of the synagogues and in public places in the city, denouncing the parnassim’s behavior. They were certain that the parnassim were averse to reading the declaration out loud because they feared that poverty in the community would decline—presumably because Jews were henceforth free to choose any profession—which would reduce the parnassim’s authority. Poor relief had always been one of their chief tasks, and it was a formidable one. Among the Ashkenazi population, poverty was acute, with thirteen thousand of the more than twenty thousand receiving allowances. The men of Felix Libertate also criticized the regulations of the Ashkenazi congregation, which they called undemocratic, contrary to the principle of religious freedom, and ineffective with regard to the care of the poor.48
That they acted as advocates for the poor did not automatically endear the men of Felix to the Jewish proletariat. The Jewish poor had always benefited, for example, from the slaughter and certification of kosher meat in the community’s meat hall, the proceeds of which constituted an important source for the community’s poor relief. The poor realized that religious freedom would negatively impact them, because Jews could no longer be obliged to buy meat exclusively in the meat hall, and the proceeds would decline accordingly, leaving the alms’ box empty—as would actually happen.49
Both camps in Jewish Amsterdam did not budge an inch, not even after the formal Emancipation of the Dutch Jews on September 2, 1796. With all middle ground gone, Felix took the momentous step to establish a new congregation in March 1797. That was, of course, unacceptable to the parnassim, who began to fine people who joined the new congregation, and forbid bakers, midwives, and newspaper deliverers to help the new congregation in any way. On their part, the leaders of the new congregation used their opponents’ uncompromising stand to urge the provincial authorities to dissolve the parnassim. They got their wish in March 1798, but the joy on the side of the revolutionary Jews was short-lived. After a coup d’état, a new national government came to power that restored the authority of the parnassim.50
On a much smaller scale, the feud echoed in the Dutch colony of Curaçao, home to the second-largest Jewish community in the Americas (table 8.2). In 1796, some Jews who attended the Neveh Salom synagogue in the neighborhood called Otrabanda, which was separated from the island’s capital of Willemstad by a canal, attempted to free themselves of the power of the parnassim (who resided in the city) and elect their own parnassim. After the city parnassim had informed him that the terms of Neveh Salom’s foundation did not allow such independence, the island’s governor decided to maintain the status quo.51
The Value of Legal Equality
Despite legal changes that took place in the wake of the revolutions, often little changed on the ground, which led to protests among the Jewish population. The Newport merchant Moses Michael Hays (1739–1805) refused to take the oath to assist in the defense of the rebellious colonies, not because he was, as he called it, “inimical to my country,” but because he had not been allowed to vote, and “never had the Continental Congress or the legislatures taken any notice . . . respecting the society of Israelites to which I belong.” Besides, unlike gentiles, he had been pressed to take the oath.52
Even in Pennsylvania, where only one Jewish loyalist has been identified and where the Mahamad had successfully protested the law that had required Jews to affirm their belief in the divine inspiration of the New Testament in 1783 (see above), actual equality remained out of reach. Ten years later, prominent merchant Jonas Phillips was fined for refusing to appear as a witness on a Saturday, while another year later, the state legislature prohibited work on Sundays, which obviously was detrimental to the Jewish residents.53
Discrimination also continued in Mantua, where the Jewish community complained in a 1799 memorandum addressed to the government of the Cisalpine Republic about forms of inequality that persisted three years after Napoleon had created the republic. The term “Jew,” they maintained, was still inserted before the name of a Jewish citizen in public documents. Jews were also blocked from acting as witnesses in notarial deeds or in lawsuits involving Christians, and instead of swearing an oath, Jews had to pronounce a formula from the book of Leviticus, the use of which they saw as blasphemous. Finally, Jews were denied access to public offices, particularly in the legal field.54 A decade after Jewish Emancipation in the Netherlands, six Dutch Jews claimed that the situation of the Jews was worse than before. Jews had been passed over in appointments to official posts, and although they paid municipal taxes, Jews were not among the beneficiaries, as the proceeds went to teachers of the Dutch Reformed Church, hospitals, orphanages, and almshouses. In addition, one Jew, who had completed his training, had been refused recognition as a master blacksmith.55
The hopes of activist Jews that the acquisition of citizenship and equal rights would end their discrimination forever thus proved vain. But that does not imply that the accomplishments of these years were small. Later Jews would, after all, reap the benefits of the achievement of formal equality. In hindsight, it was the Declaration of the Rights of Man that provided European Jews with an opening that their leaders were eager to exploit in order to bring about the desired Emancipation. Such an opportunity was lacking in a country like Prussia, despite the work of David Friedländer (1750–1834), who in petitions and writings broke ground for his fellow believers. Even though the end goal he had in mind was full civil equality and although the first period of his activities coincided with the early years of the French Revolution, he never invoked the French declaration. Such a reference would only have reduced his chances of succeeding in Prussia.56 But no matter what he tried, Friedländer’s pleas fell on deaf ears. His goal was reached only two decades later after Prussia had come under the influence of France, where the principle of equality had never been abandoned.
The French declaration failed to incite movements for Jewish Emancipation in the Americas, where no more than a faint echo can be detected in the two largest Jewish communities—those of Suriname and Curaçao. Nor did the French document influence the United States, where advocacy for Jewish Emancipation had developed independently. It triumphed when the First Amendment to the American Constitution was adopted, which read that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Congress approved the amendment on September 25, 1789, a mere five weeks after the French Assembly had adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. These documents offered Jews on either side of the Atlantic the means to effectuate equality, although genuine parity would remain elusive for many years to come.
Beyond Jewish Advocacy
As a rule, Jewish entanglement with the age of revolutions was tied to the plight of fellow Jews and their communities. A small group of Jews in the Atlantic world, however, took up causes that transcended religious boundaries. A total of nine Jewish women from Amsterdam, for example, signed documents in 1799 with fellow female Batavian citizens, in which radical demands were formulated.57
Isaac Hourwitz (1751–1812) moved away from Jewish advocacy in the course of his life. Born in Poland, he had moved to France as a young adult, where he made a living hawking goods before he was hired as a librarian. Even before the revolution, Hourwitz was an outspoken opponent of tolerance and a champion of Jewish citizenship, and once the revolution broke out, he manifested himself as a tireless advocate of his coreligionists’ rights. At the same time, he embraced causes and policies unconnected to the Jewish question, expressing his disdain, for example, for the Catholic clergy. During the last months of the Directory, Hourwitz penned a fascinating proposal for the transformation of Paris, which was published in one of the capital’s newspapers.
The plan, which would be ignored by the authorities, involved renaming the streets of Paris, some of which still bore names of saints, while others were indecent, ridiculous, or unpronounceable. Aiming to lay the foundations for a rational and enlightened identity, Hourwitz considered it necessary to completely overhaul the naming pattern. Henceforth, main streets were to be named after European countries and side streets after capitals or celebrities, who would also be honored by statues.58
Hourwitz was not alone among Jews in throwing himself wholeheartedly into the revolution and into writings that outlined revolutionary vistas. Others joined him in applying the notion of equal rights as widely as possible. One man he befriended, Abraham Furtado (1756–1817), was elected in March 1789 as one of four representatives of Bordeaux’s Portuguese Jews to the local assembly of the Third Estate, which was to choose its own representatives to the Estates General. Although he was not among those who were elected to go to Versailles, he and the other electors soon came to make up the local town council. Young and wealthy, Furtado and some fellow Portuguese Jews founded Bordeaux’s Society of the Friends of the Constitution—later known as the Jacobin Club—and dedicated themselves to supporting the work of the National Assembly.59 In a speech for this society in 1791, Furtado defended the Jacobins against the charge that they were subordinating liberty to the whims of the masses. On the contrary, the Jacobins, he asserted, did yeoman work cultivating respect for the new laws. “What is liberty?” he asked.
Liberty is not the right to do all that one wishes, but rather to not do that which one should not; . . . to obey with impunity the wise laws that one has made; . . . to participate in legislation, so as to be more bound to submit to the laws; . . . to march proudly and without fear and under the standard and shield of the law. Liberty constituted by the law, compels a religious respect for it, both from the magistrate who orders and the Citizen who obeys.60
As so many other revolutionaries, Furtado rode the waves of the revolution while simultaneously helping to shape it. In his function as a municipal councilor, he did not hesitate to disarm suspects in 1793, and he declared war on traditional beliefs and institutions, especially the Catholic Church. But the Terror led him to a complete revision of his ideas and an appreciation of traditional institutions. Furtado also came to attach more importance to his own Jewish faith than he had during his radical years.61
Furtado’s active years as a revolutionary partly coincided with those of Junius Frey (1753–94), a man with a very different background. Born in Brno (Moravia) as Moses Dobruška, he grew up as an adherent to the Jewish sect of the Frankists, founded by his mother’s cousin who claimed to be the Jewish Messiah. At twenty-two, Dobruška converted to Catholicism and took the name Franz Thomas von Schönfeld, although he did not cut his ties with the Frankists. Originally an admirer of Joseph II’s reforms in Austria, he left in 1792 for France, where he chose the name Frey and became a fiery revolutionary, siding with France against foreign monarchies. Frey started his political activities as the editor of Le Courrier, the newspaper of the Jacobins of Strasbourg, and president of the club of the Friends of the Constitution, but soon moved with his brother to Paris, where they distinguished themselves for their bravery in the August 10, 1792, assault on the Tuileries palace.62 Living large, they frequently received members of the convention in their Parisian home, which was decorated with busts of Brutus and Cicero and engravings of Franklin, Rousseau, Voltaire, and others. In the summer of 1793, Frey published a book that presented a proposal for a new constitution, in which he discussed the theological foundations he deemed necessary for a democratic regime. Of the “constitutions” of Moses, Solon, and Christ, he clearly preferred those of the latter two, and he took Moses to task for his failure to reveal the truth and for effectively perpetuating superstition. Frey was eventually arrested and executed, along with his brother, during the Terror, suspected of carrying out a secret mission for the Austrian emperor.63
Unlike Frey, the prolific Jewish writer, bookseller, and translator Saul Ascher (1767–1822) was an early convert to the French Revolution. Even before the storming of the Bastille, he had turned against absolute rulers who used the Enlightenment for their own ends. Anticipating the Marxist idea that revolutions laid the foundation for thorough social change, Ascher theorized that the revolutionary human spirit advances in three stages: first it moves into the realm of the senses, then into that of reason, and finally into that of the will. The sensual needs aim at freedom of enjoyment, reason at freedom of opinion, while the will strives to anchor the feeling of human dignity in general consciousness and to achieve moral freedom of action. The first stage, according to Ascher, was identified with economic interests, which were motivated by greed and found their expression in revolutionary struggles of previous centuries, including the American Revolution. The activity of the revolutionary spirit in the second stage coincides with the French Revolution, which eliminated the remnants of feudalism and time-honored religious prejudices, and gave birth to freedom of thought. What the French Revolution could not achieve was the highest stage: the establishment of a moral, harmonious, and happy social order in which everyone’s freedom of will and action was guaranteed. That stage was bound to arrive in the future after a major battle between progressive and conservative forces. When Napoleon took over as the sole French leader, Ascher came to see the emperor as the incarnation of the revolutionary spirit and the liberator of peoples.64
Ascher’s idea of liberation was, however, more universal than that of Napoleon, who ordered the reestablishment of slavery in the French colonies and never championed the rights of Blacks. Ascher, by contrast, translated De la littérature des Nègres, a work by the Abbé Grégoire, the famous French parliamentarian who consistently pleaded for both Jewish and Black equality. The book argued that Blacks were capable of everything that whites achieved, including in intellectual matters.
David Nassy stands out in this group of Jewish thinkers, because he never blindly followed the leaders of the French Revolution. On the one hand, he hailed “the irresistible progress of time, the breath of freedom that animates everything, the splendid example set by France for the benefit of the Jews, this gentle philosophy, this equality, founded on the morals of the people.”65 On the other hand, he condemned the revolution in no uncertain terms when he evaluated it in 1799. Its fate had ended up in the hands of vain, obscure men with unlimited ambition, cannibals.66 They pretended to inaugurate a regime of equality but had in fact accomplished the opposite. Perfect equality between the citizens of a state, Nassy wrote, is a democratic chimera. Men are unequal in their faculties, virtues, talents, honestly acquired wealth, education, and physical strength. As for freedom, it has always existed. “I don’t know any country in Europe where the government has taken from individuals their property rights, personal safety, and the right to be judged by the laws. However, when my will is subordinated to the general law, I am no longer free.”67 Any attempts to introduce pure democracy were destined to lead to anarchy and despotism.68 Nassy thus placed himself squarely in the camp of the conservatives.
In light of these observations, it may not surprise that Nassy also distinguished himself from the others by refusing to extend freedom to Blacks. In an unpublished memoir he sent to the directors of the Society of Suriname (which ruled that colony), the slave-owning intellectual wrote that “until they have arrived at a certain degree of civilization, the idea of liberty and equality catapults them into an intoxication, which passes only after they have destroyed everything.”69
Nassy’s opposite in this respect was Isaac Sasportas. A native of Saint-Domingue, where his father was a merchant, Sasportas was a well-traveled young man, who spent time in France around the time when the revolution broke out. Having lost his parents, he moved in with his uncle Aaron in Charleston. If he wasn’t a revolutionary yet, he must have become one under the influence of this man, who had fought Britain during the American Revolution and was a member of the local Jacobin club. Striking out on his own in the mid-1790s as a smuggler, Isaac Sasportas made regular visits to Jamaica, the island where he would end his days. In 1799, he came up with a plan for the French to invade and conquer Jamaica in order to abolish slavery in that colony and strengthen France’s position in the Caribbean. These goals had been discussed in previous years but had never led to a concrete plan. The French at Saint-Domingue added to Sasportas’s proposal to involve both Black soldiers from that colony as well as enslaved Jamaicans and Blue Mountain Maroons by having French Adjutant-General Jean-Baptiste Urbain Devaux and Sasportas recruit privateers at the Dutch island of Curaçao, who were to provide aid in the invasion. Although the mission to Curaçao failed due to Devaux’s attempt to overthrow the local governor, the invasion plans continued.
Ultimately, the invasion—projected to take place around Christmas 1799—never materialized, not because of any mistake or oversight on Sasportas’s part but because the plan ran counter to the goals of Toussaint Louverture, at this point the most powerful figure in Saint-Domingue. Louverture had just signed a commercial treaty with Jamaica and could not afford to provide soldiers since he was fighting a civil war with the troops led by André Rigaud. Pretending to support the invasion plan, Louverture informed the British consul in Saint-Domingue about its menace. Shortly afterward, the authorities in Jamaica arrested Sasportas, who had arrived on the island to make preparations. A military court condemned him to death by hanging.70
Jewish agency in the age of revolutions was usually tied to the quest for equal rights. When a revolution led to the granting of legal equality to Jews, in keeping with revolutionary principles, often little changed in practice. It was usually at this point that Jewish activists came out of the woodwork to claim an equality that should have already been theirs. These advocates of equality, who embraced revolutionary ideology, were not necessarily representative of the outlooks of their communities. The reaction to the American Revolution in the tiny Jewish communities on the eastern seaboard was mixed, while in Europe a conservative attitude often prevailed, as the majority opposed equality, since it was incompatible with the cherished autonomy that they enjoyed. Equality assumed Jewish integration into mainstream society, which many saw as jeopardizing the Jewish way of life. Jewish proponents of equality railed against autonomy, presenting the movement for Emancipation as logically linked to the liberation from the power of their own religious leaders, although some believed that it was possible to combine Emancipation and autonomy.
Jews’ entanglement with the age of revolutions did not exclusively occur in the context of their own ethnoreligious communities. Some Jewish activists looked beyond these communities when they joined revolutionary movements, planning for a future society for Jews and gentiles alike. The few cases featured here suggest that their ideological trajectories resembled those of non-Jews, with some soon abandoning their revolutionary pursuits, while others never gave up hope that a better, and radically different, world could be achieved.