Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE (17691821), emperor of the French. He proclaimed the emancipation of the Jews in the Italian states which he had established, and the majority of the Jews in Italy hailed Napoleon as a liberator and political savior, calling him "Helek Tov" (lit. "Good Part"; cf. Bona-Parte). Even by this time, however, problems had arisen from the contradictions posed by Jewish laws and communal autonomy on the one hand and the political and civic obligations of the Jews on the other. In May 1799, during Napoleon's campaign in Palestine (see below), the government newspaper Moniteur published the information that Napoleon had issued a manifesto in Palestine which promised the Jews their return to their country. Many European newspapers reproduced this information, although today it is questioned whether Napoleon really issued such a declaration. The news concerning the manifesto and Napoleon's Palestine campaign made little impression on the Jews in Europe. On the other hand, the campaign gave rise to millenarian hopes among certain nonconformist circles in England; for the first time, their expectation of the return of Israel to Palestine and hence to the Church was linked with realistic political projects. The principal influence exercised by Napoleon as emperor on Jewish history was in the years 1806 to 1808 when he convened the Assembly of Jewish Notables and the (French) Sanhedrin, and established the Consistories. The programmatic documents formulated during this period and the institutions which then came into being embody the first practical expression of the demands made by a centralized modern state on the Jews who had become its citizens"the separation of the political from the religious elements in Judaism." The news of the activities of the Jewish assemblies stirred both Jewish and gentile sectors of society in Central and Western Europe.