Liberty, equality, fraternity…was it good for the Jews?
By Eli Barnavi
How could a
community-based religion like Judaism fit into a society based on individual
rights? How could a religious minority long considered theologically and
socially inferior realize equality? How could a religious minority survive and
thrive in an increasingly secular society? These issues comprised what would
come to be known as “The Jewish Question” in the modern period. The following
article outlines the political paths that the nations of Western Europe pursued
in response to the Jewish question as it related to citizenship. It is
reprinted with permission from A Historical
Atlas of the Jewish People edited
by Eli Barnavi and published by Schocken Books.
Recognizing that
Jews were equal to other citizens and working toward the legal abolition of
disabilities and inequities were ideals that began to materialize in Western
Europe only two centuries ago. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen, the manifesto of the French Revolution, inspired by the spirit of the
Enlightenment, implied Jewish equality. The law passed by the Constituent
Assembly on September 27, 1791, the first act of full emancipation by a
Christian state, was perceived by the Jews as an historic turn which heralded a
future of happiness. "France... is our Palestine, its mountains are our
Zion, its rivers our Jordan. Let us drink the water of these sources; it is the
water of liberty... ! " (a
letter to La Chronique de Paris, 1791).
After the French Revolution, emancipation became the central
issue for Jews everywhere, but each community had to maintain its own struggle
for emancipation. In most places, the legal decision was the crowning
achievement of a lengthy process of economic and social integration. However,
in some cases--as in France itself--emancipation preceded the renunciation of
traditional Jewish society: it was the liberals' struggle for the universal
application of' "natural rights" which ensured the civil equality of
the Jews.
Conte de Clermont‑Tonnere, in his famous speech to the
National Assembly (December 1789), explicitly demanded that the Jews not be
excluded from article X of the Declaration of Rights ("No man ought to be
molested because of his opinions, including his religious opinions").
Therefore, he said, "The Jews shouldbe denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as
individuals." The revolutionary French armies exported this type of
emancipation to all the countries they conquered.
Whether
it was the result of a deliberate choice (as in France), or imported and
enforced (as in Italy and Germany), or a product of an extended process of
socio‑cultural maturation (as in Austro‑Hungary), emancipation was
never a linear nor a painless process. The customary religious hostility toward
the Jews, characteristic of traditional preindustrial societies, was
reinforced by modern ideologies and political forces, both conservative and
revolutionary, which regarded Jewish equality with fear and antagonism. These
animosities often merged with the opposition to Napoleon who extended the scope
of emancipation with his military victories.
Thus,
Jewish emancipation in Europe suffered major regression during the years
following the Congress of Vienna (1814‑1815), which ended the age of the
Revolution and sought to reestablish peace in Europe based on the restoration
of the old order. Nevertheless, liberal and democratic forces everywhere took
up the cause of Jewish emancipation and turned it into a central issue in their
political campaign. On the eve of the revolution of 1848, the idea of Jewish
equality could no longer be ignored anywhere in the west.
The upheavals
which rocked Europe in the mid‑nineteenth century resulted, admittedly,
in only a few formal changes. Popular anti-Jewish feelings, the reticence of
governments, and nationalist fermentation in multi‑national empires, all
still played a central role in restricting the full and legal admission of the
Jews into society. But as the West was shedding, at an uneven but irreversible
pace, its feudal and traditional structures, and entering a liberal, bourgeois,
individualist, and industrial age, the equality of all citizens was becoming an
essential condition of modernity.
When Switzerland
granted the Jews equal rights in 1874, the process that had begun in Paris
almost a century earlier was completed: Jewish emancipation in the West was by
now an established political and legal fact. This nineteenth‑century
achievement, however, was rather fragile, andwas therefore easily destroyed in certain European countries with
the rise of twentieth-century racist ideologies. This goes to show that legal
and full political participation do not necessarily lead to social acceptance
and recognition.
Eli Barnavi is the
director of the Morris Curiel Center for International Studies and a Professor
of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University. This article is reprinted with
permission from A
Historical Atlas of the Jewish People edited by Eli Barnavi and published by Schocken Books. © 1992 by
Hachette Litterature.
