Grand Sanhedrin

In 1791 France had been the first state in Europe to grant Jews full citizenship. Fifteen years later, complaints from Alsace about peasant indebtedness served as the pretext for a review. Napoleon summoned an assembly of Jewish notables, which met in Paris in July 1806.

Twelve questions were put to it, all built on the same axis: was Jewish religious law compatible with the Civil Code and with duty towards the fatherland? Polygamy, divorce, mixed marriages, usury, military service — the assembly's answers were uniformly favourable to the primacy of civil law.

To give those answers a properly religious authority, the Emperor had a Great Sanhedrin convened, named after the assembly of Jerusalem that had disappeared in antiquity. Seventy-one members, two thirds of them rabbis, sat in Paris from 9 February 1807 under the presidency of David Sinzheim, rabbi of Strasbourg.

The Sanhedrin turned the notables' answers into doctrinal decisions: in civil matters the law of the state bound the faithful, and France was the fatherland. It was the founding act of modern French Judaism — and, for its critics, a submission extracted by power.

Two decrees of 17 March 1808 drew the consequences. The first organised worship into departmental consistories under a central consistory, on the model already applied to Protestants: it is the structure that still governs French Judaism.

The second, famous as the 'infamous decree', suspended or annulled debts and subjected the trade of Jews in the eastern departments to special authorisations, for ten years. It was not renewed and lapsed in 1818. Emancipation had thus been granted with one hand and restricted with the other.