Civil Law and Religious Law, Kept Apart on Purpose

The Grand Sanhedrin's central move was a distinction with a long history in rabbinic thought but a new political urgency in 1807: between religious commandments that bind Jews eternally and unconditionally, and commandments bearing on civil and political life that Jewish law itself treats as properly responsive to the law of whatever country Jews live in. Marriage law was the hardest test case. The assembly held that while Jewish religious law does not recognise a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew as a religious marriage, French civil law's recognition of such a marriage was a civil matter Jewish religious authorities were not positioned to override, and that a French Jew who contracted such a marriage remained bound by French civil consequences even where the union carried no religious status.

On loyalty and usury, the declaration was more straightforward: it affirmed that Jewish law commands full loyalty to the government of the country of residence, that Frenchmen of every religion are to be treated as brothers rather than as outsiders, and that biblical restrictions on usury applied historically among Israelites themselves and were never a licence to deal differently with non-Jews than with fellow Jews, a reading aimed squarely at the Alsatian complaints that had helped prompt the whole process.

The declaration was accepted by the great majority of European rabbinic opinion at the time as a legitimate exercise of religious authority rather than as a capitulation, though the underlying question, how far a minority religious law can or should distinguish civil from religious obligation under pressure from a state that is itself asking the question, has recurred in other times and places since, well beyond Napoleonic France.