Grand Sanhedrin of 1807

The Grand Sanhedrin did not originate the questions it answered. In 1806, responding to complaints from Alsace about Jewish moneylending and to his own interest in whether Jews could be assimilated as full French citizens, Napoleon convened an Assembly of Jewish Notables, a body of rabbis and lay leaders drawn from across France and northern Italy, and put twelve questions to it directly: whether Jewish law permitted polygamy, whether it recognised civil divorce, whether it permitted a Jew to marry a Christian, whether Jews regarded Frenchmen who were not Jewish as brothers or as strangers, whether French-born Jews considered France their country and its laws binding, and further questions bearing on usury and Jewish economic practice.

The Notables answered in ways designed to demonstrate compatibility with French citizenship, but Napoleon wanted the answers given a religious authority the lay-heavy Notables could not fully supply on their own. He therefore ordered a second, more explicitly religious body convened: a Grand Sanhedrin, named for and modelled on the ancient Jewish high court, seventy-one members strong, composed mostly of rabbis with a smaller number of lay members, drawing delegates from French territory and, by invitation, from Jewish communities in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands as well.

The body met in Paris in February and March 1807 and issued a formal doctrinal decision, framed in the language and form of rabbinic responsa, ratifying the Notables' answers as consistent with Jewish law rather than as a concession to it.

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.