Napoleon, the Jews and the Sanhedrin

Simon Schwarzfuchs's Napoleon, the Jews and the Sanhedrin is a scholarly history of Napoleon's 1806 to 1807 convening of an assembly of Jewish notables and a symbolically named Grand Sanhedrin to formally define Jewish civic status and religious obligations under French law, written by a historian specializing in French Jewish history. Its authority comes from close use of the Sanhedrin's own recorded proceedings and correspondence, documenting both the assembly's actual answers on questions of civil loyalty, intermarriage and usury, and the political pressure Napoleon's government placed on the process. As a specialist monograph it treats the episode's legal and political mechanics in depth; readers wanting the event's longer-term reception within Jewish religious thought, where the Sanhedrin's concessions remained controversial among later traditionalist authorities, will want to supplement it with that separate literature.