Napoleon and the Jews

By Alex Gordon, Ph.D

HAIFA, Israel –The Jews know not to create idols, but what about idols they did not create! What friends and allies they have not ascribed to themselves in their long history of torment! It is a tragic trait of a persecuted people to seek real and imaginary supporters.

Napoleon’s popularity in history is unprecedented. The man who unleashed so many wars, occupied so many foreign lands, caused suffering to hundreds of thousands of people in different countries, including his own, was admired and inspired in the works of many prominent people of different nationalities and religions. What might be the reasons for this worship?

1. To counter the tendencies of industrialization and materialization required the creation of a romantic ideal: Napoleon, a brilliant general, a successful conqueror and politician who stood above capitalism, a brave man adored by the soldiers, was presented as a romantic hero.

2. A boy from a large family, a petty Corsican nobleman belonging to a national minority in France, conquered a great country and half the world with his genius, not because of his “divine” origins. A simple man became a king. People love the realization of fairy tales.

3. Heinrich Heine, who hated idols, a freedom-loving and independent thinker, fell in love with the dictator Napoleon. The Emperor (!) democratized his occupied Westphalia (motherland of Heine) and in particular emancipated the Jews there. The French army marched triumphantly through Europe spread the ideas of “liberty, equality and fraternity” among the peoples of conquered countries.

In November 1936, Sigmund Freud wrote to Thomas Mann about his new novel Joseph and His Brothers and the role of Joseph, Napoleon’s brother, in the life of the French emperor: “In a Corsican family the advantage of the firstborn is surrounded by the most sacred reverence. […] The elder brother is a natural rival, the younger one harbours a spontaneous, immensely deep animosity toward him. […] To remove Joseph, to take his place, to become Joseph himself must have been the strongest of Napoleon the child’s impulses, but such excessive childish impulses tend to turn into their opposite. A hated rival turns into a lover. So, it is with Napoleon.”

Napoleon’s desire for power in the family, long suppressed, sublimated into a thirst for power in other areas and a dislike of other people. At the top of his career he freed himself from his complexes in relation to his older brother, and he became one of the closest people to him. However, Freud notes: “The aggression unleashed at that time, just waiting for the chance to move on to other objects. Hundreds of thousands of bystanders would pay for the fact that the enraged little tyrant had spared his first enemy.” Freud deduces Napoleon’s enormous will to power from his complex of being the youngest, “inferior” son in the family.

Preoccupied with an underlying psychology, Freud does not take into account the characteristics of Bonaparte that lay on the surface. Napoleon was acutely affected by the humiliation of the Corsicans, and it encouraged him to rebel for their freedom and independence, but he did not dare to rebel. Stendhal wrote in his novel Red and Black, “Minutes of humiliation create Robespierres.” Minutes of humiliation created Napoleon. But those moments did not make him a Corsican patriot. He was ashamed of his poverty, his provinciality, and his accent in French. For a complete cure of his Corsican complexes, he needed to conquer France, to distance himself completely from his Corsican past and to exclude himself from his people, which he did.

A Corsican could conquer France, a Jew could not, even if he broke with his own people. But to what extent was Napoleon a Corsican? This question arises because of the attribution of sympathy for the Jewish people to him. An investigation of the emperor’s attitude toward the Jews can begin with an essay, An Unpublished Page of History, published by Guy de Maupassant after a trip to Corsica on October 27, 1880. The writer told about an incident that happened to Napoleon in June 1793: “This hitherto unknown page of history is a real Corsican drama, and it almost became fatal for a young officer, who was then on leave in his homeland. […] All this information I obtained in 1853 from an addendum to the will drawn up by the Emperor shortly before his death on the island of St. Helena.” Three days before his death, Napoleon added the following note to his will: “I bequeath 100,000 francs to Mr. Jerome Levy.” The former mayor of Ajaccio, Jean-Jerome Levy, a Jew, saved his life.

Maupassant’s story begins: “It was shortly after the death of Louis XVI. Corsica was ruled by General Paoli, an energetic and brutal man, a convinced royalist who hated the revolution, while Napoleon Bonaparte, a young artillery officer who was spending his vacation in Ajaccio, was trying to use all his influence as well as that of his family members for the celebration of new ideas. […] The young Bonaparte and General Paoli were already feuding with each other.”

General Pasquale di Paoli, president of the directorate of the department of Corsica and commander of the island’s armed forces, was a counter-revolutionary, Napoleon a revolutionary. Paoli was a Corsican separatist, Napoleon a French patriot. When Napoleon learned that Paoli had decided to separate Corsica from France with the help of England, he accused the general of treason. Paoli tried to liquidate Napoleon, but he managed to escape. One of the future emperor’s saviours was a Jew, Jean-Jerome Levy. Maupassant writes: “Horses were waiting by the bridge, and a small detachment took to the road, escorting the fugitives to the outskirts of Ajaccio. As night fell, Napoleon sneaked into the city and found shelter with the mayor, Jean-Jerome Levy, who hid him in a closet.”

In Jewish history it is customary from time to time to pull out a cheapo picture of the love of the French emperor for the Jews, but it is more likely that it is about the unrequited love of its authors for Napoleon. The arguments of the Jewish Napoleonophiles are as follows: Napoleon is a Corsican, and a Corsican remembers evil and good, and is bound to avenge and reward. Therefore, he bequeaths money to his saviours, and among the saviours is the Jew Levy, hence, Napoleon loves the Jews. The first argument for Napoleon’s special sympathy for the Jewish people is taken from General Bonaparte’s appeal to the Jews in 1799 during the siege of Acre:

“1 floreale 7 of the French Republic (April 20, 1799).
Bonaparte, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the French Republic in Africa and Asia, to the Legitimate Heirs of Palestine. The Jews, the only nation of its kind which in a thousand years the passion for conquest and tyranny have been able to deprive only of their hereditary lands, but not of their name and national existence! […] And those who have been delivered by the Most High will return, and will come to Zion with rejoicing. Rise up, rejoicing, exiles!”

This proclamation is one of the most stirring documents drawn up by a non-Jew in favor of the rebirth of the Jewish state. However, who was the author of the document and at what point it appeared? The great actor Napoleon Bonaparte played the role of the Messiah. He wanted to liberate the Holy Land from the Muslims and transform the nation of the Old Testament according to his own script. To this end he spared no expense in paints. But Napoleon’s excitement can also be explained by the commander’s mental stress before the decisive battle of the campaign. On the eve of his defeat at the walls of Acre he was probably thinking more about helping himself than about winning independence for the Jews. Like many friends and enemies of the Jews, he exaggerated the power of that people. He regarded the Jews as very rich and powerful and counted on their help in the struggle against Turkey, which was actively supported by England and in whose possession Palestine was. In the desperate situation in the Holy Land Napoleon was looking for support. The touching appeal to the Jews in the proclamation of General Bonaparte, the occupier of foreign lands, sounds more like the prayer of a desperate ambitious man than the prophecy of the revival of the Jewish state which the Jewish Napoleonophiles attributed to him. The most important addressee of the proclamation was the Jew Haim Farhi, adviser to the governor of Acre, Ahmed al-Jazzar, the actual commander of the city’s defence against the French forces. But Farhi had less confidence in the French conqueror than did the emperor’s later Jewish admirers.

Another fact which testified to Napoleon’s sympathy for the Jews was their emancipation in areas occupied by French troops under his command. This event, too, cannot be considered his merit in relation to the Jews, for the emancipation was a conquest of the French Revolution, which the army disseminated in the countries it captured as evidence of a new order. Max Nordau clarified the emancipation resulting from the French Revolution: “The emancipation of the Jews did not arise out of the consciousness that a grave injustice was being done to a certain race, that that race had suffered terrible suffering and that the time had finally come to correct this two-thousand-year injustice: no, it was merely the conclusion of geometric straightforward thinking of eighteenth-century French rationalism. […] The philosophy of Rousseau and the Encyclopedists led to the proclamation of human rights. From the proclamation of human rights, the strict logic of the men of the Great Revolution drew the conclusion concerning the emancipation of the Jews, and in accordance with the laws of logic the following syllogism was constructed: every man has certain natural rights; the Jews are men, therefore, the Jews have natural human rights. This is how equality of the Jews was proclaimed in France, not out of fraternal feelings towards the Jews, but because logic demanded it.”

A third fact, supposedly speaking of Napoleon’s affection for the Jewish people, is the Emperor’s establishment of a new Sanhedrin in France in 1807. After the victory at Austerlitz at the end of 1805, Napoleon was returning to Paris via Strasbourg, where he heard complaints about the Jews of Alsace from the Christian inhabitants of the city. The complainers could not forgive the Jews for their straightening and prosperity after the Emancipation Edict of the French Revolution of 1791. The discontent of the inhabitants of Strasbourg with the Jews was a manifestation of their envy of the newly emerged community from the ghetto.

On April 30, 1806, Napoleon said: “The government cannot be indifferent to see a nation humiliated, put down, capable of all meanness, take possession of the two beautiful departments of old Alsace. […] They cannot be put on a par with Protestants or Catholics; it is not civil law that must be applied to them, but political law, for they are not citizens […] I want to take away from the Jews, at least for a certain period, the right to mortgage real estate. Entire villages have already been expropriated by Jews: they have taken the place of feudal lords. […] It would also be possible to prohibit them from trading, which they taint by usury, and to invalidate their former transactions based on deceit.”

Declaring that “the evils inflicted on the Jews stem not from individuals but from the very constitution of that people,” Napoleon announced the necessity of convening the States General. As a result of Napoleon’s anger, two events occurred. One was the convocation of the Sanhedrin, which existed only one month, gave nothing positive to the Jews and was an expression of Napoleon’s megalomania. Secondly, a week after the dissolution of the Sanhedrin, Napoleon issued a decree (March 17, 1808), called “infamous” and which was in force until the end of his empire. The decree stated: “The activity of the Jewish nation from the time of Moses, by virtue of all its disposition, has been that of usury and extortion. […] The Jews must be regarded as a nation and not as a sect. It is a nation within a nation. […] Whole villages have been robbed by the Jews, they have reintroduced slavery, they are true flocks of crows. […] The harm done by the Jews does not come from individuals, but from the nation as a whole. It is the pestilence and the locusts that are ravaging France.”

According to this decree, measures of discrimination were introduced against the Jews, partially restricting their rights to settle and to engage in commerce. The final words of the “infamous” decree make clear its meaning: “The general prescriptions of this decree will be carried out for ten years in the hope that at the end of that period, under the influence of the various measures taken against the Jews, there will no longer be any difference between them and other citizens of our empire.” The decree remained in force even after the fall of Napoleon and was not repealed until 1818.

Bonaparte wanted to turn the Jews away from Judaism, believing that they had to be rescued from their mistaken faith and correct their national anomaly by assimilation in France. He wished to force every third Jew to marry a Christian and to force every third Jewess to marry a Christian: “Good is done slowly, and large quantities of vicious blood can only improve with time. […] If out of three marriages one turns out to be a mixed Jewish-French marriage, Jewish blood will cease to be any special.” He was a Corsican, but he became a Frenchman. He believed that since he had assimilated, the Jews should do the same. Napoleon wanted to turn Jews into Frenchmen in France and into French agents outside France.

Can it be argued that Napoleon, as a Corsican, remembered the Jews well for the help he had received from Jean-Gerome Levy? Was Napoleon a typical Corsican? Corsica lost its independence three months before the future emperor was born in 1769. Napoleon betrayed Corsica not only when he opposed its protector Paoli. He betrayed its independence more than once when he could, as emperor, ensure its separation from France. In dying he hoped to save his soul, and so he left money to the saviours of his body from the Corsicans. Among these men was a Jew, Jean-Jerome Levy. Napoleon was indebted to this Jew, but he did not consider himself indebted to the Jewish people whom he wanted to dissolve into the French nation. The Jews as a people had, according to Napoleon, to disappear. The Jewish people owed nothing to Napoleon Bonaparte.

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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education.