What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.
- Thread starter jacob ningen
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That's fine, but in the medium term it seems that intermarriage between Banu Zaidan and Tuqans would produce an heir who some day could rule over the whole....... which very likely should have its capital in.....
Well, at least till the next surprising turnaround of events !!!
THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE ACTORS PARIS, DECEMBER 1804: The imperial Sanhedrin prepares to meet
THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE ACTORS
PARIS, DECEMBER 1804
PARIS, DECEMBER 1804
“The convocation you propose would be a wonderful thing, vôtre majesté,” said Rabbi David Sinzheim, “but you should not call it a Sanhedrin.”
“And why not?” asked Napoleon. His tone was conversational, as befitted the setting – they were in the Emperor’s private study rather than an audience chamber, and he had invited those present to sit – but the question was nonetheless a challenge.
Sinzheim looked around at the others in the room – Champagny, the interior minister; the two commissioners from that ministry who had been holding discussions with notable French Jews these past months; and several of the notables themselves. None seemed to be giving him a clear signal, so he turned again to the Emperor and said, “because there already is one.”
“There is one in Palestine, yes – I had close acquaintance with it, as a matter of fact. But surely there can be another one in Europe.”
“Vôtre majesté, there can be any number of small Sanhedrins, as there were in ancient times. But the Sanhedrin in the Holy Land is a Great Sanhedrin, and of those, there can be only one.”
“Let me tell you a story,” said Napoleon. He leaned forward, away from the hissing stove that warmed the room against the December chill outside; even in the brief hour of Sinzheim’s acquaintance with the Emperor, he’d learned that this was the pose he liked to assume when telling war stories. “When I laid siege to Acre five years ago, I sent a herald to speak with the Jews of the city, and to show them the decree of the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem that I was not to be opposed. And their reply was, ‘the rabbis in Safed overruled him and we’re not in the Land of Israel at any rate, so we’ll use that decree to wipe our arses.’ And then they fought me, just as the Mussulmen did. So does the writ of the Sanhedrin of Palestine not stop where Palestine stops?”
There was no rancor in Napoleon’s voice when he spoke of the Acre Jews’ reply; if anything, his tone was one of rueful respect. But those Jews, all unknowingly, had now put Sinzheim in a bind. No doubt their intent had merely been to give martial defiance rather than to make a statement of doctrine; all the same, they’d put their words in Napoleon’s hands, and he was now using them.
Sinzheim cast his eyes around the room again – to the bookshelves, the tables strewn with maps and reports, the motley armchairs and couches where the assembled dignitaries waited for him to respond. How could he explain that the Sanhedrin’s power to judge cases and administer communal institutions did end at the borders of the Land of Israel, but that their treatises on law and custom were valid throughout the world?
But Napoleon spoke before he could. “Perhaps, in ancient times, there was only one Grand Sanhedrin because all the Jews were in Palestine, and now they are not?”
“I am sure, vôtre majesté, that there were Jews in Egypt before the ancient Sanhedrin ever met, and that by the time it stopped meeting, there were Jews at Rome and in Babylon as well…”
“And did they have their own courts?”
“Vôtre majesté, it isn’t that simple…” he began.
“No it isn’t,” said a gaunt black-clad man at the far end of the room. Sinzheim was grateful for the interruption; Abraham Furtado, the man who had spoken, had held public office in Bordeaux before the Terror, and he was far more comfortable in the world of politics and debate than a rabbi from Strasbourg. But Sinzheim’s gratitude lasted only a moment; Furtado was a conservative now, a partisan of the Emperor, and although he had echoed Sinzheim’s words, he did so to speak against them.
“The Sanhedrin has never been simple,” Furtado continued. “It was the court of the Maccabean kings once, and was headed by high priests. At times the office of nasi was passed from father to son rather than being elected by his fellow rabbis as now. In ancient times it numbered seventy-one; in the Holy Land now, it numbers a hundred twenty-seven. Its powers, its meeting-places, its officers – all those have changed, why can they not change again? And in Babylon, the Jews did have their own courts – the court of the Exilarch, the assemblies of the academies…”
“The Exilarch?” asked Napoleon. He’d been discussing the calling of a Sanhedrin for some time – since the Syrian campaign, he’d taken an interest in the status of the Jews – but this was obviously a word he’d never heard before.
“The civil governor of the Jews of Babylon, under the Sassanian shah. The Exilarchs were a dynasty – monarchs of the Jews, in effect, although they themselves were subjects of the shah.”
“Should I appoint an Exilarch for the Jews of France, then?”
“Vôtre majesté,” said another of the notables – Moïse Seligmann, from the Bas-Rhin rabbinical family – “that would be for you to decide.”
“No, I think perhaps it would be for you to decide,” Napoleon answered. “Perhaps one of the questions I will put to your Sanhedrin is who should be chief of the Jews in France, and how that chief – or chiefs – should be chosen. And perhaps another of those questions will be whether your Sanhedrin is in fact a Sanhedrin, and whether it is proper for the Jews of an advanced and modern country to have a separate tribunal from those of Palestine.”
“That body could answer all the same questions if it were called a kehillah or bet din…” protested Sinzheim, but the Emperor raised his hand. This was no longer even the pretense of a conversation between colleagues. The Jewish assembly he intended to call was suddenly an urgent question rather than one to debate at leisure – the news of Britain’s alliance with Sweden and the possibility of another war in Germany had made it so – and he was bringing the discussion to a halt. There was no more time to argue about nomenclature; he had decided to call a Sanhedrin, and a Sanhedrin it would be.
“Oui, vôtre majesté,” he said.
“Now let us speak of logistics,” said Napoleon, like the general he still was. “Monsieur de Champagny, my good commissioners, Rabbi Sinzheim – have you conferred on the form of the summonses, and to whom they will issue? Have you designated committees to examine the list of questions I will put to them? Have you determined the place where the Sanhedrin will meet, and how it will choose its officers?”
Heads nodded around the room, Sinzheim’s among them, but what Napoleon had said before stayed in the rabbi’s mind. Throughout this audience, the Emperor had come back to his belief that the Jews of modern Europe should have different laws than those in backward and uncivilized places, but in some ways he really wanted the French Jews to be more like those of the Galilee. He wants us to fight as they do, to work at all the jobs of the country as they do. But it was plain that he didn’t want the French Jews to pray or dress or act in public as the Galilee Jews did, or most of all, to argue as they did. Was it more civilized Jews he wanted, or simply Jews with his stamp on them? Sinzheim felt the contradiction deeply, and for a second only, his eyes met Napoleon’s and he was sure the Emperor understood it too.
“A Sanhedrin it will be,” he murmured. There was much good that could still come of such a gathering – it would reaffirm that Jews were citizens, gain favor for them with Napoleon, and if the Emperor gave his seal of approval to the laws and customs that the tribunal decreed, then no lesser official would be able to question them. And it might be good for all the Jews of France, and as many of those elsewhere in Europe as could come, to air out their differences and discuss how they might best spread the idea of emancipation to the rest of the continent.
But they would only gain that favor if the Emperor approved of their answers to his questions. And if today were any guide, some of those questions would not be easy.
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No, Bonaparte. The codification of the Mishnah and calendar and the LXX text and Onkelos and Peshitta and were due to the fact that the Diaspora was already rivalling the Yishuv in size.
Alexandria and Elephantine and Pumbdeita and Sura. Did Napoleon find the Cairo Geniza and excavate it ITTL because it would revolutionize Judaism and bolster feminism due to the number of women entrepeneurs in it.
Good point using tradition against conservatism. ie scholarship on the institutions and their evolution. Is this a proto-Positivism or Reconstructionist I see here.
I like how the Rosh Galuta is being named dropped and the whole Rabbinic account of the Karaite split. Hes not going to mention it but most Jews were in al andalus and Europe when the Masoretes of Tiberias published the Masoretic text in the 9th-12 century CE. Because that opens up Judaism to Wellhausen , Porphry, Origen,Jerome and Islam of falsification
https://www.thetorah.com/article/di...nto Aramaic writing, or even Aramaic language.
The problem of Volozhin later in the century in Russia.
The perennial problem of the judiciary if they dont curb legislative and executive power they'll be seen as mere instruments of the executive and legislative but if they rule like in Fletcher too often they run the risk of being seen as a paper tiger that lacks authority.
I like this chapter.
I doubt Napoleon will ask it but how does Jewish historiography factor into the Sanhedrin. like Furtado referencing the Geniza or Josephus while Sziem marshals more traditional sources.
Well, you can't expect him to get too far down into the weeds - his interest in Jewish history is purely instrumental.
I'm going to say no, on the basis that he had other preoccupations at the time and that his interest in the Jewish Question (as it was already being called by this time) didn't arise until shortly before he left Egypt. OTOH, the Geniza was already known to exist, and ITTL, now that peace has broken out in the Levant for the time being, there are scholars a lot closer than Paris who might be interested in its archives. Once the university at Acre that we've been talking about gets started, the Ben Ezra Synagogue could become practically a branch office, and plenty of Sanhedrin rabbis would also pay a visit. This could become a plot point in the 1840s arc or even before.
Furtado was one of the members of the Napoleonic Sanhedrin IOTL, as are the other Jews mentioned in the chapter (here is a complete list). He came from a Sephardic merchant family who settled in Bordeaux, and he was a Girondin during the Revolution who became conservative later. To some extent, I'm using him as a proxy for the Sephardim of Aquitaine in general, who had a more national/patriotic attitude during this period than the Ashkenazim of Alsace and Bas-Rhin, but the views he expresses in the chapter are consistent with his OTL Bonapartist leanings. And Reconstructionism may be similar in some ways to how Napoleon wanted to shape the European Jews, although the truly radical assimilationists like Friedlander considered the Sanhedrin to be mainly of entertainment value.
The delegates to the Napoleonic Sanhedrin have the same dilemma as IOTL, only more so - they stand to gain advantages for themselves and for other European Jews who come under Napoleon's rule, but they will have to compromise some of their principles to do so. That theme will underlie the Sanhedrins of 1805 and 1807 (yes, as planned now, there will be two, although that might change), the responses of the Jews of Europe to the Coalition wars, the attitudes of the maskilim and the proto-Reform movement, and for that matter the reactions of the various Jewish communities in the Levant.
OTOH, as you will notice, Napoleon has skipped the Assembly of Notables stage IOTL and is instead going directly to the Sanhedrin after a series of informal discussions. This is motivated by his desire to convene the Sanhedrin and have it make its report in time to be of use in the coming war with the Third Coalition, but it also means that the Paris Sanhedrin will be a forum for actual debate (albeit much of it taking place in camera via committee meetings) rather than a rubber stamp for the Notables' declarations as IOTL. More danger, but also more room for negotiation and maneuver.
All sides of the debate will marshal traditional sources, because as with much else in Judaism, there is supporting material in those sources for nearly any argument. However, the more modernist/Bonapartist delegates will indeed be the more inclined to cast their net beyond those sources.
Yes it is a typo the missing word is charges.
So, I assume you're aware how the Torah is neither punctuation and Hebrew uses an Abjad in the Torah.
The oldest codices we have with the normative jewish traditions diacritics are only from the 8-11th century CE.
Basically since the entire history of Judaism text falsification has been a charge lobbed by Abrahamic religions at each other. and the Masoretic text as we know it only dates in surviving codex form from the 9th to 10th centuries. Mentioning the relatively recent age of MT texts would be disadvantageous to Rabbinic Judaism as Islam and christianity would jump on this to claim the Masoretic text was tampered with to deny previous passages that support Christianity or Islam.
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Yes.Similarly the canonicity of Song of Songs was still disputed by Jewish authorities until the 11th century,
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True but Song of Songs was still a candidate for removal in al andalus
I mean restricting yourself to just the Rambam both sides will find support.
That's one of the beautiful things about Judaism, and I'm not being sarcastic - all the contradictions laid out and dissenting opinions preserved, giving every generation the ability to re-weigh and reinterpret without having to abandon tradition. The Ship of Theseus is a good model for a religion - it's how we can be a 17th-century faith (or for some branches, a 19th/20th-century faith) while remaining a 3000-year-old people.
Update hopefully before the weekend, work deadlines permitting.
They're probably going to give him a majority and minority opinion which he will hate.
You think there will be one minority opinion? Oh, you sweet summer child. (More seriously, the delegates are going to seek consensus, both because it's the tradition and because they know they need to - but they may not be able to achieve that consensus on all the matters posed, and there may be unofficial as well as official dissents.)
yeah there'll be at least eleven dissents on any question.
I wonder if the French Revolution, And its interaction with the near east through Napoleon's people who've stayed behind, may begin sowing the seeds of gasp Republicanism in the Yishuv. Diaspora Jewish communities have always had some level of democratization, mainly due to the need to rule by consensus in the absence of a monopoly on force, and the ideas of the enlightenment will blend into that smoothly. I can see the idea of a "Republic of Israel" (not as in a sovereign state, at least in the beginning, but as in an idea for how the People of Israel should conduct their affairs) gaining traction in esoteric, philosophically experimental Acre at first, then sowing it's seeds across the Yishuv - and probably spilling over to other communities in the region.
Well, the Yishuv has self-managed so far as an (oligarchic) parliamentary vassal monarchy....
It will also be interesting to see how "the people" end up challenging the judicial and political authority of the "undemocratic" Sanhedrin, which in the future could see itself cornered into the strictly religious sphere by some type of elective body.
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