THE PLAYBILL
JANUARY 1805
Amsterdam:
The Adath Jeshurun synagogue stood on Rapenburg street, just off the Nieuwe Herengracht canal. On one side was a merchant’s mansion, and on the other was a warehouse; inside, in a room that looked like a bit of both, the leaders of the congregation gathered to discuss a summons.
“A Sanhedrin,” said Carel Asser. “That’s certainly a bold choice.” He himself was a bold choice to be present at this meeting – he was twenty-four years old and had only recently returned from the university at Utrecht. But in the two years he’d been back at Amsterdam, he’d already made a reputation pleading cases in the courts, and he was fast acquiring another one as a man of letters. And he’d been just sixteen when the Batavian Republic, as it then was, had granted full citizenship to its Jews. He’d never known any adult responsibilities other than those of a citizen, and perhaps that qualified him, more than anyone else at the table, to discuss an assembly that would define those responsibilities.
“What remains is
our choice,” Yehuda Litwak answered. As his name suggested, Litwak had been born in Vilna, but he’d removed to Berlin in childhood where he’d learned mathematics from Mendelssohn, and later he’d come to Amsterdam to marry. He was a methodical man, and he’d applied his methods both to advocating for emancipation and to building a congregation of outward-looking merchants and professional men. And now, with equal deliberation, he said, “So do we go? And if we do, who do we send?”
“
What we send is a letter,” said Izak Graanboom, the Chief Rabbi. “Despite all appearances to the contrary, the Batavian Commonwealth isn’t France, and we aren’t Frenchmen. If we take part in a French Sanhedrin, that would be as much as saying that the French Jews can make laws for us…”
“Haven’t we always recognized authorities in other countries?” said Lemon, the medical doctor.
“We always
did,” answered Litwak, “but now? We formed this congregation to be Jewish Dutchmen, not Dutch Jews. The rabbi is right, I think. We send our brotherly greetings, nothing more.”
“Ignore France?” said Asser. “Maybe if France agreed to ignore us. But it won’t – not ever, and certainly not under Bonaparte. We may have to live under this Sanhedrin’s laws whether we want to or not.”
Litwak looked like he wanted to argue, but he nodded slowly. There was certainly no denying that the French Emperor looked on Holland more as a subject than an ally; even now, he was demanding that the French Navy be given control of customs in the Dutch ports. Not even the most ardent Dutch patriot could deny the possibility that the French Sanhedrin’s writ might one day extend to Amsterdam.
“So we go, then. And the summons is calling for lay delegates as well as rabbis – that means Bonaparte wants a parliament, not a court. So you, then, Asser. You’re the one who makes speeches. You will lead.”
Maybe, Litwak thought, it would all be for the best. After all, who had been thinking about the duties of Jews as citizens, and who had been preparing for those duties, longer than the Jews of Holland? If Bonaparte wanted answers on what was required of emancipated Jews, then maybe he would accept the Dutch answers. And young Asser would need guidance, but he was as well placed to give those answers as anyone.
_______
Mantua:
Two letters were waiting for Rabbi Abraham Vita de Cologna at the Scuola Grande synagogue. The first informed him that he had been appointed to the Collegio dei Dotti, the College of Scholars, one of the three bodies that selected the legislators and commissioners of the Italian Republic. The second, bearing the seal of the French Emperor, gave notice that the Italian Jews’ request to send delegates to the Sanhedrin had been approved and that he was summoned to the opening meeting.
“What would our fathers have said, Montini?” he asked, showing the synagogue’s caretaker the letters. “Seven years ago we were all behind ghetto walls, and now this.”
“As to
my father, signor, I don’t know, but I am certain that
your father wouldn’t have been surprised in the slightest. He kept a close eye on what was happening in the world. He saw freedom rising, and he knew it would someday come to us.”
“Freedom, but what kind?” Vita walked to the doorway of the office and looked out to the sanctuary and the platform at its head; it would be in just such a room, most likely, that Napoleon’s Sanhedrin would meet. The kind of freedom on which the Sanhedrin decided would be particularly important here, in a city that had locked the gates of the Jewish quarter at night until just seven years before.
All the same, he thought,
we’ve been facing that choice longer than many. Ever since Joseph Nasi had come to recruit immigrants from the Italian Jews, a few of Mantua’s Jews had made the journey to Acre every year. And every year, about half that number returned. There was the freedom that the Holy Land offered, and there was another freedom in what was homely and familiar, and those who would change the customs of their home would do well to consider carefully what they were changing.
Maybe this Sanhedrin – presumptuous as the name was – will be a chance. The true Sanhedrin, the one in the Holy Land, had little to say about the place of Jews in an enlightened state, because it didn’t
sit in an enlightened state. The coffee-house scholars of Acre and Tzfat might write their essays and send their correspondence, but government there was still a matter of tradition, custom and personal loyalty, and the issue of what Jews’ duties were as citizens of a non-Jewish commonwealth wasn’t one that the Galilean or Yerushalmi rabbis had much occasion to consider.
The Paris Sanhedrin would be much different. It would be a danger, yes – the freedom Bonaparte gave to his parliaments was, as Vita had already seen, often more a matter of theory than practice. But so many prominent men in the same room talking about the duties of citizens – that was certain to yield
something useful, wasn’t it?
Maybe it would yield a freedom that Mantua’s Jews wouldn’t feel compelled to leave.
_______
Berlin:
“It will be a spectacle for the Paris mob, at least,” said David Friedländer. “The caricaturists, the doggerel-writers – by the end, the gentry will be taking bets on it like the horse-races.”
“You don’t think anything useful will come of it?” asked Jakob Bartholdy. Jakob was Friedländer’s nephew through the latter’s marriage into the Itzig merchant family; Napoleon’s Sanhedrin was no longer of direct concern to him since his conversion to Christianity, but he remained close with his Jewish family and maintained friendships in the city’s Jewish intellectual circles. He was an army officer, a patron of the arts, a man of property, and he still devoted some of that property to the cause of Jewish emancipation.
“The Emperor’s Sanhedrin will be as useless as the Rambam’s. It has the same limits. The Rambam’s Sanhedrin administers the Mosaic law without thought; the Emperor’s will consider how one may observe both the Mosaic law and the law of France, which is almost the same thing. Because if it did think the matter through, it would have to conclude that one cannot.”
Bartholdy nodded; such an opinion was to be expected from one who had, six years before, written an open letter calling Jewish ritual obsolete and urging Jews to accept “dry baptism.” Bartholdy could hardly condemn that letter, not when he himself had accepted baptism of the traditional sort, but he found it curious that he saw the coming Sanhedrin as potentially liberating where his still-Jewish uncle saw it merely as a way of perpetuating backwardness.
“In Acre, they read Spinoza and then they dance under the stars,” Friedländer went on, “and this, in the end, is no different.” He raised the glass of wine that sat on the table – kosher wine; habit was still habit – and sipped while he thought. “To emancipate the Jews, we must first be emancipated from ourselves. The law of Moses and the citizenship of Europe are two separate masters. One cannot serve both, and if Bonaparte’s Jews try, they will fail.”
_______
Lyady, Russian Empire:
“Jews
cannot serve two masters!” thundered Rabbi Shneur Zalman. “There is only Ribono Shel Olam. We do not obey Ribono Shel Tzarfat!”
Mendel, the messenger who’d brought the letter, cowered; he knew Shneur Zalman’s anger wasn’t aimed at
him, but it was still an anger terrifying in its force. And it was even more so when the rabbi mocked an emperor. Ribono Shel Tzarfat, the Master of France, was indeed not the Master of the Universe, but his name was one to conjure with even in the domain of his enemy. And who was to say that Rabbi Shneur Zalman couldn’t put a curse on him even here?
Mendel would not want to be on the receiving end of a curse from the Baal ha-Tanya.
“The mitnagdim are saying that this is welcome,” said Chaim, one of the rabbi’s sons. “That the Sanhedrin will decree the liberation of all Jews from oppression, and that Bonaparte will free the Jews in all the countries he conquers.”
“The mitnagdim,” answered Shneur Zalman with scorn. “They know as much of Bonaparte as they do of the Name. He is a godless emperor and will lead the Jews who follow him into godlessness.”
“Rav Molcho of Jerusalem did support him,” said Chaim carefully. Molcho had been the unwitting cause of much trouble for Shneur Zalman; his support for Napoleon’s conquest of Jerusalem had given the mitnagdim what they needed to charge that Shneur Zalman’s collection of funds for the Hasidim of that city was treason. Twice Shneur Zalman had been arrested and imprisoned by the Tsar’s procurators, the second time for a full year.
But the thunder had gone from the rabbi’s voice, and rather than berating Chaim, he considered the example carefully. “There is a difference,” he said at last. “Bonaparte wanted nothing from Rav Molcho other than his obedience, and that of the Jews of Jerusalem. Obedience we can give to any ruler, even the Turk. But from the Jews of France and Italy – soon, from the Jews of all Europe – he wants more. He wants to change them, reshape them in his image, and this false Sanhedrin will be his tool. No Jew should want emancipation at that price.”
The rabbi sank into a chair and imagined what someone like Mendel – who had, in the interim, fled the room – might become if, in ignorance, he gave heed to Bonaparte’s rabbis. The mitnagdim, at least, were Jews; Bonaparte’s followers would not be even that. They would become as the men of Acre who prayed as Judah the Pious had done but who read Spinoza and held that science could disprove dogma; maybe they would even stop praying.
“Molcho declared herem everyone who opposed Bonaparte,” he said. “I will declare herem anyone who follows him. His Sanhedrin is of no force. If the mitnagdim follow him, we will contend with them, and if he spreads its doctrines with his armies, we will fight him.”
“Fight him for the Tsar?” asked Chaim.
“We will fight him
with the Tsar, perhaps.” Shneur Zalman closed his eyes and considered the man who’d twice imprisoned him as a traitor. “But we will fight him
for the Name.”
_______
Acre:
Suleiman Tasa was still, in name, the editor of ha-Shaliach, but he’d reached his threescore and ten and no longer spent much time at the presses. He spent his mornings in study and prayer, and on pleasant afternoons like this one, he sat on the harbor wall and looked out at the sea. The ships weren’t far, and if there was news, they would tell him.
There was news today.
The sailor with a letter in his hand had been in the Royal Navy during the siege five years past; he’d sailed on a merchantman since Amiens and still came to Acre often. He knew Suleiman well and called his name.
“Come sit, Jemmy,” Suleiman said, thinking again of how foreign that name was both to Sana’a where he’d been born and to the land where he lived now. He’d learned some English during the siege, and his tongue remembered how to shape the words. “Someone out there remembers me?”
“Not
you, sir, but it’s addressed to the Jews of the Holy Land, and you’re the first one of those I’ve seen since we got into port, begging your pardon.”
“Nothing to pardon,” Suleiman answered with the easy laughter of seventy years. He decided not to explain the finer points of which cities were in the Land of Israel and which were not. “A letter to all of us, with Bonaparte’s seal on it? He’s tried that before.”
“None of my affair, but the captain said I’m to deliver it, sir.”
“It will be in my hands,” said Suleiman, giving Jemmy half a piaster – it was more than the usual fee, but at Suleiman’s age, what else did he have to spend it on? He accepted the sailor’s thanks and rose from the wall, unsealing the letter as he made his way back to the city streets. By the time he’d finished reading, halfway to the kollel katan, he knew that this would be a working day after all.
“Miriam!” he called as he entered. She was still working the presses as she’d done since before the siege; she’d marry soon, surely, but in the meantime, she set type as quickly as any of the apprentice boys and twice as well.
“This is addressed to all of us,” he said, putting the letter on the table, “so we’ll publish it – every word of it. And after you set the type, take it to the post-riders’ stable – you know where it is – and give the next rider for Tzfat a piaster to deliver it to the Or Tamid. Tell him to give it to the Nasi personally.” He laughed again. “I think it might interest him.”
