FIRST ACT
FEBRUARY 1805
“So are we a Sanhedrin?” asked David Sinzheim.
The others in the room laughed. All of them knew Sinzheim and knew each other – Sinzheim wouldn’t have dared let any unknown quantities onto
this committee – and they were comfortable together. Under the laughter, though, was the recognition that the question was deadly serious.
“The question is whether we are a
Great Sanhedrin,” corrected Abraham Vita. “And since there is already one in Palestine, the question is whether there can be more than one.”
“There has never
been more than one,” said Joshua Segrè – like the others in the room, from an old rabbinic family. “But Rabbi Jehoshua ben Levi said that Sanhedrins are to be established both in Palestine and other places out of Palestine…”
“
Small Sanhedrins,” interrupted Sinzheim, but let Segrè continue to speak – Segrè knew as well as he did what Rabbi Jehoshua had been talking about, and Sinzheim realized that he was building an argument, not yet making one.
“And as Furtado said when we met with the Emperor, the Sanhedrin even in the Holy Land has changed over time,” Segrè continued. “The Rambam says that the Great Sanhedrin is to meet at the Beit ha-Mikdash, but there hasn’t been one of those since the time of Vespasian. And all the sources in the Mishnah and Gemara put the number of judges in the Great Sanhedrin as seventy-one, yet there are more than that now in Tzfat alone…”
Heads nodded around the table; everyone knew that the Sanhedrin of Palestine had exceeded the ancient number from the very beginning. The Rambam had decreed that a Great Sanhedrin could only exist by unanimous consent of the rabbis in the Land of Israel, and leaving any rabbi out would risk the withdrawal of that consent. It was a point of controversy even now, and the Sanhedrin was careful to assign only seventy-one judges to any given case, but they’d never confronted the issue head-on for fear of what would happen if they did, and since the affair of the Maharitz forty years past, the supernumerary judges had been enshrined in law.
“Rabbi Johanan said that judges of the Sanhedrin must know seventy languages,” added Vita. “I doubt any of the hahamim in Palestine can boast that…”
“That just means judges must be widely educated,” said Sinzheim. “Even the Rambam omits that when he lists the things that members of the Sanhedrin must know.”
“Certainly,” said Segrè. “But it also means that the laws regarding the Sanhedrin aren’t to be taken too literally.”
“There are laws and laws, though. And some are to be taken more literally than others – laws that are foundational rather than aspirational.”
“But is there a law that there can only be one Great Sanhedrin?” asked Segrè. “It has always been
assumed that there would only be one. There are laws that
imply there will be only one. And the Rambam said that there is no obligation to set up courts in every region outside the Holy Land. But is there any law
decreeing that there can only be one?”
“Are we to be Hillel or Shammai, in other words,” said Vita. “Are we to say that everything not forbidden is permitted, or that everything not permitted is forbidden?”
“That, too, is a balance that is struck different ways at different times,” Sinzheim replied. “We must consider what weighs on each side of that balance. Maybe we should do as the Sanhedrin of Palestine does and consider the nafka minah, the practicalities, and when I consider that, I keep coming back to Hillel – the other Hillel, the one who was Nasi in the time of the amoraim – and the calendar.”
Again, the others in the room needed no explanation. The second Hillel had presided over the Sanhedrin at a time when Jewish life in the Holy Land was declining and the very existence of the Great Sanhedrin was in danger, and he had ruled that the calendar should follow a mathematical formula valid throughout the world rather than being determined anew each year by the Sanhedrin’s observations. There was no law for this before his time, but there was a necessity.
“Nor was that the only instance,” Segrè said. “Only those who have received semikhah in the Holy Land are supposed to be judges – the rabbanim and the Rambam said this – but we have always appointed judges in our communities even when no one in the Holy Land could confer such authority. And judges in the diaspora aren’t supposed to decide cases of robbery or rape or personal injury, but they always have, because who would do so if they didn’t?”
“Then the question,” said Sinzheim, “is whether there can be a Great Sanhedrin in the diaspora if we need there to be one?”
“You could put it that way, yes.”
“Then
do we need there to be one?”
“In my city,” Vita answered, “there were ghetto walls eight years ago. I am a citizen now because of Bonaparte. The Jews of many other cities are citizens because of Bonaparte, and though our emancipation here in France predates him, it is still bound up with him. And he wants there to be a Great Sanhedrin in France. Do we need one? You tell me…”
_______
“There are two questions before us on usury,” said Moïse Seligmann. He was in a different room at a different table, with the other members of the committee who would consider the issue of lending at interest. “One is easy, and one may be hard.”
A murmur of agreement spread through the room. The first question – whether Jews could practice usury toward other Jews – could be answered with a straightforward quotation from Deuteronomy, and the answer was “no.” The second, though, was knottier. “Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon interest,” the Torah said, but it had long been disputed whether this permitted
charging interest to gentiles or only
paying interest to them, and that dispute had never been definitively resolved.
“Well, we know the answer Bonaparte wants,” said Jacob Rodrigues, one of the lay members from Bordeaux. “And that, too, seems straightforward enough. Dina malkhuta dina” – the law of the land is the law – “so if Bonaparte says we shouldn’t lend at interest, then we shouldn’t.”
“That
isn’t the answer Bonaparte wants,” Seligmann said. “He wants us to declare our law, not merely to obey his. And besides, there is no law in France that forbids usury, either to the gentiles or to us.”
“Then we declare it as our law. There’s certainly precedent for it.”
Seligmann was silent for a moment – could it truly be that simple? And in truth, the answer Bonaparte wanted was also the answer he wanted. The Rambam had said that one of the attributes of a judge of the Sanhedrin must be a loathing for money, and though Seligmann’s family, like many other rabbinical dynasties in Alsace and the Bas-Rhin, had married into banking dynasties, he had grown, as a syndic of the Strasbourg kehillah, to have that loathing. But while there were indeed rabbinical opinions that all usury, to gentiles as well as Jews, was banned, there were also precedents the other way, and neither was clearly more authoritative than the other…
“And besides,” said Millaud, the delegate from Vaucluse, “generations of Jews have made their living from banking, and many of them have bene pious protectors of their brethren. Are we to condemn them all?”
“Those families became bankers because they needed to be,” Seligmann answered. “They were restricted from all other professions, and our law is not so strict as to demand that they starve. But those professions are not closed to us now.”
“Necessity can be the law,” Millaud said, “but not the whole of it.”
“Then do as the Sanhedrin – the other one – did with the slave trade,” Rodrigues answered. Seligmann briefly wondered how Rodrigues, a layman, would know of that ruling, but then remembered that he had cousins in that very trade, and that he’d publicly wished he could hand them over to the rabbis in Tzfat for judgment. And his reference to that precedent was a sound one. The Sanhedrin had ruled that though there was no law in the slave trade, there was no way to engage in it without breaking many other laws. Surely, as well, one could not practice usury without the causing strife within families, encouraging dissolute habits, exposing borrowers to the risks of bankruptcy and public disgrace.
“We will consider it,” Seligmann temporized – there was no need to decide today, and it was good to debate the matter thoroughly. But he was sure that this would be what the committee reported out for a vote on the floor. It
would ultimately be an easy question, one in which the Jewish community could both please the Emperor and be true to itself.
He was very happy that he wouldn’t be the one to decide whether marriages between Jews and non-Jews were permissible or whether the Jewish people were a nation. He had learned geometry in his youth as well as Talmud, and those circles would be much harder to square.
_______
“Are we a nation, then?” asked Carel Asser.
His table was not in the Hôtel de Ville at all, nor were the men gathered with him part of any committee; they were among those that Sinzheim and the Interior Ministry commissioners had deemed unknown or unreliable. Their meeting-place was the tavern Au Rocher de Cancale, they had mugs of ale in their hands and sat among boisterous tables graced by fresh oysters (although they ate none themselves), and the debate they were preparing for would take place on the floor.
“Why don’t you argue in favor,” he said to Nathan Mayer. He had no idea if Mayer, a notary from Strasbourg, was actually for or against, but at the university, he’d frequently been assigned a point to argue regardless of his belief, and as an advocate he’d found that practice useful. “I’ll take the negative.”
“I have a meal to finish,” said Mayer. They’d bought two chickens from a kosher butcher in the Marais, found herbs and potatoes and onions in the market, and brought them to the tavern with kosher pots and Galilee olive oil; for a few extra francs, the taverner had agreed that his cooks would prepare them. Most of those at the table had finished their portions and were well into their third or fourth cup of ale, but Mayer evidently believed that it was best to take one’s time. “Why don’t you go first? Or maybe we can debate another question – what are Jews doing in a tavern?”
“You don’t think the Sanhedrin in Tzfat ever has a cup of wine together?” asked Cohen, a student who’d come from Vienna and hoped to return while there was still peace between Austria and France. “And Asser has his story about London…”
“London, yes,” Asser confirmed. He’d gone to London from Amsterdam on business, and that one trip seemed to have given him an endless fund of stories. “There are Jewish constables there, you know – in Aldgate parish where most of the Jews live. One of them was always in the taverns, and when the Jews wanted to report a theft, they knew to go to his favorite one. ‘There are good Jews and bad Jews,’ he’d say, ‘and I’m not one of the best, rabbis be damned.’”
“We
are supposed to be among the best, though,” said Mayer quietly, “or why are we here? And it seems strange to damn rabbis on the floor of a Sanhedrin.”
“But all the same, you’re here with the rest of us, and if we’re the best, it seems to have escaped Sinzheim’s notice. Good or bad, we’re members of the parliament of our nation – are we a nation?”
“Of course we are,” Mayer answered, taking the bait at last. “We’ve always been the people Israel. How would we have survived so long if we weren’t? We’d have disappeared like a drop of ink in the ocean.”
“Well said! But I hold that we were a nation when we had no other, and that now we do. I am a Jewish Dutchman, and that’s all I need to be. There are Catholic and Protestant Dutchmen…”
“Who are nations,” said Cohen, “or will you tell me there’s no difference between Hollanders and Belgians?”
“They have their differences, but when they’re in Amsterdam, all of them are citizens.”
“You have liberties in Amsterdam,” said Mayer, “but are you sure you’ll have them next year or fifty years from now? And if the Dutch expel you, who will take you in? The Jews of other cities, as in the past. Without that bond we are nothing.”
“At Mount Tabor,” said Carmi, who had been silent before, “the Jews who fought Bonaparte fought under the Zaydani banner, but their battle cry was still ‘am Yisrael chai.’”
“Lower your voice!” Asser hissed, looking around to see if anyone had overheard the mention of fighting against the Emperor. “And for them, they are citizens of their own province even if they’re subject to the Banu Zaydan. Maybe
they are a nation.”
Cohen looked ready to answer, but Mayer held up his hand. “Maybe we’re asking the wrong question,” he said. “Before we can ask whether Jews are a nation, don’t we need to ask what a nation is?” With his other hand, he gestured at the mugs of ale on the table. “And
that, I think, will take us several more of those.”
