Jewish Emancipation in France

Revolutionary France was the first European state to make its Jews full citizens. In December 1789 the deputy Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre summed up the bargain: "To the Jews as a nation, nothing; to the Jews as individuals, everything." The Sephardi Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne, and the Jews of Avignon, were emancipated on 28 January 1790. The larger Ashkenazi population of Alsace and Lorraine, about 30,000 people, followed on 27 September 1791, after a campaign led by the Abbé Grégoire.

In return Jews were expected to give up communal self-government and become French citizens of the Jewish faith. French armies carried emancipation to the Netherlands in 1796 and to the parts of Italy and Germany they occupied. Emancipation opened the professions, the army and politics to Jews, but it also raised the questions of assimilation and identity that ran through the next century, from Napoleon's Sanhedrin to the Dreyfus Affair.