Napoleon Jews Quotes

Mohammed had invited the Jews and Christians to join him; for he was not building a new religion. He was calling all who believed in one God to join in a single faith.

France was the first country in Europe to grant Jews the full rights of citizenship without qualification. Their position was further enhanced by Napoleon, according to whom Judaism was a religion, not a nationality. So long as French Jews regarded it only as a religion and gave their loyalty to France, they ought to be granted full

Religion, with its metaphysical error of absolute guilt, dominated the broadest, the cosmic realm. From there, it infiltrated the subordinate realms of biological, social and moral existence with its errors of the absolute and inherited guilt. Humanity, split up into millions of factions, groups, nations and states, lacerated itself with mutual accusations. "The Greeks are to blame," the Romans said, and "The Romans are to blame," the Greeks said. So they warred against one another. "The ancient Jewish priests are to blame," the early Christians shouted. "The Christians have preached the wrong Messiah," the Jews shouted and crucified the harmless Jesus. "The Muslims and Turks and Huns are guilty," the crusaders screamed. "The witches and heretics are to blame," the later Christians howled for centuries, murdering, hanging, torturing and burning heretics. It remains to investigate the sources from which the Jesus legend derives its grandeur, emotional power and perseverance. Let us continue to stay outside this St. Vitus dance. The longer we look around, the crazier it seems. Hundreds of minor patriarchs, self-proclaimed kings and princes, accused one another of this or that sin and made war, scorched the land, brought famine and epidemics to the populations. Later, this became known as "history." And the historians did not doubt the rationality of this history. Gradually the common people appeared on the scene. "The Queen is to blame," the people's representatives shouted, and beheaded the Queen. Howling, the populace danced around the guillotine. From the ranks of the people arose Napoleon. "The Austrians, the Prussians, the Russians are to blame," it was now said. "Napoleon is to blame," came the reply. "The machines are to blame!" the weavers screamed, and "The lumpenproletariat is to blame," sounded back. "The Monarchy is to blame, long live the Constitution!" the burgers shouted. "The middle classes and the Constitution are to blame; wipe them out; long live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," the proletarian dictators shout, and "The Russians are to blame," is hurled back. "Germany is to blame," the Japanese and the Italians shouted in 1915. "England is to blame," the fathers of the proletarians shouted in 1939. And "Germany is to blame," the self-same fathers shouted in 1942. "Italy, Germany and Japan are to blame," it was said in 1940. It is only by keeping strictly outside this inferno that one can be amazed that the human animal continues to shriek "Guilty!" without doubting its own sanity, without even once asking about the origin of this guilt. Such mass psychoses have an origin and a function. Only human beings who are forced to hide something catastrophic are capable of erring so consistently and punishing so relentlessly any attempt at clarifying such errors.

They took it, too, like Napoleon’s soldiers. And they had the Jews and the Negroes to look down on, more and more. The M.M.’s saw to that. Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.

They took it, too, like Napoleon’s soldiers. And they had the Jews and the Negroes to look down on, more and more. The M.M.’s saw to that. Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on. *

As an instance of an intended act, Napoleon emancipated the Jews; as an instance of an unintended act which manifested the "cunning of reason," Napoleon created German nationalism by the very act of abolishing the Holy Roman Empire.

The (unratified) Preamble of the European Constitution begins by stating that it draws inspiration “from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law.”3 This may easily give one the impression that European civilization is defined by the values of human rights, democracy, equality, and freedom. Countless speeches and documents draw a direct line from ancient Athenian democracy to the present-day European Union, celebrating twenty-five hundred years of European freedom and democracy. This is reminiscent of the proverbial blind man who takes hold of an elephant’s tail and concludes that an elephant is a kind of brush. Yes, democratic ideas have been part of European culture for centuries, but they were never the whole. For all its glory and impact, Athenian democracy was a halfhearted experiment that survived for barely two hundred years in a small corner of the Balkans. If European civilization for the past twenty-five centuries has been defined by democracy and human rights, what are we to make of Sparta and Julius Caesar, of the Crusaders and the conquistadores, of the Inquisition and the slave trade, of Louis XIV and Napoleon, of Hitler and Stalin? Were they all intruders from some foreign civilization? In truth, European civilization is anything Europeans make of it, just as Christianity is anything Christians make of it, Islam is anything Muslims make of it, and Judaism is anything Jews make out of it. And they have made of it remarkably different things over the centuries. Human groups are defined more by the changes they undergo than by any continuity, but they nevertheless manage to create for themselves ancient identities thanks to their storytelling skills. No matter what revolutions they experience, they can usually weave old and new into a single yarn.

Eighteen centuries have now passed away since God sent forth a few Jews from a remote corner of the earth, to do a work which according to man's judgment must have seemed impossible. He sent them forth at a time when the whole world was full of superstition, cruelty, lust, and sin. He sent them forth to proclaim that the established religions of the earth were false and useless, and must be forsaken. He sent them forth to persuade men to give up old habits and customs, and to live different lives. He sent them forth to do battle with the most grovelling idolatry, with the vilest and most disgusting immorality, with vested interests, with old associations, with a bigoted priesthood, with sneering philosophers, with an ignorant population, with bloody-minded emperors, with the whole influence of Rome. Never was there an enterprise to all appearance more Quixotic, and less likely to succeed! And how did He arm them for this battle? He gave them no carnal weapons. He gave them no worldly power to compel assent, and no worldly riches to bribe belief. He simply put the Holy Ghost into their hearts, and the Scriptures into their hands. He simply bade them to expound and explain, to enforce and to publish the doctrines of the Bible. The preacher of Christianity in the first century was not a man with a sword and an army, to frighten people, like Mahomet,—or a man with a license to be sensual, to allure people, like the priests of the shameful idols of Hindostan. No! he was nothing more than one holy man with one holy book. And how did these men of one book prosper? In a few generations they entirely changed the face of society by the doctrines of the Bible. They emptied the temples of the heathen gods. They famished idolatry, or left it high and dry like a stranded ship. They brought into the world a higher tone of morality between man and man. They raised the character and position of woman. They altered the standard of purity and decency. They put an end to many cruel and bloody customs, such as the gladiatorial fights.—There was no stopping the change. Persecution and opposition were useless. One victory after another was won. One bad thing after another melted away. Whether men liked it or not, they were insensibly affected by the movement of the new religion, and drawn within the whirlpool of its power. The earth shook, and their rotten refuges fell to the ground. The flood rose, and they found themselves obliged to rise with it. The tree of Christianity swelled and grew, and the chains they had cast round it to arrest its growth, snapped like tow. And all this was done by the doctrines of the Bible! Talk of victories indeed! What are the victories of Alexander, and Cæsar, and Marlborough, and Napoleon, and Wellington, compared with those I have just mentioned? For extent, for completeness, for results, for permanence, there are no victories like the victories of the Bible.

There is a singular absence of his own father in the fragmentary jottings Lucien made concerning his early life. Indeed, he never seems to have been there at all. He was a regular soldier of course, and this displeased my grandmother's family, who were the Blackest of Blacks – by which I mean – I write for those ignorant of the language of Third Republic France – zealous clericals, Royalists also, who disapproved of the recognition of the Republic implicit in a military career. The Balafrés however were proud of their tradition of military service – they saw themselves as soldiers of France irrespective of the regime, and one of them indeed, though brought up as an émigré after the Revolution, had been so fired by the splendour of Napoleonic warfare that he had been among the numerous Royalists who had found service in the imperial army an irresistible temptation; he never returned from the Russian campaign. Accordingly, my grandfather, Etienne like myself, may never even have questioned the suitability of a military career. Anyway, like so many of his fellow officers, he saw the Army as the real bastion against Jews, Protestants, Socialists and Masons. French life has always been complicated; at least since the Revolution. He was of course convinced that Dreyfus was guilty, and even when his innocence seemed to have been proved, continued to believe the whole thing had been a Jewish/Socialist plot set up to discredit the Army.

There had been Seligmans in Baiersdorf for over a century. Theirs had been a family name long before Napoleon had decreed that Germany’s Jews no longer needed to be known as “sons” of their fathers’ names—Moses ben Israel, and so on. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tombstones in Baiersdorf’s Jewish cemetery recorded the upright virtues of many of David’s ancestors, all named Seligman (“Blessed man” in German).

Thanks to “The Trial”, Kafka bequeathed to us at least two concept words that have become indispensable for understanding the modern world: tribunal and trial. He bequeathed them to us: meaning that he put them at our disposal, for us to use, consider, and reconsider in terms of our own experiences. Tribunal: this does not signify the juridical institution intended for punishing people who have violated the laws of a state; the tribunal (or court) in Kafka's sense is a power that judges, that judges because it is a power; its power and nothing but its power is what confers legitimacy on the tribunal; when the two intruders enter his room, K. immediately recognizes that power, and he submits. The trial brought by the tribunal is always absolute; meaning that it does not concern an isolated act, a specific crime (theft, fraud, rape), but rather concerns the character of the accused in its entirety: K. searches for his offense in "the most minute events" of his whole life; in our century, by this standard, Bezukhov would have been indicted for both his love and his hatred of Napoleon. And also for his drunkennness, since, being absolute, the trial concerns private life as well as public; Brod condemned K. to death for seeing in women only the "lowest sexuality”;… The trial is absolute as well in that it does not keep within the limits of the defendant's life; thus K.s uncle says: "Do you want to lose this trial? ... It means that you will be absolutely ruined. And all your relatives along with you." The guilt of one Jew contains within it that of the Jews of all times; the Communist doctrine on the influence of class origin includes within the offense of the accused the offense of his parents and grandparents; in the trial of Europe for the crime of colonialism, Sartre accused not the colonists but Europe, all of Europe, the Europe of all times; because "there is a colonist in each of us," because "being a man here means being an accomplice since we have all profited from colonial exploitation." The spirit of the trial recognizes no statute of limitations; the distant past is as alive as today's event; and even in death you will not escape: there are informers in the cemetery. The trial's memory is colossal, but it is a very specific memory, which could be defined as the forgetting of everything not a crime.

Today Vladimir expects us to believe that Obama has been plotting Russia’s destruction. Yes, that same Obama who sent the bust of Churchill back to England; that same Obama who detests Netanyahu. Yes, that Obama – the flexible negotiator set to give Iran the bomb and whose goal is “zero nukes” for America. Oh yes, that’s the man who is plotting Russia’s destruction. And do not doubt that this incredible stupid lie will be widely believed because millions have heard that the American military-industrial complex is on the move. What these millions do not see, and may never see, is that every dictator blames his victim for what the dictator is about to do; even as Napoleon blamed England for wishing to dominate Europe; even as Hitler blamed the Jews for trying to provoke a Second World War; even as the Communists blamed the West for igniting the Cold War. Whatever the dictator says his victim is planning to do, totalitarian psychology suggests the dictator is planning to do it himself!

Napoleon's emancipation of the Jews had a number of unforeseen consequences as well. He got his first inkling of what they were when he passed through Strasbourg on his way back to Paris after the battle of Jena. The citizens of Strasbourg, who now had to accept the Jews, who up to that time had been merely tolerated as resident aliens, as their equals, complained to Napoleon that the Jews used their new-found status as citizen to cheat Strasbourg's Christian population.