ABSTRACT
The French Revolution and Napoleonic rule exploded the already existing contradictions of Enlightenment culture, caused by the tensions between universal rights and individual and group differences and between assimilation and preserving Jewish identity. While the community and solidarity system that governed the Jewish world was thrown into crisis, Jewish reactions towards the Revolution differed according to geopolitical situations. However, adhesion to the new regimes and political activity provoked, on one hand, a process of assimilation that could lead to the transgression of religious observance, and on the other hand a conflict between membership in the new Nation and the effort to maintain one’s own particular identity. The revolutionary rhetoric of the “regeneration” of the Jews comes with the cost of renouncing diversity. The ambiguities of emancipation and equality emerge with even greater impact in the Napoleonic phase with the so-called “infamous” decrees that push towards total assimilation. The two Restorations of 1800 and 1814–15 then erase the conquests of civil and political emancipation almost everywhere in Italy and Europe, while anti-Jewish apologetics and propaganda proliferate, especially in the Catholic world, with the revival of all the centuries-old stereotypes and accusations.
