On December 25, 2025, Professor Alan Hertz gave a lecture on Napoleon Bonaparte's attitude towards the Jews. You are more than welcome to watch it via the video below, but if you are not fluent in English, you are welcome to read the lecture summary.
Bonaparte's Italian roots (and identity complex) 🇮🇹
When we come to examine the figure of Napoleon, the natural tendency is to see him as the embodiment of Frenchness. But the reality, as emerges from the uncensored historical sources in Dr. Alain Herz’s study, is quite different. Napoleon was born in 1769, a year after the French conquest of Corsica, to parents who were Corsican revolutionaries – Carlo Bonaparte and Letizia Remolino. Both supported the local hero Pasquale Pauli in his fight for independence against the French. (Yes, it turns out that the symbol of the French Empire actually grew up in a home that fostered distinctly anti-French sentiments.)
Napoleon’s native language was not French, or even vernacular Corsican, but Tuscan Italian – the language of the elite of Corsica’s port cities. His father and brother, Joseph, studied at the University of Padua and wrote in Italian. In fact, it was not until the age of nine, when he already had a well-formed worldview, that Napoleon was sent to school to learn French. Later in life, in exile on St. Helena, he was fluent in English, French and Italian, but chose to conduct his relations with the British governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, in Italian only. He himself testified that he was “either French or Italian,” but rejected the designation “Corsican” with disgust, seeing it as an insult.
Childhood heroes and the Jewish connection (that we are not taught in schools) 📜
To understand Napoleon's policy toward the Jews, we must understand who his childhood heroes were who formulated his worldview from the dawn of his youth. The list includes Pasquale Pauli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Father Raynal, and Maximilien Robespierre. The common denominator of this entire quartet? They were all outspoken philo-Semites who advocated the liberation of the Jews or the establishment of a Jewish state.
- Pasquale Pauli: The leader of the Corsican revolt, who invited Jews to settle in Corsica under the promise of equal rights and freedom to live according to Jewish law. In return (and here interests play a role), the Jews of Livorno and Amsterdam provided the rebels with weapons, artillery, and money in the 1730s and 1760s. The historian James Boswell, who visited Corsica, recorded that Pauli saw himself as a kind of “Judas Maccabee” and identified the struggle of his Corsican people with that of the Jewish people.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The prominent philosopher of the French Enlightenment, who wrote in his book “Emile” that he would not believe what the Jews had to say until they had an independent state and their own universities.
- Father Raynal: In his writings (which Napoleon read diligently), he emphasized the fact that the Jews were a nation in every sense of the word, and expressed a wish that they could be grouped together in their own state (he even suggested Jamaica as a possible destination).
- Robespierre: One of the leaders of the revolution, who worked resolutely for emancipation and equal rights for French Jews.
The French Revolution: Not What You Thought About the Catholic Religion ⚔️
We tend to think of the French Revolution as a single event in 1789, but it was actually a long process that lasted a decade, until Napoleon’s coup in 1799. The central feature of this decade was a burning hatred of the Catholic Church. The Church was seen as the backbone of the old regime and as a justification for the monarchical rule of Louis XVI. For ten years, the revolutionaries humiliated the Church – and the young Napoleon was at the forefront of this struggle. He took part in drafting the decrees for the establishment of the Roman Republic, the expulsion of the Pope from Rome and his taking as a prisoner to France.
In parallel with the struggle against the Church, the Revolution placed the liberation of the Jewish people at the center of its foreign policy and human rights. The generals of the revolutionary armies did not act in a vacuum; they implemented an official French foreign policy of the Directory in Paris. When the French army entered the cities of Italy, it sent Jewish soldiers to break down the walls of the ghettos, ordering the Jews to remove the yellow patch and wear the tricolor ribbons of the Revolution. (Just as modern human rights discourse sometimes focuses on specific populations, so the French Revolution saw the liberation of the Jews as a supreme goal.)
Why do French historians ignore this? (or: the bond of silence) 🤫
If all this is true, why is this information absent from the accepted history books? The answer lies in political processes that occurred later. As Napoleon consolidated his rule (as First Consul and later as Emperor), he made a U-turn, reconciled with the Catholic Church (Concordat 1801), and began to adopt a reactionary and anti-Semitic spirit. During the Restoration and the rule of Metternich (1820-1848), it was strictly forbidden in Europe to write anything positive about the French Revolution or its anti-Catholic policies.
Key French historians, such as Jacques Bainville and Patrice Gueniffey, simply ignored the Jewish angle or the Corsican-Italian background. Even renowned French-Jewish historians, such as Jacques Godchaux and Simon Schwarzfox, did everything they could to eliminate the documents attesting to Napoleon’s philosophic intentions, in an attempt to present themselves first and foremost as “Super Frenchmen.”
Godchaux went further, in a 1976 article referring to a report in the newspaper “Le Moniteur” on May 22, 1799, according to which Napoleon called on the Jews to return to Jerusalem. Godchaux deliberately distorted the quote: instead of the source that spoke of “restoration of ancient Jerusalem” (Restauration de l'ancienne Jérusalem) – an expression accepted by the Republican revolutionaries – he quoted “restoration of Jerusalem” (Restaurer la Jérusalem), a romantic-Catholic expression identified with the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, which the revolutionaries abhorred. The only conclusion is that Godchaux did not even bother to read the original document that he denies by annulment.
The 1799 Declaration: Fake News or Suppressed Historical Truth? 📜
At the heart of the controversy is the declaration issued by Napoleon in 1799, calling on the Jews of Africa and Asia to unite under his banner in order to restore ancient Jerusalem to them. The full document was discovered in Vienna in 1940 as a German translation from a Hebrew original, and was later published in the journal “New Judea.” Skeptical historians were quick to declare it a forgery, with one central claim: the letter is dated April 20, 1799, from “Jerusalem,” at a time when Napoleon was engaged in the siege of Acre against Ahmed al-Jazzar Pasha and the British.
But this criticism misses the point of understanding the propaganda of the French Revolution. The revolutionaries made frequent use of the rhetorical concept of “prolepsis” – creating a dramatic effect by presenting a planned future event as if it had already occurred. Even before the invasion of Israel in February 1799, Napoleon distributed leaflets in Arabic in which he claimed that his army had already reached Damascus and Cyprus. Moreover, what propaganda value or persuasive weight does a declaration that comes out of the “siege works of Acre” have? An announcement of the liberation of Jerusalem conveys power and victory.
When this argument is not enough, skeptics demand: “Bring us the original document from the French archives.” But they ignore the simple fact that Napoleon did everything he could to erase all traces of his agonizing failure in the Middle East and his “philo-Semitic enthusiasm.” Between 1802 and 1807, he ordered his secretary to collect all the documents of his Middle Eastern trip – the embarrassing documents were simply put aside and burned. Another erasure of history occurred in the 1850s, under Napoleon III, when Catholic France clashed with the Russian Tsar over control of Jerusalem and preferred to erase any connection between France and the establishment of a Jewish state.
The Smoking Gun: Foreign Archives Reveal All 🔍
Here we reach the historical turning point. For generations, researchers who searched only in Paris or Vienna found nothing and determined that “there is no evidence.” But in the age of the mature Internet and the digitization of foreign archives, a completely different picture emerges that shatters the bond of silence:
- The European Press (1799): In May 1799, no fewer than 20 different newspapers across Europe (including four different newspapers in Paris on May 22, such as Le Journal des Prés) simultaneously reported Napoleon’s declaration to the Jews. It was impossible to find an educated person in Europe at that time who did not believe this story.
- The Archives in Moscow (1798): An official letter from August 17, 1798, from Russian Tsar Paul I to General Godowitz. The Tsar explicitly writes that his ambassador in Constantinople, Counselor Tamara, reported that Napoleon had landed in Alexandria with the intention of re-establishing the “Evreyskaya Respublika” (Jewish Republic) in Jerusalem!
- The Ottoman Archives (mid-19th century): Ahmed Cevadet Pasha, the official historian of the Ottoman Empire, reviewed archival documents and explicitly wrote in Ottoman Turkish (regarding the year of the Hijra 1212 / 1797-1798) that the Turks knew of a revolutionary proclamation calling on Jews to establish a Jewish government in Jerusalem (Quds al-Sharif).
The real reason for the trip to Egypt: the Suez Canal (and 22,000 digging shovels) ⛏️
To understand the full picture, one must ask: Why did Napoleon go to Egypt at all? The accepted answer about the restoration of ancient trade routes is incomplete. Napoleon was sent to Egypt under a secret and unambiguous French order: “to cut the Straits of Suez” – that is, to dig the Suez Canal to open a direct route for the French fleet to India, and to deal a fatal blow to British trade (which at that time was forced to go around the Cape of Good Hope). A deep and fast navigation canal that would allow the passage of warships, not just insignificant river routes.
The overwhelming proof of this is the unusual equipment that Napoleon carried with him to the French conquest: alongside the soldiers, he loaded onto his ships in Toulon 35 full-fledged civil engineers, and no less than 22,000 iron shovels! An unimaginable number on the scale of 18th-century armies.
Everything went wrong on August 1-2, 1798. Lord Nelson destroyed the French fleet at Aboukir. The ships sank, taking with them most of the iron shovels, which had apparently been stored in the bottom of the ships to serve as ballast (stabilizing weights). Napoleon found himself stranded in the Middle East, cut off from France, without a fleet and without the tools to dig the great canal he had planned. (Later in his life, to cover up his failure to comply with the secret order, Napoleon claimed at St. Helena that in any case the Red Sea had been found to be 32 feet higher than the Mediterranean Sea and therefore the canal was impossible. This was a baseless excuse intended to retrospectively excuse the loss of the shovels and the collapse of the project.)
The “Lord Clive” Model and the Vision of the Protectorate Republics in the Middle East 🗺️
Cut off, without ships and without a fleet, Napoleon was forced to completely change strategy. He turned to a political path inspired by the British Lord Clive, who had taken control of India through indirect rule (“the Maharajas”). Instead of a direct conquest, Napoleon planned to provoke a major coup in the Ottoman Empire and establish “sister republics” under the auspices of the French Republic, which would serve as a buffer zone and protect French interests.
The geopolitical structure he planned included: an Armenian republic in Anatolia, a Maronite republic (for the Shiites in Lebanon), and a Jewish republic in the Land of Israel. For Napoleon, the establishment of a Jewish state was first and foremost a cynical move of distinctly French interests (just as the revolutionaries had acted elsewhere in the world), even if it was entirely in line with the philo-Semitic views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Pauli who had so influenced him.
To prepare French public opinion for the idea (which God forbid would be accused of betraying the values of the revolution if it made “realistic” agreements with Turkey), the French press was bombarded with sympathetic propaganda. In April 1798 and on June 8, 1798, detailed articles (“A Letter from a Jew to His Brother”) appeared in the press describing a Jewish council that would convene from all over Europe to reach, with the help of the French government, an agreement with Turkey on the restoration of the Land of Israel. This rhetorical move is almost identical to the way the British marketed the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to US President Woodrow Wilson – as a noble step in favor of the liberation of the Jewish people, in order to justify a purely imperial interest.
Why didn't the Jews respond to the historical call? 🕍
Despite France's dramatic intentions and rhetoric, the reaction on the ground was much more complex. The Jewish community in Jerusalem was far from jumping for joy; in fact, they were terrified. They lived in constant fear of the Ottoman government and the local Arab population (especially the Christian Arabs, who historians say were their greatest enemies at the time). Public collaboration with the French was a death sentence for them.
However, direct contacts certainly took place. On March 9, 1799, Napoleon distributed a special letter in the region, and while in Jaffa (at Damiani’s house), he personally met with a delegation of Jews, with whom he spoke in Italian. At that meeting, one of the Jewish merchants, Signor Azriel, explicitly told him: “Nothing will grow from the Land of Israel unless the administration of the place is placed in the hands of the Jews.”
It is interesting to note that a hundred years later, in 1899, Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl wrote to the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, with the aim of engaging him in the vision of a Jewish state. In his letter, Herzl specifically stated that he was proposing to the Kaiser “to do what Napoleon began 100 years ago.” The very fact of mentioning this fact indicates that Napoleon’s move was well-established and well-known among Jewish leaders, and not some insignificant myth.
Conclusion: History does not end with a burned archive 🔍
The affair of Napoleon, the Suez Canal, and the establishment of the Jewish Republic is clear evidence that the absence of evidence in the archives (especially after it had gone through generations of censorship and deliberate erasure) is not evidence that the event never happened. Using modern digital tools and a deep search of the archives of the adversaries – Russia and the Ottoman Empire – the myth is shattered, revealing to us one of the most fascinating and daring diplomatic and geopolitical moves that a foreign army has attempted to implement in the Middle East for the sake of Western interests.