(FRENCH JUDAICA).

n.p.

1789

Adresse présentée á l'Assemblée Nationale, le 31 août 1789, par les Députés Réunis des Juifs, établis à Metz, dans les Trois Evêches, en Alsace & en Lorraine [“Address Presented to the National Assembly the 31st of August 1789, by the Deputies of the Jewish community established at Metz...”]

The petition was lanced by “Louis Wolff and Gandchaux (sic)-Mayer-Cahen, Deputies of Metz; D. Sintzheim and S. Seligman Wittersheim, Deputies of Alsace; and Mayer-Marx and Ber-Isaac-Ber, Deputies of Lorraine.” D. Sintzheim is none other than the renowned halachist R. Joseph David Sintzheim, author of Yad David. The eminent French Jewish historian Schwarzfuchs sums up the major thrust of this petition: “The Jews of eastern France…turned to the National Assembly on 31August and asked again for their civil rights, but did not agree to give up their communal organisation. The Jews of Metz already suspected the great danger that complete emancipation would mean to their community: They instructed their delegates to request the enactment of a law which would forbid any and every Jew of Metz to move out of the Jewish quarter without having paid his share of the common debt: 'This necessary law will prevent disastrous emigration which would make it possible to evade one's obligations, the consequence of which would be to impose on a small number of Jews the obligations which apply today to all of those who are gathered in the same quarter' (p. 18). For the first time, some of the adverse effects of emancipation were clearly delineated.” Simon Schwarzfuchs, Napoleon, the Jews and the Sanhedrin (1979), pp. 9, 198