In a Modern European First France Emancipated its Jews

This idealized print celebrates a decree by Napoleon extending emancipation to all of the lands conquered by the Empire.

France became the first nation in the modern era to grant its Jews emancipation under the law—full equality of citizenship rights and the removal of all traditional encumbrances that had been historically placed on the community—on September 28, 1791 by Emperor Napoleon I.  The edict was in line with the liberating thought of the Enlightenment, and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen which guaranteed freedom of religion and free exercise of worship.  The new edict when further both in its specificity and in provisions that recognized the freedom of the Jewish community, as well as individuals including lifting what ghetto restraints remained in France.

But France was not absolutely the first nation to do so.  More than 500 years earlier the 1264, the Polish Prince Boleslaus the Pious issued the Statute of Kalisz—The General Charter of Jewish Liberties in Poland, an unprecedented document in medieval history that allowed Jews personal freedom, legal autonomy, and separate tribunal for criminal matters as well as safeguards against forced baptism and blood libel. The Charter is ratified again by subsequent Polish Kings including Casimir the Great in 1334, Casimir IV in 1453, and Sigismund I the Old in 1539.   

Polish King Casimir the Great renewed the unprecedented Medieval Statute of Kalisz  giving freedom of religion and rights to Jews.  It stood for more than three centuries until Jesuits gained control of the Polish kingdom and eradicated religious tolerance.

Poland was then on the cultural fringes of Europe, and most importantly, only tenuously connected to the power of the Catholic Church.  General religious tolerance flourished along with Lutherans, Reform (Calvinist), and the paleo-unitarian Polish Brethren.  Poland was also under-populated and needed both Jewish peasants and artisans.  Meanwhile elsewhere in Europe Jews were being blamed for the Black Plague which resulted in waves of pogroms; draconian strictures on residence, occupation, and worship; and eventually the persecution of the Inquisition.  Jews had flocked to Poland and soon it had the largest communities in Europe in which a rich shtetl culture emerged.  However, the Jesuits eventually re-asserted Catholic supremacy in Poland, wiping out Protestant dissent and introducing rising anti-Semitism into the population.  Then Poland, like much of Europe, became a dangerous place for its many Jews.

Under King Edward I in 1290 England became the first European nation to expel its Jewish population more than 200 years before Spain and Portugal did the same.

The Middle Ages and Renaissance were tough on Jews across Europe.  They were expelled from England, Spain, Portugal, and the Low Countries.  Everywhere they were confined to ghettos and prohibited from most professions—except money lending since The Church forbad usury by Christians.  That made them essential to urban Bürgermeisters, nobles, and royalty but also despised for charging interest.  In most countries Jews could not go abroad on the streets without a Judenhut—a kind of identifying conical hat—or yellow badges, either of which could invite street assault.

The dawning of the Enlightenment in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries, gave Jews a glimmer of hope because it not only challenged the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church, but of Protestant ones as well.  Increasing religious diversity among the most literate and creative members of society inevitably led to demands for religious liberty and eventually for what we would call separation of church and state or either the disestablishment of state religion or the allowance of free worship outside them.  Originally Jews were excluded from this calculation.  But ideas like this are hard to keep in a bottle.  By the later part of the 1700’s and under the influence of the American and French Revolutions, most advanced thinkers were including Jews in their vision of religious liberty.

Among the Jews of Western Europe, a small minority had prospered and began to mix more with Gentile society.  They were exposed to the scientific and philosophical currents of the wider society and hoped to adapt insular Jewish life to it.  Some, like Spinoza and Salomon Maimon gained respect as philosophers.  Out of this grew the so-called Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah which advocated adopting enlightenment values, pressing for better integration into European society, and increasing education in secular studies, Hebrew language, and Jewish history outside of the scriptures.  It was at odds with the closed communities of the ghetto and shtetl, with Jewish mysticism, and traditional Orthodox scholarship. 

The interests of the Haskalah and Napoleon coincided.  The Emperor hoped that emancipation would eventually lead to assimilation, intermarriage, voluntary conversion or at least abandonment of Judaism as a faith, and eventually virtual disappearance as an identifiable minority.

In later decrees, Napoleon extended emancipation to all the territories he conquered.  Greece, upon winning its independence from the Ottomans followed suit in 1830.

By the 1840’s the numbers of educated and westernized Jews were ballooning rapidly.  Many were becoming politically active in their countries and were often leading voices in the reform and revolutionary movements that swept Europe.  After the revolutionary year of 1848 emancipation spread rapidly over Europe including German states, Austria-Hungary, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom.  Although de facto discrimination, especially in education and positions in public service continued to be wide-spread, legal encumbrances were fast fading. 

But it was not until after the turn of the 20th Century that those cradles of the Inquisition—Spain and Portugal—declared emancipation.  Russia, the home of millions of Jews, did not act until the Revolution in 1917.

Americans have been known to boast that the United States never had to emancipate its Jews because it never discriminated against them.  While this is true of the government under the Constitution, it was not true of the states.  Most of the founding colonies had some legal restrictions on Jews.  The outstanding exception was Rhode Island which became home to the country’s first Synagogue at Newport.  Quaker Pennsylvania had few restrictions and individual Jews like the Financier of the Revolution Robert Morris prospered there.  Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statue of Religious Liberty annulled the citizenship barriers that previously existed.

But each state had to act on its own.  The US Constitutional ban against the establishment of religion was not then considered binding on the individual states, several of which had established churches—the New England Standing Order and Anglicanism/Episcopalians in most of the Middle and Southern States—and many had restrictions on Jews voting, holding office, or even testifying in court.

One by one the states did abolish these restrictions.   The last to do so was New Hampshire in 1877.

In the late 19th and and 20th Centuries the backlash against Jews was in full swing fueled by the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elder of Zion and scapegoating Jews for economic woes.

The rise of European Jewry was accompanied by a rise in a new kind of anti-Semitism.  The famous forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion first surfaced in Russia in 1903 and theories of various Jewish conspiracies to rule the world spread. 

The assimilated Jews of Western Europe largely felt secure in their emancipation by the early 20th Century.  They were wrong.  Adolph Hitler and the Nazis voided a century and a half of progress and unleashed unimaginable horrors.

But that is another story.

 

A Birthday of the U.S. Army but Not the Only One

 

General George Washington demobilized the Revolutionary War Continental Army in May 1783 and bade a formal farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern in New York City in December.  His hope that Congress would authorize a small regular army under General Henry Knox was dashed.

If asked about the origin of the United States Army, most folks, if they have a clue, would point to the American Revolution.  On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress created the Continental Army and the next day unanimously elected George Washington commanding general.  Volunteer units from several colonies already besieging Boston alongside militia units were mustered as the First Regiment of the Line.  Washington soon joined the troops, and the war was on as a seriously united effort.

All of that, of course, is true.  But almost as soon as the war ended the Continental Army was demobilized and essentially disbanded by order of General Washington on May 12, 1783 after Congress, now under the Articles of Confederation, rejected his appeal for a small standing army to be placed under the command of General Henry Knox.  Congress was deeply fearful that a standing army would lead inevitably to monarchy or dictatorship—and more than a few feared that the popular Washington might use it to have himself made king. 

The chain of institutional custody of  the U.S. Army lies elsewhere.

One hundred artillerymen and 500 infantry were kept on the payroll.  The artillery company was stationed at West Point, essentially security guards for the large arsenal there.  The infantrymen were scattered in small numbers at forts and outposts across the long western frontier and the border with British Canada.

Those infantrymen were totally unable to face the challenge of continuing warfare on the frontier by native tribes still allied with the British.  The plight of settlers west of the Alleghenies and south of the Ohio was soon desperate.

And this tiny Federal force was not even regularized, it operated out of necessity but with no legal foundation.

In June of 1784 Congress formally rejected Washington’s scaled back plans for a 700 man army.  On May 12 they discharged all the troops except for 25 caretakers at Fort Pitt and 55 at West Point.  On June 14 of that year Congress reluctantly agreed to raise a force of 700 men for one year duty on the frontier under the command of a Lt. Colonel.

                                   Members of the Army's First Regiment on frontier post duty.

On September 29, 1784 the War Department formally issued the order creating what many considered just a temporary resurrection of the Continental Army.  Four companies of infantry and two of artillery dubbed the First American Regiment came under the command of Colonel Josiah Harmar of Pennsylvania. 

The creation of the First Regiment is considered the true birthday of the Regular U.S. Army.

The idea that a tiny regular army supplemented with local militia and, if need be short term musters of volunteer regiments would be enough to keep a lid on the powder keg on the frontier was ludicrous.

Some of the bloodiest, most intense, and widest ranging Indian warfare in American history continued for years on the frontier.  On November 4, 1791 a large force of volunteers, militia, and some regular companies under General Arthur St. Clare was routed and nearly massacred by native forces of the Western Confederation near Fort Recovery in Ohio.

The Legion of the United States during the campaign against the native Western Confederacy leading to the decisive Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.

This disaster finally encouraged Congress to expand and reorganize the Army.  With the approval of new President Washington and his Secretary of War Knox, the Legion of the United States was created with General “Mad” Anthony Wayne in command.  It was organized into four sub legions, two of which were converted from the First and Second Regiments, and two more to be recruited and trained. 

After extensive training in 1792 and ’93 the Legion took to the field for operations against the Western Confederacy south of the Ohio.  The large, disciplined force, with the assistance of the now veteran militia, was successful in a campaign in Kentucky that drove most of the hostiles north of the river. 

Wayne and the Legion pursued the tribes into their home territory north of the river, burning several principal towns and finally decisively defeating them at the Battle of Fallen Timbers on August 4, 1794.

Later that year the Whiskey Rebellion broke out in Western Pennsylvania.  To suppress it Washington, at the urging of his closest advisor, Alexander Hamilton raised the largest army the new nation had ever put into the field, over 12,000 troops, mostly federalized militia including for the first time, draftees, and a handful of Legion troops.  He personally took to the field to command the force, which made quick, and largely bloodless, work of suppressing the rebellion.  But that confirmed the worst fears of old anti-federalists and Thomas Jefferson’s nascent Republican faction that a large army would be used to suppress the people in defense of a powerful elite.

Major General James Wilkinson, first Commanding General of the U.S. Army,  was a brave soldier in combat, but an inveterate schemer, Spanish secret agent, and plotter of various treasons.

With the frontier seemingly secured, the Legion was disbanded in 1796 and the reduced Army was reorganized into regiments the following year.  Some historians take this as the real origin of the Regular Army, but since the First and Second regiments were reconstituted, most take the 1784 date.

The new Army was placed under the command of General James Wilkerson, an officer with a checkered reputation for rascality, but a splendid battle record in the Revolution and under Wayne at Fallen Timbers—despite the fact that as a double agent for the Spanish in New Orleans he may have leaked some of the Legions operational plans to British agents active with the Indians.

President George Washington took command of the large army raised to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania is seen here reviewing the troops.  Alexander Hamilton to command in the field for the brief, largely bloodless campaign. 

After retirement Washington was recalled to command the Army in 1798 by President John Adams as a possible war with France loomed.  A large force was raised, mostly Volunteers with regular Army regiments.  Washington helped plan the formation and logistics but left operational command to his favorite Hamilton who expected to take the field in effective  command.  Hamilton had grandiose dreams of martial glory, including the conquest of Louisiana.  

Washington died at home in Mt. Vernon still nominally in command on March 1, 1799.  The crisis with France passed, much to Adams’s relief and to the disappointment of Hamilton.  The Volunteer Army was disbanded, and the Regular Army shrank again. 

Wilkerson was restored to command and embarked on more plots with the Spanish and later with disgraced Vice President Aaron Burr who planned a filibustering campaign to either capture Texas from the Spanish or perhaps create a break away nation west of the Appalachians. At the last moment the Commanding general betrayed Burr, but that is another story.

The Regular Army remained undermanned and scattered in coastal defense fortifications and along the frontier.  It was totally unprepared for the War of 1812...yet another story.

The Old Guard of the 3rd Infantry Regiment still marches in the post-Revolutionary War uniforms of first U.S. Regular Army troops for special ceremonial occasions like this Presidential Inaugural parade.

The First Regiment was consolidated with four other regiments in the post War Of 1812 reorganization in 1815 as the 3rd Infantry Regiment, which is the oldest active Regiment in the Army.  Now known as the Old Guard it has mostly ceremonial duties around Washington including soldier funerals at Arlington National Cemetery, standing guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Presidential escort, and providing troops for review for visiting foreign dignitaries.  It is the only unit in the army to always march in parades with fixed bayonets in honor of its charge at the Battle of Cerro Gordo in the Mexican War. Units from it fought in Vietnam and companies were dispatched to support deployments in the Horn of Africa, Djibouti, and at Camp Taji, Iraq.