=4. Progress of Events and Legislation in France (1780‒1880).=――At the time when Moses Mendelssohn’s efforts were producing a reform in feeling and in conduct among and towards the Jews of Germany, the Jews in France thought that his influence might be brought to bear upon their rulers. The Jews in Alsace accordingly, who, numbering by this date some 20,000, were the most numerous of the various French communities, forwarded an appeal to Mendelssohn, setting forth their wrongs and their hopes. In deference to this appeal a very famous memoir in favour of Jewish claims to fair treatment came to be written by a learned and enlightened Christian scholar named Dohm. Dohm was one of Mendelssohn’s influential friends, and thought well of all Jews for Mendelssohn’s sake. When the Jews of Alsace begged Mendelssohn to speak up for them, he wisely thought that a Christian advocate might gain more hearers than a Jewish one; and so, at his friend’s request, Dohm wrote and published in 1781 a book on the Political Reform of the Jews, which work had a great, though indirect, share in the bringing about of better times. Another friend for the French Jews was found in Count Mirabeau, who, before he came to be a power in the stirring events on which the eighteenth century closed in France, was, with Dohm and other noteworthy people, a frequent visitor in the salons of Henrietta Herz and of Mendelssohn’s daughters at Berlin. The Abbé Grégoire was another personage who, having had the opportunity of intimate intercourse with Jews, used such knowledge to their benefit. Both Mirabeau and Grégoire wrote and spoke frequently and earnestly on the subject of Jewish emancipation, which was rapidly becoming one of the questions of the day. Whether French Jews should be admitted to the rights of French citizens, was over and over again debated in the French Assembly. Many ignorant arguments were brought against it. One speaker urged that Jews could not serve the state; that they could not be soldiers, since their laws forbade them to fight on their Sabbath; nor artisans, added another orator, nor agriculturists, for their holidays were too numerous for continuous labour. Such speakers must have forgotten all about the Land and the Book――all about the oliveyards and the vineyards of Palestine, the ‘borders set with precious stones,’ and the battlefields drenched with more precious blood. The discussion went on. Their own friend Abbé Grégoire hurt their cause by remembering something of all this past, and pleading for them as a ‘people.’ This roused the stupid folks. Could a ‘people,’ dispersed among other ‘peoples,’ be patriots? they asked. And when that was answered out of history, and Jewish loyalty and law-abidingness taken as proved to demonstration, then a new doubt was raised on the score of the alleged money-lending proclivities of the race. Robespierre answered this. ‘The vices of the Jews,’ said he, ‘are born of the abasement in which you have plunged them.