Raise their condition, and they will speedily rise to it.’ After an immense amount of eloquence had been expended on the question, the Assembly, on September 27, 1791, passed the vote for the emancipation of the Jews, and mainly on the grounds that those who fought against the measure were actually fighting the Constitution, which proclaimed Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, without reservation or exception, to all subjects of the French republic. By this vote, France gained for herself the distinction of being first among modern nations to give not only tolerance, but liberty, in its full social, legal, and political meaning, to her Jewish subjects. It remained for Napoleon Bonaparte to complete the work. When that extraordinary man came to be Emperor of France, he showed an extreme interest in the history and the position of his Jewish subjects. He summoned an assembly of representative Jews, composed of Rabbis, merchants, and literary men, and calling it a Sanhedrin, he desired this assembly to report on the present religious and political status of their nation, and to define their duties towards God and their country. This so-called Sanhedrin did its difficult work very well. Starting with a quotation from one of the _Amoraim_,[68] that the law of the State is a binding law on the Jews of that State, the Assembly showed, by proof and by principle, that Judaism constrains Jews to be in every sense true and worthy sons of the soil. Passing from declaration to suggestion, the Assembly advised with great sagacity on many subjects, on that especially of mixed marriages, on the practice of ‘usury,’ and on the choice of trades and professions. Napoleon gave the sanction of authority to much of this counsel, and altogether the deliberations of this latter-day Sanhedrin greatly helped forward the progressive movement which had set in. The wave of liberty, which swept over France in such terribly tumultuous fashion at the end of the eighteenth century, has known no ebb tide. The many and various forms of government, which have changed much and effaced much since 1793 in the fair and fickle land of France, have, to their honour, left religious freedom at high-water mark. It has been well said that, from that date to this, one cannot accurately speak of the ‘Jews of France,’ but only of French citizens professing the Jewish religion.[69] Rabbis of the Jewish Synagogue, since 1830, have been considered to hold the same relation towards the state as curés of the Catholic church, receiving, like them, their salaries from the Government. Not only in the army and in the learned professions, but also in every class of society, the Jews of France march, nowadays, shoulder to shoulder with their fellow-countrymen. The war of 1870, which made Alsace and Lorraine German, was a great blow to the loyal French-Jewish inhabitants of these provinces, but the loss to France of her Alsatian Jews was