442 A History of Judaism
with Yiddish as a national language. Both were discouraged by the state,
particularly during the Black Years from 1948 to 1953, when Stalin
campaigned against Jewish nationalism and ‘cosmopolitanism’. By
1970 the vast majority of Jews in the Soviet Union had Russian as their
mother tongue and knew very little about Judaism, with only the elderly
attending those synagogues permitted by the state to remain open for
worship. Most of those who gained permission to leave the Soviet Union
for Israel in the 1970s and 1980s had to learn their religion on their
arrival. Many of them had no interest in religion at all.
The trauma of Soviet Jews under Stalin in the late 1940s had of course
been exacerbated beyond measure by the annihilation of many Jewish
communities in the western Soviet Union while under German occupa-
tion from 1941 to 1945. At first glance it is surprising that this ultimate
assault on the Jews stemmed not from the repressive regime in Russia
but from what had been considered the more enlightened part of Europe.
The French Revolution, proclaiming equality and fraternity, had
opened up the possibility that Jews in western Europe might be freed
from the status of a barely tolerated minority, in which they had existed
since the end of antiquity, and become full members of the societies in
which they lived. But in France itself emancipation for the individual
was accompanied by heavy- handed state control of religious life. On
the instruction of Napoleon Bonaparte, an Assembly of Jewish Not-
ables, comprising both lay leaders and rabbis, was mustered on 26 July
1806 to transform Jews from a ‘nation within a nation’ to ‘French citi-
zens of the Mosaic faith’. The Assembly responded patriotically, but
when it became clear that religious authority would be required to bring
the resolutions of the Assembly into effect, Napoleon ordered the con-
vening of a Sanhedrin of seventy- one Jews, mostly but not exclusively
rabbis, with a brief to separate the immutable religious laws of Judaism
from those which could be safely discarded. The aim was to incorporate
into the religious requirements of Judaism services to the French state,
including the military, and to require Jews to undergo civil procedures
alongside religious ceremonies in marriage and divorce. The Sanhedrin
met on 4 February 1807 to undertake this task and its decisions were
then used as the framework for the establishment in 1808 of consis‑
toires throughout France, with both rabbis and lay participants to
regulate Jewish life for the benefit of the state. Their role included the
enforcement of military conscription, with the central consistoires in
Paris under the authority of three grands rabbins and two laymen. The
system, which is still in operation in France, Belgium and Luxembourg,