Lawyers and Emancipation Politics

• In Event: Jewish Citizenship and the State in the Modern Era

Abstract

This paper will analyze five Jewish lawyers [Adolphe Crémieux (1796-1880); Gabriel Riesser (1806-1863); Francis Henry Goldsmid (1808-1878); Simon Wolf (1836-1923); Genrikh Sliozberg (1863-1937)] in five countries who with partial or full emancipation actively advocated for equality. This was a formative development in emancipation politics. Previously Jews had used law primarily reactively, to defend charter-based privileges, as an instrument within the existing legal and political system.

From the 1820s Jewish lawyers began to advocate for emancipation proactively. They asked the state to adhere to the principle of equality before the law either prior to the state enacting equality or once the state had enacted it yet did not honor it. These lawyers were adopting a new politics in which they aimed to alter the state’s character and behavior.

Such juridical advocacy constituted a new installment in the long history of the vertical alliance. It meant the alliance was based not on the legal status quo but rather on the state’s proposed amelioration. Jewish jurists were asking the state to regenerate itself according to higher principles. They placed the onus of their campaign for equality on the state. They wanted the state to embrace a better self.

This juridical approach fundamentally recast one pillar of diaspora politics, the dictum “the law of the land is law” (dina de-malkhuta dina). The (1806-1808) Parisian Assembly of Notables and Sanhedrin famously redefined the dictum by extending its purview from fiscal matters to issues of state law in general and personal status law in particular (marriage, divorce). The Assembly and Sanhedrin officially endorsed the primacy of state law.

Nineteenth-century Jewish lawyers redefined the dictum yet again: they treated the law and the state itself as dynamic entities. Whether implicitly or explicitly, these lawyers asked the state to alter itself and existing practice by honoring the principle of equality before the law. They aimed to subject the state to principled amelioration. In so doing they based the vertical alliance on reforms that would perfect the modern constitutional or juridical state (Rechtsstaat).

Author

• David J. Sorkin, Yale University