The Rabbinic Debate over Napoleon

When Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces marched through Germany and Italy, they tore down the walls of the ghettos in which Jews had been forced to live—symbols, to Revolutionary French eyes, of the worldly power of the Catholic Church in the old regime. Some French Jews even wrote Hebrew panegyrics in Napoleon’s honor. When the emperor was poised to invade Russia, many prominent rabbis prayed for his victory, seeing French rule as clearly more beneficent than that of the tsars. But Shneyer Zalman of Liadi, the founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of the ḥasidic movement, disagreed. Dovid Margolin writes:

Shneyer Zalman’s s stark rejection of Napoleon was on the surface not an easy or obvious position to take. It placed him in direct opposition to other great contemporary Polish ḥasidic leaders, including Rabbi Yisroel Hopstein—known as the maggid (preacher) of Kozhnitz—and Rabbi Mendel of Ryminov, who insisted that the liberation promised by Napoleon would be preferable to Russia’s oppression of its Jews. After all, “[i]t was the ideology of the French Revolution, incarnated in Napoleon, that liberated European Jewry from confinement in the ghetto,” as Irving Kristol observed in a 1988 Commentary essay.

Rabbi Shneyer Zalman maintained his loyalty to the tsar despite his imprisonment by Russian police on false charges of sedition. In the final year of his life, he authored a homily about Sennacherib—the Assyrian king who sent the ten tribes of Israel into exile in 721 BCE—that Margolin reads as a veiled critique of Napoleon:

Unlike the other idolatrous kings of his time, [the rebbe wrote], who recognized the idea of a God of gods, Sennacherib rejected the very existence of a Creator. Shneyer Zalman alludes to the tradition that the [the founder of ḥasidism], Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, refused to travel in a wagon driven by a Gentile who did not make the sign of the cross while passing a church along the road: “There is more [possibility for redemption] for a non-Jewish believer than for a heretic,” Shneyer Zalman explained in the discourse. And so the lines were drawn: on one hand, there was Tsar Alexander’s religious faith in the one Master of the Universe who created and controls the world, and on the other hand was Napoleon’s [secularism].

Read more at Tablet

More about: Chabad, Hasidism, Napoleon Bonaparte, Russian, Russian Jewry

To Stop Attacks from Yemen, Cut It Off from Iran

On March 6, Yemen’s Houthi rebels managed to kill three sailors and force the remainder to abandon ship when they attacked another vessel. Not long thereafter, top Houthi and Hamas figures met to coordinate their efforts. Then, on Friday, the Houthis fired a missile at a commercial vessel, which was damaged but able to continue its journey. American forces also shot down one of the group’s drones yesterday.

Seth Cropsey argues that Washington needs a new approach, focused directly on the Houthis’ sponsors in Tehran:

Houthi disruption to maritime traffic in the region has continued nearly unabated for months, despite multiple rounds of U.S. and allied strikes to degrade Houthi capacity. The result should be a shift in policy from the Biden administration to one of blockade that cuts off the Houthis from their Iranian masters, and thereby erodes the threat. This would impose costs on both Iran and its proxy, neither of which will stand down once the war in Gaza ends.

Yet this would demand a coherent alliance-management policy vis-a-vis the Middle East, the first step of which would be a shift from focus on the Gaza War to the totality of the threat from Iran.

Read more at RealClear Defense

More about: Gaza War 2023, Iran, U.S. Foreign policy, Yemen