The emperor and the Jews

The major nineteenth-century accounts of Napoleon and the Empire did not mention Jews at all, except to relate how Polish Jews provided supplies to the French army during the retreat from Moscow. As the focus of Napoleonic historiography shifted from the battlefield to domestic issues, and from hagiography to a more critical form of understanding, however, Napoleon's treatment of his roughly 40,000 French-Jewish subjects has come to seem a vital part of his legacy. Samuels provides new insight into the social, psychological, and ideological conflict over Napoleon's legacy for Jews in nineteenth-century France.