MISCELLANEOUS NOTES 757
Jew and non-Jew, and the legality of usury. So pleased was Napoleon with the pronouncements of the Assembly that he summoned a Sanhedrin after the model of the ancient council of Jerusalem to convert them into the decrees of a legislative body. The Sanhedrin, comprising 71 deputies from France, Germany, Holland and Italy, met under the presidency of Rabbi Sinzheim of Strassburg on 9th February 1807, and adopted a sort of charter which exhorted the Jews to look upon France as their father land, to regard its citizens as their brethren, and to speak its language, and which also pressed toleration of marriages between Jews and Christians while declaring that they could not be sanctioned by the synagogue”. It will be noted the Jews refused to sanction intermarriages between Jews and non-Jews. They only agreed to tolerate them. The second instance related to what happend when the Batavian Republic was established in 1795. The more energetic members of the Jewish community pressed for the removal of many disabilities under which they laboured. “But the demand for the full rights of citizenship made by the progressive Jews was at first, strangely enough, opposed by the leaders of the Amsterdam community, who feared that civil equality would militate against the conservation of Judaism and declared that their co-religionists renounced their rights of citizenship in obedience to the dictates of their faith. This shows that the Jews preferred to live as strangers rather than as members of the community. It is as an ‘eternal people’ that they were singled out and punished. But that is not the case with the untouchables. They too are in a different sense art “eternal people” who are separate from the rest. But this separateness is not the result of their wish. They are punished not because they do not want to mix. They are punished because they want to.
Untouchability is worse than slavery because slave has personality in the Society while the untouchable has no personality has been made abundantly clear. But this is not the only ground why untouchability is worse than slavery. There are others which are not obvious but which are real none-the-less.