I say that if you want to judge a person’s character, look at how they behave when they don’t think anybody’s watching. With the Jews? Now we know.

Regarding the Jewish problem, it seems that Napoleon, being so influenced by the Enlightenment, sought to implement the French Republicans’ policy writ large : “To the Jews as a nation, nothing. To the Jews as individuals, everything.” The Enlightenment idea of all previous ethnic, class, and religious allegiances being subsumed by loyalty to the nation-state “forced the issue” with the Jewish Question: they could no longer be a people apart in the ghettos. Of course this threat of assimilation was a constant concern to Jews, see Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Dialectic of the Enlightenment,” but it also meant that in the nations that supposedly “assimilated” the Jews were in reality giving an alien and hostile force unprecedented power. I chalk this up mostly to naïveté: the French and British Enlightenment thinkers had very little experience with Jews, and thought that they could be made into good citizens like any White group.