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who have enlightened the universe are there.”⁶⁴ Cultures and empires have celebrated and consolidated their greatness through poetry: Greece, Rome, the France of Louis XIV, and the Russia of Peter the Great. Fallen cultures, such as the Trojan, or even corrupt cultures can be later celebrated and valorized by the muses. Poetry can delight and transform the old as well as the young, and has something for people of all walks of life.

      After ordination in 1776, Grégoire became preoccupied by the far-from-poetic abuses inherent in an aristocratic society. Witnessing the death of an old man who had masqueraded as a salt worker, the priest Grégoire was hardened against a regime that would hound the poor with a heavy tax on salt pits and streams. Prison life had killed the old fellow, “a poor octogenarian who had pulled up a little water to make his wretched soup.”⁶⁵ As pastoral assistant at Marimont-lès-Bénestroff, Grégoire completely dropped his work in poetry for the sake of the great causes. When he joined the Société philanthropique at Nancy, he was constitutionally attracted to the 1779 Strasbourg concours of the society, using the occasion to prepare a report on the “Jewish question,” based on a study tour of parts of Alsace. Then he combined a pilgrimage to Notre-Dame des Ermites near Zurich with a study of Swiss democracy. He became the friend of the social work–oriented Protestant pastor Jean-Frédéric Oberlin of Ban-de-la-Roche, and then began a study of the treatment of Gypsies in Europe. His apostolate as curé of Emberménil, begun in 1782, remained for him the happiest and most fulfilling period of his career, serving his Catholic parish and working to know and understand the Ashkenazi Jewish communities of Lorraine, concentrated in Metz, Nancy, and Lunéville.

      Out of his own formation Grégoire fashioned a life and ministry that was priestly and pastoral in the tradition of the Council of Trent: there’s no question that he saw himself as mediator and teacher. If he wrote little about his celebration of Mass as a young priest, he exalted the values of confession, which “establishes in the Catholic religion relations that are more direct between pastors and the faithful than in societies that have suppressed this element of the sacrament of penance. In general, the confidence of my parishioners was such that if I had not placed some limits on their spontaneous revelations, they would have gone too far.”⁶⁶

      Regenerated Political Society: Jews and Christians

      In 1788, Grégoire put together a treatise that promoted the acceptance of Jews into European society, with the accompanying training and restraints necessary to make this reform work.⁶⁷ On the one hand, he insists that if these people are treated fairly they can fill all roles, accomplish all tasks. But on the other hand, he seems to accept all the old prejudices. Christian Europeans, he says, have contributed in no small measure to the physical, moral, and political plight of the Jews of his day, but the majority of the condemnations and criticisms of Jewish physical, moral, and political degeneration are valid. God has made them pay for their past sins. It is not for Christians to replay God’s vengeance, but to offer the Jews justice, charity, and the possibility of a happy life. The low estate of the Jews is not permanent: they can be regenerated.

      To begin with, Grégoire evokes the destruction of Jerusalem and the persecutions in Europe. He makes the case that many Christian bishops, and the popes themselves, were defenders of the Jews against the murderous attacks of princes and populations. Wherever they have gone, they have been massacred, burned alive, victims of pillage and pursuit. The Jews have suffered the equivalent of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre hundreds of times. Grégoire does note, however, that here and there Jewish society did bring on persecution by its reprehensible behavior. And he does accept the notion that “the blood of Jesus Christ has fallen upon the Jews as they once desired: since the day of blood at Calvary, they have become a spectacle to all the earth as they wander across it looking for a Messiah.”⁶⁸

      More often than not, the Jews were made to suffer unjustly, “for imaginary crimes.”⁶⁹ How could they, then, love their rulers, or the peoples who made common cause against them? They could only be jealous of Christians, whose religion has completely eclipsed their own. When you persecute a religion, you render it more precious to its members; they become more committed to the values for which they have suffered. Grégoire admits that Jews, like everyone else, are given to vice, but he lists also their many virtues, and he rehearses many persecutions they have endured, concluding that “in their place we would have perhaps been worse.”⁷⁰

      Then Grégoire paints a collective portrait of decadence and degradation, in which he lists a wide variety of dangerous, even murderous, rabbinical influences, with no real questioning or downplaying of reports he transmits. “What to conclude from all of this?” he asks. “That we must hunt down the Jews and destroy them: No! which clearly proves that we need to regenerate this people.”⁷¹ And thus, beginning with the perversion of usury and working down the list of their evil tendencies, recognizing that in the end their usury in particular resulted from the oppression they suffered. It is the “height of inconsequence” to reproach them for their crimes “after having forced them to commit them.”⁷² The many governments of Europe have taken away from them all other means of subsistence.

      Enlightenment has already begun among the Jews, he says, citing the case of Moses Mendelssohn and the attempt to return to the purity of the law: “Already a number of Jews disgusted with rabbinical mess, prune away all the human additions to the law, without harming the truth of the basic principles.”⁷³ The Jews must be formed in the arts and crafts, as well as in agriculture. In other times and in other places they have excelled in these things. Give them a chance, he says. Grégoire combines a language of safeguards against their supposed natural tendencies and a hope for community with Christians. Ensure a sensible education and solid moral training for them, surround them with good will, and “they will learn to love enemies too generous to be hated, and they will thereby acquire a [new] sociability, sentiment, and virtue, without losing the simplicity of their ancient ways.”⁷⁴ Limits can be set on Jewish commerce, but, properly integrated into life, they will be in a good position to revive languishing areas of the economy. Grégoire proposes legislation that will be fair and yet keep them away from the types of business dishonesty to which they are prone. Let commercial transactions be done in cash, but allow for old debts to be paid. When Grégoire proposes to keep the Jews away from functions that will draw them back to the old ways, he adds, “For we should never lose sight of the character of the people we are hoping to set straight.”⁷⁵ His project, after all, is regeneration, and not simple liberation. Opposing ghettos, he continues his argument that the company and goodness of Christians will have a salutary effect. They should be given freedom of expression, although those elements of Mosaic practice that would not be acceptable in modern government (e.g., stoning of adulterers) are not negotiable Should they be admitted to civil office, the nobility, the academies, education, and the ownership of buildings? Yes, to all the above, and he would permit Jewish/Catholic marriages if the children could be raised Catholic.

      In sum, Grégoire preaches love and fraternity: “Children of the same father, eliminate every pretext for aversion to your brothers, who one day will be reunited into the same sheepfold; open to them places of refuge when they can peaceably lay down their heads and dry their tears. And may the Jew at last, granting to the Christian a return of affection, embrace in me his fellow citizen and his friend.”⁷⁶

      Across the months intervening between his full engagement with the Jewish question and his first weeks in the 1789 assemblies, Grégoire did not lose his central concern for Jewish regeneration. During the 13–15 July session of the Constituent Assembly, he reprised his ideas in a motion on behalf of the Jews, published and entered into the minutes: “Now allow a Catholic pastor to raise his voice on behalf of the fifty million Jews in the kingdom, who, being men, demand the rights of citizens.”⁷⁷ As Alyssa Sepinwall puts it, Grégoire was “radically inclusive” as he developed his project of regeneration with successive attention to the rights of blacks and the status of women.⁷⁸

      Polarities of Revolutionary Priesthood

      Polarities do not define “typical,” of course, but they do define a range of priestly types, from jobber through apostle. Clear in politics and primed for revolution, the abbé Sieyès had a minimal and mutated pastoral orientation. But he was a philosophical

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