Peace" (_Shir ha-Shalom_), published at Paris in 1804, is the
apotheosis of Napoleon, whom the poet hails as "liberty rescued" and
"beautiful France", the home of liberty. This unique poem is
characterized by unbounded love for France and the French, the beautiful
country, the free, high-mettled people, bearing love of country in its
heart and in its hand the avenging sword, and cherishing hatred against
"tyranny on the throne, which had changed a terrestrial Paradise into a
charnel house." The poet extols the dictator not only because he is a
"friend of victory", but because he is at the same time and still more a
"friend of science." He salutes the victorious armies. Although they
bring destruction and misery in their wake, they bear before them the
standard of science, civilization, and progress.

The cry of liberty wakened a loud echo in the ghettos of even the most
backward countries. Hebrew literature contains a number of curious
mementos, tokens of the ardent hopes which the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic conquests evoked in the breast of the Jews, whose character
has little enough affinity with the rule of despotism. In numerous
Hebrew hymns and songs they welcomed the armies of Napoleon as of the
savior Messiah. [Footnote: To name but a few among the many: an ode by
the celebrated Rabbi Jacob Meir in Alsace, an ancestor of the family of
the Grand-Rabbin Zadoc Kahn; another ode composed at Vienna by the
Polish grammarian Ben-Zeeb; and the hymns sung in the synagogue at
Frankfort (1807), at Hamburg (1811), etc. The Revolutionary Code
published at Amsterdam in 1795 is also worthy of mention.] Before the
first flush of joy died away, the reaction set in, and their hopes were
blighted. The Jews relapsed into their olden social misery.
Nevertheless, the clash between received notions and the new conceptions
had contributed not a little to produce a ferment of ideas and create
new tendencies in the ghetto, at last aroused from its millennial