in February 1799, Thomas Corbet, an Irish officer serving in the French army – one of those who escaped the debacle of the revolt of the United Irishmen and the failed French invasion of 1795 – had much the same idea. Writing to Paul Barras, Bonaparte’s patron in the governing Directory, Corbet proposed that the directors should summon some ‘Jews of the highest consequence’ and propose the mass mobilisation of men and money in the cause of liberating their ancestral land, thus attaching more than a million Jews throughout the world to the cause of the Grande Nation of liberty. The Irish at the
...more
