Wednesday, June 26, 2013

A rabbi, a priest and a minister walk into an audience with Napoleon...

Recently I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I saw this portrait of Napoleon. Evidently, he enjoyed pageantry and symbolism.


































Here is an anecdote about the time the rabbi of Dusseldorf went to pay his respects to Napoleon. As you can see, the old rabbi was supported by a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister in, what the writer suspects, was a symbolic gesture for Napoleon's benefit:

































This incident occurred in 1811, and as the rabbi of Dusseldorf was, at the time, R. Judah Leib Scheur (d. 1821, age 87), then he must have been about 77 - not 100 as depicted here.

2 comments:

  1. Yerachmiel Lopin5:53 PM, June 27, 2013

    Where were the comedians when we needed them?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I read that "one hundred years old" as an exaggeration.

    ReplyDelete