lieutenant-general of the kingdom, and to the campaign led in Parliament by the deputies comte de Rambuteau and Jean Viennet. Encouraged by these prominent men, the minister of education, on 13 November 1830, offered a motion to place Judaism upon an equal footing with Catholicism and Protestantism as regards support for the synagogues and for the rabbis from the public treasury. The motion was accompanied by flattering compliments to the French Jews, "who", said the minister, "since the removal of their disabilities by the Revolution, have shown themselves worthy of the privileges granted to them". After a short discussion the motion was adopted by a large majority. In January 1831, it passed in the Chamber of Peers by 89 votes to 57, and on 8 February it was ratified by King Louis Philippe, who from the beginning had shown himself favorable to placing Judaism on an equal footing with the other faiths. Shortly afterward the rabbinical college, which had been founded at Metz in 1829, was recognized as a state institution, and was granted a subsidy. The government likewise liquidated the debts contracted by various Jewish communities before the Revolution. Full equality Full equality did not occur until 1831. By the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, France provided an environment in which Jews took active and many times leading roles. The Napoleonic policy of carrières aux talents, or 'careers for the gifted', permitted French Jews to enter previously forbidden fields such as the arts, finance, trade, and government. For this they were never forgiven by primarily Royalist and Catholic antisemites. Assimilation While the Jews had been placed in every point the equals of their Christian fellow citizens, the oath More Judaico still continued to be administered to them, in spite of the repeated protestations of the rabbis and the consistory. It was only in 1846, owing to a brilliant speech of the Jewish lawyer Adolphe Crémieux, pronounced before the Court of Nîmes in defense of a rabbi who had refused to take this oath, and to a valuable essay on the subject by Martin, a prominent Christian advocate of Strasburg, that the Court of Cassation removed this last remnant of the legislation of the Middle Ages. With this act of justice the history of the Jews of France merges into the general history of the French people. The rapidity with which many of them won affluence and distinction in