Although antisemitism knows no borders, the experience of the Jewish community in the British isles in the eighteenth century was markedly different than their coreligionists on the continent. This meant that the Revolution and Napoleon's emancipation edicts really did not have that much of an impact on the wider Anglo-Jewish community.

One of the key differences that set the Anglo-Jewish community apart was relatively recent one compared to long-standing Jewish communities in Alsace-Lorraine or Frankfurt am Main. Cromwell's government had allowed for the resettlement of Jews in Britain in the 1650s and the community had grown with immigration from Sephardi from Iberia and later Ashkenazim Jews from Central Europe and the Low Countries. Like many recent immigrants, these communities practiced self-segregation by both choice and circumstances, but their movements were not as legally restricted like they were on the continent. Jewish quarters in cities like London were not the byproduct of long-standing laws and regulations like Frankfurt am Main's ghetto, whose establishment dated back to the eleventh century.

Some Anglo-Jews did manage to become quite prosperous during the eighteenth century. There was an Anglo-Jewish presence in the London financial sector and a small elite of London Jewish families that were somewhat prosperous. Sampson Gideons, a prominent banker in London in the first half of the eighteenth century, acted very much in the vein of a continental Hofjude (court Jew), an unofficial adviser and financier to the government. Likewise, there was a middling strata of Anglo-Jews involved in various service industries and trades, there was a popular association between Jews and watch production, for example. But in addition to these upper and middling strata of Jews, there was also a bulk of Jews, often from the more recent immigrants, that lived much more on the socioeconomic margins of British society. A number of these Jews continued in the continental tradition of Beteljuden (begging Jews) in which they took to the road as traveling salesmen hawking merchandise of variable quality.

While Anglo-Jews certainly did face antisemitism and discrimination, it was seldom at the hands of the state or law. Regulations limiting Jewish participation in government certainly did exist, but so too did laws against other religious minorities in England and Scotland. The Jews Bill of 1753 had allowed for British Jews to gain civil rights, but was repealed by the Commons after a wave of antisemitic protests. The Commons also investigated charges of Jewish malfeasance and peddling shoddy wares periodically. But such public investigations and public invective against Jews were pretty much par for the course in European politics. While the British isles were far from a philosemetic paradise, Jews were a largely tolerated, albeit begrudgingly, religious minority.

The same really could not be said of the continent. Although Hofjuden were an ever present reality of European courts, the public reaction against them could get quite violent. While some of the Samson Gideon faced considerable social prejudice that consigned him as an upstart Jew who tried to buy his way into respectability, such slights were nothing compared to the fate of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, a Württemberg Hofjude who was hung after the death of his patron in 1738 and his corpse displayed on a gibbet outside of Stuttgart for some six years afterwards. The public invective against the Jew Act never reached the level of popular violence against the Jewish community. In contrast, violence almost always preceded the repeal of various emancipation efforts on the continent. The wave of "Hep-Hep" pogroms in 1818/19 in Germany, for instance, preceded the larger rollback of the Napoleonic emancipations that followed in the wake of the Congress of Vienna.

This type of popular violence drew from a wider culture of antisemitism and French emancipation decrees were often infused with this type of thinking. In both the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Era, there was a strong tendency of the state to sweep aside many of the restrictive laws against Jews. This was of a piece with the Revolution's Enlightenment heritage which emphasized a rational legal and social order. The Enlightenment operated under a schema which postulated that disorder and crimes originated from imperfections within society. If Jews were associated with such activities like usury and swindling, then eliminating restrictive laws would end that activity. Very few Revolutionaries would turn the mirror on themselves and conclude that the Jews' negative image was the result of gentiles' own antisemitism; they took this antisemitic image of the Jew as an exploiter of gentiles as a given. The Revolution fostered the elimination of corporate privileges of the Jewish communities, largely clustered in the borders at Alasace, and made the tentative first steps towards accepting Jews as full citizens of France. The moderate liberal Stanislas Clermont-Tonnerre would argue in the National Assembly that:

We should refuse the Jews any rights as a separate nation, but grant them the same as individuals. They must not make in the State either a distinctive corps or an order. They must become individual citizens.

Similarly, the revolutionary firebrand Henri Grégoire published a pamphlet in October 1789 favoring Jewish emancipation. Grégoire's motions for Jewish emancipation received tentative support from other political actors like Mirabeau and Robespierre. In the latter case, the Jacobin leader saw the lack of Jewish integration into French culture as baleful legacy of the monarchical regime:

The vices of the Jews have their roots in the degradation into which you have plunged them. They will be good when they see some benefit in being so.

Yet the chaos of the Revolution's later stages meant that emancipation, which passed in the National Assembly in 27 September 1791, would be highly patchwork and incomplete.

It was up to Napoleon to complete this undone task. The Emperor shared much in common with Robespierre with regards to French Jews. In an 1806 letter to the Minister of the Interior, Napoleon would assert that the integrating the Jews into French society through social institutions like the army would eliminate

the tendency of Jewish people to practice a very great number of activities that are harmful to civilization and to public order in society in all the countries of the world.

In the few state meetings that delved into the Jewish question, Napoleon would contend that the ancien regime's classification of the Jews as a separate corporate entity only enabled the Jews' own worst vices. Like his Revolutionary predecessors, Napoleon did not question his own antisemitic precepts about Jews.

Napoleon was in many respects the culmination of the Revolution's Jewish policy. Although the National Assembly had granted Jews full citizenship rights towards the end of its existence, the new revolutionary state also sought to subordinate and systematize Jewish religious and social institutions. Napoleon, who was a systematizer par excellence, convened a council of Jewish elders, the Grand Sanhedrin, to declare that Jewish conscription was religiously valid. This followed other governmental attempts to regulate its Jewish community, ranging from religious dress or the state control over rabbis. Napoleon ushered in the French government's century-long attempt to subordinate religion to the state oversight and control. Although the French state also tried to subordinate the Catholic church to the state as well, Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic approaches to Judaism often treated Jews as community that needed to be corralled into "correct" behavior. Berr Isaac Berr, the Alsatian Jewish delegate to the National Assembly, perceptively analyzed the antisemitism latent in these emancipatory initiatives in an 1806 pamphlet:

Hardly had the decree which granted Jews the title of citizen been handed down than they were reproached with not yet having become worthy as a group for this great favor.

Within this context, it becomes quite easy to see why although Napoleon's elimination of antisemitic restrictions and laws was a departure from the ancien regime, they did did not really amount to that much immediately. Most of the Napoleonic emancipation edicts had much more to do with harnessing the Jews for immediate service to the state with the corollary that the new order would force Jews to assimilate.

So while it is not impossible that some Anglo-Jews would flee to the continent to serve in the Grande Armée, Napoleon's emancipation decrees were not much of an inducement for service for Jews in Britain. Anglo-Jewish pamphlets dealing with Napoleon's convocation of the Grand Sanhedrin in 1807 held a fairly negative assessment of the Emperor's attempt to browbeat the leaders of the faith into state service. Antisemitism in the British Isles was certainly a major facet of the Anglo-Jewish experience in the Georgian period, yet British society did not have the same potential for the levels of popular violence that was normal on the continent. The Anglo-Jewish community was not only a rather new one by the start of the nineteenth century, but it had already laid the foundations for both assimilation and acculturation for the better part of a century.