ish Grand Rabbis as to the ecclesiastical heads of
the Christian confessions.[23]

The absence of any direct reference to the Jews, or even to equal rights
for all religious communities in the Principalities, is less
satisfactory. The omission is in the first place due to the circumstance
that the Treaty in itself is incomplete. Articles XXIII, XXIV, and XXV
refer the question of the constitutional reorganisation of the
Principalities to a Commission which was to meet at Bucharest and
consult Divans of the two Principalities with a view to making the
necessary recommendations to the Powers.[24] This Commission did not
report until 1858, when its proposals were considered by a fresh
Conference of the Powers, which based upon them the scheme embodied in
the Convention of Paris of August 19 of that year. The question of
religious liberty is dealt with in Article XLVI of that instrument.[25]
Originally it was intended to assure complete emancipation and equality
for all non-Christian communities in the Principalities, and articles to
this effect were adopted by the preparatory Conference of
Constantinople, in its Protocol of February 11, 1856, with the express
design of relieving the Jews, whose sufferings had already become a
matter of European notoriety.[26] The Rumanians, however, were already
strongly hostile to Jewish emancipation, and the reigning Prince of
Moldavia misled the Powers with specious promises of a type which has
since become bitterly familiar to the Jews all over the world.[27] The
Report of the Bucharest Commission of 1858 accepted these promises and
excluded all references to Religious Liberty from its scheme.[28] The
first draft of the Convention submitted to the Conference of the Powers
did likewise,[29] but ultimately a compromise amendment was introduced
by which the Powers agreed (Art. XLVI) to limit political rights to
Christians, while providing for the extension of these rights to
non-Christians by subsequent legislative arrangements.[30] This
concession to the Rumanians was made on the express pledge that the
original scheme of the Conference at Constantinople would be gradually
realised.[31] Needless to say, the pledge was never fulfilled. In
dealing, however, with the question, the Convention of Paris had one
merit. It lent no support to the subsequent theory of the Rumanians,
that the Jews were foreigners in a secular sense in their own country,
but, on the contrary, assumed that their stat