By the end of the 18th century, in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the National Assembly decreeing in December 1789 that non-Catholics were eligible for all civil and military positions, the Revolutionary government in France made a play for the alligence of Jews, in competition with Britain. During the Egypt–Syria campaign of the French Revolutionary Wars, Bonaparte invited "all the Jews of Asia and Africa to gather under his flag in order to re-establish the ancient Jerusalem." Although Bonaparte himself was secular and the idea an early example of pragmatic Political Zionism, the Jacobin idea itself may have originated from Thomas Corbet (1773-1804), an Anglo-Irish Protestant emigrée who, as a member of the liberal-republican Society of United Irishmen, was an ally of the Jacobin-government, engaged in revolutionary activities against the British and served in the French Army. In February 1790, he authored a letter to the French Directory, then under the leadership of Napoleon's patron Paul Barras. In the letter he stated "I recommend you, Napoleon, to call on the Jewish people to join your conquest in the East, to your mission to conquer the land of Israel" saying, "Their riches do not console them for their hardships. They await with impatience the epoch of their re-establishment as a nation." Dr. Milka Levy-Rubin, a curator at the National Library of Israel, has attributed Corbet's motivation to a Protestant Zionism based on premillennialist themes.