Nidra Poller

Square Theodor Herzl was dedicated with appropriate ceremony on a sunny afternoon last July. The unassuming square – actually a triangle, in a downscale corner of the 3rd arrondissement where Asian wholesale jewellery shops alternate with remnants of the once flourishing schmatte district – was chosen as the site to honour the father of political Zionism on the centennial anniversary of the rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus. It was a matter of a few weeks before vandals painted over the Square Herzl street sign, turning it into a signpost of the problematical situation in France, where self-conscious ceremonial acknowledgment of past crimes is given a new coat of
dangerous Jew-hatred.

Any description of the dangers facing Jews in France today will sound alarmist because it can be countered by ample evidence to the contrary. A French Jew can wake up in the morning, go through the day and retire at night without encountering a single real-life anti-Semitic incident. French Jews are prominent in every sphere, financially successful, respected as intellectuals, visible in the media and show business, elected to political office. Three major contenders for nomination as their party’s presidential candidate – Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Nicolas Sarkozy and Laurent Fabius – are Jewish or half-Jewish. And yet important thinkers – Shmuel Trigano, Michel Gurfinkiel, Alain Finkielkraut, Daniel Sibony, Jean-Claude Milner, among others – cast doubt on the future for Jews in France.

As if to demonstrate that doubt, six hundred French Jews made aliyah in late July 2006, while Hizbullah rockets were raining death and destruction on Israel and anti-Zionism was stoked up in France in reaction to ‘Israel’s war against Lebanon’.

The current wave of Jew hatred did not arise as a continuation or resurgence of the mid-twentieth-century European anti-Semitism that culminated in the Shoah, with the extermination of six million European Jews, the destruction of Yiddishkeit and the murmur of a more or less sincere ‘never again’. Ill-digested lessons of the Shoah have paved the way for the new Jew-hatred that has risen to fever pitch in Arab-Muslim nations and spread rapidly to Europe’s Muslim communities. Fellow-travelers promote this lethal hatred that is cloaked in ideals and ideologies – multiculturalism, post-colonial guilt and anti-Western resentment.

It was almost unthinkable in the immediate post-war years for Jews to return to Germany. Why did it seem so natural for survivors to return and pick up where they had left off in France? French collaboration was, perhaps, considered less evil than Nazi instigation. For decades France portrayed itself as a victim of
German tyranny; the former French Vichy official Maurice Papon claimed, at his 1997 trial for crimes against humanity, that he had collaborated with the Nazis in order to save Jews. France jumped into the Allied camp at the tail-end of the war and still thinks of itself as among the victors. And French culture has a particular talent for smoothing things over, balancing them out, prettying them up, talking them away. French Jews, like everyone else, enjoyed the benefits of thirty years of post-war peace and prosperity, ‘les trentes glorieuses’.

The community was reinvigorated in the Fifties by an influx of Jewish refugees from the Maghreb. In those days, feisty little Israel was admired by opinion-makers, French Jewish intellectuals stood at the forefront of humanitarian causes, participated in all the noble combats, mobilized in favour of decolonization and sailed blithely into the storm centre of 1967 and the subsequent downhill slide.

The roots and foundations of contemporary anti-Semitism – age-old persecution, Catholic anti-Judaism, right-wing fascism, left-wing repulsion – link the distant past to the present day. At different periods
in French history anti-Semitism has been countered by
values of tolerance, Enlightenment rationality, the assertion of secular values and an abiding strain of philo-semitism. The Napoleonic concord that granted French Jews all rights as individual citizens and no rights as a religious community is cited as a force that favours successful integration while leaving Jews vulnerable in times of stress because they cannot defend themselves collectively.

The historical approach may be misleading. A sufficiently broad perspective can demonstrate simultaneously that France has been particularly hospitable to Jews and, with equally convincing arguments, that France has periodically both welcomed and rejected Jews, exploiting their talents only to confiscate their wealth and kick them out. Europeans are often paralyzed by excessive focus on the past, which leaves them helpless to forge a better future. What lesson should be drawn from the ease with which the French collaborated in the mass extermination of European Jews in the mid-twentieth century?

The Vichy government was formed as a result of surrender to Nazi military aggression. The current danger to Jews arises from surrender to a strategy of soft invasion combined with a variety of jihad attacks, commonly described as terrorism. The historian Bat Ye’or has scrupulously documented the ‘Eurabian’ policy that has led to the installation of aggressive Muslim enclaves within European nations. By incorporating, enhancing and whitewashing Islamic Jew-hatred, French society has become increasingly hostile to Jews. By denying that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are the same rose with different names, French society has liberated itself from post-Shoah taboos.

The Jewish community reacted vigorously to the sudden outburst of anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence in 2000-2001; to no avail. No matter what form of action was attempted, no matter what groups were formed, no matter what previous influence was brought to bear, the result was equally disappointing. One by one, forthright voices fell silent. Whether the cases were pled in the law courts or in the court of public opinion, the verdict was the same: Jewish grievances were treated as neurotic, exaggerated, communitarian (clannish), Islamophobic, extremist, irrelevant.

United in expressing shock and indignation at the sudden deterioration of their situation, French Jews have now split into various camps: some have chosen exile, primarily to Israel or the United States; some writers and thinkers have slipped into the background and pursue their careers within the limits left to
them; some pursue a rather factitious activism that leads nowhere; many have decided to withdraw from the battle and cultivate their gardens.

A drop in the number of violent attacks against Jews or, more often, a cloak of silence that renders them invisible might suggest that the worst is behind us. The absence of ‘official anti-Semitism’ (as compared with the situation during the 1930s and 40s) is held forth as a sort of absolute ceiling, while official anti-Zionism thrives. An underlying hostility to the state of Israel, a deep-seated refusal to recognize Israel as a sovereign state, consistent alignment with Arab governments, excessive indulgence for Hamas, Hizbullah, Saddam Hussein and the little Hitler of Iran . . . this is the background music of France’s foreign policy. Anti-Zionism is a prerequisite for acceptance in academic circles and prestigious think tanks. Anti-Zionism, intimately associated with anti-Americanism, has soaked into the public mind, colouring thoughts and attitudes but no longer open to critical examination.

To understand how anti-Zionism permeates French society, it is essential to know something about French media. Whatever legitimate complaints might be made about media bias in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and other European countries, nothing can compare with the drastic lack of information in French media. It is worse than it was in the USSR – because at least Soviet citizens knew they were being fed propaganda. The French public exults in an illusion of a free press. Journalists are outraged at the suggestion that they are beholden to someone, anyone, whomever. Arrogant, misinformed French people delight in declaring that the American media are under government control, censored, bought, sold.

The French media speak with one and only one voice on questions of foreign policy. Is this done by unspoken rules, direct orders or survival instinct? I don’t pretend to know. The result is so striking, and yet it seems that generally well-informed people who do not follow French media day by day cannot imagine the mixture of inanity and propaganda fed to the public. Newspaper and magazine circulation is negligible compared to the UK and the US – the great bulk of French people get their news from radio and TV. Primetime newscasts, one half hour twice a day, are repetitive and nearly identical between the three big networks, two state-owned, France 2 and 3, one ‘independent’, TF1.

During the Hizbullah war last July, radio and TV newscasts opened systematically with: ‘On the xth day of the Israeli offensive against Lebanon . . .’ Hizbullah rocket attacks against Israel were tacked on at the end of the report, like an afterthought. The general population was fed a meticulously packaged version of the conflict and led to believe that French diplomacy had soared to new heights, bypassing Bush’s wrong-headed approach to the Middle East, successfully leading the international community into an exquisitely moral alternative to Israel’s US-backed ‘disproportionate’ war against Lebanon and its innocent civilians. President Chirac’s popularity rating jumped by 11 per cent.

France has the largest Jewish community in Western Europe (estimated at 550-600,000 and falling), the largest Muslim population (estimated at 6 to 10 million and multiplying), and the most fervently Zionist community in the Diaspora. More than half of the Jews in France are of North African descent, many of whom have family in Israel. Increasingly uncertain of their future in France, they draw closer to Israel. Young people go to study, retired people buy apartments, businessmen develop commercial relations. They are more likely to think of Israel as a haven than a high-risk destination.

Organized Jewish community leadership favours access over confrontation with the powers that be. Political heavies attend galas, dinners and conferences and make all the right noises. High government officials receive Roger Cukierman of the CRIF (Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France, an umbrella organization representing all Jewish groups in France), Chief Rabbi Joseph Chaim Sitruk, presidents of Jewish associations, charities and student groups. It would be foolish to deny the benefits of access – an aura of prestige reflected on the Jewish community and practical measures such as police protection for synagogues and day schools – but it often leads to embarrassing compromises. Community leaders acting as interface with American and Israeli counterparts regularly praise France’s fabulous laws against anti-Semitism and neglect to mention that they are not enforced.

As the Jewish community shrinks, the Muslim population grows and occupies the scene; their misdeeds are hidden behind thick veils of euphemism, their qualities are exaggerated beyond belief. Jewish success is viewed as an imbalance or, worse, an injustice to be corrected; Muslim failure is attributed to Islamophobia, discrimination, disrespect, humiliation.

Religion is rejected in France today, but Islam is glorified. The absence of religious fibre leaves French society vulnerable to pressure from Islam, while a mixture of tolerance, exoticism and colonial nostalgia increases the attraction of Islam as fashion. France’s twenty-first-century New Look is distinctly third world.

France is in the grip of a grave crisis that has implications for the whole of Europe. European countries are fast approaching a crossroads, and do not seem to have any idea which way to turn. European women are not producing enough children to perpetuate their societies. An overwhelmingly Muslim immigrant population may ensure its own reproduction; it will not produce Europeans.

‘When synagogues burn the République smoulders,’ they chanted, more than one hundred thousand people, almost all of them Jewish, who marched from Place de la République to the Bastille in the spring of 2002, to stand up against anti-Semitism in France, show solidarity with Israeli victims of terrorism, and warn the Republic of imminent danger. The warning was ignored. Four years later the flames are more often directed at buses and the rocks are thrown at policemen. A church was torched at the beginning of November in la Duchère district near Lyon, near to where a synagogue was attacked in 2001. The French Republic is, without exaggeration, in danger. It is not rising to the challenge. The façade is cracking, revealing a breakdown of institutions, a deficit of democracy, an antiquated judicial system, an inadequate police force and rotting prison infrastructure. France, mired in humanitarian cant, has turned its back on meritocracy; it is losing its reputation for industrial innovation, losing its finesse, its intellectual prowess, its vitality. Talented, skilled, ambitious people are looking elsewhere for opportunity.

In this volatile situation the fate of Jewish citizens is just part of the collective uncertainty...only more so. Today the mobs are attacking the police, tomorrow the flames could leap in other directions. We have seen that nothing or no one stops them.

Nidra Poller is an American writer living in Paris. This is an abbreviated version of an article that appeared in The Jewish Quarterly in England, Winter 2006/2007. The website is: www.jewishquarterly.org