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Jewish Chronicle, April 27, 2007
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Moins français... plus juif
The French community voted this week on religious and ethnic grounds, perhaps for the first time, says Daniella Peled
More than
two centuries
ago, Napoleon
Bonaparte
summoned
the leaders of
France’s small
Jewish com-
munity to enquire whether
there was anything in their
religion that precluded their
inclusion in the new Republic.
No, the rabbis assured him, Ju-
daism was perfectly compatible
with French citizenship. And so
French Jewry found itself com-
fortably positioned within the
foundations of French identity,
which were strictly secular.
But things are changing in
the Republic. The social and
ethnic maps are being redrawn
and politics is catching up. With
glaring irony, in the land where
the theoretical basis of citizen-
ship is complete integration,
politicians and minorities alike
are utterly convinced that an
ethnic vote is emerging.
The 600,000-strong Jewish
community is no exception.
Although there is no precise
breakdown of how the Jew-
ish vote was split last week,
the received wisdom is that,
spurred by rising antisemitism,
French Jewry has transferred its
traditional allegiance with the
liberal left to Nicolas Sarkozy,
the fiery head of France’s ruling
centre-right UMP party. Earlier
this week he week emerged with
some 31 per cent of the first-
round vote, ahead of socialist candidate Ségolène
Royal, with 26 per cent.
“We are seeing something new — an ethnic
vote,” said one communal security source, rather
apocalyptically predicting a grim future with Jews
and Muslims divided along religious lines. “I
think it’s going to happen everywhere in the EU.
We are an ageing and declining community, and
the Muslim community is growing.”
Let’s stop playing the underdog. It’s dangerous
The way we teach our history — as if Jews were just powerless victims — threatens our future. By Ariel Beery
R e m e mb e r i n g t h e
Holocaust is one of the few
imperatives of contemporary
Jewry, one of the few things the
disparate streams of the Jewish
people can agree upon.
But what exactly are we
remembering? The Shoah nar-
rative is normally retold in a way that positions
the Jews as an object in someone else’s drama: the
subject is Hitler, his rise to power, and what he did
to the Jews. In this narrative, the Jews only react
after the fact, bewildered.
Jews here play the part of the powerless victim,
a person with little to no agency. In Steven Spiel-
berg’s Schindler’s List, the Jews are nothing but
supporting actors in Oskar Schindler’s story; in
Roman Polanski’s Pianist, it took the goodhearted
Gentiles to save the talented Jews; in the much-
recounted story of Anne Frank, the most Jews
could do was hide away and hope.
The hammering home of the status of the Jew as
a powerless victim has instilled a nearly reflexive
contemporary Jewish identification with any party
that is perceived as powerless. The passion of the
post-genocidal generation of 1968 was rooted in
this self-identification. As the French philosopher
Alain Finkielkraut records in his masterful politi-
cal memoir, The Imaginary Jew, “from Spartacus to
Black Power, an instinctive and unconditional soli-
darity united me with all of the earth’s damned”.
analysis
France has Europe’s largest Muslim minority,
estimated at between four and five million. And
France has signally failed them, with a legacy of
unemployment, educational disadvantage and
a distinct lack of political representation. They
tend to be regarded as foreigners and identify as
such; the opposite has long been true of Jews. The
French Ashkenazi community remained highly
assimilated and patriotic even after the traumas of
Leading members of today’s young generation
also find power and solace in the identity of the
Jew as the Other. Jennifer Bleyer, the founder
of the iconic Heeb magazine, directed at young
intellectual Jews, wrote that she “preferred the
definition of Jews as ultimate outsiders”. Popular
youth magazines and websites heavily reflect this
opinion. That a young hip British group chose to
call itself “Jewdas” shows this yearning for pariah
status is not limited to one corner of the diaspora.
There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong
with identifying with the underdog. Unfor-
tunately, however, in
today’s post-1967 world,
Jews are rarely seen as We must remember what
the underdog, and Israel
is increasingly seen as responsibility we bear for
unworthy of solidarity.
Instead, the ultimate the smokestacks
underdogs in many
people’s minds are the Palestinians.
There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong
with supporting the Palestinians either, provid-
ing one does so in the context of supporting a
two-state solution that confers self-determination
on the Jews as well. But in recent years, leading
members of the Jewish intelligentsia have pushed
that option off the table — justifying their opposi-
tion to Zionism with allusions to Nazi Germany
and the Holocaust. As Alvin Rosenfeld describes
in a pamphlet published by the American Jewish
COMMENT&ANALYSIS review ● 39
I blame Geoffrey
Alderman — David
Aaronovitch, Page 41
the Vichy era. Even the concept of a “Jewish bloc”
is distasteful to members of the old guard, who
consider themselves French first and foremost.
But Sephardi Jews from former North African
colonies now make up some 80 per cent of the com-
munity. They have a stronger religious identity, are
happier to identify with Israel and vote more con-
servatively. Mr Sarkozy’s brand of economic liberal-
ism, coupled with a robust stance on immigration
Committee, scholars such as Jacqueline Rose have
compared Herzl’s Der Judenstaat to Hitler’s Mein
Kampf; Michael Neumann states that Israel has
embarked on “a kinder, gentler genocide”; and
collections of “progressive” Jewish writing, such
as Wrestling with Zion edited by Tony Kushner
and Alisia Solomon, sprinkle each essay with just
enough references to the Holocaust as to take the
comparison of Zionism and Nazism as a given.
To confront this strain of thought — that turns
Jews against the Jewish State — and to provide a
more realistic understanding of Jewish power and
our options in the Mid-
dle East, we would do
well to remember what
we as a community did
with that little power
that we had just before
the Holocaust — and
what responsibility we
bear for the smokestacks.
Few of us remember the vociferous debates
within world Jewry before the demise of European
Jewry began. For example: in 1935, the Menorah
Journal — a leading intellectual journal of Ameri-
can Jewry — published an article by journalist
Louis Minsky arguing that American Jews had
been too aggressive thus far in their dealings
with Hitler. Arguing that “the policy of fighting
antisemitism by public agitation, parades, mass
meetings, oratorical invective, persistent moralis-
and law and order, has proved
attractive. And in a departure
from the traditional French-Arab
alliance, Mr Sarkozy publicly
supported Israel’s right to defend
itself and condemned Hizbollah
during last summer’s war. Per-
haps for the first time, French
Jews are voting as Jews rather
than as French citizens.
The political drift is caus-
ing alarm among some Jewish
intellectuals, including essayist
Alain Finkielkraut. This month
he told Ha’aretz: “There is a
future for Jews in France only if
France is a nation, but there is
no future for Jews in a multicul-
tural society, because then the
power of anti-Jewish groups is
liable to be greater.”
Others see this as unneces-
sarily alarmist. “It’s not like
most American friends of mine
believe, that France is going
through some kind of civil war
with the Jews on one side and
the Muslims on the other,”
says Jean-Yves Camus of the
Institute of International and
Strategic Relations.
Yet the key issue of these elec-
tions — more than the creaking
economy and high unemploy-
ment — has been one of national
identity. Mr Sarkozy has even
proposed setting up a ministry
dedicated to dealing with that
question. And Ms Royal surprised
supporters with flag-waving state-
ments celebrating patriotism.
Both candidates, who will go
head-to-head in the next round
on May 6, are of the post-war generation which
grew up amid immigration from the former
French colonies in Africa and the Maghreb. Now
they are dealing with what multiculturalism
means to France. The country, itself undergoing
an identity crisis, is turning right, and the Jewish
community is turning right with it.
Daniella Peled is the JC’s foreign editor
ing, boycott” had been disastrous, Minsky further
claimed that “the aggressivist strategy, far from
succeeding, has, on the contrary, aggravated the
situation both in Germany and in this country”.
This line of argument is echoed by many in the
Jewish community today when other Jews attempt
to take on threats clearly articulated by various
groups in the Middle East. Instead of uniting
against Iran or providing a solid front against the
same Hamas that keeps kidnapped soldiers and
reporters from even the Red Cross, prominent
intellectuals rail against the “Israel Lobby”. They
call on Jews to think twice about supporting the
policies of the elected government of Israel — and
blast the community for being too aggressive, for
using the little power they have.
If we want the Jewish People to grow stronger as
a supportive community, it is time we rethink the
Holocaust narrative we teach our children. As his-
tory has proved time and again, the international
community will not step in to stop a genocide in
progress, no matter how many times we call upon
them to remember times past. “Never again” is a
fine slogan; but if we truly want to see these words
borne out, we need to recognise which “again” we
should never repeat: never again should we be
powerless to act, and never again should we choose
inaction when genocide crouches at the door.
Ariel Beery is the editor and publisher of PresenTense
Magazine, and the co-editor of BlogsofZion.com