Anti-semitism in France Today

The Lure of Anti-Semitism

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Jewish Identities in a Changing World

General Editors

Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yosef Gorny

VOLUME 10

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The Lure of Anti-Semitism

Hatred of Jews in Present-Day France

By

Michel Wieviorka

with

Philippe Bataille, Clarisse Buono, Sébastien Delsalle, Damien Guillaume, Farhad Khosrokhavar,

Emmanuel Kreis, Jocelyne Ohana, Alexandra Poli, Svetlana Tabatchnikova, Simonetta Tabboni,

Nikola Tietze, Fiammetta Venner

Translated by

Kristin Couper Lobel and Anna Declerck

LEIDEN • BOSTON2007

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This book was � rst published as, La tentation antisémite : haine des Juifs dans la France d’aujourd’hui. Editions Robert Laffont, Paris, 2005.

The author would like to acknowledge the aid of the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah in the translation of this book.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available onhttp://catalog.loc.gov.

ISBN 1570-7997ISBN 978 90 04 16337 9

Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.Fees are subject to change.

printed in the netherlands

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For Roman, a true Gosu

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CONTENTS

Abbreviations ............................................................................ xiTranslators’ Note ...................................................................... xvWorks by Michel Wieviorka ..................................................... xixGeneral Introduction .................................................................. xxi

PART ONE

BACKGROUND

Introduction ................................................................................ 3 1. What Do the Statistics Tell Us? ...................................... 5 2. In Schools ......................................................................... 16 3. Changes in the Public Sphere ......................................... 23 4. The Shoah: De� cit, Plethora and Loss of Meaning ...... 48 5. Global Anti-Semitism ...................................................... 62 6. The Jews in France: Developments and Concerns ......... 80

Conclusion .................................................................................. 88

PART TWO

GHETTO ANTI-SEMITISM

Introduction ................................................................................ 93 7. Anti-Semitism (almost) without Jews ............................... 98 8. The Power of the Imagination ........................................ 115 9. A Sociological Intervention ............................................. 12410. Muslim Anti-Semitism: The View from Prison .............. 141

Conclusion .................................................................................. 156

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PART THREE

ANTI-SEMITISM AND COMMUNITIES

Introduction ................................................................................ 16111. The Jews, the ChaldoAssyrians and the Others ............. 16312. Anti-Semitism at Local Level .......................................... 17713. An Unusual Variant of ‘Global’ Anti-Semitism ............. 20014. “Why There Were No Clashes in Sarcelles” .................. 21415. The Marseilles Counterpoint: The Pieds-noirs and the

Jews ................................................................................. 228

PART FOUR

IN ALSACE

Introduction ................................................................................ 24116. The Fears of the Jews in Alsace ...................................... 24417. Malaise in the Alsatian Countryside ............................... 25518. Two Extreme Right Political Forces, Two Anti-Semitic

Rationales ......................................................................... 27019. Mohammed Latrèche and the Parti des musulmans

de France ............................................................................ 28320. Desecrations ..................................................................... 294

Conclusion .................................................................................. 306

PART FIVE

IN THE UNIVERSITIES

Introduction .............................................................................. 31121. Boycotting Israel ............................................................ 31422. Two Extreme Cases of Anti-Zionism ........................... 32023. Leftism in Decline and Extreme Anti-Zionism ............ 333

Conclusion ................................................................................ 351

viii contents

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PART SIX

ANTI-SEMITISM: A QUESTION IN SCHOOLS?

Introduction .............................................................................. 35924. The Clamour of the Media and the Silence of the

Teachers ......................................................................... 36125. Dealing with the Shoah in Schools ............................... 37626. Ethnic Diversity in Schools ........................................... 39027. Abuse and Attacks ......................................................... 39828. Anti-Semitism in Schools and Globalisation ................ 410

General Conclusion .................................................................. 418

Index ........................................................................................... 427

contents ix

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ABBREVIATIONS

AA Alsace d’abord Alsace FirstAACF Association des Assyro-Chaldéens de France The Association of ChaldoAssyrians of FranceAGEN Association générale des étudiants de Nanterre The General Association of Students of NanterreAGET Association générale des Etudiants de Toulouse The General Association of Students of ToulouseAIPAC American Israel Public Affairs CommitteeAPHG Association des professeurs d’histoire-géographie Association of lecturers in history and geographyAUJF Appel uni� é des Juifs de France United Jewish Appeal, FranceBAC Brigade anticriminalité Anti-crime squadCADIS Centre d’analyse et d’intervention sociologiques Centre for Sociological Analysis and InterventionCAPJPO Coordination des appels pour une paix juste au Proche-

Orient Joint Appeal for Peace and Justice in the Middle EastCFCM Conseil français du culte musulman The French Council of Muslim FaithCGT Confédération générale du travail General Confederation of LabourCICUP Comité interuniversitaire pour la coopération avec les

universités palestiniennes Inter-university Committee for cooperation with the Pales-

tinian universitiesCNCDH Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme National Human Rights Consultative CommissionCNIL Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés French Data Protection AuthorityCNT Confédération nationale du travail National Labour Union

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CRCM Conseil régional du culte musulman Regional Council of the Muslim FaithCRIF Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France Representative Council of Jewish InstitutionsCROUS Centre régional des œuvres universitaires et scolaires Regional Centre for Welfare in Universities and SchoolsCSJUP Comité de solidarité Jussieu avec les universités palesti-

niennes Jussieu Palestinian Universities Solidarity CommitteeEMF Étudiants musulmans de France Muslim students of FranceFANE Fédération d’action nationale et européenne Federation for National and European ActionFN Front national National FrontFNJ Organisation des jeunesses du Front national National Front Youth OrganisationFNDIRP Fédération nationale des déportés et internés résistants et

patriotes National Federation of resistants and patriots deported

and internedFPLP Front populaire de libération de la Palestine Popular Front for the Liberation of PalestineFSE Forum social européen European Social ForumFSJU Fonds social juif uni� é United Jewish Social FundGRECE Groupement de recherche et études pour la civilisation

européenne Research and study grouping for European civilisationIRIS Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques Institute of International and Strategic StudiesLCR Ligue communiste révolutionnaire Revolutionary Communist LeagueLDH Ligue des droits de l’homme Human Rights LeagueLICA Ligue internationale contre l’antisémitisme International League against Anti-Semitism

xii abbreviations

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LICRA Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’anti-sémitisme

International Organisation against Racism and Anti-Semitism

LO Lutte ouvrière Workers’ struggleMIB Mouvement de l’immigration et des banlieues Movement for Immigration and SuburbsMNR Mouvement national républicain National Republican MovementMRAP Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre

les peuples Anti-Racism MovementPC Parti communiste Communist PartyPMF Parti des musulmans de France Party of Muslims of FrancePS Parti socialiste Socialist PartyPT Parti des travailleurs Workers’ PartyRPR Rassemblement pour la République Rally for the RepublicSGEN-CFDT Syndicat général de l’Éducation nationale-Confédéra-

tion française démocratique du travail General National Education Union—French Demo-

cratic Labour UnionSNCS-FSU Syndicat national des chercheurs scienti� ques—Fédé-

ration syndicale unitaire National Union of Scienti� c Researchers—Unitary

trade union federationSNESSup-FSU Syndicat national de l’enseignement supérieur—

Fédération syndicale unitaire National Union of Higher Education—Unitary trade

union federationUEJF Union des étudiants juifs de France Union of Jewish Students of FranceUGET Union générale des étudiants tunisiens General Union of Tunisian students

abbreviations xiii

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UMP Union pour un mouvement populaire Union for a Popular MovementUNEF Union nationale des étudiants de France French National Student UnionUNI Union nationale interuniversitaire Inter-university national unionUOIF Union des organisations islamiques de France Union of Islamic Organisations of FranceVB Vlaams Blok

xiv abbreviations

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TRANSLATORS’ NOTE

Israelite

In Chapter 2 (French page 34) the author explains that this word is now out of use:

we no longer use the old vocabulary which referred to them (the Jews) as ‘Israelites’, often as a precaution

Where appropriate, a footnote indicates when the term has been used by informants.

Feuj

In Chapter 2, (French page 34) the author explains the use of this word:

‘Feuj ’—a slang term used in the suburbs of Paris—which, in some cases, is only an objective expression for a relation experienced in ethnic terms but which, in others, enables the speaker to insult, humiliate and abuse a person very directly. The Jew or the Feuj is then the personi� cation of evil, the word, as Brenner notes, “amounts to an insult and is self-suf� cient”1—

Fete BBR (Chapter 3)

BBR refers to the colours of the French � ag, ‘bleu, blanc, rouge’; the ‘fête BBR’ is an annual political festival traditionally held by the Front

national. After an interruption of four years, this festival was held again over 2 days in Le Bourget in October 2005 and over three days in November 2006 (cf. Le Monde, 11 October 2005 and 12/13, 14 & 15 November 2006)

1 Emmanuel Brenner (editor), Les Territoires perdus de la République. Antisémitisme, racisme et sexisme en milieu scolaire, Paris, Mille et Une Nuits, 2002, p. 28.

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‘BBR’ is also used as a way of describing a French person who is white without being openly racist—see Chapter 9 for an example of this usage.

Pied Noir (Introduction, French p. 14 and Chapter 17)

Pied-noir (with the plural: pieds-noirs) is a term for the former popula-tion of European descent of North Africa, especially Algeria.

Harki

Harki (from the Arabic Haraka: ‘movement’) was the generic term for Muslim Algerians serving as auxiliaries with the French Army during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962. Since Algerian independence ‘Harki’ has been used as a derogatory expression within Algeria, equating to ‘collaborator’.

Banlieue

Banlieue means suburbs; we have preferred to keep this term in French to avoid the positive connotation associated with ‘suburbs’ in the Anglo-Saxon literature. In everyday speech ‘banlieue’ is associated with the poorer suburbs characterised by the ‘cités’ or low-cost housing projects, poverty, deprivation and unemployment, but there are rich, middle-class ‘banlieues’—for example, Neuilly.

Slang

Commonly used in this text:

Bougnoule—dark-skinned foreigner—pejorativeNique ta mere—Mother F*****Ta mere—abbreviated form of the above

xvi translators’ note

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Verlan

In the French language verlan is the inversion of syllables in a word which is found in slang and youth language. It rests on a long French tradition of permuting syllables of words to create slang words. The name verlan is itself an example: verlan = lan ver = l’envers (meaning the inverse). Some verlan words have become so commonplace that they have been included in the Petit Larousse. Examples of verlan in the text include:

Beur—ArabeRebeu—beurFeuj—juifRenoi—noir—black personBabtou—toubab—white person

translators’ note xvii

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WORKS BY MICHEL WIEVIORKA

L’Etat, le patronat et les consommateurs, PUF, 1977.Critique de la théorie du capitalisme monopoliste d’Etat (with B. Théret), Mas-

pero, 1978.Lutte étudiante (with A. Touraine, F. Dubet, Z. Hegedus), Seuil, 1978.Justice et consommation, La Documentation française, 1978.La prophétie antinucléaire (with A. Touraine, Z. Hegedus, F. Dubet), Seuil,

1980.Le pays contre l’Etat (with A. Touraine, F. Dubet, Z. Hegedus), Seuil,

1981.Solidarité (with Alain Touraine, François Dubet, Jan Strzelecki), Paris,

Fayard, 1982 (English translation, Solidarity: The Analysis of a Social

Movement: Poland 1980–81, Cambridge University Press, 1984).Le mouvement ouvrier (with A. Touraine, F. Dubet), Fayard, 1984 (English

translation, The Working-Class Movement, Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Les Juifs, la Pologne et Solidarnosc, Denoël, 1984.Terrorisme à la Une. Médias, démocratie et terrorisme (with D. Wolton), Gal-

limard, coll. « Au vif du sujet », 1987.Sociétés et terrorisme, Fayard, 1988 (English translation, The Making of Ter-

rorism, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, new ed. 2003).Le modèle EDF. Essai de sociologie des organisations (with S. Trinh), La

Découverte, 1989.L’espace du racisme, Seuil, 1991 (English translation, The Arena of Racism,

Sage, 1995).La France raciste (with P. Bataille, D. Jacquin, D. Martuccelli, A. Peralva,

P. Zawadzki), Seuil, 1992.Racisme et modernité (edited by M. Wieviorka), La Découverte, 1993.La démocratie à l’épreuve. Nationalisme, populisme, ethnicité, La Découverte,

1993.Racisme et xénophobie en Europe (with P. Bataille, K. Couper, D. Martuc-

celli, A. Peralva), La Découverte, 1994.Face au terrorisme, Liana Levi, 1995.Penser le sujet. Autour d’Alain Touraine (edited by F. Dubet and M. Wieviorka),

Actes du colloque de Cerisy, Fayard, 1995.

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Les Russes d’en bas (with A. Berelowitch), Seuil, 1995.Une société fragmentée (edited by M. Wieviorka), La Découverte, 1996.Commenter la France, Ed. de l’Aube, 1997.Raison et conviction, l’engagement (edited by M. Wieviorka, with S. Moscovici,

N. Notat, P. Pachet, M. Perrot), Textuel, 1998.Le racisme, une introduction, La Découverte, 1998.Violence en France (with P. Bataille, K. Clément, O. Cousin, F. Khosro-

Khavar, S. Labat, E. Macé, P. Rebughini, N. Tietze), Seuil, 1999.La différence, Balland, 2001.La différence culturelle. Une reformulation des débats (edited by M. Wieviorka,

with J. Ohana), Balland, 2001.L’avenir de l’islam en France et en Europe (edited by M.Wieviorka), Actes

des Entretiens d’Auxerre, Balland, 2003.Un autre monde . . . Contestations, dérives et surprises dans l’antimondialisation

(edited by M. Wieviorka), Balland, 2003.La violence, Balland, 2004.L’empire américain ? (edited by), Actes des Entretiens d’Auxerre, Paris,

Balland, 2004.(edited with Jean Baubérot) De la séparation de l’Eglise et de l’Etat à l’avenir

de la laïcité, Actes des Entretiens d’Auxerre 2004, Editions de l’Aube/Essai, 2005.

(editor) La tentation antisémite. Haine des Juifs dans la France d’aujourd’hui, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2005; Hachette Littératures « Actuel », 2006, 710 p.

Michel Wieviorka, Julien Ténédos, Sociologue sous tension. Entretien avec

Michel Wieviorka (Parts One and Two), Aux lieux d’être, 2006.Em que mundo viveremos ?, São Paulo, Editora Perspectiva, 2006.Le printemps du politique (with E. Barnavi, J. Boxser Liwerant, J. Caraça,

I. Cisneros, P. Pasquino, E. Sanbar, A. Savas Akat, S. Tabboni, A. Touraine, S. Zermeño, G. Zincone), Robert Laffont, coll. « Le monde comme il va », 2007.

(Editor.) Les sciences sociales en mutation (with the collaboration of A. Debarle and J. Ohana), Editions Sciences Humaines, 2007.

xx works by michel wieviorka

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Will the 21st century see the return of anti-Semitism to France? In recent years, anxiety has been mounting amongst Jews in France, but also, somewhat late in the day, amongst those of a democratic and humanist turn of mind which is by far the most widespread frame of mind in this country, in the media and within political circles. Abroad, in the United States and in Israel, fears repeatedly take the form of accusations describing France as a profoundly anti-Semitic country in which the Jews are said to be in great danger.

These fears are based on two analytically distinct elements, even if these do interconnect at a political level: one is the general climate of opinion and the other is actions of a relatively serious nature.

There is an increase in areas acting, or apparently acting, as breeding grounds for the verbal abuse, or limited forms of violence which are the expression of present-day anti-Semitism: these are frequently said to be working-class suburbs, schools, some universities, sometimes even the press and television and circles which have not been associated with anti-Semitism to date. The nationalist extreme right or fundamentalist Catholicism, for example, are not the focus of the fears which are most frequently expressed—which obviously does not mean to say that hatred of the Jews has disappeared from these traditional spheres. This overall climate of anti-Semitism includes remarks, graf� ti, and threats and, above all, it indicates an end to the taboo on anti-Semitic speech. We are obviously no longer in the post-war environment when Jean-Paul Sartre could write that anti-Semitism, which was merely an opinion until the discovery of Nazi barbarism, should henceforth be considered a criminal offence. Nor are we in that of the 1970s, 1980s or even 1990s when recognition of the Shoah, of which till then there was little aware-ness at international level, constituted a symbolic, almost sacred form of protection in the face of any threat of a drift into anti-Semitism. This included acts which, if it were not for the symbolic signi� cance associated with any threat to the Jews, would be considered minor, because they fall within the sphere of incivilities or physical attacks of no importance, skirmishes which are quickly stopped, blows which are not serious, spitting, etc.

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xxii general introduction

On the other hand, the sense of danger and of threat is sustained by actual actions which are far more serious, including outright attacks on people, their property or on Jewish institutions: attempted arson of syna-gogues, attacks targeting Jewish schools or desecrations of cemeteries, for example. These actions, which are systematically recorded, appear in the of� cial statistics and data or in the data compiled by Jewish com-munity organisations, like the CRIF (Conseil représentatif des institutions juives

de France), possibly in close liaison with the authorities. On occasions, anti-Semitism may not be irrefutably established or proved. It may also be exaggerated even before the facts, which are over-interpreted, are recorded. Or else, it may be a myth or a fantasy which, in return, may lead to the accusation that the assertion of the existence of a rise in anti-Semitism today is an exaggeration. This was revealed in a recent incident. In July 2004, a young woman, Marie L., stated that she had been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack in an RER train. This was headline news in the media, before it was discovered to be a hoax. This led the media to re� ect on their own way of working as well as on the extent of anti-Semitism. Exaggeration and pure fabrication should obviously not invalidate the undeniable reality of many of the acts of which the anti-Semitic intention is clearly established.

These two levels—that of the climate of opinion and that of serious actions—should in no way be confused. An observer endeavouring to understand the problem as a whole solely in the light of what is known about anti-Semitic attacks or aggressions would not be able to give an account of the general climate. He would be faced with the practices of rootless young people, left to their own devices, with no particular ideology, who are not so much imbued with a constructed form of hatred as neglected or relegated. He would be faced too with attitudes predominated by personal differences and the settling of scores, and not necessarily by a deep-seated hatred of Jews. The move to action is not the direct result of the general climate of opinion even if this climate does encourage, permit or facilitate it. The two levels taken together in no way portray a coherent, integrated movement likely to lead to a consistent, political ideology and mobilisation: the movement is fragmented and dislocated.

The present climate of opinion and the serious actions do confront us with a nagging question: are we capable of evaluating present-day anti-Semitism correctly? There is always a risk of over or underesti-mation. We waver between the temptation to play down or, on the contrary, to exaggerate the misguided actions of our society. What is

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general introduction xxiii

valid for this question in its totality is also valid for each of the ele-ments which shape it from one day to the next. Each event and each piece of information is a challenge to whoever intends to avoid both thinking and saying too much or not enough about it. Many remarks are open to contradictory interpretations, beginning with those relat-ing to Israel. Many judgements are too summary or too rapid: who is anti-Semitic and who is not? It is not always easy to draw a clear line between the two. Expressing oneself on this subject involves running the risk at each instant and at each word, of lapsing into the ideology of pre-determined interpretations.

The authors of this book are aware of this dif� culty. They took it into consideration from the very beginning of their research which lasted over two years. This book may appear too subtle in the eyes of readers in a hurry to avail themselves of cut-and-dried, de� nitive or decisive judgements. But the reality demanded a slow approach. In order to gain a clear understanding of the situation we needed to take the time to carry out an in-depth survey.

This tendency to over and underestimate simultaneously is only one feature of a tension speci� c to the modern world in general, and which is especially relevant to a theme as sensitive as anti-Semitism: a tendency which simultaneously unites and opposes objectivity and subjectivity. For, where hatred of Jews is concerned, there is always likely to be a considerable distance between what is said and done on the one hand, and what is perceived on the other, especially when the perception is � ltered by the media and the images which it puts forward. The lack of links between serious acts of anti-Semitism and the climate of opinion relatively speaking can only reinforce the risk of creating a distance between objectivity—provided that this can be established with the support of reliable statistical data for example—and subjectivity, which varies between individuals and groups, but also over time, from one moment to another. Is a ten year old pupil who draws a swastika on his exercise book making a minor gesture or is he set-ting in motion a vast set of meanings which could attach an immense symbolic signi� cance to his drawing? And isn’t it different if it is a 15 year old schoolboy?

Revival? Return? Emergence of a hitherto unknown phenomenon which would need to be described in other terms? Dramatisation on the part of the Jews in France for whom, moreover, this would not spell the � rst upsurge in anxiety since World War II? This book was born of a desire to know and understand what lies behind the feeling

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xxiv general introduction

that many people have that there has been a rise in anti-Semitism in France. Here general considerations, anchored in concerns which have already been the subject of various research studies on racism, anti-Semitism or Jewish identity are combined with an integrated set of � eldwork studies and delve into places where anti-Semitism is either more likely to manifest itself than elsewhere or else to assume spectacular or clear-cut forms.

This book therefore endeavours in the � rst instance to examine tangible data, whether it be assaults and attacks, problems speci� c to schools, tendencies and ‘incidents’ which rouse the public sphere and politico-intellectual life, while not neglecting the extreme right which is too often played down in current debate. It demonstrates how the Shoah, which for a long time was not an integral part of western politi-cal consciousness, has become established, providing, in the face of the threat of anti-Semitism, a protection which is weakened by competition between the victims, endeavours to banalise it, negationism or even accusations concerning the ‘Shoah business’. France is not the only country to be called into question. In many respects these questions are ‘global’ and inseparable—but to what extent?—from the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict, the rise of Islamism and the broadcasting of hate speech targeting Jews from some Arab countries, where the virulence of the press is sometimes impressive.1

We have therefore decided to tackle the most controversial questions head-on.

Could it be that contemporary anti-Semitism is linked to the exis-tence of a large Muslim population, or a population of North African immigrant descent? We carried out a survey in a particularly dif� cult working-class area, in Roubaix, a town profoundly affected by the major crisis in industry in the 1980s and 1990s. We also met Muslims in prison.

Could it be that anti-Semitism is promoted by the behaviour of the Jews in France, and their tendency to act as a visible collective entity? We analysed the general evolution of this community and we also car-ried out a long and painstaking � eldwork study in Sarcelles, home to a sizeable Jewish population.

1 Translator’s note: In the French version of this book, a chapter is devoted to this press.

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general introduction xxv

Could anti-Semitism be the product of colonial history, with the ‘pieds-noirs’ as the heirs thereto? We went to meet them in Marseilles, a town where ‘nostAlgeria’ remains intense.

As is suggested by the term ‘Islamo-progressivism’, which Alain Finkielkraut in particular is so fond of, anti-Semitism might owe a great deal to the merging of Islamism and the ‘progressive’ ideologies by which is meant leftist or neo-leftist, third-worldist type ideologies. In this case, some universities are said to be favourable areas where, in practice, these two currents are likely to converge and unite. To be quite clear about this, we went to several universities in the Parisian region.

Are there good reasons in the present climate of opinion, for anti-Semitism in its most traditional forms or meanings to prosper or to acquire a new lease of life? It was with this in mind that we went to Alsace, a region where the desecration of Jewish cemeteries has long since been a speci� city and where the existence of a robust, radical right leads one to believe that the traditional hatred of Jews might � nd a political outlet there.

If we are to believe the media, anti-Semitism is now very much alive in schools. We have here an urgent invitation to study schools and their capacity to confront new, or renewed challenges which could make them places which not only host but also have a hand in co-producing anti-Semitism.

This research is the � rst in-depth attempt to evaluate the extent of anti-Semitism in present-day France with the tools and the rigour of the social sciences. The CADIS (Centre d’analyse et d’intervention sociologiques) team which I set up and led, included both seasoned researchers and other less experienced young PhDs or doctoral students. The � eldwork mobilised us, usually in pairs, and sometimes more; team meetings, on average twice a month, served to incorporate our observations and analyses into a comprehensive argument which my weekly seminar at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales was an opportunity to con-solidate and systematise.

The � eldwork and the tasks were distributed as follows in my team: Philippe Bataille and Sébastien Delsalle in Roubaix ; Clarisse Buono , Alexandra Poli and Nikola Tietze dealt with the schools as well as Marseilles and, with Simonetta Tabboni , Sarcelles; Damien Guillaume and Emmanuel Kreis worked on the extreme right and Alsace; Svetlana Tabatchnikova , with Simonetta Tabboni and Jocelyne Ohana , studied the university; Farhad Khosrokhavar looked at Muslims in prison.

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xxvi general introduction

The chapters which correspond to these � eldwork studies were writ-ten by them, in close contact and in cooperation with myself. Fiam-metta Venner participated actively and always very constructively in the general team discussions; Jocelyne Ohana collated and updated a large amount of basic documentation. Moussa Khedimellah and Syl-vain Kerbourc’h helped to get the research in Roubaix off the ground. Christine Blanchard-Latreyte helped me to improve the form of this manuscript. Mireille Gaultier took on the arduous task of the manage-ment of this research programme.

This research would not have been possible without the involvement of several institutions. For their help and trust I would like to convey my heartfelt thanks to the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah, its President, Simone Veil , and the board, beginning with Henri Hajdenberg , as well as two successive directors, Pierre Saragoussi and Anne-Marie Revcolevs-chi ; the Union sociale pour l’habitat and its delegate general, Paul-Louis Marty ; the Ministère de la Recherche, and the Minister, Claudie Haigneré ; the Institut des hautes études de sécurité intérieure, which was replaced by the Institut national des hautes études de sécurité, and their directors, Jean-Marc Berlioz and Régis Guyot . The founder and director of the Institut de

recherche en sciences sociales in Hamburg, Jan Philipp Reemtsma , who was awarded the Heinz-Galinski prize in 2003 by the Jewish community in Berlin, insisted on donating all of the prize money to this research. I admit that my intellectual and professional relations with his institute are long-standing and very close.

We mobilised a great number of people and built up numerous contacts and interviews for this research. It is impossible to list them all here and to thank them, all the more so as, for many, anonymity must be preserved.2 But all the materials which were gathered and produced by this research, transcriptions and recordings on cassette,

2 We have endeavoured, particularly in the chapters drawing directly on � eldwork, to respect the anonymity of our numerous interlocutors, including sometimes by confusing the issue: the initials and the � rst names are not necessarily the real ones and the institutions (for example the pre and post-16 educational establishments) are not generally named. Nevertheless, in some cases, we thought it essential to identify a person, a place, or an institution. We must make it clear here that the fact that we sometimes use � rst names and sometimes M. or Mme. is a re� ection of the relationship which developed on the ground between the interlocutor and the researchers. One sole initial A , B ., etc., indicates that a direct conversation has taken place in a spirit of trust but without using � rst names.

WIEVIORKA_f1_i-xxvii.indd xxvi 7/30/2007 9:27:55 PM

general introduction xxvii

are at the disposal of researchers who wish to have access to them. My sister, Annette, read a � rst version of this book with great patience and suggested very useful corrections and adjustments which I used to good advantage. Finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all the members of the CADIS which, since it was founded by Alain Touraine, has provided a lively and stimulating intellectual environment. More particularly, I would like to thank Jacqueline Longérinas, without whom this research would not have been possible.

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PART ONE

BACKGROUND

WIEVIORKA_f2_1-4.indd 1 7/30/2007 2:46:54 PM


INTRODUCTION

At the end of World War II, anti-Semitism seemed doomed to disappear from the face of the earth. Had it not been totally discredited once and for all by Nazism which had made of the slightest anti-Jewish remark a crime liable to lead to the worst abominations?

In France, as in Europe, the phenomenon has not entirely disap-peared; for example, it was only in the mid 1960s that the Catholic Church published the aggiornamento in the Vatican II Concilium, thus ending what Jules Isaac has referred to as the “teaching of contempt”. But for some forty years, anti-Semitism was restricted, con� ned to the private sphere, to the intimacy of feelings which can no longer � nd expression in the public sphere, except amongst very small groups which are rapidly sanctioned by the law as soon as they achieve visibility.

Fears that anti-Semitism might be making a comeback were � rst aroused by the convergence of the extreme right, by now a political force, with negationism, which stated that the Nazi gas chambers had never existed, or that they were not intended to destroy the Jews, thus considerably playing down the extent of the genocide. The fear of this type of anti-Semitism was so great that when a terrorist attack was made on the synagogue in the Rue Copernic, in October 1980, the media reported that the vast majority of both the Jewish and non-Jewish population thought the extreme right was responsible. This in� uenced those in charge of the inquiry, who, as a result, lost several months before it was established that the attack came, not from a small extremist French group such as the FANE (Fédération d’action natio-nale et européenne), but from the Abu Nidal group which claimed to be supporting the Palestinian cause, and was based at the time in the Middle East.1

At the beginning of the 21st century, fears have increased consid-erably. Hatred of Jews � nds new sources in the drifting of a certain type of leftism and in the identi� cation of a signi� cant proportion

1 At the time, Annie Kriegel was the only person amongst the observers, intellectuals, journalists and politicians to make the correct diagnosis immediately. Cf. her Ré� exions sur les questions juives, Paris, Hachette, 1984.


of the immigrant population—in particular that of North African descent—with the Palestinian cause on the one hand and with radical Islamism on the other.

The tangible manifestations of this renewal do not make of it a phenomenon integrated into a uni� ed discourse or ideology. The new anti-Semitism—by whatever name it is known, and we shall come back to this point—is a phenomenon which springs up in several places and which, in the � rst instance, must be evaluated by examining each of its various manifestations.

4 part one: introduction


CHAPTER ONE

WHAT DO THE STATISTICS TELL US?1

Let’s start with the acts of anti-Semitic violence which are serious enough to be listed in the of� cial statistics (Ministry for Justice, Ministry for Home Affairs). These data refer to attacks against institutions and their property (synagogues, community centres, Jewish schools, cem-eteries, etc.) and against individuals (attacks, death threats, throwing of stones, etc.), or their property (notably vandalism).

What Data Do We Have?

The � gures here have to be examined with caution. Victims may be frightened of making a complaint, or ashamed of the attack to which they have been subjected; institutions do not necessarily record all the acts which should be listed; � nally, from one year to the next, the variations tell us more about the activities of the police or legal action, which may itself be subject to political demands of various weight than about the evolution of the phenomenon. Thus, as the inquiry carried out by Johan Weisz, published online by Proche-Orient.info (23 April 2003) demonstrates, with evidence from witnesses, it often happens that victims of anti-Semitic attacks are not really listened to by the police, or by the magistrates. The police refuse to make a formal record of their complaint, which becomes a mere entry in the daily log-book; or else, their complaint is � led and the victim abandoned. Lastly, the legal system and the police do not always show a great deal of enthusiasm for in� icting punishment or conducting an inquiry.

The quali� cation of violence as ‘anti-Semitic’ may be challenged: it is not because the victim of an offence or a crime is Jewish that the perpetrator has necessarily acted on grounds of anti-Semitism and it may be nothing more nor less than a common law offence, a question of

1 For this chapter, I am considerably indebted to Matthieu Bourrette, at the time the magistrate in charge of the Bureau des politiques pénales générales et de la Protection des libertés individueles at the Ministry for Justice for his help.


6 chapter one

personal vengeance, a political affair, an accident, etc. Similarly, an act of violence may appear to be anti-Semitic, accompanied, for example, by anti-Jewish remarks, even though the victim is not Jewish.

The detection rates for this type of violence are low, less than 20% and, moreover, vary depending on the type of the act: the police and the legal system have more success in solving cases of attacks on indi-viduals than those involving property or institutions. Crimes are solved primarily when the perpetrators are caught red-handed and rarely as the result of an inquiry.

The � gures concerning anti-Semitic violence vary depending on whether the source is the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Justice, Jewish organisations or anti-racist associations. What is meant by anti-Semitic violence is not clearly de� ned but in 2002 a degree of standardisation was introduced. The data at our disposal since this date are the outcome of considerable politico-institutional changes. At the end of 2001 the publication of a dossier ‘the grim � gures of anti-Semitism’ in the weekly publication L’Express, led to a somewhat acrimonious polemic, with the Representative Council for Jewish Insti-tutions in France (the CRIF) announcing much higher � gures than the of� cial ones.2 In April 2002, after a peak in anti-Semitic acts in the previous month, and in the context of a forthcoming presidential election, the government decided on a more active penal policy. But, at the time, the government did not have the IT tools to record the data appropriately and, until the Lellouche Law (3 February 2003), it was impossible to say whether a penal offence was anti-Semitic or not. The Lellouche law did not solve the issue entirely:3 it states that it is the circumstances which determine whether or not an act can be quali� ed as anti-Semitic and which, if it is, make it more serious in the eyes of the law.4 However, it does underline the speci� cally anti-Semitic nature of some of the affairs judged.

2 Since the beginning of the 1980s, in a report on the violent acts of which the Jew-ish communities were victims between September 2000 and September 2001 Shmuel Trigano reminds us that “the services of the Jewish community (Consistoire, Fonds social juif uni� é, CRIF) “record incidents every single day” and “check in situ that the facts reported were correct”, Observatoire du monde juif, Bulletin no 1, November 2001.

3 According to the MP after whom the law was named, Pierre Lellouche, it was “tragically not applied”—the title of his article in Le Monde, 15 June 2004.

4 For example, violence which led to death although this was not the intention was subject to twenty years’ imprisonment instead of � fteen if the motive was found to be anti-Semitism (but also racism or xenophobia).


what do the statistics tell us? 7

Another series of dif� culties encountered by the agencies of the State in using computer technology to monitor the spread of anti-Semitic acts systematically stemmed from the risks which this practice might represent in the opinion of the CNIL (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés) which guarantees the liberty of the individual and which is particularly vigilant in the event that � les are put together on Jewish persons.

Since November 2003, the public prosecutor has systematically been sending the information to the central administration of the Ministry of Justice which can follow the progress of dossiers, case by case: � ling of a complaint, complaint dismissed without action, decision of the public prosecutor’s of� ce to take the case to court, judgement. Consistency with the � gures supplied by the Ministry of the Interior is ensured and the CRIF has stopped speaking of underestimation. Moreover, the two ministries and the organisations of the Jewish community consult and brief each other regularly. The vigilance of the authorities at the moment, in particular in requesting rapid judicial responses to anti-Semitic acts means that the Jews as present or potential victims have better protection than those complaining of other forms of racism. Moreover, Jewish organisations tend to exert constant pressure for the acts which they consider to be anti-Semitic to be systematically recog-nised and dealt with as such by the police and the legal system. This is sometimes excessive because, as we have said, not all actions against Jews are necessarily of an anti-Semitic nature. This combination of public action and community mobilisation of Jews in France reinforces an image which can in itself nurture anti-Semitism: even as victims, do they not get better treatment than any other group?

The Perpetrators

Over and above the legitimate criticisms that this type of document usually provokes, the Annual Report of the Commission nationale consulta-

tive des droits de l’homme did provide, in 2003, suf� ciently conclusive ele-ments to enable us to learn some lessons.5 Whereas between 1995 and

5 Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme, 2003 La Lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie. Rapport d’activité. Paris, La Documentation française, 2004. Cf. also the report of Jean-Christophe Ru� n, “Chantier sur la lutte contre le racisme et


8 chapter one

1999 the number of acts of anti-Semitic violence of� cially registered remained below one hundred, the number rose to 743 in 2000, fell to 216 in 2001, rose again to 932 in 2002 and once again fell to 588 in 2003. Furthermore, with the exception of the year 2001, the number of injured (which was nil or in� nitesimal until 1998), rose to 11 in 2000, then to 18 in 2002 and 21 in 2003.

Moreover, between 1 January and 6 June 2004, the Ministry for Justice had to deal with over 180 offences (104 against property, 46 against individuals and 30 infractions by the press) which gave rise to 29 lawsuits. Approximately 16% of these offences were solved. Of the 61 perpetrators identi� ed, 20 were adults and 41 were minors. Twenty-one of the forty-seven persons prosecuted were minors (in some cases several people were involved). The pro� le of the perpetrators, once identi� ed, is not very different from that of those involved in classi-cal urban crime, nor is the judicial treatment which awaits them. For adults, the court hearing takes place immediately and the sentence is community service (TIG-Travail d’Intérêt general), rather than prison, with a suspended sentence rather than gaol.

Numerous observers have suggested a link between the political situ-ation in the Middle East and the rise in acts of anti-Semitic violence in France. It is true that the outbreak of the second intifada (in September 2000) provoked a rise in the � gures,6 and, on several occasions, in 2002 and 2003, peaks of anti-Semitism in France coincided with important events linked to the Israeli-Palestine con� ict. But since then it would appear that the phenomenon of anti-Semitic violence, after having been sustained by international events, has become self-suf� cient so to speak, remaining at a high level and no longer being dependent on distant events: in 2003 and 2004, anti-Semitism was ever present and had its own agenda which, from then on, had little to do with events abroad. For all that, this does not necessarily mean that it does not have anything to do with international problems and, in particular, those in the Middle East.

l’antisémitisme”, Ministère de l’Intérieur, de la Sécurité intérieure et des Libertés locales, which includes a series of analyses and suggestions for action, October 2004.

6 The Union des étudiants juifs de France and SOS Racisme jointly published a book, Les Antifeujs, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 2002, with an eloquent subtitle which dates the present wave of anti-Semitic violence back to the beginning of the second intifada: Le Livre blanc des violences antisémites en France depuis septembre 2000.



On the whole,7 acts of anti-Semitic violence are the outcome of restricted interaction, or are the work of individuals or even, more frequently, of small spontaneous groups who have prepared them in haste—which complicates the task of investigators who are better at identifying, or even, in� ltrating structures or organised networks. Most actions, at least of those recorded, target Jewish institutions: attempted arson, vandalism, stone throwing and, more frequently, anti-Semitic graf� ti. The perpetrators are rarely caught.

When they are caught, as we noted above, this tends to be for attacks on individuals. The offenders are often young with a low level of educa-tion—in court, magistrates and observers are struck by their dif� culty in expressing themselves. The majority of their offences are very far from any sort of intellectualisation and the perpetrators themselves are frequently described as being unbalanced, irresponsible and having psychological dif� culties. While many of those who are identi� ed are of North African immigrant origin, they are rarely in the tutelage of any community, mosque or imam. They are frequently already known to the police and have already been sentenced for petty crime. At the time of the offences, they are often under the in� uence of alcohol, have nothing to do and are angry and are not under the in� uence of any sort of radical ideology. Moreover, in many cases, anti-Semitism surfaces during a quarrel—a quarrel with the neighbours, or with a business partner, or when a relationship with representatives in the public sphere or of any form of authority deteriorates.

Alsace is a special case with the violence having its origin, here more than elsewhere, in the extreme right, of the neo-Nazi or skinhead vari-ety, in particular taking the form of the desecration of tombs in Jewish cemeteries and threats against individuals.

Finally, in 2004, attacks targeted individuals, including their homes, their cars or their houses which had graf� ti scrawled on them, and were to round out the repertory of violence which, until then, had been restricted to institutions, and therefore to the Jewish community as such. From then on, it was to be individuals who were threatened or attacked as Jews.

Below are some illustrations of these different scenarios.

7 Our remarks here are based on several sources, legal and others, including the sum-maries “of ongoing and closed legal proceedings concerning court actions against the perpetrators of anti-Semitic acts and threats” posted regularly on the CRIF website.


10 chapter one

In Colmar, in April 2002, six youths of North African descent, made an explosive device using a � re extinguisher and used it in an attempt to destroy the oratory of the Jewish cemetery in Cronenbourg. Five of them were known to the police, three for previous acts of anti-Semitism and two for drug offences.

In Montpellier, in June 2002, an 18 year old, Abdeslam,8 along with two minors, Saïd (17 years old and already sentenced � ve times for theft) and Mustapha (16 years old and already prosecuted twice for robbery with violence), threw stones and a bottle of beer onto the roof of a synagogue from the window of a neighbouring apartment. When the police arrived, they noted that all three had already been drinking beer and had smoked cannabis. Abdeslam, who was ‘under the in� uence of alcohol’, fought with the police.

Once again in Montpellier, two months earlier, Morad (an agricul-tural worker born in 1977), Jamali (born in 1978, unemployed) and Hakim (born in 1982, unemployed), ‘after an evening of drinking and idleness’ as stated in the judgement, decided ‘to do a synagogue’. They found one by asking a passer-by the way and threw Molotov cocktails through the window. They were arrested by a police patrol as they cruised slowly past the same synagogue a few minutes later in a BMW to witness the result of their actions. The judgement states: “No link has been established between the three who were sentenced and any Islamic fundamentalist movements.”

In Villeurbanne, in 2003, Raabah insulted his neighbour, “[. . .] � lthy Jew, � lthy youd [. . .] we’ll get you, you’ll end up behind bars, Hitler didn’t � nish the job, and we’re going to � nish you off”, and threw stones at him. The sentence (six months’ imprisonment) re� ected that the family of the victim had been terrorised by Raabah for a long time (insults, swastikas drawn on the door, refuse tipped out in front of it).

In Dijon, Mehdi (born in 1984), who was sentenced on 5 March 2004, had insulted a railway (SNCF) employee the day before, calling him a ‘� lthy Jew’, and attacked two others. He had already been sentenced for committing acts of violence against public sector workers.

In Grasse in 2003, when arrested by the police who took him to the station, Chatir used anti-Semitic language which increased his sentence

8 We have decided not to quote any family names and to mention only � rst names.



(for carrying an offensive weapon), attacking the most senior of the examining magistrates in Antibes with the words:

[. . .] F*** your race—fat swine of a Jew—fat Jewish piece of shit—we’re going to get, all you French and Jews—I only obey the law of Allah. . . . He put my wife in prison; I’m going to get him.

Thus, as a crime punishable by law, anti-Semitic violence is an undeni-able phenomenon today, though not, as yet, fatal. Its rise dates from the second intifada, but it was already at work long before. The major-ity of those mobilised are young people of immigrant origin, people without roots who do not depend—or in any event not directly—on organised networks or communities for ideology or structure. It is not therefore an active expression of radical Islam and there are cases, especially in Alsace, where it seems rather to come from the extreme right. The violence recorded by the police and the legal system is a move to action. It erupts and breeds in a context in which other forms of anti-Semitism are also developing, and, in this respect, it is effectively an element which is part and parcel of one and the same scene—a scene which is apparently fragmented and disunited.

The perpetrators of serious acts of violence (and let us remember that these cases are rarely solved) are involved in a move to action which is not exactly of the same order as the breaking down of taboos on the Jewish question in the remarks made by young people. The often exag-gerated ‘affairs’, scandals, accusations or suspicions with respect to the Jews which plague the public sphere are of a different nature: they bear witness to the inability of French society to construct the discussions and policies which the ethnicisation of community life, the crisis in the institutions of the Republic or social exclusion demand. Moreover, the fact that ‘North Africans’ (or any other term referring to the populations of immigrant origin from the Arab-Muslim world) have now joined the ranks of those involved in anti-Semitism does not mean an end to the existence of the traditional culprits, hankering for times past, or those promoting a ‘new right’: skinheads, neo-Nazis, extreme right ideolo-gists, not to mention the Front national. Serious violence is one of many elements in the fragmented arena of anti-Semitism in our time, which allows a considerable number of amalgams and many unfounded accusa-tions to be made. For, as long as a case remains unsolved by the courts all sorts of hypotheses can be envisaged; any group, origin, religion, or ideology can be accused or suspected without any proof.


12 chapter one

What the Opinion Polls Say

In this confused situation, the statistics of acts of violence—be they of� cial or from Jewish or anti-racist organisations, are not the only statistical evidence of the spread of the disease—and, as we saw, they are not entirely reliable. Opinion polls can provide complementary information. Thus, making a comparative analysis of data from vari-ous opinion polls carried out between 1988 and 2000, Nonna Mayer and Guy Michelat state, “There is not more anti-Semitism in French society, but there are fewer people who are ashamed of being anti-Semitic. More people now dare to say aloud what they think.” They say that it is:

in working-class and poorly educated environments, amongst those elderly people who are most right-wing, authoritarian and concerned for their future that the rejection of Jewish people is at its most pronounced

and maintain that, “it beats all the records in two categories, the Gaullist right on the one hand and the practising Catholics on the other”.9

The most recent opinion poll which Mayer and Michelat draw on was in 2000 and it is possible that more recent data still would lead to a slight difference in the � ndings which, ultimately, tend to suggest a rise or a hardening of traditional anti-Semitism which is anti-Jewish or nationalist in origin, rather than an actual renewal. It is also possible that this type of opinion poll either leaves to one side, or underestimates in its samples, the sectors harbouring the ‘new Judeophobia’ as noted by Pierre-André Taguieff on Islam and populations of North African descent.10 The fact remains that as an opinion or a prejudice, “the ‘new’ anti-Semitism is uncannily like the old”, Nonna Mayer declares in answer precisely to Pierre-André Taguieff ’s arguments. But there is one important point which cannot be ignored which emerges from an analysis of the opinion polls: yes, anti-Semitism, as an opinion or

9 Guy Michelat and Nonna Mayer, “Le racisme en France à l’aune des sondages”, Historiens et géographes, n° 385, January 2004.

10 Nonna Mayer, “La France n’est pas antisémite”, Le Monde, 4 April 2004. Pierre-André Taguieff complains that the opinion polls on which Nonna Mayer bases her information only enable “the evaluation of the persistence of traditional anti-Semitism” and do not provide “speci� c information on the representation of Jewish people in the worlds of the “suburban youths” who are “opposed to Zionism in the name of anti-racism, and defend negationism in the name of freedom of speech”, in “Retour sur la nouvelle judéophobie”, Cités, June 2002, pp. 117–144.



as a form of prejudice which comes out when the population is asked whether or not “the Jews have too much power in France” or whether “the Jews are French like other people”, is on the rise in France, and not only—and this is the main point—amongst young people of immigrant origin. Its return, if not its renewal, is also manifest in the circles which are traditionally favourable to it. This lends weight to the hypothesis that we are dealing with a fragmented phenomenon which is developing in quite diverse sections of French society and for reasons which are not necessarily homogeneous or coherent, so much so that it is dif� cult to consider it a single entity. Violent or destructive behaviour is one thing, opinions are another. The same analysis cannot explain at one and the same time, how, for example, young people who are excluded and themselves the victims of racism can become perpetrators, and how opinion hostile to Jewish people evolves in French society. In other words, the analysis has everything to gain from not amalgamating into an a priori image of one and the same phenomenon rationales which undoubtedly communicate and foster links but which are nonetheless autonomous. The incidence of anti-Semitism in French public opinion does not shed light directly on the upsurge of acts of violence target-ing Jewish people: these are forms of anti-Semitism which are more appropriately dealt with separately.

Observing Anti-Semitism, Observing Racism

Unlike other forms of racism, in particular racism targeting populations of North African or Sub-Saharan African origin, the major character-istic of hatred of Jews is not that it is grounds for discrimination, seg-regation or social exclusion. Religion is not the most important aspect, unlike the feelings directed at Islam. There is some concern about the in� uence which Jews are said to exert in all sorts of areas; they are associated with power, with money and a capacity for manipulation; it is fraught with jealousy and resentment rather than contempt.

Sometimes those who study anti-Semitism are accused of being indifferent or blind to other forms of racism, and vice versa. In fact, the two problems are suf� ciently different for them to be dealt with separately, and even for it to be recognised that they constitute two distinct phenomena, and not one. This does not mean to say that they are in no way related. On the contrary: we will be able to see how anti-North African racism in particular nurtures a suffering which may


14 chapter one

well end in anti-Semitism. Nor does this mean that any mobilisation against the two forms of racism should be organised separately. Until the beginning of the 1990s there were even the makings for their inte-gration, in particular within SOS Racism, an organisation in which, as Nicolas Weill11 did well to remind us, the Gulf War saw a parting of ways: Jewish intellectuals tended to approve of the French involvement in this war, unlike the militants of North African immigrant origin. In this instance, one might even be tempted to draw a parallel with the American experience in which numerous intellectuals and left-wing Jewish militants participated in the struggle of the 1950s for equal civil rights for Black Americans, whereas today there is considerable distance between the Jewish and the Black American movements, some of which, like Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, have veered towards anti-Semitism. However, we still have to tread carefully; the rapprochement between Jews and Black Americans in the 1950s was not that widespread and not all Jewish intellectuals are responsible for the distance in France today. Moreover, the latest development of SOS Racism indicates a � erce mobilisation against anti-Semitism which is clearly differentiated from other forms of racism against which the movement also continues to mobilise.

Our perceptions of anti-Semitism and of other forms of racism are not formed in the same way. In France, the Jewish world is politically and culturally active and, while it would be wrong to say that all the Jews in this country recognise themselves as being part of a community, it is nonetheless true that there are community organisations which are capable of community mobilisation, in particular in the face of anti-Semitism. The mere observation of the facts, the collection of data, the pressure on politicians to take action, on the media to react, on intellectuals to take positions, on the police and judiciary to be ef� cient and � rm mean that the most aggressive forms of anti-Semitism are a phenomenon which is now very much to the fore in public debate. The same is not true of anti-North African racism or of Islamophobia,12 about which our information is much less precise and systematic. What observatory, for example, would keep, for anti-North African racism, records of hostile actions as full and as detailed as those of the CRIF

11 Nicolas Weill, Une histoire personnelle de l’antisémitisme, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2003.12 This concept is based on Vincent Geisser’s book, La Nouvelle Islamophobie, Paris,

La Découverte, 2003.



which regularly records all sorts of events very precisely, going so far as to include, for example, for January 2004, in Ile-de-France: “a swastika and the words ‘death to Jews’ [. . .] reported on the walls of a building in Allée Brindeau in the 19th district of Paris” or, for February 2004, the fact that: “in the 6th district of Paris, a Jew who had left his car in a bus lane for a moment to deliver a letter was called ‘a � lthy Jew’ by the driver?”

It is not a question of criticising such extreme vigilance. We only wish that similar resources were put into observing other forms of racism and, as a result, into exerting legitimate pressure. In the absence of these resources, the victimised groups are more likely to fall prey to people who use their distress for their own ends; the racism to which they are subjected is taken in hand by moral entrepreneurs including political, ideological or religious movements which put their own interpretation on the experience, even if it means constructing imaginary or distant issues from which anti-Semitism can emerge.

At the end of the 1980s, it appeared to us to be urgent to launch a research programme on racism in France13 and to show that anti-Arab or anti-North African racism was not limited to its political manifesta-tions alone, embodied by the Front national. At the time, anti-Semitism was not as alarming a reality as today, even if its renewal was already noticeable.14 But today, research and action alike, must be mobilised on the two fronts of racism and anti-Semitism. Hence this book which, in some ways, complements the research published in La France raciste, and which unfortunately has lost none of its freshness or topicality. It is true that, on the whole, in France people are now protesting much more rapidly, sometimes even too much so, about anti-Semitism than about other forms of racism. But this is neither a reason to refuse to acknowledge its spread nor to dispense with the attempt to understand it.

13 Michel Wieviorka et al. La France raciste, Paris, Le Seuil, 1992.14 We carried out a study on this phenomenon in Sarcelles as early as 1991–92, cf.

Nacira Guénif, Farhad Khosrokhavar, Paul Zawadski (edited by Michel Wieviorka), “L’expérience de l’antisémitisme à Sarcelles”, in Pour une sociologie du racisme. Trois études. Rapport d’étude, CADIS/CNRS-EHESS, 1993.


CHAPTER TWO

IN SCHOOLS

Although they should be a haven of tolerance and were established with the aim of ensuring that all pupils gain access to reason and the universal; although they were supposed to protect them not only from the violence which prevails in the outside world but also from the barriers to socialisation which exist in society in general and in the more limited circles to which they belong, in particular family or community; although they are placed under the protection of a motto proclaiming liberty, equality and fraternity, state schools, more than anywhere else, are the places where the renewal of anti-Semitism in our time crystallises. That is why Emmanuel Brenner and a collective of teachers—in a book which created a considerable stir, particularly amongst the Jewish community in France—were able to speak of the ‘Republic’s lost territories’.1

The Many Guises of Anti-Semitism

In the � rst instance, state schools are a sphere in which we encounter forms of anti-Semitic violence which appear to be an extension of those which exist in society. These acts rarely give rise to legal action. They are the work of minors and schools usually think that they can deal with them themselves. Furthermore, considerable progress has been made by the Ministry of Education since 2003; amongst other measures, there has been an improvement in the systematic recording of the facts (attacks, destruction and other acts of a fairly serious nature) at national level, but also in all sorts of initiatives undertaken by the local education authorities (Académies) or even by the schools.2 The report of the Commission national consultative des droits de l’homme (2003), to which we referred above, lists 12 violent anti-Semitic incidents and 80 anti-Semitic

1 Emmanuel Brenner (editor), Les Territoires perdus de la République. Antisémitisme, racisme et sexisme en milieu scolaire, Paris, Mille et Une Nuits, 2002.

2 For further information about this subject, see Part Six.


in schools 17

threats in schools in 2000, � ve and 25 in 2001, 30 and 47 in 2002 and 22 and 63 in 2003: it is obvious that these � gures underestimate the phenomenon. They do not take into account many acts and threats which the victims have not reported, along with the high degree of passivity resulting from ignorance, indifference and a lack of understand-ing on the part of the teaching or administrative staff in the schools. ‘Becoming resigned’ or ‘giving up’ to use the words of Brenner and his co-authors is obviously not the rule; but it is frequent and we shall come back to them in this book. It is often reinforced by the anti-racist feelings of those who do not wish to challenge the culprits when the latter, as is frequently the case, are of North African immigrant origin and, as a result, are themselves victims of deep-rooted racism.

In schools, anti-Semitic violence—which is only one element in a much wider picture of violence in schools3—can be serious. In recent years, several incidents have been reported in which a pupil, boy or girl, was bullied and humiliated for being Jewish for weeks on end. But apparently it is now frequent to hear remarks hostile to Jews being expressed openly, between pupils, in the playground and in the corridors, sometimes even in class, or else in relation to teachers, the supervisors or the heads of the school. It is true that in France the ethnicisation of social relations has become so widespread that individuals increasingly tend to use categories of religion or national origin to refer to each other as if it were natural without this necessarily being done aggres-sively—but the transition from the commonplace epithet to hate-speech is rapid, especially when it is a question of Jews and of interactions with young people of North African immigrant descent.

The move to action here is a move to words, to the breaking down of the taboo which, until only a few years ago, surrounded everything to do with Jewish people, beginning with their very name: we no lon-ger use the old vocabulary which referred to them as ‘Israelites’, often as a precaution, and there is much less use than in the past of the sort of � lthy vocabulary of the type, for example, which Céline used speci� cally for Jewish people. We say ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewess’ quite simply or,

3 At the beginning of the school year 2001–2002 the Ministry of Education, using the SIGNA software, set up a scheme for reporting acts of violence in secondary schools. In 2002–2003, “racist threats”—the only category under which anti-Semitism could be recorded, represented only 1.2% of all the acts recorded. The acts are recorded by the schools as coming under one of the following categories: acts which are obvi-ously criminal; acts which have been reported to the police; acts which have caused a considerable stir in the educational community.


18 chapter two

‘Feuj’—a slang term used in the suburbs of Paris—which, in some cases, is only an objective expression for a relation experienced in ethnic terms but which, in others, enables the speaker to insult, humiliate and abuse a person very directly. The Jew or the Feuj is then the personi� cation of evil, the word, as Brenner notes, “amounts to an insult and is self- suf� cient”4—“a feuj pen”, commented the Minister for Education, Luc Ferry, at the press conference for Dix Mesures pour lutter contre le racisme

et l’antisémitisme dans les établissements scolaires, “is a pen which does not work”.5

The move to words does not simply concern a small minority of somewhat rootless individuals, as in the cases of the incidents which end up in the courts, or which ought to end up there: it is widespread and con� rmed by countless witnesses.6

Anti-Semitic graf� ti and swastikas are everyday occurrences on the walls of some pre and post-16 educational establishments and even inside the school building, sometimes even on the notice boards. Attacks and beating up of Jewish pupils which go well beyond mere insults are reported in the schoolyard, in the vicinity or even on the sports grounds. Death threats do not only concern pupils but may also target teachers or members of the governing body of the educational institutions.

Anti-Semitic violence in schools is inseparable from an ideological climate and a set of images and opinions which always include the same elements: Jewish people, traditionally de� ned by their power in politics, the economy and the media, are associated both with the State of Israel and the politics of Ariel Sharon. They are said to behave today towards the Palestinians as the Nazis behaved towards them half a century earlier; they are thought to be enemies of Islam and possibly in collusion with the United States. This is all frequently summed up in graf� ti (often in swastikas) or expressions of the type: ‘� lthy Jew!’, ‘F*** the Jews!’, ‘Down with the Jews!’, ‘Death to Jews!’. Thus the head of the Beaumarchais School in Paris, interviewed by the Stasi Commission on secularism in September 2003, commented:

Jewish children are frequently the victims of anti-Semitic remarks—‘� lthy Jew’ is the one most frequently heard and the mildest. (These remarks . . .) have been accompanied, since events which there is no need to recall,

4 Emmanuel Brenner, op. cit., p. 28.5 Libération, 28 February 2003.6 Cf. for example Emmanuel Brenner, op. cit.


in schools 19

with ‘Long live Bin Laden!’ which I hear in the corridors all day long even though we are battling against it the whole time.

Expressions of hatred are mainly to be found outside the classes, some-times incited by Islamist militants, such as these monitors who spread their negationist7 ideology in schools and who were mentioned by sev-eral of the teachers who participated in the collective led by Brenner. Anything concerning history and geopolitics is particularly sensitive. As a result, some lessons become an opportunity for the expression of hostility towards Jewish people: the content of what is said about World War II, the Shoah, the Middle East and the United States is challenged in terms which can become extreme—but are not neces-sarily tempered. Mara Goyet describes thus how third year pupils in her school reacted when they were invited to the theatre to see a play about a Jewish family during World War II:

The lights went out and the chaos began. For one and a half hours the pupils shouted, laughed and insulted the actors. They shouted, “Strip, you bitch!” at a woman wearing a concentration camp uniform and “Paedo-phile!” at a father saying goodbye to his child. Others shouted, “Get in the showers!” [. . .]. One of the actors came on stage to announce that the company refused to take a curtain call. Some of the teachers were in tears [. . .]. The malaise affected everyone. One of the pupils got up on the stage and shouted to his comrades: “Muslim brothers, my brothers, what we have done is bad—we didn’t respect the work of these actors . . .” For the next few days, the school was in turmoil and discussions were held with the pupils. They decided to apologise . . .8

Similarly, Michaël Sebban, a philosophy teacher in a state secondary school in Seine Saint-Denis gives us an illustration of the unstable nature of their attitudes, but this time to the other extreme: “In the top class, they read Primo Levi because it is on the list of set books. They weep. Afterwards, they go out into the street and say the Jews are bastards”.9

7 Cf. in particular the evidence from Barbara Lefebvre, pp. 95–99 and Sophie Fer-hadjian, pp. 99–105 in Emmanuel Brenner, op. cit.

8 Mara Goyet, Collèges de France, Paris, Fayard, 2003, pp. 89–90.9 Interview published online by Proche-Orient.info, 3 May 2004.


20 chapter two

The Extent of the Disaster

It is impossible to quantify anti-Semitism in schools given the number of different forms that it can take and the extent to which its assess-ment varies depending on the individual, the criteria used and the real knowledge they have of certain problems. Interaction between pupils may end in anti-Semitic remarks. Are such remarks the outcome of a difference of opinion which began with criteria other than racial ones, or were they based on racial hatred from the outset? A Jewish child is the victim of an extortion racket: does this have anything to do with his Jewish identity? Another child is bullied to such an extent that it is a real ordeal of insults and violence about which he says nothing for fear and shame: none of this will appear in any document. Once the head of the establishment has been informed he remains silent and does nothing: the information is no longer made public. Between doing too much and doing too little, dramatisation and silence, it is impossible to obtain an accurate picture of the extent of the phenomenon. But it is clear that it is widespread and often rather diffuse, taking the form of abuse, insults and threats, tags and graf� ti or else the everyday use of the disquali� er ‘Jews’.

The threats and attacks are often, but not exclusively, carried out by pupils of North African immigrant descent and, that being the case, are often, but not necessarily, laden with references to the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict or radical Islam. In these instances, there is a hatred of the State of Israel which makes little distinction between its politics, its government (Ariel Sharon), its existence, its historical project (Zionism) and Jewish people in general. These may be made by very young people, but for all that, they are not con� ned to schools in what are referred to as ‘dif� cult areas’: they can also be found, for example, in pre and post-16 educational establishments in Paris which are not particularly ‘sensitive’.

Hatred of Jews emerges in the classroom and not only in the schoolyard, in the corridors or outside the school, especially when the subject-matter or content of the lesson lends itself to it, which is particularly true of history. But how widespread is the phenomenon? Here we have the � ndings of a survey carried out in 2003 on the ini-tiative of the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah and the Association des

professeurs d’histoire-géographie, the APHG, who sent its 5,344 members a


in schools 21

questionnaire and obtained 641 replies.10 While bearing in mind the methodological limits of its approach, the study does bring to light the existence of a real problem, but a minority one. A summary of the report put the proportion of institutions in which incidents had occurred in class at 15.9%. Not all of the incidents reported were anti-Semitic by any manner of means. The majority of the incidents which occurred were by and large related to religion—and here anti-Semitism is secondary. Speci� cally anti-Semitic incidents emerge in class when it is a question of World War II, the Shoah or the Middle East. They may take the form of provocation—“the teachers have little dif� culty in countering them but they make the classes tiresome and, in the long run, exhausting”. The report also points to incidents relating to teach-ing which deals with the Middle East which “express either partial or total disagreement with the policy of the State of Israel for some and of the Palestinian Authority for others” and which are “often likened erroneously to anti-Semitism”. The report also points to incidents which refer to the Algerian War or which “re� ect the malaise of pupils who can no longer bear to be presented as ‘of immigrant descent’”. It also notes that in some classes “the study of the United States and its foreign policy in particular is now beginning to provoke hostile reactions”. In short, this report is an invitation not to over dramatise problems which should not be denied or underestimated and in which anti-Semitism itself is only one of many elements. It notes that “frequently it is a case of ‘somewhat heated discussions’ rather than of incidents as such”. It deplores the fact that the media overestimate them.

It is � tting that a document like the APGH Report should qualify the impression gained by reading a book like Emmanuel Brenner’s. The lat-ter has the merit of drawing attention to the problem of the ‘territories lost to the Republic’. But, by referring only to the elements which can support his thesis—and which are striking—the book does not enable us to evaluate the wrongs which he describes, and it may even aston-ish teachers who work in schools where there are not any problems. State schools are not all or permanently in � ames; anti-Semitism is not entrenched. But it is taking root and obviously cannot be attributed

10 Our remarks here are based on the report by Bernard Phan, vice-president of the Association des professeurs d’histoire-géographie: Des dif� cultes pour enseigner l’histoire et la géographie? September 2003.


22 chapter two

solely to rootless individuals in disarray, as tends to be the explanation when the most serious forms of violence come to court.

There is indeed a problem which is speci� c to state schools, a form of anti-Semitism in schools which is not simply an extension of the general anti-Semitism in society. It is important to question exactly how schools help to produce it: we shall come back to this.


CHAPTER THREE

CHANGES IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Another new development in the anti-Semitism of our time concerns the public sphere, constantly stirred up by various issues which are, in fact, the makings of new forms of political and intellectual life.

Until the 1990s the anti-Semitism which attracted media attention was mainly a traditional form—at least in its most deeply rooted guises. However, its renewal could be observed quite early on, not so much in the nature of the themes propounded which remained the traditional ones—hatred of Jews as the evil personi� cation of money, power, the media and, possibly, of the Revolution or of Bolshevism, to which can be added hostility to the State of Israel. A new set of arguments was put forward after the war by ‘revisionism’; these either underestimated or banalised the Shoah or else, more frequently, denied that it had ever taken place. ‘Negationism’ (or historical revisionism) even went as far as accusations denouncing the Shoah as a ‘business’.

The Successes of Negationism

Negationism consists in denying the intention of the Third Reich to destroy the European Jews, the use of the gas chambers to this end and the systematic annihilation of this group of human beings.

It began with the � rst ideological partnership formed by Maurice Bardèche and Paul Rassinier.1 Maurice Bardèche was an extreme right activist who was also the brother-in-law of Robert Brasillach whose name he wished to clear. Rassinier was a former deportee, a man of the left, who started out socialist and strongly anti-communist, a paci-� st, who, for a time was associated with the Fédération anarchiste (in the 1950s and 1960s) and whom Valérie Igounet, in her excellent Histoire

du négationnisme, describes as “a godsend for the extreme right”.2 What

1 Nadine Fresco has written a biography of Paul Rassinier, Fabrication d’un antisémite, Paris, Le Seuil, 1999.

2 Valérie Igounet, Histoire du négationnisme en France, Paris, Le Seuil, 2000, p. 33.


24 chapter three

brought the two men together was not hatred of the Jews, but of Com-munism. For, one of the founding concepts of what was, at the outset, merely revisionism, is the idea that Nazism was not the only form of barbarism: there was also Bolshevism and Communism. For them, the dramatisation of communist crimes went hand in hand with the banalisation of those committed by the Nazis. A new theme emerged fairly rapidly in these � rst revisions of history. This was anti-Zionism. It was already linked to the theory that the destruction of the Jews was an invention aimed at ensuring the success of the State of Israel. In Paul Rassinier’s words:

This lie (the destruction of six million Jews) was told to procure the funds required to set up the State of Israel (German indemnities proportionate to the number of Jewish victims).3

The extreme right’s criticism of Zionism was to become more focused a little later, at the time of the Six Day War (1967), making no distinc-tion between hatred for the State of Israel and hatred for the supposed power of the Jews of the Diaspora.

Negationism, which had had no particular impact on public opinion until then, was revived in the 1970s by the forming of a new alli-ance—that of Robert Faurisson, an academic specialising in literature, who went much further than Rassinier and Bardèche by denying out-right the existence of the gas chambers, at least those intended for the destruction of the Jews, and Pierre Guillaume, an extreme left activist. In an interview published in L’Express (October 1978), the former Com-missioner for Jewish Affairs in Vichy, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who had taken refuge in Spain, broke a taboo by declaring, “In Auschwitz, only the � eas were gassed.” Robert Faurisson took this opportunity to broadcast his ideas. He explained in an interview on Europe 1:

The so-called massacre of the Jews and the so-called existence of the gas chambers is simply one and the same politico-� nancial scam. The main bene� ciaries are the State of Israel and the international Zionist movement, and the main victims are the German people, excluding its leaders, and the entire Palestinian nation.

Faurisson was quickly joined by Pierre Guillaume, himself backed, for a while at least, by a few friends, extreme left, libertarian and other

3 In Le Drame des juifs européens, � rst published in 1964 and then re-published in 1984 by La Vieille Taupe.


changes in the public sphere 25

militants, including Serge Thion and Gaby Cohn-Bendit (who distanced themselves fairly rapidly) and Gabor Rittersporn. Furthermore, the linguist, Noam Chomsky, in the name of freedom of speech, prefaced a book by Faurisson, who was to explain later that without this back-ing “the adventure would have gone no further after the death of Rassinier in 1967”.4

The public outcry which ensured the success of the Faurisson/Guil-laume partnership owed a great deal to the inadequacies of histori-ography, and perhaps even to the self-satisfaction of French historians who, even in February 1979, thought it sufficient, in response to Faurisson’s arguments, to publish a text signed by 34 of them in Le

Monde stating:

The question is not how, technically, a mass murder of this sort was possible. It was technically possible because it took place. This has to be the starting point of any historical inquiry into the subject [. . .] There is not, and there cannot be, any discussion about the existence of the gas chambers.

As Valérie Igounet reminds us,5 Faurisson was delighted when he read this text: “I had won! If 34 historians met to write this sort of non-sense, it was because they could not answer.” Pierre Vidal-Naquet, one of the signatories, explained, in a discussion with Paul Thibaud and Serge Thion, that as far as he was concerned, “one cannot challenge something which is obvious”.6

In the 1980s, revisionism was energetically challenged7 on two fronts. On the one hand, it was criminalised and became, not a mere variant of incitation to racial hatred, but the object of speci� c legal treatment, in particular in the Gayssot Law (13 July 1990). On the other hand, historians began to establish the facts with increasing precision, an important starting point being a colloquium organised in 1982 at the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) by François Furet and Raymond Aron on ‘Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews’.8

4 In “Les révisionnistes proposent un débat public”, Annales d’histoire révisionniste, spring 1988, no 4, p. 18.

5 Valérie Igounet, op. cit., p. 240.6 Id., p. 242.7 Amongst the � rst to be concerned was Nadine Fresco, “Les redresseurs de morts”,

Les Temps Modernes, June 1980, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les Assassins de la Mémoire, Paris, La Découverte, 1987.

8 Colloquium published under this title by Gallimard/Le Seuil in 1982.


26 chapter three

A key participant in this wake-up call to historians, the surprise star of the colloquium in question, was an unusual person, Jean-Claude Pressac, a pharmacist who had initially worked with Faurisson before distancing himself from him once he had established the historical truth of the gas chambers, not on the basis of testimonies but on the basis of the study of technical dossiers (on incineration and gassing, with the aid of architectural plans or bills from � rms.)9

Thereafter, negationism hit the headlines several times, especially with scandals in which the University was implicated by association (the negationist PhD thesis defended by Henri Roques at the Université de Nantes in June 1985, the publication in the academic journal, Économies

et Sociétés in August 1989 of an article by Bernard Notin attacking the Jewish ‘lobby’, an attack which was repeated from the stronghold of negationism, the Université Lyon-III, etc.). In the 1990s others took over, in particular Roger Garaudy, who took issue over the ‘brainwashing’ on the Shoah and the � gures usually quoted, and who was supported by Abbé Pierre. But the most important issue lay elsewhere.

It consisted in the Front national’s taking up the issue of negationism. This occurred most probably in the mid-1980s and was obviously aimed at banalising the Shoah, a point to which we shall return. In October 1985, during the Bleu-Blanc-Rouge festival at Le Bourget, Jean-Marie Le Pen attacked Jean-François Kahn, Jean Daniel, Yvan Levaï and Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, referring to them by name, describing them as “all liars in the press in this country. These people are a disgrace to their profession”. Everyone understood that he was targeting journal-ists whom he presumed to be Jewish. In autumn 1987, a few weeks after the showing of the � lm Shoah, he said on television that the gas chambers were “a mere detail of World War II”. Valérie Igounet tells how this remark was prepared and tested and was not an unintended blunder. On 2 September 1988 at the Front national’s summer school at Cap d’Agde, the leader of the Front national using the name of the Minister, Durafour, made a play on words on ‘Durafour crématoire’.10 In case the message was not self-explanatory, the press close to his movement explained that if you were going to protest against Nazi

9 Cf. Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the Gas Chambers, New York, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989.

10 Translator’s note: ‘Durafour-crématoire’ was a pun on ‘four crématoire’, French for crematorium.



crematoria, then you should protest against those who burn aborted foetuses every day.

Today the revisionist version of anti-Semitism is widespread in France, as a result of the inroads made by the declarations of the leader of the Front national. It is no longer a strange anomaly, the meeting of the anti-communist and libertarian obsessions and the traditional extreme right targets for hatred. It is now a phenomenon which, all the more potent for having gained ground amongst the radical right, has spread to the Middle East from where it is imported, then re-exported in the form of books, cassettes or via the Internet to the working-class areas and the mosques where radical Islam holds sway—we shall come back to this.

Maintaining Traditional Anti-Semitism

Apart from the ideological and political organisation of the spread of negationism, in the 2000s, a number of events were to point to sup-port for an older, traditional type of anti-Semitism, nationalist even religious and anti-Jewish in nature. At the same time, sometimes exces-sive vigilance was exercised with respect to anything which seemed to express it.

An incident in the media was evidence of a certain degree of his-torical continuity, namely the ‘Renaud Camus affair’. This writer, who is somewhat affected and aesthetic, was accused of anti-Semitism by various journalists and intellectuals (starting with Marc Weitzman of the Inrockuptibles, as well as in Le Monde).11 In a few lines in his diary in 1994 (at that time it was to be published in April 2000, under the title, La Campagne de France), he had regretted that the radio programme, Panorama, on France-Culture was run by journalists who systematically proclaimed their Jewishness. He wrote:

It annoys and saddens me to see and hear this experience [of France], this culture and this civilisation having as principal spokespersons and means of expression, in very many cases, a majority of Jewish people, very frequently � rst or second generation French, who are not direct participants in this experience.

11 Pierre Péan and Philippe Cohen in La Face cachée du Monde, Paris, Mille et Une Nuits, 2003, devote pages 364 to 370 to this affair, in which, according to them, the chief editor of the newspaper played a leading role.


28 chapter three

The affair had a brief sequel in 2002, when Renaud Camus published a new book, Du sens, in which he discussed it. Patrick Kéchichian (Le

Monde, 15 June 2002) saw therein the con� rmation of the ‘disease’ affecting Camus: anti-Semitism. Similarly, Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote (Le Point, 21 June 2002), “One can be a good writer and an inveter-ate anti-Semite.” If anti-Semitism there be—and not only Renaud Camus, but also many intellectuals and journalists would challenge this—it must be admitted that it is fairly traditional, set in a context which recalls Barrès or Maurras. Its sources have nothing to do with Islam, the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict, tendencies in the suburbs or the blunders of the extreme left, which we shall discuss a little later: the critics of Renaud Camus do tend to interpret him in terms of a virtu-ally outmoded nationalism.

Other incidents, which have not received as much media attention, are evidence of vigilance with respect to any expression of traditional anti-Semitism in the press, on television, in the cinema or in books. In September 2004, the Centre régional de documentation pédagogique (CRDP) in Franche-Comté and the publishers, Fernand Nathan, decided to with-draw a school book entitled Enseigner le fait religieux, un dé� pour la laïcité, with a preface by Régis Debray from sale. The latter said later that he had not read it, thus preferring to admit to having made a professional error rather than having to give any further support to dubious passages stating, for example, that Jews have an “almost paranoid tendency” to be sensitive to anti-Semitism or that “death in concentration camps enabled the portrayal of a Christ-like image of the destiny of the Jew-ish people which bears only a very distant and politically very dubious relation to true Judaism”. In 2001, the UEJF (Union des Étudiants Juifs de France) attacked the encyclopaedia, Quid. In the article on the concentration camps, after enumerating at length the statistical data emanating from the most outstanding historians who had worked on the Shoah, the authors quoted the revisionist thesis declaring that the number of Jewish victims in Auschwitz was 150,000 persons, “which, included approximately one hundred thousand Jews, most of whom died of typhus”.12 Le Parisien, a daily newspaper, published ‘simple crosswords’ in poor taste, where the answers were ‘genocide’ for ‘wholesale butch-ers’ or ‘youpine’ for a Jewish woman. Warned by the MRAP (Mouvement

12 At once, the editor decided to rectify this entry and, after a technical incident in 2002, the correction was made permanent in 2003.



contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples), the newspaper apologised for ‘this regrettable tendency’ and declared its ‘intention to � ght racism and anti-Semitism’. We could add the decision by the television channel TF1 to censor the anti-Semitic speeches in a � lm about Hitler produced by a Canadian studio “which could have been misinterpreted”; or the polemics surrounding the release in France of Mel Gibson’s � lm The Passion of the Christ which was accused of presenting the Jews as blood-thirsty deicides, and therefore of encouraging a somewhat archaic form of religious anti-Semitism—condemned by the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) but still alive in some sectors, in particular among fundamentalist Catholics. Moreover, the thesis of the ‘Shoah business’, which presents the Jews as being unashamedly money-grabbing, is a further extension of negationism, asserting that the ‘big lie of Auschwitz’ is an invention which enables the Jews to get rich. Defended by Norman Finkelstein in a book which is perhaps in dubious taste rather than blatantly anti-Semitic and translated from the American in 2001 under the title L’Industrie de l’Holocauste,13 this thesis is a link, or a sort of transition between the classic theme of the Jews’ relationship with money, updated by the negationists, and the radical challenging of the State of Israel, which is said to be at the centre of the operation aimed at extorting money from Europe for the bene� t of its own policies.

Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism in the Media and the Courts

Today, what is really new is the way in which politics and the media have been rocked by recurrent scandals where questions posed by the State of Israel and by anti-Semitism have been con� ated, subjecting various public � gures to serious accusations, often quite excessively.

Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, positions hostile to its existence could appear to be an expression of anti-Semitism. It is not always easy to draw a line between these two concepts. To criticise Ariel Sharon’s policies today does not imply a challenge to the principle of Zionism which, in the course of history, many Jews themselves have challenged. For example, some religious movements have done so,

13 Norman Finkelstein, L’Industrie de l’Holocauste. Ré� exions sur l’exploitation de la souffrance des Juifs, Paris, La Fabrique, 2001 (2000).


30 chapter three

as did the socialist militants of the Bund from its foundation at the end of the 19th century until its annihilation under the combined effect of Nazism and Communism.14 To criticise Zionism is not necessarily to deny the Jews, as a people or as a nation, the right to have a state—but it may go as far as that and then enter the realm of anti-Semitism. We should add that Zionism may itself serve as a vehicle for a certain type of anti-Semitism by suggesting that the Jewish Diaspora should be wound up and all Jews sent to the Hebrew State.

The fact remains that, since the end of the 1990s, the media has oscillated between expressions of opinions critical of Israel and accusa-tions of anti-Semitism as regards these criticisms. What is speci� c to these accusations is that they all target public � gures who are generally considered to be progressive and quite above any form of racism and that they are not always based on sound arguments. They appear in the media, but on occasion the courts are also brought in.

In some cases, the controversy operates primarily on an intellectual or artistic or media level. Here are some examples.

The group Sniper, after having sold two hundred thousand copies of their CD La France on which they sing “screw France [. . .] f *** the Republic”, made a new CD in 2003 on which they praised “those who throw stones” explaining that “blowing things up is a form of resistance”, and added, “Contradict the Zionists and in two seconds you’re taken for anti-Semitic.” They quoted Rim K (Karim), the lead singer of the 113 group: “I come from a municipal garbage truck, I don’t live like a Jew or like a Hollywood star” and when he was inter-viewed by the online newsletter Proche-Orient.info, which is always vigilant with this type of dossier, the singer explained, “I don’t live like a Jew or in Hollywood. . . . I don’t live like a star [. . .]. In France, Jews are labelled: they dress in Prada clothes. They go to tanning salons [. . .] I know lots of rebeus 15 who go to tanning salons [. . .] There’s nothing derogatory about what I’m saying. It’s not an insult.” This was not the sort of material which would constitute an ‘affair’ and the staff from Proche-Orient.info left it at that.

The � lm made by Eyal Sivan and Michel Khlei� Route 181. Fragments

d’un voyage en Israël-Palestine is a road movie, in which they interview

14 Cf. Henri Minczeles, Histoire du Bund. Un mouvement révolutionnaire juif, Paris, Denoël, 1999.

15 Translator’s note: ‘rebeus’—slang for second-generation North African born in France.



people whom they meet along the line of partition stipulated by UN resolution number 181. “The aim of the trip,” wrote Serge Kaganski in Les Inrockuptibles (17 March 2004), “was to demonstrate that Israel is a genocidal state, a paranoid and racist society”. The � lm had already been shown on Arte (24 November 2003) and had given rise to numer-ous protests at the time. The scandal broke when the organisers of the festival Cinéma du Réel at Beaubourg changed its screening. Faced with further protests and concerned about their ability to ensure security, they cancelled one of the two showings but screened the showing going ahead in a bigger theatre. Can this � lm do other than incite anti-Semitic hatred, as its critics contend, anti-Semitism barely concealed behind its anti-Zionism? Or is it a demonstration of the illegitimacy of Israel coupled with a normal appeal to freedom of speech, including the freedom to criticise this state? A petition against censorship was signed, among others, by Jean-Luc Godard, the publisher Eric Hazan, François Maspero, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Rony Brauman, Mathieu Lindon, and Etienne Balibar—an intelligentsia which cannot be suspected of anti-Semitism, but which is both very critical of Israel and totally opposed to censorship. But where does criticism of the State of Israel end and anti-Semitism begin?

This problem recurs so frequently, that, for example, legal action was taken against Sami Naïr, Danièle Sallenave and Edgar Morin for ‘racial defamation’ and ‘justi� cation of terrorist acts’ after they published a column in Le Monde criticising the Israeli people for having become ‘domineering and over-con� dent’, ‘disdainful and enjoying humiliating others’ and displaying a ‘dreadful inhumanity’. The associations Avocats

sans frontières and France-Israël accused the authors of these remarks of a ‘semantic shift’ with the criticism of Israeli Jews being extended to Jews in general. For anyone who knows Morin’s background, work and posi-tions, labelling this sociologist as anti-Semitic is an out-and-out paradox, if not totally absurd. A petition was circulated to this effect. However, this did not put an end to the polemic. Edgar Morin returned to his analysis in a new column (Le Monde, 18 February 2004) and was more speci� c in his criticism of Israel. Responding to the analysis, the journal-ist Sylvain Attal (4 March 2004) denounced his ‘intellectual treachery’ (‘trahison des clercs’)16 as well as the ‘monstrous idea’ that the Jews,

16 Translator’s note: The title of Julien Benda’s celebrated book, Julien Benda, La Trahison des Clercs, Paris, J.J. Pauvert, 1965 (1927).


32 chapter three

as a result of their own behaviour, were responsible for their rejection “while their attackers were able to take advantage of the excuse of the very real forms of discrimination from which they suffer”.

The scandal, or its beginnings, sometimes originates in the publica-tion of a book. Hence, Israël Shamir’s L’Autre Visage d’Israël,17 includes statements such as “Jewry has taken control in the United States”, the Jews are “cunning people” and their “thirst for vengeance” is “stronger than their greed”. As soon as it came out in October 2003, and after its content had been reported by Proche-Orient.info, it was immediately withdrawn from sale by one of its co-editors, Balland, whose managing director apologised: he had not read the manuscript carefully. Con-versely, in L’Humanité (5 November 2003) Régine Deforges defended the author, “an Israeli citizen of Russian origin (who) attacks the present policies of the Sharon government and calls for the peaceful creation of an Israeli-Palestinian state”. Didier Daeninckx then protested on a website remarking that “the blue bicycle has gone off the rails” (Régine Deforges is the author of La Bicyclette Bleue). Other complaints were sent to L’Humanité which did not reply but withdrew Régine Deforges’ article from its website.

Randa Ghazi’s book Rêver la Palestine18 is presented as a novel for young people. It tells how young Palestinians in Gaza � ght Israeli sol-diers who, for their part, allegedly assassinate children and old people, rape women, desecrate mosques and break the bones of babies in cold blood. Is this anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic? The book does use the term ‘the Jews’ to refer to the Israelis. The CRIF protested. True, this book is not the only place in which the Israeli army is described in this way; for example, in an article by Sara Daniel in Le Nouvel Observateur (n° 1931, November 2001) we � nd descriptions of the same ilk. The editorial committee would then endeavour to blot out the disastrous impact of such comments as:

Palestinian women who have been raped by Israeli soldiers are systema-tically killed by their own families. Here rape has become a war crime because the Israeli soldiers know exactly what will happen.

Another example is the case brought against the journalist Daniel Mermet, who was criticised for his editorial line on France-Inter; between 18 and 22 June 2001, in his broadcast Là-bas si j’y suis,

17 Paris, Co-edited by Balland/Blanche, 2003.18 Paris, Flammarion, 2002.



he gave the � oor to listeners, some of whom were fervent anti-Zionists. The UEJF, the LICRA and Avocats sans frontières accused him of racial defamation and incitation to racial hatred (he was acquitted). He was accused of ‘not being impartial’ in his broadcast and of ‘empathy’ with terrorism. Amongst the witnesses, Roger Cukierman, the president of the CRIF, said Mermet was partly responsible for the current “wave of anti-Jewish acts”, Alain Finkielkraut accused him of describing Israelis as Jews, “victims who had become Nazis” and Rony Brauman, conversely, explained that Zionism “included an element of racism”. Commenting on the trial, the website legraindesable.com remarked that the extreme right had been condemned for less violent remarks and added, “It is not because one is on the side of progress that one has the right to be above the law.”

The last issue or rather the last dossier which we shall refer to here is that of the comedian, Dieudonné, who, since 2002 at least, seems not to think twice about making very violent remarks about Jews. Invited to the Conférence Berryer (a speech contest for young lawyers), he declared that his electoral programme was “anti-Semitism, anti-white and pro-Bin Laden [. . .]. The Jews are a sect; it’s a con [. . .]. The Torah shields interests which are much darker than spiritual interests”.19 On 1 December 2003, during the television broadcast On ne peut pas plaire à tout le monde hosted by Marc-Olivier Fogiel, he appeared wearing a combat uniform and a black balaclava, over which was a hat and two sidelocks which could only evoke religious Jews. He claimed to be a “Zionist fundamentalist” who had converted to Judaism not “for political reasons but for profes-sional reasons, if you see what I mean”, and invited the young people from the deprived banlieue housing estates to “get their act together” and join up with “the axis of good. The American-Zionist axis”. He concluded his monologue with an IsraHeil! and, raising his arm in Nazi fashion, was applauded by the public. Another comedian on the stage, Jamel Debbouze, congratulated him, “I’ll be your minister whenever you want [. . .]. You’re the greatest.” Jamel Debbouze dissociated himself from Dieudonné in January 2005 after backing him on another occa-sion by shouting, “You are saying out loud what everyone really thinks” on the stage of the Zenith in Paris at a show during which Dieudonné invited the public to boo at the name of various Jewish public � gures. “Since then, I’ve understood that you can’t laugh at everything with everyone” (Le Figaro, 11 February 2005). Dieudonné, whose show at

19 Quoted in Le Monde, 19 February 2002.


34 chapter three

the Olympia and then a tour outside Paris were to be cancelled, due to threats received by the organisers, returned to the charge on several occasions: he denounced the monopoly on suffering which the Jews bene� ted from, according to him, whereas Blacks had had more than their share of suffering in history; he linked his hatred of the Jews with the problems of deprived banlieue areas, with social exclusion and with the racism of an oppressive society. A few months after the episode on television, he was one of the leading candidates on the Euro-Palestine list to stand at the European elections in May 2004, claiming to defend the Palestinian cause. The list included � gures of such questionable leanings that Leila Shahid, who represents the Palestinian Authority in Paris, was anxious to publicly disown it.

There are several lessons to be learnt from these various events. In the � rst instance, they are evidence of the tremendous capacity of the intelligentsia to react to the slightest suspicion of anti-Semitism or, on the contrary, to the slightest attempt to restrict any criticism of Israeli policy. They indicate the spectacular presence of the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict in public discussion, which has been reduced, in these incidents, to an ideological struggle where two camps constantly exchange blunders and exaggerations, possibly even degenerating into a form of anti-Semitism. It is sometimes dif� cult to judge whether this anti-Semitism came � rst, the father of such discourse, or whether it is the ultimate conclusion of criticism of Israeli policy. Thereafter, these events act as the driving force on two levels. One is at media level where opinions, positions and news shape the image of a public space constantly oscil-lating between over and underestimation; the risk being that remarks are either banalised or, on the contrary, over-dramatised. The other is at the level of justice, since the presumed anti-Semites are liable to be taken to court, particularly by Jewish associations. Here we see the emergence of an axis of opposition between two approaches: the � rst invokes freedom of speech which is said to be threatened by those who are permanently on the lookout for anti-Semitism behind the slightest criticism of Israel; the second demands punishment for any expression of an anti-Semitism, however trivial, slight or veiled with humour, that anti-Zionism would only mask.20

20 Cf. for numerous illustrations, Bernard Fauvarque, “L’antisionisme au travers de la presse catholique” in the collective work, Nouveaux Visages de l’antisémitisme. Haine passion ou haine historique? Paris, NM7, 2001, pp. 267–278.



A further characteristic of some of these issues is that they reveal serious shortcomings on the part of institutions and the media. The host of a primetime programme, during which someone could shout IsraHeil! to applause, did not react, or reacted badly and late; the organisers of the festival of the Cinéma du Réel did not know how to deal with the Route 181 incident: the people who were protesting against this � lm were not necessarily requesting that the screening be cancelled, and, if some of them did suggest prohibiting it, it was a result of the blunders in the decisions or in the press communiqués of those in charge of the festival. Whenever the question of anti-Semitism arises the reaction of the media is always characterised by excesses or neglect. We have already seen a spectacular illustration of this recorded in this book. Journalists and the whole political class lost their heads, in July 2004, when a young woman claimed she had been attacked by six youths from a poor housing estate—some black, others North African—who, she said � rst assaulted and robbed her, then beat her up because they thought she was Jewish. The story was an invention from start to � nish as they would learn a few days later.

The preceding remarks present the media as a stage on which various dramas are played out in which anti-Semitism—known or suspected—constitutes one of the major themes. This anti-Semitism has gained a new lease of life in comparison with the traditional discourse given the central nature of anti-Zionism. It should be noted here that some Catholic publications have also permitted an anti-Semitism in keeping with the current anti-Israeli sentiment to surface here and there.21 Are the media themselves not directly responsible for the spread of hatred of the Jews? Do they not sometimes tend, consciously or unconsciously, to encourage it or, at least, to be extremely indulgent towards it? There is no lack of analyses to support both these arguments. Some people criticise the way in which some of the media are either occasionally or systematically hostile to Israel, not hesitating to resort to lies, and never apologising for any errors made, even major ones. Agence France-Presse (AFP), for example, was accused by Paul Foster22 of ‘pandering to their considerable Arab clientele’ or of ‘false rumours’ and hence ‘disinforma-tion’.23 But what they say is often undermined by their exaggeration and

21 Cf. Bernard Fauvarque, op. cit.22 Paul Foster, “L’odyssée des médias. Les médias français seraient-ils devenus antisémites?” in

the collective publication Nouveau Visages de l’antisémitisme, op. cit., pp. 221–228.23 Cf. also, in the same book, Clément Weill-Raynal “L’affaire du ‘Tunnel des

mosquées’ vue par l’Agence France-Presse, AFP”, pp. 203–219, which says that the


36 chapter three

their unconditional defence of anything to do with Israel. Other people, or sometimes the same ones, demonstrate how the anti-Semitism which they criticise in the media is much more than a simple extension of identi� cation with the Palestinian cause and open hostility to Israel. It is an opinion brimming with hatred towards the Jews which is tolerated and present, even if veiled to a greater or lesser extent. They then go on to accuse, not only the press of the extreme right and the Muslim radios, but also the television or even newspapers like Libération or Le

Monde and radio stations like France-Inter, not to mention the press close to the extreme left like Le Monde diplomatique, for example. The lawyer, Gilles William Goldnadel, who gives examples in Le Nouveau Bréviaire

de la haine,24 claims that this type of media can always be relied on to be quick to attack the racism or anti-Semitism of the extreme right, or ‘traditional’ anti-Semitism, but when the anti-Semitism originates ‘in Arab-Muslim circles or among left-wing extremists’ they can only be described as ‘passive’ or ‘complacent’.25

We should add here that the traditional media are restricted by laws and are controlled to a certain extent, even if, as we have just seen, blunders, or the beginnings thereof, are possible. On the other hand, over the past few years, the Internet has afforded an opportunity for a surge in anti-Jewish hatred which is much more dif� cult for public authorities to counter. It provides anti-Semitism, along with many other forms of hate speech (anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism seems to mobilise Internet surfers much more than anti-Semitism)26 with novel

‘Agence France-Presse’ tacitly consented to broadcast far and wide the accusation of ‘Israeli plot’ [. . .] on the holy Muslim sites in Jerusalem. Millions of listeners and readers of the press were able to hear and read that “an odious crime had been perpetrated in Jerusalem” [. . .]. There was a move from Israeli plot to a ‘Zionist plot’ aimed at converting Jerusalem to Judaism. A tunnel had been dug ‘secretly’, ‘overnight’ under the mosque. An action “rejected by all religions because it represents a � agrant attack against the house of God” [. . .], “one of the most heinous sins” [. . .], “intense provo-cation against the Christian and Muslim holy sites” [. . .] Violent and perhaps sincere reactions reported by Agence France-Presse, to an imaginary crime . . . invented by the self-same Agency”, pp. 218–219.

24 Gilles William Goldnadel, Le Nouveau Bréviaire de la haine, Paris, Ramsay, 2001.25 Idem, p. 21.26 A CNCDH Report (Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme)

quoted by Le Monde, 17 June 2004 reports on a study of over one million articles published on the Net between 1993 and 2004 by 334 racist francophone forums. The insult ‘bougnoule’ is found in 6,210 messages and ‘youpin’ or ‘yid’ in 4,739 messages;



ways of spreading their message. They disseminate it via networks and loops—and it is possible for a small group, even a single person, to be the driving force behind a powerful ideology. Here we have a new ele-ment, which involves the proliferation of all sorts of anti-Semitic sites but which is also set in the context, to which we shall return later, of the globalisation of anti-Semitism since, via the Internet, the dissemi-nation of hate speech operates at international level, no matter where it is produced.

The Tariq Ramadan Affair

In October 2003, the oumma.com website published a text by Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim preacher, who is especially active in France where he has a large following, particularly amongst the most highly educated Muslim young people. Apparently the article had been refused by the editorial boards of Libération and Le Monde. He accused the “French Jewish intellectuals, who until then had always been considered as universalist thinkers,” of having begun to “develop analyses which were increasingly in� uenced by a tendency to be community oriented, tending to relativise the defence of the universal principles of equality or justice”. He quoted Pierre-André Taguieff, Alain Finkielkraut, Alex-andre Adler, Bernard Kouchner, André Glucksman and Bernard-Henri Lévy whose analyses were said to support Ariel Sharon, and stated that, “We are witnessing the emergence of a new attitude amongst certain intellectuals who are everywhere in the media”. Their “retreat into identity politics” was said to be a political positioning which “was a response to community rationales, as Jews, or nationalists, as defenders of Israel”.

This document was to assume considerable importance. It was distrib-uted by the European Social Forum (ESF) on the eve of its November 2003 meeting, a huge alterglobalist rally which was the focus of all media attention. This indicated a rapprochement between this protest movement and various Muslim organisations based on their hostility

22% of the texts target the Arab-Muslim category with only approximately 10% targeting Jews.


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to the United States, a strong identi� cation with the Palestinians and a rejection of the traditional left whose former secretary of the Parti

socialiste, Lionel Jospin, then Prime Minister, had described Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation. The alterglobalisation movement was desta-bilised. Tariq Ramadan’s supporters had to respond to intense internal criticism, such as that of Jacques Nikonoff, president of ATTAC, who protested at “manipulation” aimed at “creating problems within the alterglobalisation movement”. Pierre Khalfa was more cautious, describ-ing Tariq Ramadan’s text not as anti-Semitic but “characterised by a community-oriented perspective”. It is true that a few months earlier, in Berlin, during a preparatory meeting for the same forum, some young members of the Hachomer Hatzaïr, a movement of left-wing Zionist Jews, had withdrawn from the organisation after having requested in vain the prohibition of a T-shirt on which was printed, “The world stopped Nazism. The world stopped apartheid. The world will stop Zionism”. Outside the alterglobalisation movement, members of the Parti socialiste (like Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Vincent Peillon and Manuel Valls) questioned their participation in the forum given that it welcomed Tariq Ramadan. Among them, Malek Boutih said that he “did not understand the presence of Ramadan” at the forum. At the same time, the Trotskyists from the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR) refused to see the slightest anti-Semitism in Tariq Ramadan’s article and one of the leaders of the Verts, Noël Mamère, considered the criticisms aimed at Tariq Ramadan as a “means of destabilising the ESF”.

Tariq Ramadan’s text was effectively anti-Semitic since there was essentialism in his treatment of his targets rather than his text being limited to a discussion of ideas. So much so that some of the intellec-tuals referred to as Jews may not have been Jewish at all. It shook the left and the extreme left. Some of their leaders thought along the same lines; others were up in arms. It is a good illustration of how legitimate criticism of Israeli policy can become distorted and veer towards anti-Semitism. But it had another effect: it had somehow allowed a Muslim intellectual to break into the media at the highest level. Le Monde was well aware of this, putting Tariq Ramadan on the front page with banner headlines announcing a pro� le of him. Ramadan himself had succeeded in rising to the same level as the most famous of the ‘media’ intellectuals, Bernard-Henri Lévy. He was positively jubilant in the article he wrote in reply which was published in Le Point (n° 1622, 17 October 2003):



No, Mr Lévy, I am not an imam. I can understand it is dif� cult for you to treat me as an equal (after all, you have been accustomed to taking a paternalist attitude which apparently gave you the right to think on behalf of the ‘jeunes beurs’27 for such a long time) . . .

Similarly, on 14 November 2003, at the European Social Forum, he said:

One does not reply to a person who writes books [he is referring to himself ] by cobbling together something worthy of the banlieue press [he is referring to Bernard-Henri Lévy] . . . well, I have nothing against the banlieue press. . . . What I meant to say was the society press.

He also declared that he had always condemned anti-Semitism. There-after there were more criticisms and also more expressions of support together with a brief televised debate with Nicolas Sarkozy, the Min-ister of the Interior. Tariq Ramadan, with his text and its shocking content, marked the arrival of a new set of players on the intellectual media scene who challenge the French version of universalism which prevailed until then.

If we consider the intellectual argument alone, Tariq Ramadan con-structed his intervention around the theme of the classical opposition between universalism and particularism. He argued that the Jewish intellectuals who in the past had identi� ed most closely with universal-ism had now switched to particularism. But two of his main targets, Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Lévy do not occupy exactly the same position and it may be useful to explain where they differ. Alain Finkielkraut is indeed primarily an incarnation of the republican form of universalism, which wants to see in the public sphere only individuals who are free and equal before the law. The weakness of his republican leanings is that they come on top of Finkielkraut’s rather high pro� le as a Jewish intellectual who is listened to and admired in the Jewish community, with the result that he has a dif� cult balancing act to per-form between rigorous Republicanism and the af� rmation of a speci� c identity. Bernard-Henri Lévy primarily personi� es the universalism of human rights and is not particularly associated with any sort of ‘Republicanism’. While he is respected amongst the Jewish commu-nity, he is less of a charismatic � gure than Finkielkraut. Furthermore,

27 Translator’s note: ‘beur’ is a second-generation North African born in France.


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the accusation that he unconditionally supports Israeli policy, including that of Sharon, is totally unfounded.

Tariq Ramadan’s accusation hits the model represented by Finkiel-kraut—the intellectual performing a balancing act—harder than the model represented by Lévy, which, is ultimately more traditional. But, in any event, it is an indication of a change in the tenor of the debate in France which, with � gures like Ramadan,28 will be less and less able to make do with the universal alone and will be forced more and more to open up to cultural differences. There is a heavy price to pay for opening up: the way in which it was achieved is open to question, given that it allowed anti-Semitic remarks.

On the Left and the Extreme Left

Modern anti-Semitism is not the monopoly of the radical and nationalist right. It also has a long history on the left. Hence we can go back to the Enlightenment and Voltaire; look to Camille Desmoulins or Marat29 during the French Revolution; then consider some of the writings of Karl Marx, Fourier or Proudhon.30 More recently, communist parties and regimes have proved actively anti-Semitic with Jews personifying money, capitalism and even American imperialism but also, in some cases, unfair competition for ‘national’31 executives. In Central Europe under Soviet domination and where purges had almost eliminated the last Jews, we have even witnessed ‘anti-Semitism without Jews’ in the words of the journalist Paul Lendvaï,32 possibly used as a tool by the authorities. Communist parties and regimes have not always been hostile to the State of Israel. For a time, Joseph Stalin supported Israel, most probably to counter the British in� uence in the Middle East. But, on the whole communist parties and regimes have tended

28 Cf. also on Tariq Ramadan, Gilles Képel, Fitna, guerre au cœur de l’islam, Paris, Gallimard, 2004.

29 Cf. for example Arthur Hertzberg, Les Origines de l’antisémitisme moderne, Paris, Presses de la Renaissance, 2004 (1968).

30 Cf. for Karl Marx in particular, “On the Jewish question” published for the � rst time in the Annales franco-allemandes in 1844.

31 Cf. for example, in relation to Poland, Michel Wieviorka, Les Juifs, la Pologne et Solidarnosc, Paris, Denoël, 1984.

32 Paul Lendvaï, L’Antisémitisme sans Juifs, Paris, Fayard, 1971.



to demonstrate an anti-Zionism which has sometimes degenerated into anti-Semitism or become mixed up with it. There is therefore nothing new about the fact that anti-Semitism has been able to work its way into the left and the extreme left, and not only onto the other side of the political chessboard.

In France today, it is clear from the Israel-Palestine con� ict that such an observation must be made without excluding other geopoliti-cal aspects which, then, refer more widely to a critique of American imperialism and to possible ideological backing for various regimes in the Arab-Muslim world.

Once again, various affairs or polemics offer insight into, if not the reality of anti-Semitism, at least the problems which simply suspecting it can arouse. Some of these originate in current events, and involve radical political stances including anti-capitalism, anti-neoliberalism, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli and anti-American positions occasionally extending into expressions of anti-Semitism of varying degrees. There have been several instances of this in the Parti socialiste where tensions have often run high in this area. Thus, in April 2001, Pascal Boniface, a member of the party and a specialist in international relations, direc-tor of the Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques (IRIS), sent a memorandum which he had written on the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict to the � rst secretary of the Parti socialiste, François Hollande, and to the international secretary, Henri Nallet. In it he sharply criticised the policy of the State of Israel and its breaches of international law. He observed that supporting this State despite everything could become counter-productive for the Parti socialiste:

I am struck [. . .] by how things have progressed amongst young people, particularly students, who were very split on the subject of the Middle East twenty years ago and are today massively pro-Palestinian [. . .]. By relying on its electoral weight to ensure the impunity of the Israeli government, the Jewish community may be the loser in the not too distant future. The Muslim community, and/or those of Muslim descent, who are also becoming organised, will wish to counteract this and, at least in France, will weigh heavily in the balance, if this is not already the case [. . .] I am struck by the number of young “beurs” and of French Muslims of all ages who say they are on the left but who, because of the situation in the Middle East, state that they do not wish to vote for Jospin in the presidential elections.

The memorandum was distributed and a very bitter polemic ensued, in the columns of Le Monde in particular where an article by Pascal Boniface


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carried considerable weight. Accused of attacking the French Jewish community, Boniface wrote in a book which was later published:

Anything I had said which could be considered compatible with the interests of Israel had been erased, as if I had to be demonised at any price, as if it had to be proved to the reader at any price that the Jews only have implacable enemies who tar them all with the same brush.33

He was mainly accused of having attempted to bring pressure to bear on the Parti socialiste to endeavour to secure the votes of the popula-tion of Arab-Muslim origin by distancing it from Israel, even if that meant losing votes in the Jewish community, which was much smaller. He was then accused of identity politics—quite simply of giving preference to the Arab or Muslim community rather than the Jewish community. And within the Parti socialiste some party of� cials went as far as blaming him for the defeat of Lionel Jospin at the presidential elections in April 2002. “Le Pen should thank Pascal Boniface,” were the words of a Parti socialiste leader in the Val-de-Marne at the time in a circular in which he explained that Jospin lost the Jewish vote as a result of the positions defended by Pascal Boniface. Later, within the Parti socialiste remarks could be heard or attitudes observed reasserting, or even stiffening, the position of Boniface. For example, Kader Arif (� rst federal secretary of the Parti socialiste in Haute Garonne) boycotted the dinner given by the Midi-Pyrénées CRIF ( January 2004). In an open letter ( June 2003), Frédérique Sprang asked, “How much longer are these pro-Israeli organisations going to continue to intimidate all those in France who criticise the policy carried out by Ariel Sharon in the occupied territories, by accusing them of anti-Semitism?”

It is unfair to accuse Pascal Boniface of anti-Semitism, unless any criticism of Israel is to be taken as proof of hatred towards the Jews in general. But there was no shortage of accusations and, most importantly here, these accusations had considerable in� uence within the Parti sociali-

ste. Does this mean that the party is resolved to distance itself from any criticism of Israel which is too trenchant? The answer is not so simple. For we also have an example of someone at the centre of a controversy in the Parti socialiste for the opposite reason. One of its elected members,

33 Pascal Boniface, Est-il permis de critiquer Israël?, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2003, p. 207.



François Zimeray, who, along with others, had launched a petition of 170 members of the European Parliament, requested a committee of inquiry into the use of the European funds allocated by the European Community to the Palestinian Authority and denounced the way the Palestinian school textbooks spoke about Jews. François Zimeray had also been behind the decision of the publisher, Delagrave, to withdraw a book for technical school students (CAP) which included somewhat dubious passages and, in particular, an exercise in which an unjusti� ed link was suggested between the Jews in general and the Israel-Palestine con� ict. Ostracised by his local section, excluded from the Socialist list for the European elections, Zimeray was accused in February 2003, in a letter from the Socialist president of the Upper-Normandy region “of transposing an exceedingly complex con� ict [. . .] Your electoral mandate imposes on you a genuine respect for positions which have been taken collectively. You have involved us against our will”.

The Parti socialiste is in no way open to anti-Semitism. However, it is regularly taken to task by those who would like it to adopt positions more distinctly favourable to the state of Israel and its policies, as well as by those who, on the contrary, would like to see it clearly distanc-ing itself from them. It is under pressure. The Parti communiste (PC) is in a slightly different situation. Its leaders support the idea of the coexistence of two states, Palestinian and Israeli, but among the rank and � le, anti-American sentiment inherited from the Cold War period is powerful and is prolonged by an anti-Zionism which sees in Israel a bridgehead of the United States. However, it is not really within the PC that we observe the most radical tendencies to move from criticism of Israel to anti-Semitism.

With the Verts, pro-Palestinian positions can drift towards attitudes or remarks which, while not anti-Semitic, do provide anti-Semitism with a sort of support or political legitimacy. Their spokesperson in Paris, Aurélie Filippetti made a speech expressing her anger after the demon-stration against the war in Iraq on 22 March 2003—a demonstration during which slogans hostile to Jews, and not only to Israel, were heard and during which young left-wing Zionists were attacked. She explained in Libération (29–30 March 2003) that “when an Israeli � ag is burnt, it is not Sharon’s policy which is being condemned but the very existence of a Jewish state. It is therefore anti-Semitism and not anti-Zionism”. She said she would like her party to be both clearly pro-Palestinian and


44 chapter three

Zionist. But, she remarked, “The word “Zionist” triggered a hue and cry. I was called a colonialist, a revisionist . . .”.34 Her account of the internal discussions within the Verts is evidence of a mass refusal on the part of militants and party of� cials to accept ‘Zionism’—the existence, in fact, of the State of Israel. Alain Lipietz retorted, “You are insulting my family because, when they came out of the camps, they refused to go to Israel”; Yves Contassot told her that she had no business discussing the dossier because she knew nothing about it; Patrick Farbiaz, “who is pro-Palestinian through and through, lost his temper and ended up saying, “Anyway, you are not even Jewish, what has it got to do with you? I am Jewish—I know what it’s about, whereas you—you can have nothing to say in the matter”. She commented, “We were going round in circles. They refused to go to the nub of the debate: recognising the speci� city of anti-Semitism in France”.

In fact, the Verts are divided. There is a ‘left wing’ whose radical, intransigent anti-Zionism can pave the way to an anti-Semitism, which follows in its wake under the cover of a political party which is not in itself anti-Semitic. There are also “young bloods” who, like Aurélie Filippetti, oppose anti-Israeli hyperbole and the risks of distortion which they lay open. But, in public life, it tends to be the left of the Verts which is in control. After Aurelie Filippetti’s intervention in favour of the two � ags, Israeli and Palestinian, during the next demonstration against the war in Iraq, she recounted that

the Verts, at national level decided that there would be no � ags in their procession [. . .]. But, in the demonstration on 29 March, there were Palestinian � ags everywhere, as well as Iraqi � ags, photos of Saddam Hussein and anti-Semitic slogans.

And what had been at issue in the protests against the war in Iraq came up again in other circumstances, for example during the European Social Forum (November 2003) where the Verts, on the whole, tended to be in favour of Tariq Ramadan’s presence, or else when Gilles Lemaire, their national secretary, got up and left the dinner given by the CRIF after its president, Roger Cukierman, denounced the existence of a ‘red-brown-green’ anti-Semitic alliance. Lemaire later explained that, “Today Israel exists. We are not challenging its legitimacy. On the other hand, the necessity of it is another question”.35

34 Interview published in L’Arche, n° 546–547, August-September 2003.35 Interview published in Tohu Bohu, May-June 2003.



On the extreme left, the anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian positions are clear and close to those which have just been described with reference to those on the left of the Verts. There is no explicit anti-Semitism there, but instead a political radicalism so intransigent towards Israel that it has no counterpart when it comes to other states or regimes, however brutal or dictatorial, including in the Middle East. As this situation does, in some cases, lead extreme left organisations to make misguided alli-ances, in particular with various forms of Islam of varying degrees of extremity, it also brings them closer to anti-Semitic discourse or attitudes. But it is not amongst the established extreme left—that of the Ligue com-

muniste révolutionnaire (LCR) or the Parti des travailleurs (PT ) or Lutte ouvrière

(LO)—that we are likely to � nd what are the true foundations of the anti-Semitism linked to absolute anti-Zionism, that is, negationism. This manifests itself explicitly elsewhere, in small, extreme or very marginal groups and still more in infrapolitical networks on the Web.

One point is worth emphasising here: amongst the most radical pro-Palestinian militants, in the Verts, in some alterglobalist movements, as well as in the extreme left, there are some people who are not only Jewish but who explicitly assert a Jewish identity or origin which they proclaim as a sort of further proof of the legitimacy of their position. They lend a singular emphasis to the radical anti-Zionism which they promote, appearing to guarantee by their very presence that it cannot involve any anti-Semitism. Now these people are brought into close contact with more or less veiled expressions of hatred for Jews on the back of trends from within their organisations, amongst their allies or during certain events when it springs from their own ranks or those who identify with them. Does their position express a desire to dissolve their origins or their af� liations in the melting pot of universal values? A desire for an action which would extend to � ghting more systematically than anyone else those who personify the identity which they reject, or even any similar type of identity, beginning with the very form of the nation state?36 Or should we see here the ideological legacy of mili-tants who, Jewish or not, learned their politics in the 1960s or 1970s?

36 For an example of an argument which attributes a form of self-hatred to Jews, cf. Shmuel Trigano, La demission de la République. Juifs et musulmans en France, Paris, PUF, 2003, p. 80 in relation to the ‘Israelites’ of the 19th century: “Accusing one’s own people helps them to give themselves the illusion of lessening the burden of anguish, by letting themselves believe that there is some truth in the accusation made against their group and therefore that the hostility towards them is not as mysterious and irrational as it appears to be.”


46 chapter three

This hypothesis stresses, if not May ’68, at least the leftism of the 1970s as the prism through which extreme left militants would interpret the world, their identi� cation in particular with the Palestinian cause appar-ently enabling them to continue their erstwhile campaigns, linked with the war in Vietnam and anti-colonialism. From this point of view, Israel is a brutal, colonial even racist state in its dealings with the people which it oppresses. It personi� es the worst and calls for denunciation which, surprisingly, is not extended to other regimes which are nevertheless obviously much more obnoxious:

From the Viet Minh to the Viet Cong, from the Algerian FLN to the Vietnamese FLN, the symbolic sharing of representations of good and evil tolerated no nuances. Any alliance was justi� ed against the main imperia-list enemy of which Zionism was the ultimate form [. . .] the role devolved to Israel was that of Nazi Germany in these substitution games.37

We ought to remember that it was in November 1975 that the General Assembly of the United Nations voted by a large majority—made up, in particular, of Arab States, countries from the Soviet bloc and African states—resolution 3379 which likened Zionism to a form of racism. The result of this resolution was to encourage third-world or anti-American thinking to the point of view that an anti-Israeli position was legitimate. The most tenacious in the criticism of pro-Palestinian ‘leftism’ usually make a close association between the crystallisation of the anti-Zionist positions which they observe and anti-Semitism. As lawyer Goldnadel wrote:

There is nothing to justify the opprobrium to which it (the State of Israel) is subjected,—not only is it exceptional, it is totally unique—nothing, except anti-Semitism. Of all the nation-states, the Jewish state is the most condemned, the most racist, the most sexist, the greatest threat to the environment and archaeology, the least respectful of liberties. It is the state which poses the greatest threat to world peace, the terrorist state par excellence, the state which is the greatest enemy of human rights [. . .]—these superlatives on all fronts, this literally infernal disproportion, this obsessive focus, this non-Jewish Israeli centrism are indeed the stamp of the devil.38

37 Jacques Tarnero, “Une maladie de l’âme”, in Nouveaux Visages de l’antisémitisme. Haine-passion ou haine historique, op. cit., pp. 245–266.

38 Gilles William Goldnadel, op. cit., pp. 117–118.



Here anti-Semitism is to be found in the � xation with Israel while there are many other problems and many other causes to which passions and ideologies could and should attach themselves. There is indeed something troubling here.

We should add that, since the 1980s, the rise of Islam and Islamism has been forcing the heirs of post-68 leftism to compromise with play-ers who shape phenomena which are no longer national but politico-religious (like the Palestinian cause or even the Arab cause). Today, the anti-Semitism which may perpetuate an anti-Zionism based on identi� cation with the Palestinian cause—when it does not predate it—is not the only phenomenon at issue. When it adds momentum to a possibly warlike and terrorist militant Islamism, it poses a new challenge to extreme left militants and organisations or comparable groups.


CHAPTER FOUR

THE SHOAH: DEFICIT, PLETHORA AND LOSS OF MEANING

If there is currently an upsurge or renewal of anti-Semitism, is this not primarily because some defences have been breached and because what could have protected the Jews ten or 20 years ago is now proving to be much less ef� cient? Such a hypothesis can be expressed in speci� c terms as follows: must we acknowledge that the memory of the Shoah, after having taken some time to penetrate the collective consciousness has now entered a phase of decline or a period in which it is open to challenge?

In the French consciousness and collective memory, the destruction of the European Jews by the Nazis is perceived today as a fact which nobody would deny, except those misguided, particularly ignorant or wicked souls, the negationists. However, we should not deduce from this general comment that this has always been the case since the end of World War II; nor should we imagine that this is something which will be obvious for all time, or even central to the image which French society has of itself, its history and its past. On the contrary: the Shoah, as a historical fact, follows a speci� c trajectory. To begin with, it was marginalised or repressed, even by historians; it then attracted atten-tion and exerted considerable in� uence before weakening and entering the present period where various challenges to its authenticity either banalise or relativise it.

De� cit of Meaning

At the end of World War II, the systematic destruction of the Jews did not have the standing in public discussion that it was later able to have. It is worth taking a transnational approach to the question by considering two other experiences, besides the French experience, of which the impact on our country in this respect has been considerable: namely that of the United States and Israel.


the shoah: deficit, plethora and loss of meaning 49

In the United States, as Peter Novick has recalled in his important book, The Holocaust in American Life, the Shoah � rst appeared as merely one aspect of a war which had comprised many other aspects. Until the end of the 1950s it did not loom large in public debate and was not even a major concern in the public discourse of American Jews. All sorts of reasons have been advanced to account for this inhibi-tion and Novick proposes a particularly rich list. The Holocaust, as he points out, as we understand it today, was not what stood out at the time because Nazi barbarism was directed against many other peoples beside the Jews, who were not its only victims. The survivors were not the focus of attention they are today; our image of them was predominantly negative, even if their fate did arouse sympathy; their stories often bored people. The far-reaching geopolitical changes of the time had a considerable impact. The Cold War meant that the images of atrocities associated with Nazism were transferred to a new, Soviet, enemy and both the Nazi and Soviet regimes were yoked together in a common denunciation of totalitarianism, which weakened the percep-tion of the speci� city of Nazism—which, of course, resided primarily in the destruction of the Jews. The Cold War had the effect of “mar-ginalizing the Holocaust . . . it was the displaced victims of Stalin, not of Hitler, who were fashionable . . .”1 As Novick says, “the Holocaust was historicized”, (it had not yet), “attained transcendent status as the bearer of eternal truths or lessons”2—unlike Hiroshima which “had a much greater impact on Americans”.3 American Jews had the same con� dence in American society as the Americans had at the time; they felt they were integrated; they were no longer a foreign element and in these circumstances were:

not going to be inclined to center the Holocaust in their consciousness [. . .] The upbeat and universalist postwar mood not only muted discussions of the Holocaust, it colored what discussion there was.4

In other words, at this point in time, the Jews in the United States were endeavouring to think of their experience in positive terms,

1 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Houghton Mif� in Co., 1999, page 110.

2 Novick, op. cit., pages 88–89.3 Id., p. 110.4 Id., p. 114.


50 chapter four

including that of World War II, as witnessed by the huge success at the time of the Diary of Anne Frank and its adaptations for stage and screen which focussed on the optimism and ‘universalism’ of Anne in contrast to the interpretations given 30 or 40 years later.

Nor were the years of the construction of Israel a period during which the Holocaust was particularly prominent. Early on, during World War II, the destruction of the European Jews was not the major issue which it was to become much later. This, in any event, is the argu-ment—hotly debated, to be sure—used by the ‘new Israeli historians’ who, like Tom Segev,5 consider, for example, that information about local or regional conditions during the years preceding the creation of the Hebrew State often carried more weight than information about the destruction of the Jews by the Nazis. Furthermore, recent discus-sions amongst Israeli historians have focussed on the hypothesis of a disjunction between the birth of Israel and the awareness of what the Holocaust was; this runs contrary to the current idea according to which Israel is the outcome of the guilt and stupefaction of nations all over the world on discovering the extent of Nazi barbarism towards the Jews.6 An equally controversial issue today, in particular amongst Israeli historians, is what Segev has referred to as the ‘denial of the Diaspora’. Were the future leaders of Israel and the Zionists in general more con-cerned during the war about the making of the state than about the Jews in Europe who were being destroyed? Were they, as Tuvia Friling contests, for example, not capable of rising to “the challenge which the Shoah represented for them at both theoretical and practical level”?7 Did they abandon the European Jews to their fate? Did they not, on the contrary, do everything in their power to save them? Whatever the case may be, the fact remains that the � rst years of the State of Israel were not dominated by the theme, or the cult, of the memory of the Shoah which was to be established later.

In France, the Jews who survived the camps often wanted to talk about their experiences. As Annette Wieviorka has shown,8 and contrary to

5 Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, New York, Hill and Wang, 1993.

6 Cf. Peter Novick, op. cit., p. 71.7 Tuvia Friling, “David Ben Gourion et la Shoah. Racines et évolutions d’un sté-

réotype négatif ”, Critique du postsionisme, “Réponse aux nouveaux historiens”, T. Friling, ed. Editions In Press, 2004, p. 490.

8 Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et Génocide. Entre la mémoire et l’oubli, Paris, Plon, 1992.



Michael Pollak’s9 general thesis, this experience was not indescribable. However, any reference to it—with its speci� cally anti-Jewish hostil-ity—met with refusal or a total incapacity to listen and to hear. At the time, when they were being subjected to the humiliation in� icted by the torturers in the camps, some Jewish prisoners, like Simone Weil who has discussed this,10 had the feeling that they were despised by the other prisoners because they were Jewish. There were also occasions when they discovered, when the camps were liberated, that their lives were less important, in the eyes of the liberators, than those of the political prisoners or members of the Resistance. Their lives thereafter proved particularly harrowing. Total disbelief hung over any talk of the destruction of the Jews to the point of sti� ing it, as did the stigmatis-ing attitude of those who implied that survival was shameful and even the reproach—why had they not rebelled? Very recent history (that of collaboration) also had an impact, as did the political situation with Communists and Gaullists uniting in a cult of the Resistance, leaving little room for the evocation of a drama speci� c to the Jews alone. Moreover, the Jews themselves were more interested in participating in the reconstruction which was taking place in a climate of relative con� dence in and optimism about the future. They wanted to be an integral part of French style universalism, or became involved in politi-cal campaigns in which there was no cause to proclaim their speci� city. The particularly idealistic Jews who chose to return to the European countries under Soviet rule, especially to Poland, to build a true socialism represented an extreme case. Sooner or later most became disillusioned, often, moreover, as a result of anti-Semitic campaigns.

Hence, the years 1945–1967 were, as Jean-Michel Chaumont11 wrote, the years of the ‘period of shame’, of eclipsing the speci� cally anti-Semitic nature of Nazi barbarism, the accusation of passivity which likened the Jews, rounded up and taken to camps, to sheep being led to the slaughter and culminated in blaming them for what had hap-pened to them.

For a more precise picture, we would have to take examples from other countries and participate in discussions about the ‘passivity’ of

9 Michael Pollak, L’Expérience concentrationnaire. Essai sur le maintien de l’identité sociale, Paris, A-M.Métailié, 1990.

10 Cf. for example Maurice Szafran, Simone Veil. Destin, Paris, Flammarion, 1994.11 Jean-Michel Chaumont, La Concurrence des victimes. Génocide, identité, reconnaissance,

Paris, La Découverte, 1997.


52 chapter four

the Jews in particular, or take part in the discussions on Israeli histo-riography. But we have said enough to enable us to make an initial observation: for twenty years after the war, there was no mention in France either of the ‘Holocaust’ or of the ‘Shoah’. The term ‘Holo-caust’ only emerged in the United States towards the end of the 1970s, before it met with a degree of success in Western Europe, while the word ‘Shoah’ only really became widespread in France in the 1980s with Claude Lanzmann’s � lm of this title. In the western world, anti-Semitism seemed to be doomed by its own excesses, associated with Nazism, while at the same time there seemed to be a kind of de� cit of meaning in anything to do with the Jewish experience outside Israel, and in particular of anything which might refer to the systematic destruction implemented by Hitler. This de� cit was to last until the 1960s.

Plethora of Meanings

At this point, however, everything does change, and perhaps � rst in terms of events in the Middle East and more precisely in Israel. Two facts of prime importance in Israel were to have an impact throughout the world in conferring meaning on what the Nazi enterprise of the destruction of the European Jews actually involved.

In 1961, the leader of the Israeli government, Ben Gurion, announced to the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, that Adolf Eichmann had been arrested and his forthcoming trial would take place in Jerusalem. The man who had been amongst those in charge of the implementation of the � nal solution had been discovered, arrested and secretly trans-ported from Argentina to Israel by the Israeli secret services. He was tried by Jewish judges, before a press which had come from all over the world—including the philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who covered the trial for The New Yorker.12 Countless testimonies were solicited; in Annette Wieviorka’s13 words, the age of the witness was born. The event demonstrated that the Jews now had a state capable of ensuring justice even if, as far as Argentina was concerned, it meant ignoring international law. Israel was holding a trial where the international

12 She published an important book on the basis of her reporting, Eichmann in Jeru-salem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York, Viking Press, (1963).

13 Annette Wieviorka, L’Ère du témoin, Paris, Plon, 1998.



community, by leaving Eichmann free and unpunished, had failed for over � fteen years and this trial was followed with enthusiasm in Israel. But it also went much further than the trial of Eichmann alone; it afforded an opportunity to discuss the destruction of the European Jews and the death camps, and to put an end to the inhibition or repression, while at the same time recognising that Israel enabled the Jews to join a negative identity—that of a group of people who were the victims of a policy of destruction—with a proud, positive identity—that of a community capable of acting in a free and responsible manner.

Five years later in 1967, the Israeli Army won a lightning war, the so-called Six Day War, against a coalition of Arab countries who were preparing to attack Israel. Feelings ran high throughout the world. The Israeli success put an end to the image of the Jew incapable of defending himself or even the image of the frightened Jew. It also forced international opinion to confront the possibility of an Israeli defeat, which would have brought the existence of the Hebrew State to a dramatic end—according to the Arab leaders, the intention was “to throw the Jews into the sea”. Many Jews in the Diaspora, who, until then, had been indifferent or even hostile to the construction of this state, adopted positive feelings towards it. Against the background of the alarm after the event and of Jewish pride, the voice of the Jews in the Diaspora was liberated and made itself heard: the death camps and the terrible years of World War II were revisited; the cinema, lit-erature and history took up the subject from this angle. The Six Day War widened the breach opened by the Eichmann trial and gave the Shoah meaning.

In the United States, having given rise to various criticisms, in par-ticular of the conduct of the Israeli agents in Argentina, the trial of Adolf Eichmann afforded an opportunity to offer up for public debate the theme and even the word, Holocaust, the English translation of the Hebrew word, Shoah, suggested by the Israelis themselves. The destruc-tion of the European Jews was thus beginning to acquire speci� city in the general view of Nazism. The showing of the play, The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth on Broadway in 1964 at the time when Vatican II was drawing to a close in Rome, created a scandal, because it described how Pope Pius XII, when confronted with Nazism, had chosen to promote the interests of the Catholic Church rather than concerning himself with the fate of the Jews. We have to follow Peter Novick here when he states that, “The Eichmann trial, along with the controversies over


54 chapter four

Arendt’s book and Hochhuth’s play, effectively broke � fteen years of near silence on the Holocaust in American public discourse.”14

From then on, there was a ‘reversal of values’, in the words of Jean-Michel Chaumont, whereby the Holocaust was not only understood and perceived as a phenomenon in all its dimensions, but whereby American Jews, under the guidance of Elie Wiesel, declared the uniqueness of the genocide of the Jews and made of it something to be proud of and no longer a source of shame. Jean Michel Chaumont has recounted how a few weeks before the Six Day War a symposium which brought together four important Jewish public � gures (Emil Fackenheim, Rich-ard H. Popkin, George Steiner and Elie Wiesel) marked a milestone. There they discussed the Shoah as “a glorious chapter in our eternal history”, and stressed its uniqueness and singularity: in short, American Jews and a considerable proportion of American public opinion had made the transition—henceforth the Shoah had become meaningful in the United States. The impact of the Six Day War was consider-able: it brought the United States and Israel closer together while at the same time reinforcing awareness of the extent and speci� city of the Holocaust.

In France, the events referred to above (the Eichmann trial, the Six Day War) were to have the same effects as in the United States. But the change, which was identical in nature, with public opinion focussing on the Shoah, was also based on other factors. Some were demographic: with decolonisation, many Jews had just come from North Africa. They were Sephardic Jews who brought with them not only the vitality of their community and a greater observance of religious practices, but also sensitivities which differed from those of the Jews in France, most of whom are of Ashkenazi origin who emigrated from Central Europe before World War II—they are survivors. The North African Jews are attached to the State of Israel and have little knowledge of the power-ful Jewish political non-Zionist or anti-Zionist movements in Europe, such as the Bund; they are less Republican in outlook and more likely to have a visible presence in the public sphere. They remember the violence to which they may have been subjected in the past, but have not been confronted directly with the Shoah. Furthermore, at the end of the 1960s, France entered into a more general phase of doubt, questioning the universalistic notions of progress and reason as they

14 Peter Novick, op. cit., p. 144.



had been forged by the Enlightenment, the Republican idea or ideolo-gies of the communist type. The arrival of the Holocaust on the scene was facilitated, and also co-produced, by the rise of more widespread sensitivities, which called for the recognition of speci� cities, such as regional ones, including those of the Jewish experience and of the speci� city of the Holocaust.

On another level, speci� c to France, the change also came from the diplomatic turning point implemented by General de Gaulle who, now that the Algerian War was over, went back to the project of a grand-scale Arab policy. The alliance between France and Israel was no longer in favour: in a press conference in 1967, General de Gaulle referred to the Jews as a “chosen people, sure of themselves and domineering”, remarks which had the effect not only of alienating part of the Jewish population in the country, but also of suggesting that the Republican model of integration, con� ning the Jews purely and simply to assimila-tion was not an absolute guarantee for them. This also created a climate conducive to the af� rmation of a Jewish identity, including in the public sphere. And this identity would be constructed to include not only a strong identi� cation with the State of Israel but also extreme sensitivity to anything which could in any way bring to mind the Holocaust.

However, to date France has not really undertaken the labour of remembrance and re� ection which World War II demands: a past which, with Vichy and collaboration, is not con� ned to the Resistance. Indeed, it is this same climate which allows, if not a recognition of the central importance of the destruction of the Jews to Nazi barbarism and the role of France in this experience, at least a serious consider-ation of the Vichy period. Thus, we witnessed the fairly rapid success of Marcel Ophuls’ (1971) � lm, Le Chagrin et la Pitié, or books on this period, beginning with the American historian, Robert Paxton’s, Vichy

France: Old Guard and New Order (1973).

Once again, more detailed work would reveal other internal and external factors which may have contributed to the emergence or recognition of the Shoah as central to the experience of Nazism and to the memory of the countries which have just been mentioned. Furthermore, it might bring into play other aspects speci� c to other countries (Germany in particular). But here too, the main point to note is what is revealed by a study of the 1960s, however incomplete and super� cial: the co-production at global level, with national speci� ci-ties, of an awareness of the unique and central nature of the Shoah in western experience. The destruction of the European Jews by the


56 chapter four

Nazis had little meaning in public debate in the 1950s; it was now to take on its full meaning.

Indeed, for some twenty years, the Jews in the Diaspora lived through a golden age protected by the meaning or the ever greater signi� cance of the Shoah in western public opinion. From being marginal, the Shoah, in effect, moved not only to a central position in Jewish consciousness but also, on a broader scale, in Western consciousness. It guaranteed a form of absolute protection, a powerful defence against any risk of anti-Semitic tendencies.

In the United States, the ‘golden age’ for American Jews became ‘even more golden’15 despite their repeated references to the reappearance of anti-Semitism. In fact, the 1960s and 1970s are the years during which discrimination against Jews totally disappeared from the land and opinion polls showed a decline in anti-Semitism. At the same time, the Holocaust came to be the heart of the image which American Jews had of themselves, perhaps core to the de� nition of Jewish identity, as Peter Novick suggests (but this interpretation has been criticised), not least as a result of the activity of American Jewish organisations. Nevertheless, the Holocaust is not, for all that, a Jewish speci� city; it has entered into American consciousness as witnessed, for example, by its place in the school curricula or even in Hollywood productions for cinema and television. The success of the Holocaust series (April 1978) was that of a revelation, in melodramatic form, of the destruction of the European Jews. Fifteen years later, the success of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) was based on far superior historical and cinemato-graphic qualities. Novick quotes a 1990 opinion poll which showed that a clear majority of Americans considered that the Holocaust “had been the worst tragedy in history”.

In France, the general development was very comparable. From being marginal in the collective French consciousness, the Holocaust was to become the most ef� cient defence possible against anti-Semitism, with the term giving way in 1985 to that of Shoah, popularised by Claude Lanzmann’s � lm—a � lm which perhaps marks the apogee in the pro-cess of becoming aware of and attributing a powerful meaning to the Holocaust. Simone de Beauvoir wrote:

[. . .] Seeing Claude Lanzmann’s extraordinary � lm today, we realise that we knew nothing. Despite all our knowledge, the atrocious experience

15 Id. p. 175.



remained remote from us. For the � rst time, we experience it in our minds, our hearts and our bodies. It becomes ours [. . .]. Shoah succeeds in recreating the past [. . .]. Like all the spectators, I mix the past with the present [. . .]. It is this confusion which characterises the miraculous aspect of Shoah.16

In literature, on television, in the cinema and at the theatre, but also in the social sciences, beginning with history, which seemed to be work-ing twice as hard to make up for lost time, the genocide of the Jews penetrated far beyond the Jewish consciousness. In France, it is also part of the school curriculum. After understanding or considering the Vichy regime somewhat late in the day, society, and sometimes the judiciary was coming to grips with this past. In 1981, Le Canard enchaîné launched the Papon affair; this high-ranking civil servant was accused of crimes against humanity in 1983 and sentenced in 1998 to ten years in prison for complicity in crimes against humanity. In July 1987, Klaus Barbie was sentenced in Lyon, again for crimes against humanity. Paul Touvier, who was arrested in May 1989 and judged in 1994, died in prison in July 1996. On 8 June 1993, René Bousquet, who had been general secretary of the Vichy police, was assassinated by a mentally unbalanced person just when a complaint had been � led against him for crimes against humanity.

In France, the fear of a resurgence of anti-Semitism nonetheless lives on, attributed to its old protagonists, the extreme right. It was revived by the terrorist attacks in October 1980 (Rue Copernic, in Paris) and in August 1982 on the Goldenberg restaurant (Rue des Rosiers in Paris)—although these attacks were the work of people from the Middle East. Against a historical background favourable to the victims, the Jews in France found in the Shoah what seemed to be a staunch form of protection: had they not survived the most absolute barbarism, the inhumanity of a project of destruction which could not be anything other than repulsive to the whole world? For all the political powers, the Christian authorities which had accomplished their aggiornamento with Vatican II, the heads of educational and judicial institutions, the spectre of the Shoah and, sometimes, the acts of penitence, made it impossible to envisage a further wave of anti-Semitism. The slightest signs of revival, whether real or imagined, were immediately � agged

16 In the preface to Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (the full text of the � lm), Paris, Fayard, 1985, pp. 7–10.


58 chapter four

up, denounced and repressed. At the same time, an active policy was implemented, some examples of which we have just listed, including material reparations by public bodies as a result of the Mattéoli mission, which in turn had been set up in a general climate in which the main initiatives came from the United States. In the France of the 1970s and 1980s, considerable space was devoted to the Shoah forming a defence against the resurgence of anti-Semitism, which could only operate at the margins. It was not surprising that the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Carpentras in 1990, which had long been attributed to the Front national in various circles was the work, as we were to learn six years later, of young neo-Nazis and not of this party. The Front

national’s strategy was to act not in a violent and directly anti-Semitic manner, but at an ideological level, by attacking, precisely, the theme of the Shoah, and that only since the mid-1980s.

Loss of Meaning

In France, since the 1980s, the Shoah has had to compete with other tragic events. It has been banalised and weakened. As a result, it has lost some of its meaning. This has occurred despite the resolute politi-cal stance adopted by those in the top political posts. One of Jacques Chirac’s � rst gestures, on being elected President of the Republic for the � rst time, was to make an important speech in which he recognised the responsibility of the French State in the Vichy period.

From the time of its emergence in the public arena in the 1960s, the prominence of the Holocaust had the paradoxical effect of producing effects contrary to those evoked above. By encouraging Jews to set this historical event at the centre of their identity, and in the public sphere, this prominence made victims of them and gave them visibility. Now other groups, peoples and nations, de� ned in ethnic, racial or religious terms have been subjected to barbarism, genocide, slavery and mass crimes: one consequence of the recognition of the Shoah is to have awakened groups other than the Jews, and to have inspired other victims also to set themselves up as collective players and to demand recogni-tion and reparation. Even when they have not been set up as such, the recent victims of extreme violence in ex-Yugoslavia, then the African Great Lakes, have penetrated western consciousness and shown that after Nazism other dreadful experiences had been allowed to assume the proportions of genocide. In the words of the title of Jean-Michel



Chaumont’s book, La Concurrence des Victimes, we have entered the era of competition amongst victims. Henceforth, the Jews may appear to wish to monopolise the status of historical victims, particularly as they evoke the ‘uniqueness’ of the Shoah. Resentment and jealousy can therefore make inroads and, depending on the circumstances, be transformed or extended into hatred of Jews—into anti-Semitism.

Since the 1980s, the misadventures of the Israel-Palestine con� ict have also had an impact on perceptions where, ultimately, the Shoah has become not only an increasingly fragile shield, but also an arm which has now turned against those whom it hitherto protected. In 1982, the Israeli incursion into Lebanon under ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’ led to the departure for Tunis of the Palestinians from the PLO who were living there and tarnished the image of Israel and its army. The principle of this operation was highly controversial and moreover, it afforded the Christian militia the opportunity to engage in the atroci-ties of Sabra and Chatila, two Palestinian refugee camps of which the population was subjected to a dreadful massacre. The Israelis were held responsible: they were said to have stood by or, at the very least, not to have taken the necessary steps to prevent these crimes. The � rst intifada (1987) followed by the second one (September 2000), after the failure of the peace process initiated in Oslo in 1993, meant that the Israeli army had to deal with a threat which was no longer far off and outside its borders, but nearby, and even internal in 1987, since at that time there was as yet no Palestinian Authority.

From then on, large swathes of international public opinion distanced themselves from the policy of Israel and, amongst those who chose to identify with the Palestinians, some were tempted, quite simply, to make no distinction between Jews and Israelis, and to attribute the misfortunes of the Palestinians to both, indiscriminately. In France (as in the United States), this tendency to make no distinction between the two was encouraged by the discourse of the Jewish community leaders who showed unconditional support not only for the State of Israel but also, in most cases, for the policy of its government. A new discourse developed: the Jews did indeed experience a terrible fate during World War II, but was it not time to recognise that from now on they were no longer victims but torturers—the Israelis directly, by the fate to which they subjected the Palestinians, the Jews in the Diaspora less directly, by their support for Israel’s policy? The Holocaust was not denied but reversed: the Palestinians today were to be like the Jews of yesterday, the victims of genocide.


60 chapter four

In France, this discourse had considerable resonance. Not only was it the driving force behind the words of numerous people of immigrant descent who identi� ed their suffering (racism, social exclusion) with that of the Palestinians, but also, in watered-down versions, behind many of the extreme left or alterglobalist stances. It goes further than banalising the Holocaust; it deprives the Jews of the Holocaust by handing it over, so to speak, to other protagonists.

The combination of ‘competition amongst victims’ and a somewhat caustic criticism of the State of Israel is a transnational phenomenon. Thus the World Conference against Racism in Durban in August 2001 was dominated and undermined by the rapprochement, at least verbally, of radical Islamism, extreme left ideologies and references to certain victims, in particular of slavery and the Palestinian cause. In a climate which was particularly hostile to the United States and Israel, anti-Semitism very explicitly made inroads: during Fidel Castro’s speech to the NGO’s forum, some shouts of ‘Kill the Jews’ were heard following the slogans ‘Free Palestine’; the Union of Arab League Lawyers was sell-ing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on its stand and distributing tracts likening the Jews to the Nazis; another anonymous tract showed a photo of Hitler with the caption: “What if he had won? There would have been no Israel and no Palestinian blood would have been shed”.17

Thus the Shoah, which had already been relativised by the Front

national—as we have seen, Jean-Marie Le Pen considers the gas chambers to be ‘a detail’ in the history of World War II—has been banalised, has competitors and is accused of legitimising a gruesome ‘business’. The Jews are increasingly becoming the object of a reversal process in which they become the guilty party. Against this background, the Shoah is beginning to lose its meaning just when it had achieved full recogni-tion. The Shoah can no longer rely on the memory of a unique form of barbarism in history, one which targets a speci� c people, to counter the risks of anti-Semitism. The result is that, as an example, the Shoah has in some instances become problematic in nature and those who are responsible for teaching the lessons that can be drawn from it in schools have dif� culty in assigning a meaning to it and in squaring, for teaching purposes, what it demonstrates of both the universal—learn-ing to recognise the paths leading to the worst abominations—and the speci� c—remembering that it destroyed a speci� c people.

17 We rely here on Fiammetta Venner’s written account.



But perhaps this sense of loss of meaning must be counterbalanced by the consideration that what is also, and even predominantly, at stake is a two-fold phenomenon of the passage of time and institutionalisa-tion. There are now very few survivors of the Holocaust left and with them disappears a voice which, particularly in schools, had an impact. Our historical knowledge is now sound and it is dif� cult to imagine any drastic changes in this respect. The confrontation with Vichy which came late in the day has now entered into our consciousness. The memory of the Shoah has been established in the public sphere, the � rst instance being the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah, set up in December 2000. Should we now ascribe the loss of meaning to anti-Semitic attacks and competition amongst victims or to the passage of time and the institutionalisation of the recognition of the Holocaust? The fact remains that the latter can no longer be so central to Jewish identity; nor can it be the main defence against the threat of a reap-pearance or renewal of anti-Semitism. Its message is no longer what it was in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was very much with us and its extent unchallenged: this is also what comes across in the current expressions of hatred for Jews in the public sphere.


CHAPTER FIVE

GLOBAL ANTI-SEMITISM

Today the hypothesis of a renewal of anti-Semitism is frequently associ-ated with a speci� c group which is said to be much more involved in it than others, namely, ‘youths of North African immigrant descent’ who identify with the Palestinian cause and radical Islamism. However valid this association and however strong this identi� cation, it invites us to look beyond the framework of the nation-state and to consider the globalisation of anti-Semitism.

Even in the dim and distant past, hatred of Jews has never been con� ned to a restricted geographical area. It has often been spread over vast territories while at the same time becoming anchored locally where it has manifested itself in a speci� c form. Consequently, we can-not consider present-day anti-Semitism in France without setting it in a context of time and space. Furthermore, we have to consider whether the term ‘anti-Semitism’ which we have used unquestioningly to date is the most appropriate word to use. Can we use the same term for a phenomenon which has undergone considerable changes in history? Are we not committing the error of anachronism by applying it to experiences other than the one in which it was forged?

Anti-Semitism, Anti-Judaism and Judeophobia

The vocabulary in use today provides us with three major terms to designate our object.

The word ‘anti-Semitism’ with the current meaning was popularised (but not created, as is frequently suggested), and with dazzling success, by a German advertiser, Wilhelm Marr, in 1879.1 Against the background

1 The term was apparently used for the � rst time in 1860, by Moritz Steinschneider He criticised Ernest Renan for his ‘anti-Semitic’ prejudices—Renan is in fact refer-ring to ‘Semites’ in general, and not only to Jews. Cf. M. Steinschneider, Hebräische Bibliographie. Blätter für neuere und ältere Literatur des Judentums, vol. III, Berlin, A. Ascher & Comp., 1860.


global anti-semitism 63

of the rise of nationalism in Europe as well as of the racist ideologies that were rife which had not as yet been criminalised by Nazism, the term was established, laden with biological connotations. From this point on, the Jews were to constitute a race, which was Semitic, with presumed physical characteristics which were the basis for moral or intellectual attributes and for their malignity. This does not mean that modern anti-Semitism is homogeneous. On the contrary, it is even characterised by its capacity to amalgamate in plain language the most contradictory meanings. It may well accuse the Jews of personifying modernity and ushering in its most harmful aspects while at the same time preventing modernity with their religion or their traditional way of life. In this sense, anti-Semitism is as much a perversion of the legacy of the Enlightenment as it is a product of Christianity. As factors of modernity, Jews may be detested for their presumed role as the rul-ing class, their capitalist power, their control of the media or even for their presumed identi� cation with intellectual, political or social protest movements, the revolution or with Communism. Similarly, they are just as likely to stand accused of ensuring the in� ltration of industry or of modern � nancing at the expense of traditional ways of life as of depriving other potential candidates of the possibility of playing a modernising role. When it is a question of accusing them of prevent-ing modernity, they are perceived primarily as traditional communities, de� ning themselves � rst and foremost in terms of their religion, endea-vouring to appear as a ‘nation’, including in the public sphere where there is little room for the expression of their speci� city.2 Depending on the time and place, they are sometimes one, sometimes the other and sometimes both at once—� gures, then, of absolute evil. Why this should be so has continued to be a challenge to many researchers down the centuries. For Leon Poliakov, for example, the Jews ultimately enabled those who turned against them to have ready to hand an elementary and exhaustive set of causes to explain their dif� culties,3 while for Yves Chevalier, anti-Semitism is associated with a scapegoat mentality which ensures processes for regulating social crises in symbolic terms.4

2 For a systematic presentation of these contradictions in a particularly complex situa-tion, cf. my article “Analyse sociologique et historique de l’antisémitisme en Pologne”, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, vol. XCIII, 1992, pp. 237–249.

3 Léon Poliakov, La Causalité diabolique, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1980.4 Yves Chevalier, L’Antisémitisme, Paris, Cerf, 1988.


64 chapter five

The concept of anti-Semitism de� nes the Jews as a race (Semitic) whereas the concept of anti-Judaism de� nes them as a religion. Once this distinction has been made, the term ‘anti-Semitism’ can be extended, somewhat anachronistically to be sure, to the whole period of modernity beginning in Spain at the end of the 15th century where, well before Wilhelm Marr, the word nevertheless already referred to a racialised or biological de� nition of the Jews. It was indeed with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and from Portugal, which began in 1492, that the idea began to take shape that those who remained and converted to Christianity remained Jewish by reason of their blood—whence the status of ‘pure bloods’. From then on, the Jews were not perceived uniquely in religious terms: it was their biological characteristics which made them a group apart. Before, they had not really been de� ned in racial terms; they came to be so—a development which may legitimise the use of the term, anti-Semitism.

While it is tempting to use this term for the whole of the modern period, at least as from the 16th century (although the turning point may have been earlier, in the 12th or 13th century according to Gavin L. Langmuir5 for example), should we not beware of using it for the current period? For, what does seem to be most novel about the phenomenon is formulated in terms which may indeed naturalise the Jews, for example by comparing them to animals—traditionally, in the Arab-Muslim world, the comparison is with monkeys and pigs—but without really describing them in terms of race. In the hatred directed at them today, the wily characteristics attributed to the Jews have little to do with major physical or biological characteristics, and there is not really any even vaguely scienti� c theory to explain the threat which they are said to pose to society, the planet or certain more closely de� ned groups of people. In that respect, the hostility towards them follows the general trend of all present-day forms of racism, which no longer look to science to support the idea of difference or inferiority particular to any one presumed ‘race’ and which, on the contrary, leave consider-able room for cultural, religious, national or ethnic identities. It is the identi� cation of Jews with the State of Israel which is denounced and

5 Gavin L. Langmuir, Toward a De� nition of Antisemitism, University of California Press, 1990, and History, Religion and Antisemitism, University of California Press, 1990. Cf. also Jeanne Favret-Saada, Le Christianisme et ses juifs, 1800–2000, Paris, Le Seuil, 2004, which challenges the idea of a recent break or a discontinuity between Christian anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism.



not their genetic make-up. This also explains why even the most viru-lent anti-Zionist campaign can be waged by Jews: when this campaign becomes anti-Semitic, its participants retain the ability to distinguish between the Jews who share the radical criticism of Israel and those who do not. The argument then sometimes appears to be reversed: the anti-Zionist militants say that it is not they who are racist but Israel which treats the Arabs and, more generally, anyone who is not Jewish, in a racist manner.

Would anti-Judaism be a suitable term to describe the present-day renewal of hatred of the Jews? To answer in the af� rmative would mean that today the issue is de� ned in terms which are predominantly religious or anti-religious. It is true that Islam may be the source of some references to this de� nition, and we shall return to this point. But it is only as an afterthought that Judaism, the religion of the ‘Isra-elites’ (a term which is totally outmoded today) is the target of acts of violence or remarks hostile to Jews. Anti-Judaism is so intimately linked to the history of Christianity, much more than to that of Islam, that it is better to keep this word to refer to Christian history. It is true that Jean-Claude Milner does state that “anti-Judaism has a future,” whereas “anti-Semitism is obsolete. It was associated with the Jewish problem as it was posed in pre-1945 Europe. Now this problem has been resolved; we know how and why”.6 But from there to adopting the word ‘anti-Judaism’ to designate, as he does, the major form of hatred of the Jews in the future, is a step which we will not take: Jew-ish identity, as it appears in the discourse of hostility towards the Jews today, apparently cannot be reduced to Judaism alone, at least not if we mean by that the religious dimension of this af� liation.

Would the term ‘Judeophobia’, which is open and all-encompass-ing, not enable us to do away with the term ‘anti-Semitism’ for the present period? Anti-Semitism would then become inappropriate and anachronistic and we would not have to con� ne ourselves to the overly restrictive categorisation offered by the concept of anti-Judaism. It is in these terms that Pierre-André Taguieff argues in favour of setting aside the term ‘anti-Semitism’, explaining that it should be reserved for:

the explicitly racist Judeophobia, which was born towards the middle of the 19th century and fell into disuse after 1945, according to which

6 Jean-Claude Milner, Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique, Lagrasse, Verdier, 2003, p. 127.


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the Jews were an example of a harmful and dangerous inferior race and which only constituted a brief episode—barely one century—in the long history of anti-Jewish views and practices.7

According to him, we have now entered a ‘new’ era of Judeophobia, characterised by an ‘inexpiable’ hatred of Israel, an ‘absolute’, ‘demonis-ing’ form of anti-Zionism with overtones of negationism and a world view ensuring the convergence “of the new anti-neoliberal leftism and the warriors of the radical Islamist movements”.8

The term Judeophobia itself is recent and dates from the same period as anti-Semitism. Taguieff notes that he borrowed it from Leo Pinsker;9 Peter Schäfer10 states that he found it in the title of an article by J. Halévy dated 1903. It has the advantage of being timeless and of specifying the target of the hatred (the Jews and anything Jewish) without necessarily specifying the content of what is targeted (a religion, a race, a state, a people, a nation, etc.). But does this not take away its edge? Does it not disregard the speci� city of this very unique hostility which has traversed time and space for perhaps 25 centuries? Containing the idea of a ‘phobia’, the term anti-Semitism becomes pathological and part of a view which tends to be more medical or psychological than political or historical. Peter Schäfer, studying Judeophobia in the ancient world, uses the word ‘anti-Semitism’ deliberately. Obviously well aware of the risk of anachronism, he notes that the concept of race in ancient Egypt, for example, could not be the same as in modern times. But he also observes that the ancient pagan hatred of the Jews and the violence based on it was not uniquely religious or xenophobic. Accord-ing to him, it was the outcome of an ‘ingrained hostility’ predating the facts and which he describes as ‘anti-Semitic’.

This discussion brings us closer to a question which is also very sen-sitive: should we consider hatred or hostility towards the Jews as one form of racism amongst others, or should we note its radical difference?

7 Pierre-André Taguieff, “Retour sur la nouvelle judéophobie”, Cités, special issue, June 2002, p. 118. Cf. his book, La Nouvelle Judéophobie, Paris, Mille et Une Nuits, 2002. (Rising from the Muck: the new anti-semitism in Europe, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004.)

8 Id., p. 119. 9 Taguieff refers to Leo Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation, the � rst edition (Berlin) is dated

1882.10 Peter Schäfer , Judeophobia. Attitudes towards the Jews in the Ancient World, Harvard

University Press, 1997 (Paris, Cerf, 2003).



This question merits three separate answers depending on whether we approach it from a sociological, historical or political point of view.

From a strictly sociological point of view, this hatred and hostil-ity call for the same analytical categories as other forms of racism, to which they are to some extent related. Like them, they naturalise or demonise a group of people, manifest themselves in various ways (violence, prejudices, discrimination, segregation, etc.), may or may not � nd their way to the political level and in various ways combine the rationales of differentialist rejection and inferiorisation. In any given society, they function according to mechanisms in which there is no fundamental distinction between anti-Semitism, by whatever name, and other types of racism.

However, if we adopt a historical stance, the picture is quite different. Anti-Semitism then appears as something extremely unique, given the remarkable depth and continuity of the phenomenon from ancient times to the present day. We have to admit that no other group in history has been subjected to such an experience, to such an extent, with little respite throughout the centuries and on such a large geographical scale. It is the perception of continuity and even of the relative coherence of this experience which explains, for example, the success and importance of Léon Poliakov’s immense Histoire de l’antisémitisme.

Finally, politically, any consideration of hostility towards the Jews involves examining how it has been dealt with in the society under the microscope, in comparison to other forms of racism. Thus, in France today, including and perhaps primarily in circles which cannot be suspected of the slightest degree of racism, a genuine irritation is perceptible at the realisation of a disproportion between the exag-gerated sensitivity of the political class, of opinion or the media to any manifestation of anti-Semitism and the much greater indifference towards other racist excesses. The very fact that we can put a name to the racism targeting the Jews, whereas we do not have a suf� ciently precise vocabulary for other groups of people is sometimes described as an injustice: even as victims, the Jews fare better because they have a term to describe their misfortunes. The fact remains that a debate has opened, for example within anti-racist organisations or amongst intellectuals, between those who, like the MRAP, demand that anti-Semitism should not be singled out in the political and ideological campaign against racism and those who, on the contrary, insist on the speci� city of the problem.


68 chapter five

The more one endeavours to identify a speci� city in the hatred of the Jews as compared with other forms of racism, the less one has to consider whether it should be referred to as Judeophobia, anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism. Ultimately, it suf� ces to speak of anti-Jewish racism. But to do so would be to bring matters to an abrupt conclusion. In our opinion, the choice is as follows: should we, at the risk of anach-ronisms, be more sensitive to historical continuity, to the speci� city of the hostility towards the Jews and to the strength that the concept of anti-Semitism has acquired and, � nally, keep this term? Would it not be better to recognise that we have entered a new era, to which we cannot really give a name but which can be characterised, cautiously, precisely, by the term ‘new Judeophobia’? We, for our part, intend to go on using the term ‘anti-Semitism’, with the idea that it is a speci� c form of hatred, which reached its peak with Nazi barbarism. Any other term takes the edge off the phenomenon and loses part of the strength which its evocation acquired in 20th century history. Paradoxically, the ‘new Judeophobia’ is not the sum total of a combination of elements of which classical anti-Semitism is only an ‘old’ outmoded element: it tends to be one of many dimensions, although central, of the revival of anti-Semitism today.

Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism

Hatred of the State of Israel is so central to the prevailing anti-Semitic discourse in France that a delicate but unavoidable question arises: where do anti-Israel political propaganda and criticism of the Hebrew State begin? At what point do we discern therein hatred of the Jews? In other words: how can we be sure that the rejection of Israel is of a different order from hatred of Jews in general—where does the one leave off and the other begin? In short, is there a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism? This question, at once emotional and complex, is the subject of � erce debate in France. Is the equation anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism so obvious that it is less and less open to argument, or, as Denis Sieffert11 claims, ‘both outrageous and monstrous’?

11 In a collective publication, Antisémitisme : l’intolérable chantage. Israël-Palestine, une affaire française?, Paris, La Découverte, 2003.



We have to begin by stating that the vocabulary used poses a prob-lem. Anything to do with the State of Israel is frequently quali� ed as ‘Zionist’ rather than ‘Israeli’, which adds to the confusion. For, if those who criticise Israel’s policy describe themselves or are perceived as ‘anti-Zionist’, there is nothing to prevent us from thinking that they are challenging not so much the action of a state but the intention behind it, or its very existence. We must therefore pause for an instant and consider this word ‘Zionism’.

Any discussion of Zionism refers to a project of which the age and the historical depth, predating Theodor Herzl, extends, for example, to the ‘pre-historic Christian Zionism’ to which Paul Giniewski12 refers, or political thinkers and players, Christian and Jewish in particular, who had imagined, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Emile, a ‘free state’ for the Jews. The project associated with Herzl is far from always having met with the unanimous approval of the Jews. Hence, between the � rst Zionist congress in Basel (in 1897) and the creation of the State of Israel (1948), strong opposition was expressed, in particular by the Bund, as we have said. This Jewish social-democratic party considered that the future of the Jewish proletariat in Europe resided in a political struggle in Europe and not in the departure for Palestine. Since the 1960s, these forms of opposition have declined while at the same time it was becoming obvious to the Jews in the Diaspora that the State of Israel was no longer a utopia but a historical reality.

The Zionist project had become a reality and more precisely, a state. With the Six Day War, the vast majority of Jews in the Diaspora accepted what was now a positive identi� cation with Israel. The result is that today Jewish identity falls within the boundaries of religion, anti-Semitism, remembrance of the Shoah and the State of Israel. Of course, not all the Jews in the Diaspora are believers. They do not all necessarily feel threatened by anti-Semitism. Neither the memory of the Shoah nor identi� cation with Israel is the same for all and they may endeavour to promote a secular form of Jewish culture in the Diaspora. But they tend to de� ne themselves in terms of these four main poles. In the debate about whether anti-Zionism is, or is not, anti-Semitism there is plenty of scope for the expression of Jewish subjectivity and, in most cases, for the two concepts to be confused quite simply because Jewish identity increasingly tends to include a positive reference to Israel.

12 Paul Giniewski , Préhistoire de l’État d’Israël, Paris, Ed. France-Empire, 1997.


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Among the Jews, this lack of differentiation is sometimes total and quite unambiguous; at other times it is more subtle or bypassed and, while this may not be the case for everyone, it nonetheless constitutes the dominant tendency.

However, if it is becoming so commonplace, is it not that it refers to a reality and to the fact that, in practice, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism do come down to the same thing for those who profess the one in order better to advance the cause of the other? Ethnocentrism may hamper our thinking here somewhat; hence, for an Arab living in the Middle East, while the enemy may be an Israeli, the latter is also Jewish and the two terms are more easily or spontaneously interchangeable. This does not necessarily mean that the same hatred is felt for the Israelis as for the Jews in the Diaspora. The target is the Zionist Jews in Israel. For the anti-Semite living in France and identifying with the Palestinian cause, the Arab world and Islam, the � gure of the hated Jew tends not to be the Israeli in the � rst instance. We must therefore certainly accept the idea that the confusion or the amalgam does not have quite the same signi� cance in the two types of situation. If anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are coming closer, it is for a reason already referred to above: contrary to an over-simpli� ed idea, the anti-Semitism of hate speech is all the more extraordinary for being unconnected with the internal political realities of Israel or the actual experience of the Arab citizens of Israel and the inhabitants of the ‘territories’ and for spreading to places which are farther a� eld and dominated by imagination and fantasy. These may just as well be the working-class areas of Egypt or Jordan as the most deprived of the French banlieues or suburbs.

It is not dif� cult, however, at least theoretically, to say where the dividing line lies between challenging the existence of the State of Israel and anti-Semitism. When it is a question of describing the politics of the Israeli government or of the Israel-Palestine con� ict, in terms which may possibly be extremely harsh, the criticism cannot be called anti-Semitic simply because it targets the practices of this state, the repression of terrorism, the behaviour of its army, the settlement of the colonies, the violence of the settlers, etc. It becomes anti-Semitic, or at least comes much nearer to it when the very existence of the Hebrew State is challenged. For, the arguments which are then advanced con-cern, not only this State, but the Jewish people in their entirety and in a discriminatory manner.

Some of these arguments insist on the idea that there is a funda-mental link between the Shoah and the creation of the State of Israel.



Now, while it is certain that the discovery and understanding of Nazi barbarism did promote the creation of the state and had an impact on it, we would do well to remember the prior existence of the Zionist project, the long-standing existence of a Jewish settlement in Palestine and the presence of Jews on this territory since time immemorial. Too close a link between the Shoah and the creation of Israel creates the impression that the Hebrew State is the outcome of victimisation, for which it only partly compensates, thus sustaining a questionable notion of history which favours the equation Jews = victims = Israel. It must be said that this equation is itself encouraged by the similar proposi-tion: anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism.

Sometimes the arguments combine historical aspects and judicial elements to challenge the very existence of Israel. The Arab or the Palestinian presence in Palestine is said to have preceded that of the Jews and the undertaking of the Jewish people to have transformed itself into a nation and to have demanded and obtained the right to form a state is said to be illegitimate. Here too, the argument is spe-cious. For one thing, it is based on a historical construct which is worth discussing: how did the immigration of the Jews to Israel take place before and after 1948? What were the relations between the Arabs and the Jews—purchase of land, plundering, violence and labour relations? How were Jews treated in Arab countries and how were they treated thereafter? What exactly were the migratory processes of the Arabs to Palestine? How did Arab leaders and Muslim dignitaries behave in the face of Nazism? Research like that of Henry Laurens13 shows plainly that history is more complex than the supporters of the various camps would have us believe, particularly when the Zionist experience is reduced to colonialism and the plight of the Palestinians to exclusion, for which the Zionists and their friends alone are said to be responsible. The question can be formulated in judicial terms: by virtue of what principle is it permissible to forbid the Jews from thinking of themselves as a nation in the same way as others and from wanting to have a state? On the basis of what judicial criteria can this sort of prohibition be justi� ed? And if this criteria only applies to the Jewish people, is it not, in reality, a desire to discriminate which is a sign of anti-Semitism?

13 Cf. in particular Henry Laurens, La Question de Palestine, Paris, Fayard, 2002.


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Moreover, it is dif� cult to see what legitimacy could be attributed to the United Nations if the 1947 decision, which was voted by a majority of two thirds, were to be challenged. Any discourse which questions the very existence of the State of Israel, and not uniquely its functioning, rapidly leads to a denial. It denies the right of the Jewish people to a state. In this respect, the discourse does contain an element of hostility towards this people, which is refused the same modes of collective existence as are granted to others. The very term, anti-Zion-ism, facilitates this confusion between the State of Israel as it is and the project on which it is based. We must therefore clearly state that if criticism of Israeli policy, and, for example, of its expansion through the settlement of colonies, is acceptable, any criticism which goes back to the creation of this state to challenge its very existence, is not. This is a position which is clear and is expressed suf� ciently explicitly and frequently within Israeli society itself for it to be, if not acceptable, at least free of any anti-Semitism.

The State of Israel is sometimes accused of being racist and the accusation may then extend to the Jewish people as a whole. This touches on a particularly sensitive point when it refers to the very foundations of this state which claims, and rightly so, to be democratic while at the same time asserting itself as a Jewish State. It is a fact that the so-called law of return, under which any Jew can come and live in Israel with no conditions attached and immediately and automati-cally become a citizen, does discriminate against non-Jews who have to request permission. The criteria for establishing who is Jewish are dif� cult to list, apart from the one usually advanced by religious Jews for whom the mother must be Jewish. This naturalises the de� nition of identity and can be compared to an ethnic or even racial14 notion. The question has political and social consequences: how can a Jewish state be created while at the same time democratically guaranteeing equal rights to everyone, Jew or non-Jew? In practice, as Laurence Louër15 shows, the answer consists in differentiating between two categories of residents, the Jews and the others—amongst which are, primarily,

14 For an idea of the complexity of the problem and the discussions to which it gives rise amongst Israelis themselves, cf. Eliezer Ben Rafaël , Jewish identities: � fty intellectuals answer Ben Gurion, Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2002.

15 Laurence Louër , Les Citoyens arabes d’Israël, Paris, Balland, 2002.



the Arab citizens of Israel—and thus in allowing a two-tier citizenship to develop.

In fact, the Arabs of Israel only accede to ordinary citizenship with dif� culty and not fully. They do vote, at all levels, they have local elected members and are represented in the Knesset. But access to land and to ownership of land is dif� cult for them, they have no right to family reunion and, apart from the Druzes and the Bedouins, they are excluded from the sphere of military conscription. In the words of Laurence Louër, they constitute a category which is “acephalous and deprived of community institutions and autonomous sources of income”, and for whom “citizenship . . . tends to lose all substance”.16

This is obviously a huge problem for the State of Israel in addition to the separate issue of the con� ict with the Palestinians, and which can give rise to the extremely keen, but quite legitimate criticism: how can the principle of such an unequal citizenship be accepted? And once again it is easy to see where anti-Semitism may begin: in the idea that this challenge in some way refers back to a sort of racism which is inherent to the Jewish people and not to the present-day dif� culties of a state which is confronted with a major contradiction, since it is at one and the same time both Jewish and democratic.

A ‘Global’ Phenomenon

Since the end of the Cold War, the theme of globalisation has inevi-tably emerged in describing international rationales which make light of frontiers and states, particularly in the economic sphere. These principles have an impact on anti-Semitism which in turn has become in its own way a ‘global’ phenomenon.

Beyond the Nation-State

For some thinkers, philosophers, historians or others, anti-Semitism is � rst and foremost a European phenomenon. Jean-Claude Milner in particular explains that, “Modern Europe is the place where:

16 Id., pp. 30 and 41.


74 chapter five

a. the noun ‘Jew’ is thought of as a problem to resolve;b. a solution is only valid if it aims to be de� nitive [. . .] the problem/solu-

tion pair has determined the modern history of the word ‘Jew’ from the 18th century to the present day”.17

For Jean-Claude Milner, “old Europe [. . .] is the cause of everything [. . .]. It formulated everything, de� ned everything, and invented every-thing”.18 And if anti-Semitism, (as we have seen, he prefers, when referring to present times, to speak of anti-Judaism) focusses nowadays on Israel as the centre of hatred of the Jews, it is because Europe not only no longer needs this state to de� ne itself but � nds it an ‘embar-rassment’. Israel keeps to the form of the nation-state which, according to Milner, Europe is preparing to abandon, claiming “to know nothing about it any longer”.19

For others, it is more appropriate to think of the present renewal, as coming from the Arab-Muslim world rather than Europe and, more precisely, in terms of the two sources that this formula perhaps over hastily associates: Arab traditions on one hand and Islam on the other. Is there not a long tradition in Arab or Muslim countries whereby the Jews are a despised and hated minority? Do the Koran and the Sunna not both curse the Jews, at least those who do not believe in God, describing them as lost souls who have become the brothers of pigs and monkeys? We should add here that it is preferable to speak of an invention of tradition rather than a tradition as such: anti-Semitism of Islamic origin has spread considerably since the 1960s or 1970s. The fact remains that when discussing the renewal of anti-Semitism in France today, the more the Arab or Muslim origins of its bearers are stressed, the more tempting it becomes to see it as an imported product brought into the country in the baggage of immigrant parents or grandparents, in particular from North Africa where hostility towards Jews is said to have been by and large part of the culture, even perhaps anchored in daily life, later to be stirred up or revived by the media or the Internet which ensures a constant link with the Middle East.

That Europe or the European idea does play a speci� c role in pres-ent-day anti-Semitism in France is undeniable. It is not just France, a major producer of fascist or racist ideologies, as the historian,

17 Jean-Claude Milner, op. cit., p. 13.18 Id., p. 15.19 Id., p. 128.



Zeev Sternhell20 has demonstrated. It is equally undeniable that we should also take the role of the past and of memory into account as well as that of present-day relations, via the media, with all that the Middle East contributes in this respect. This leaves us with no choice but to accept the concept of ‘globalisation’. To describe hatred of Jews as ‘global’21 is in fact to admit that it is at one and the same time international, transnational and localised. It is an attempt to think of anti-Semitism at one and the same time in terms of its most general, global and local dimensions—rooted as they are within a country, a region, a town, a local area or a housing estate. If, for example, we want to understand why a youth in a ‘dif� cult’ area throws stones at a Jewish school bus, we undoubtedly have to take into consideration factors associated with the situation (daily exclusion and racism, for example), along with others concerning the international state of affairs, in particular in the Middle East.

The Global Principle of Anti-Semitism Today22

As David Harvey23 has aptly demonstrated, the globalisation of anti-Semitism is based on a dual compression of both time and space. It amalgamates elements originating in historically and geographically distinct repertories which its propagandists have no dif� culty in merg-ing. This may include anything and everything: accusations of ritual crimes, as in the somewhat distant past when a Christian anti-Judaism was prevalent in Europe; repeated references to The Protocols of the

Elders of Zion, an invention which originated in the imagination of the Tsarist regime and its police; a return to the classically racist themes of modern anti-Semitism at its peak, as we have seen, between the end of the 19th century and Nazism; revisionism and negationism, minimising, banalising or denying the existence of Auschwitz and the gas chambers;

20 Zeev Sternhell , La Droite révolutionnaire. Les origines françaises du fascisme, 1885–1914, Paris, Le Seuil, 1984.

21 This idea of a ‘global’ phenomenon is also to be found in a book co-edited by Paul Iganski and Barry Kasmin, A New Antisemitism? Debating Judeophobia in 21st Century Britain, JPR, London, 2003. Some, but not all, of the authors of this collective publica-tion prefer to speak of Judeophobia rather than anti-Semitism.

22 A � rst version of this text was published in the online journal Proche-Orient.info, 13 May 2003.

23 David Harvey , The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origin of Cultural Change, Cambridge, Mass., Blackwell, 1990, p. 240.


76 chapter five

denunciation of the ‘Shoah business’—said to be a source of wealth for the Jews and Israel; or even accusations attributing the responsibil-ity for anti-Semitism to the Jews themselves as a result, for example, of some of the presumed activities of certain persons as ‘lobbyists’ in the service of the State of Israel, or of the positions adopted by them in public discussion.

At the same time, the globalisation of anti-Semitism is to a large extent due to electronic technologies which enable the instantaneous circulation throughout the world of texts, sounds and images and par-ticularly, propaganda. The Internet and television are complementary here. However, we do have to differentiate between them because the Internet implies a much more active approach on the part of the user than television. Moreover, in some countries the Internet functions as an organ of the anti-Semitic written press, almost completely freely in some countries; these sites thus ensure world distribution, whatever the country of origin.

Is This a Hitherto Unknown Phenomenon?

In fact, throughout history anti-Semitism has always manifested itself in the form of a ‘global’ rationale combining as it does a very large scale territorial presence with a variety of strongholds in local situations. Thus the source of the anti-Semitism of the ancient world (here we are drawing on the work of Peter Schäfer, including the terminology) was Egypt but it spread to Syria-Palestine and then to Rome where it acquired a special meaning in so far as, in addition to hatred and hostility, it was fraught with fear. As Schäfer remarks, this is one more reason for not using the term ‘Judeophobia’, which may be accept-able in Rome but not in the other two regions of the ancient world which he studies—“Judeophobia is more appropriate when there is only hatred”.24

It was probably in Egypt at Elephantine towards 410 BC that the � rst pogrom in history took place: the Jews were allegedly accused of siding with the Persian occupiers, and the Egyptian population, in a wave of nationalist sentiment, were said to have attacked the Jews for ‘collaborating’ with the foreign power. The story as told by Schäfer

24 Peter Schäfer , op. cit., p. 30.



is remarkably modern and brings to mind various episodes of recent history, for example in Central Europe, when the Jews were accused of siding with a foreign ruler, notably with the Communist regime imposed by Moscow on a country in the Empire.25 Schäfer also recalls the violent incidents in Alexandria in 38 AD, during which the Egyp-tians attacked the Jews while under Roman rule; the Egyptians were themselves apparently manipulated by the Greeks in the town who were also struggling for access to power and hated the Jews: “The struggle between the various ethnic groups in Alexandria (Greeks, Jews, Egyptians) was the determining factor in the events which led to the explosion in the summer of 38 AD”.26 Schäfer also demonstrates how the accusation of xenophobia, unfriendliness and misanthropy directed at the Jews was a ‘very powerful weapon’27 against them in the area that he calls Syria-Palestine and how in Rome, in the same period, they were perceived as a threat because their proselytism, at that time very active, enabled them to in� ltrate society and to hold a ‘growing attraction’28 for society. Further on, Schäfer notes that the Romans inherited the brutal hatred of the Egyptians and the contempt of the Greeks for the Jews but that, further, “They felt intuitively attracted by them and reacted either with kindness and in fact by converting or with fear, aversion and, in fact, hatred”.29

We can therefore already speak of globalisation with reference to the anti-Semitism of the ancient world where it extended over a vast territory with elements common to all and speci� cities particular to certain regions. A similar argument could be made for Christianity; throughout history its entire sphere of in� uence has favoured anti-Semitism including in the lands where it had missions, for example, the Middle East, where, towards the middle of the 19th century, Christians brought up themes typical of medieval anti-Judaism (the accusation of ritual murders of non-Jews being committed by Jews, or the poisoning of water).

25 Cf. for example my study of the Polish experience, Les Juifs, la Pologne et Solidarnosc, Paris, Denoël, 1984.

26 Id., p. 263.27 Id., p. 291.28 Id., p. 318.29 Id., p. 322.


78 chapter five

The globalisation of contemporary anti-Semitism is neither a dis-organised nor a destructured phenomenon. It is organised around perceptions which are focussed on a main centre, the Middle East and, more speci� cally, the Israel-Palestine con� ict. The focus is on challenging the existence of the State of Israel and, as we have seen, this either mutates into a generalised hatred of Jews, or masks it. The ‘global’ principle of anti-Semitism is then conveyed by radical Islamism which goes beyond the Palestinian cause and sets its anti-Jewish action in a context which is genuinely global where the Palestinian con� ict ceases to be centre stage and gives way to the idea of a metapoliti-cal struggle against evil, of which the Jews are said to be one of the main manifestations, the other being the United States. It brings anti-Semitism closer to the sphere of present-day terrorism which has itself become ‘global’: the attacks on the synagogue in Djerba in Tunisia (11 April 2002), against the Jewish institutions in Casablanca in Morocco (16 May 2003) and in Istanbul (15 and 20 November 2003) associate terrorism and anti-Semitism, both being ‘global’. Finally, places where there are large concentrations of Jews outside Israel, beginning with the United States and France, have their own speci� c contributions to make to the hatred of Jews. Such contributions have their roots in these countries but also spread throughout the remainder of the global arena of anti-Semitism along speci� c lines. For example, France has been the origin on several occasions since the 1950s of the revisionist, then the negationist hypotheses which have enjoyed world-wide suc-cess. It is from the United States that the idea has bounced back at us with increased vigour that the Jews exploit their own misfortunes and have set up a ‘Holocaust industry’ to use the words of Norman G. Finkelstein30 in a book which is in all respects a contribution to the spread of these ideas, also at global level.

From the moment we agree to consider anti-Semitism as part of a ‘global’ rationale, we must endeavour to ensure that the analysis of any local situation (that of France concerns us here) articulates the internal and the external, and advances an explanation drawing on factors inside and outside of France. Thus changes which are speci� c to French society, its institutions and the French idea of the nation undoubtedly have a signi� cant impact on the recent renewal of anti-Semitism in this

30 Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry. Re� ections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, New York & London, Verso, 2000.



country, but the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict or the con-sequences of the rise of Islamist terrorism also play a role. Approaches which restrict the phenomenon to its Franco-French dimensions alone or, on the contrary, uniquely to its foreign or transnational dimensions are incomplete and rapidly erroneous.


CHAPTER SIX

THE JEWS IN FRANCE: DEVELOPMENTS AND CONCERNS

It is imperative that we dare to ask a particularly sensitive question. If anti-Semitism is based on an imaginary image of the Jews, is it not also shaped by the relations which do actually exist between the Jews and other groups of people? Is it not also fashioned by the behaviour or the attitudes of the Jews? The social sciences have long come up against this question when they decide to deal with racism and anti-Semitism. To state that these phenomena are completely unconnected with how its targets behave, express themselves and also evolve, is to reduce them to sheer imagination or ideology. To introduce the idea that the behaviour of the targeted group can in� uence the feelings which are expressed about them is to risk laying on them at least part of the responsibility for their misfortunes, and transforming the victims into culprits. It is dif� cult to � nd a happy medium which avoids these two pitfalls. If we now examine the evolution of the Jews in France since the end of World War II, our aim is therefore to shed further light on our analysis, but without making it the central point.

Anti-Semitism may be an imaginary construct which has absolutely nothing to do with reality. It may also be the outcome of an over-interpretation of reality which is distorted but does not completely lose touch with reality. Peter Schäfer explains:

one always needs both components to ‘create’ anti-Semitism: the anti-Semite and the Jew or Judaism, concrete Jewish peculiarities and the intention of the anti-Semite to distort and to pervert these peculiarities. Anti-Semitism always happens in the mind of the anti-Semite, but it needs its object, the Jew or Judaism [. . .]. It is the distorted imagination of the anti-Semite nourished by real Jews, as well as by his fantasies about Jews, which creates anti-Semitism.1

1 Peter Schäfer, op. cit., p. 8.


the jews in france: developments and concerns 81

For a long time, Jews in France formed communities—in the Comtat Venaissin,2 in Alsace, in the Parisian region and in Bordeaux—and their emancipation was an important theme for the philosophers of the Enlightenment and during the French Revolution. The model to which they conformed for over a century and half dates from this period and from the � rst Empire—a model which Annie Kriegel has described as one of ‘hesitant assimilation’.3 Until the 1960s, at least theoretically, Jews in France were to cease to be visible in the public sphere. In particular, after the Commune, and throughout the dura-tion of the Third Republic, they were to identify fairly clearly with the French nation and with the state institutions.

The Dreyfus affair and the power of anti-Semitism which it revealed, something which the huge success of Edouard Drumont’s La France

juive had already intimated, did not succeed in shattering this model. The Jews in France have endorsed the republican separation between the private sphere where they are free to practise their religion and the public sphere in which they are free individuals with equal rights, like other citizens: they are citizens of the Israelite denomination, they are Israelites.4 Some of them accede to the highest state of� ces—the ‘madmen’ of the Republic whose political history has been researched by Pierre Birnbaum.5 Others, particularly amongst those brought from Central Europe in the waves of immigration following World War I, participated in political and trade union action. They did not all sub-scribe to the rationale of simple assimilation or conform to the strict model of the Israelite. There are various movements—in particular the Zionists and the orthodox Jews—who assert the fact that they are Jewish publicly. But, in the main, the dominant � gure is really that of the Israelite who conjugates unobtrusive and private religious practices with great con� dence in the Republic and its values of liberty, equality and fraternity, along with a genuine love of the homeland. The waves of Jewish immigration from central Europe between 1880 and 1930

2 Translator’s note: the former name of the region around the city of Avignon in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of France. The region was named after its former capital, Venasque.

3 Annie Kriegel, Les Juifs et le monde moderne. Essai sur les logiques d’émancipation, Paris, Le Seuil, 1977.

4 ‘Israélite’ in the French text; (see translators’ note).5 Pierre Birnbaum, Les Fous de la République. Histoire politique des Juifs d’Etat de Gambetta

à Vichy, Paris, Le Seuil, 1995.


82 chapter six

bear witness to a strong capacity for integration with the republican model.

The Decline of the Republican Model

There was change across the board in the 1960s due to various factors which it will suf� ce to recall brie� y here: the arrival of the Jews from North Africa who were usually Sephardic and who formed close-knit communities, the Six Day War (1967) which brought Jews in France closer to the State of Israel and put an end to the image of the Jew as a passive victim—and therefore inconspicuous and even invisible; General de Gaulle’s pro-Arab policy which became possible as soon as the Algerian War had ended; the labour of remembrance concerning the Shoah, insisting on the role of the Vichy regime in the deportation of the French Jews. Moreover, the end of the 1960s was a period of general social change which the French Jews did not escape: the idea of progress was challenged, universalist concepts were questioned, the nation-state was criticised—all ideas which contributed to weakening the French republican model as a whole.

Everything converged in the invention of a new model, in which French Jews became a paradigm of French-style multiculturalism. They seemed to have the capacity to personify two contradictory demands and to articulate in a moderate fashion what the Republic traditionally separated and even opposed: the universal values of the republican idea and the speci� city of an identity which from then on would be increasingly visible in the public sphere.

Protected by the knowledge, if late in the day, and the understand-ing of the Shoah, it was something of a golden age for French Jews. Some marked a religious presence displaying a wide range of religious tendencies from the Lubavitch to the liberal. Others were anxious to educate their children in Jewish schools, which began to grow in number. In the universities, departments for Jewish studies became fashionable while, at the same time, publishers specialising in Jewish themes began to develop. The Jewish culture and the languages which were disap-pearing such as Yiddish and Ladino were once again practised; ad hoc institutions were created or saved. At the same time, the Jewish memory was given pride of place, not only in the form of books and � lms but also in ceremonies and in symbolic and material claims. Furthermore, the historiography of World War II, in which the cinema played an



important role, was taking shape. Jews appeared as Jews in public at the time of the trials of Paul Touvier, Klaus Barbie and Maurice Papon. Finally, French Jews, once again speaking as Jews, were expressing their feelings about Israel with increasing clarity—some to support Israel unconditionally, others to criticise its policy either in a radical fashion or with the aim of promoting peace and negotiation.

Hence, towards the end of the 1990s it seemed that a new formula would allow the harmonious combination of a rich Jewish life, with no hesitation about appearing as Jews in public, and of belonging to the Republic. Today it is this formula which is disintegrating.

The Crisis of the New Model

In the space of twenty years, the world of the Jews in France has become both more close-knit and weaker as a collective entity. Various � gures from a recent study by Erik Cohen6 show that the world of the Jews has become more community oriented: 28,391 children attended Jew-ish schools in 2002 as compared with 15,907 at the end of the 1980s; today only 18% of Jewish heads of household state that they in no way participate in any collective life of the community as compared with 35% in 1988. The Jewish world is weakening because the Jews in France are an ageing and declining population: according to the same study, numbers have fallen from 535,000 in 1980 to 500,000 today.

There are also more people who envisage—and even actually accom-plish—their alyah (making alyah, or ‘going up’ is the departure of Jews to go and live in Israel): 6% say they are preparing to do so and, accord-ing to Israeli sources, twice as many people actually accomplished it in 2001 than in 2000. But it is true that there are no � gures available for unsuccessful alyahs and for departures or returns from Israel to France. Finally, Jews in France are deeply attached to Israel: 86% say they are close or very close to Israel.

Although frequently demonstrating their support for the State of Israel, even if it is to criticise its policy, and increasingly integrated in Jewish community organisations, the Jews in France are anxious.

6 Erik H. Cohen, Les Juifs de France, valeurs et identité, Fonds social juif uni� é, Paris 2002. Cf. also the journal L’Arche, December 2002, which gives a very full account of the book and opens a discussion on its � ndings.


84 chapter six

While they have always been sensitive to anything which suggests the rise of anti-Semitism, today they feel particularly threatened from all sides. They feel threatened by the most traditional anti-Semitism, that of the extreme right and the most sombre nationalism. They feel threatened by the ‘socialism of fools’ in the well-known words of Kronawetter, a Viennese socialist at the end of the 19th century for whom the Jews were a particularly malevolent incarnation of capitalism, boosted or weighed down, depending on the circumstances, by anti-Zionism. And, above all, they feel threatened by the acts of violence, aggressive atti-tudes, insults or threats which are said to come primarily from people of immigrant descent.

The conviction that they are confronted with a rise in anti-Semitism has a certain number of effects on the Jews in France. The most wide-spread is a sort of re� ex reaction whereby they return to the republican model. The aim is not to become ‘Israelites’—French citizens of Jewish confession—once again, but for the Republic to reconquer the territories which it would appear to have lost—we are referring here to the title of the book by Emmanuel Brenner, Les Territoires perdus de la République which we have already quoted and whose in� uence with the Jews in France is considerable. Is the mission of the institutions of the Republic not to ensure the security and protection of all, and therefore also of the Jews? From this point of view, it is not about calling for some sort of assimilation, but instead for a return to discretion and minimal vis-ibility in their life as a community.

Some observe that it is dangerous to expose oneself in public as Jewish, with a kippa or a Star of David, or by reading a publication with an explicitly Jewish title in a café or in the underground, and conclude that they must become less conspicuous once again. These people, and others, complain of the shortcomings of the state schools of the Republic and would like them to recover their erstwhile sup-posed vitality. In short, many are rediscovering the path of the founding model, inherited, as we said, from the Enlightenment, the Revolution, Napoleon I and the Third Republic. They propose an amended version but one which is indeed based on the fundamental principle of separa-tion between the public sphere, where according to them individuals enjoy freedom and equal rights (including, consequently, the right to be protected by the police and the legal system of the Republic) and the private sphere which, in comparison with the old formula, is much larger, more varied and more dynamic.



Two Major Obstacles

However, this return to the clear separation of public and private, and therefore to the republican model is impossible. This is undoubtedly what makes the Jews in France so tense and so anxious. Such a return is prevented by two main trends.

The � rst is linked to their action as a community. This has an impact on the visibility of Jews in the public sphere whether they like it or not. It brings them resources, including political ones,7 particularly in places where there is a strong Jewish community which is organised and active at local level. It enables them to confront anti-Semitism better than when they expected the Republic and the usual representatives of democracy to do it all. It is also a major factor in mobilising and bringing pressure to bear in the public sphere. Acting as a community is even one of the sources of anti-Semitism, as we were able to observe in Sarcelles amongst young people of North African immigrant descent as well as Caribbean origin youths at the beginning of the 1990s: they said that they were, in a way, jealous of the strong sense of community spirit amongst the Jews in the town in view of their own incapacity to organise an equally strong community for themselves.8

The more anxious and threatened French Jews feel, the more they turn, in ever greater numbers, to Jewish organisations, the greater their impression that there is a crisis in the republican institutions and, in particular, that state schools are honouring the � ne promises of the Republic less and less, and the more they subscribe to attitudes which depart from the republican norm stricto sensu. It is dif� cult to see what could curb this tendency, the action of the Jews as a community in France being one of the expressions of a wider phenomenon—the gen-eral crisis of the Republic—while, at the same time, being a response to this crisis.

There is a second reason which plays a role in making the return to a republican model, even an amended version of it, dif� cult: the existence of the State of Israel and the deep attachment of Jews in France to it. For, Jews in France can no longer remain silent when the existence or even quite simply the direction of the policies of Israel

7 The annual dinner of the CRIF can illustrate this remark since it has become the occasion for its president to question the Prime Minister.

8 Nacira Guénif et al., edited by Michel Wieviorka, op. cit.


86 chapter six

are at stake; they cannot be silent in public debate if only because oth-ers intervene and in a way which may run counter to their interests. Nowadays, anything to do with Israel mobilises them—which obviously does not mean that they all support Ariel Sharon, far from it—and this encourages them to intervene, as Jews, in public debate. Now this also puts them in an awkward position, at least those who are endeavouring, somewhat confusedly, to return to the republican model. How can they hope to be considered as free individuals with equal rights without any collective visibility in the public sphere if, as soon as Israel is at stake, they see � t to intervene on the subject, and often vehemently, in the self-same public sphere and as Jews?

The republican model was invented before the creation of Israel in a France in which public and private life could be considered to be part of a single, national framework and in which belonging to a Diaspora had little impact on the inclusion of Jews in the state, the Republic and the nation. But today we cannot reduce the cultural and political existence of the Jews in France to the framework of the nation-state alone. Without casting the slightest doubt on their loyalty to their coun-try, they also want to be able to demonstrate and to say that they are concerned about what is happening in the Middle East. Hence, even if their collective life were to become extraordinarily inconspicuous and their religious life equally so, they could not refrain from enter-ing as Jews into public debate. In this situation, the ideologists of the republican model are left with no choice but to engage in rhetorical contortions—publicly, and as Jews, making their positions on Israel and its policy clear while at the same time, continuing, if need be, to participate in the dynamics of the community, however far removed from the traditional republican idea.

Is it possible for Jews in France to extricate themselves from their current predicament and for the present crisis to be resolved? For this to happen, a number of conditions would have to be met. The most obvious has to do with the Middle East and the resolution of the con-� ict between Israel and the Palestinians—it should be noted here, that on the whole, according to Erik Cohen’s survey, Jews in France are in favour of a negotiated peace settlement. Other conditions depend on the capacity of French political leaders to restore the institutions in charge of the republican idea, beginning with state schools. Finally, others depend on the Jews in France themselves, their ability to resist the present trends to radicalisation and extremes, including in the perception of problems and in the language used to describe them.



From this point of view, the radicals and extremists who advocate that all Jews support the policies of Israel unconditionally, whatever they may be, are equating the Jews in the Diaspora with the Jews in Israel which is extremely dangerous because it provokes, in return, an anti-Semitic discourse which is based on the same equation.


CONCLUSION

THE UNIQUENESS OF THE FRENCH EXPERIENCE

If we were to trust American opinion and the remarks of the rul-ers of the State of Israel, France sporadically appears a profoundly anti-Semitic country, where Jews are said to come up against serious physical threats and not only against hostile opinions and prejudices. Jews in France are themselves anxious, even if some, like Theo Klein,1 who was the president of the CRIF, advised them not to dramatise the situation.

Anxious as the reader may be to avoid exaggeration and moral panic, he or she has now been presented with suf� cient elements to admit that there are indeed questions to be asked. The � eldwork discussed in the following chapters of this book should offer speci� c and in-depth answers on the extent and gravity of the problem and, above all, its nature. But why is anti-Semitism much more prevalent in France than in other Western countries?

France has various characteristics which make it an exceptional country, more propitious than others to the present-day revival of anti-Semitism. These speci� cities are, in the � rst instance, demographic. Although we are not able to give the precise � gures, the Jewish popu-lation is by far the largest in the Diaspora after the United States: the � gure currently advanced is 500,000 to 700,000 persons.2 France also has a very large population of immigrant descent from Arab and/or Muslim countries, beginning with those from the Maghreb. When it comes to categorising the members of this population by identity in terms as clear as it is to de� ne a group of persons as Jewish, the endeavour is highly problematic, as Hervé Le Bras3 has shown, and the � gures are vague—at the moment, the media advance the � gure of

1 Théo Klein , Le Manifeste d’un juif libre, Paris, Liana Levi, 2002.2 Émeric Deutsch , on the basis of a SOFRES survey, spoke of between 600,000

and 700,000 Jews in 1977; Doris Bensimon and Sergio Della Pergola , in La Population juive de France: socio-démographie et identité, Jewish Population Studies n° 17, 1986, calculate for the years 1972–1978, a population of 535,000, and Érik Cohen , op. cit., suggests a � gure of 500,000 in 2002.

3 Hervé Le Bras , Le Démon des origines, La Tour d’Aigues, Éd. de l’Aube, 1998.


the uniqueness of the french experience 89

� ve million Muslims. The Muslim world in France is extremely diverse and the idea of a strong Arab culture is questionable. Young people of North African immigrant descent do not, on the whole, speak much Arabic nor do they speak it well—they may only know a few words and these may be obscenities. If they do identify politically with the Palestinian cause, this is usually abstract with little knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. There may be a historical depth to anti-Semitism amongst this population, for it still has vague memories of the colonial period when hostility towards Jews could be found amongst Muslims and there were instances when the powers that be did not treat them as well as the Jews: thus in 1871, under the Crémieux Decree, the Jews in Algeria became French citizens but this was not the case for the Muslims. There may therefore be a shared past, which was rather tense, which is re-opened by present-day anti-Semitism or on which it relies more readily than in other post-colonial situations.

Moreover, France is one of the cradles of modern anti-Semitism and its somewhat ‘exclusive’ nationalism, to use the words of Michel Winock,4 characterised by fear of the decadence and corruption of the social fabric, is based on a perpetual obsession with anti-Semitism which neither Nazism nor the discrediting of the Vichy regime, followed by the conclusions of the Vatican II Council, have totally eradicated. This traditional anti-Semitism is now charged with new post-war themes: hatred of the State of Israel and, above all, negationism, which, we would do well to remember, is a very French invention.

France is also a country which had a strong Communist Party, the historical decline of which, particularly since May 68, has favoured the emergence of various leftist movements and trends, to some extent structured in organisations. Now, one of the directions taken by anti-Semitism is to follow the meanderings of anti-capitalism with overtones of anti-Zionism in a climate of anti-Americanism: this is a well-trodden path in France. All the more so because France is a country—‘the’ country—in which intellectuals play an important role. Some of them defend third-world, alterglobalist or anti-Zionist positions which some-times lead to this murky grey area where it is dif� cult to tell whether we are dealing with anti-Semitism or, simply, with strong criticism of the policies of the State of Israel. Others come out as unconditional

4 Michel Winock , Nationalisme, antisémitisme et fascisme en France, Paris, Le Seuil, 1990.


defenders of Israel, to the extent that they accuse all those who criticise Israel of anti-Semitism.5

France is also witness to a whole set of dif� culties indicative of change, the three main elements of which are propitious to the expansion of the sphere of anti-Semitism. France emerged from the age of industry in the worst possible way, with periods of high unemployment and exclusion, particularly among its populations of immigrant origin. It is having dif� culty implementing the aggiornamento of its republican institu-tions which are in crisis, leading to disenchantment and, for many, the feeling that the motto of the Republic, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity is an unful� lled promise. Finally, the French national identity seems to be challenged by various cultural speci� cities which are clamouring to be recognised in the public sphere, while the Front national is appropriating the nation to make of it a particularly dismal ideology. In this context, hatred of the Jews conveys the misfortune or anxieties of those who have been left behind by the changes and the phantasms of players not all of whom are threatened in social terms. It further conveys the incapacity of the Republic to safeguard its mission, against a background of the idea of nation withdrawing into nationalism.

Finally, France is a geopolitical power which intends to play a diplo-matic role in the world and in the Middle East in particular. Its political leaders whether in power or in opposition, continually take stances on the issues of the Israel-Palestine con� ict, while the population as a whole is much more sensitive to anything which affects this part of the world, than to events anywhere else.

Each of these elements, taken in isolation, may well be encountered in other countries. Not all of them necessarily have an impact on hatred of the Jews or operate uniquely in this direction. But their combined presence means that they constitute a unique entity within which forces contributing to the revival of anti-Semitism in France converge in a much more disturbing or disquieting way than elsewhere.

5 Cf. Dominique Vidal (co-editor of Le Monde diplomatique) in his attack on the authors of what he calls an ‘ideological anti-intifada’—the unquestioning defence of Israel in Le Mal-Être juif. Entre repli, assimilation et manipulations, Marseille, Agone, 2003.

90 part one: conclusion


PART TWO

GHETTO ANTI-SEMITISM



INTRODUCTION

If there is a ‘new Judeophobia’—or rather a recent and renewed rise of anti-Semitism—many people say that it is primarily due to the population of North African immigrant descent, its religion, Islam, and its identi� cation with the arguments most favourable to a radical conception of the Palestinian cause—a cause with which this population sympathises most deeply. There is also sometimes a social dimension to the explanation: this population lives in the so-called ‘dif� cult’ areas which are home to the new ‘dangerous classes’, namely young male petty criminals.

Suppositions of this type immediately stigmatise the young people in question, postulating as they do, a direct link between a religious and cultural origin which is in some way racialised (are they not often referred to as Arabs, North Africans or Muslims?) and anti-Semitism. They discredit the areas whose inhabitants are de� ned not only by the injustice to which they are subjected, by social inequality and exclusion, but also by the violence, feelings of hatred and irrationality which they display. While hatred of Jews may be expressed fairly spontaneously and openly by the young people on these housing estates, they are not responsible for all the acts of anti-Semitic violence and attacks regis-tered in recent years.

But let us start with the reports that hate speech towards Jews is becoming more open on the deprived housing estates. If hatred of the Jews in these instances is linked to religion and culture and identi� cations which are, for the most part, remote and connected with the Middle East, this means that such hatred does not require for its existence any real Jews or any contact with a living Jewish community or with any actual Jewish practices whatever in the search for a job, or at work or in local political or community life for example. Therefore it must be possible to study the phenomenon without a Jewish presence in situa-tions where there are none, or almost none. If such hatred is displayed by poor people, in working-class areas where exclusion, unemployment and other social evils hold sway, this means that to understand it, we have to go into these areas and consider them from the point of view of these social characteristics and not just from the point of view of the rise of Islam and ethnic identities.


But what are the links between anti-Semitism and the experience of social dereliction? How does one make the step from a profound sense of injustice, of a lifetime of rejection, discrimination and the experience of racism to hostility towards a group of people which one knows only from the realm of the imaginary, from hearsay, prejudice, family talk or images on television?

To deal with these questions and to bene� t from the knowledge gained from a social survey at grass-roots level, our research team carried out � eldwork in an area with a high percentage of people of North African immigrant descent who presented these characteristics of exclusion with-out the shadow of a doubt. The research was conducted in two stages. In the � rst phase, the researchers carried out a series of interviews, not only in the area we had chosen, the Trois-Ponts in Roubaix, but also in the town itself and even further a� eld, in the region, in particular in its capital Lille. In the second phase, they undertook a ‘sociological intervention’ with the social workers and the young people in the Trois-Ponts area, which enabled them to broaden their analysis.

Unemployment, juvenile delinquency, insecurity, mass immigration, housing un� t for habitation are just some of the stigma associated with Roubaix,1 making it a so-called ‘high-risk area’ without ever clearly de� ning or reviewing this notion. The times when the smoke from the factories inspired poets are long gone. The dullness of the grey walls round the former textile factories which have shaped the industrial wasteland is gradually disappearing; the town has raised the standing

1 There is considerable literature on Roubaix. Cf. in particular Ahmed Benyachi and Saïd Bouamama , Les Discriminations dans l’emploi et leurs impacts: l’exemple roubaisien, Voix de Nanas, March 2000; Hélène Bleskine et André Diligent , « À Roubaix . . . André Diligent parle de Roubaix », Lumières de la ville, n. 2, June 1990, pp. 135–146; Paul Delsalle , Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing. Histoire et traditions, 1991; Léon Diagoras , La Genèse d’une métropole, essai sociologique. Roubaix: ville-cobaye, 1969; Dominique Duprez and Muhieddine Hedli , Le Mal des banlieues, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1992; Yves-Marie Hilaire , Histoire de Roubaix, Westhoek-Éditions, Les Éditions des Beffrois, 1984; Laurent Marty , Chanter pour survivre. Culture ouvrière, travail et technique dans le textile: Roubaix 1850–1914, Fédération Léo Lagrange, 1982; Catherine Neveu , « L’anthropologue, l’habitant et le citoyen. Citoyenneté et rapport au politique dans une ville du Nord », Ethnologie française, October–December 1999; Chantal Pétillon , La Population de Roubaix (1740–1889): une croissance exceptionnelle, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2004; Damien Roustel , « Comment Roubaix est devenue une ville à majorité musulmane », Le Monde diplomatique, June 1997, pp. 22–23; Bertrand Verfaillie , Roubaix: histoire de participer, Association « Le pas de côté », Desclée De Brouwer, 1996; Michel Wieviorka , La France raciste (the second part), Paris, Le Seuil, 1992.

94 part two: introduction


of this architectural heritage, a reminder of the glorious past of the ‘wool town’. But this past is receding because since the 1960s there has been nothing to stop the decline of industry which, until then, formed the backbone and the international reputation of the town. Roubaix bore the brunt of the crisis and entered an age of deindustrialisation which led to further economic and social dif� culties.

The demographic expansion of Roubaix dates back to the 19th century and was then directly linked to the need of the textile industry for manpower. Factories and housing rose rapidly; the town was one enormous building site. Courées (backyards), forts, housing estates and culs-de-sac were built which still characterise the town today.

Industry in Roubaix attracted foreign labour. Immigration which can be observed from the end of the 19th century was initially for the most part Belgian, to the extent that at the end of the century there were more Belgians than French in the town. Then came others in waves—Poles, Italians then North Africans and � nally Africans. These populations and their descendants were to be the � rst to be affected by the indus-trial decline and the deterioration in living conditions which weakened Roubaix at the end of the 20th century. At this point, the town began to change in order to survive the disappearance of the manufacturing sector. The former textile capital opted to develop the tertiary sector and has now become France’s leading town in mail-order sales (VPC or Vente par Correspondance). But this conversion did not ensure that the workers who were laid off when the factories were closed would � nd new jobs, because their quali� cations did not correspond to employer requirements in the leading sectors of economic activity. The working class population as a whole in Roubaix was becoming poorer, while the middle classes left the town for nearby towns, like Villeneuve-d’Ascq which were implementing attractive policies. It was predominantly the poor who stayed in the Roubaix of the 1970s and 1980s.

The � gures at the end of the 1980s were impressive: all the social and urban dif� culties of the industrial crisis were concentrated in the town of Roubaix. The town was a disaster area of the � rst order. One third of its population was unemployed and all the poverty indicators were � ashing red. The percentage of people living on the poverty line at the beginning of the year 2000 was twice as high as the national average in France. The percentage of the population eligible for the CMU or universal health insurance was � ve times higher than the national average.

part two: introduction 95


Today the town is involved in long-term efforts and there are vis-ible signs of recovery. In particular, the town council is relying on a cultural policy which, for a long time, lagged behind the social welfare policy. Hence, in the year 2000 Roubaix was named ‘Ville et pays d’art

et d’histoire’ (a town and region of art and history). It is also developing trade. The construction and recent opening of a shopping mall in the town centre is part of a municipal project which combines urban regen-eration with economic development by offering the citizens of Roubaix living in precarious situations access to employment. The town is also endeavouring to attract people from outside, for example by opening a metro line in 1999 which improved access to the centre of Roubaix from the neighbouring towns of Lille and Tourcoing.

The industrial crisis was so severe that even today the population easily feels abandoned. In addition to this, for the immigrants and their children, there is the feeling, which is to a large extent justi� ed, of being the victims of racial discrimination. Everyday life in the work-ing-class areas is also characterised by petty crime and drug addiction. Clandestine trading and black-marketeering are rife—a social and economic response to the all-pervasive marginalisation: in the words of Abdel, a social worker, “They are 16 years old and they deal in death to buy a baseball cap”. The youngest are amongst the worst hit by a disintegration which the social and community workers no longer suc-ceed in controlling despite considerable efforts based on the substantial resources granted by the local authority.

In Roubaix, the cultural mix is a reality accepted by local policies. It must be said that this is not dif� cult because, apart from a considerable population of North African descent, the largest in the north of France, the town houses over a hundred nationalities. The effect of this is a marked presence of a wide range of places of worship: Catholic (13), Muslim (seven), Protestant (six) and Buddhist (three) and Jehovah’s Wit-ness (three). The town has agreed to ‘devise an intervention program’ for these places of worship.2 This does not cut Roubaix off from the republican project but is the outcome of an open attitude to secular-ism. The town is also proud to bring its twinning with the towns of origin of its foreign population to public notice. Recently it twinned with Bouira in Algeria, which is where many families in Roubaix are originally from.

2 Decision number � ve at the town council meeting of 19 December 2002.

96 part two: introduction


Employment no longer plays the integrating role that it once did when a shared work experience brought people of different cultural origins closer together or even merged them. Racial discrimination, especially in recruitment, is widespread, reinforcing the sense of exclusion and injustice. But despite its necessarily limited resources, the local authority does endeavour to maintain what was throughout the industrial age, but also in the worst years of the crisis, the original model of social democratic local government: this is based on maintaining close links between the town hall and local areas, in particular through the inter-mediary of a particularly dense and active network of associations to which it gives considerable support. If the town has not sunk into utter chaos, it is because of this model and a mode of intervention from the top (the local authority) down (the most deprived populations). This formula attaches considerable importance to social work.

part two: introduction 97


CHAPTER SEVEN

ANTI-SEMITISM (ALMOST) WITHOUT JEWS

Roubaix does not have a Jewish community and there is no Jewish place of worship, intra muros. If there is anti-Semitism, it cannot be the outcome of intercommunity tensions. Jews are only known indirectly through the intermediary of television or through hearsay in the family or amongst friends. In the words of Samir, a social worker, for young people a Jew “is a bloke who throws bombs at Arabs. It’s someone who has plenty of money but doesn’t share it with others”. Of course, there are a few Jewish families living in Roubaix including in the working-class areas. “They keep a low pro� le . . . they’re a bit frightened,” says Gérard, a local social worker. “They don’t assert their identity like we do our origins . . . but all the same there are some around here,” says Amar, one of Gérard’s colleagues. The nearest synagogue is in Lille, a few kilometres away, a place where the Jewish community in Lille worships and meets; the community representatives, of whom there are not many in Roubaix, have little contact with the leaders of the religious communities in the town.

Remarks, Graf� ti and Other Expressions of Anti-Semitism

Roubaix has never been the scene of any highly symbolic or violent anti-Semitic incident. The town is like the region in that it is not usual to witness acts which are seriously anti-Jewish, especially compared with the South of France or the Parisian region. For all that, it is not an exception to the national climate of opinion. For example, here too it is commonly remarked that the Jews stage or exaggerate anti-Semitic attacks. The father of Latifa, a young girl of North African descent, comments, on her behalf, on the repeated attacks of synagogues in France and especially the fact that the � nger is pointed at Muslims: “It’s unbelievable. It’s the Jews who are doing it to draw attention to themselves”. Young people of immigrant descent in Roubaix often make anti-Semitic remarks but, according to the director of the community centres, these are usually sporadic and unpremeditated. Going further,


anti-semitism (almost) without jews 99

she explains that anti-Semitism is usually the work of individuals who are themselves victims of racial and social discrimination, an idea which is expressed again and again throughout our survey. According to the analysis of Bouziane, a local social worker, these somewhat disorientated young people are frustrated and envious: “It’s a discourse of jealousy which comes down to ‘why them and not us?’ That’s the problem”. It is not unusual to hear young people speaking quite spontaneously about the Jews as dominating the world and holding the keys to power whether it be in the sphere of the economy, politics or the media. Ahmed and Said, two young North African descent youths, in the middle of a conversation which they knew the researcher was monitoring, let slip, “The Jews are powerful. How should we put it? They rule the world. They control everything: money, sex, diamonds, gold. They control everything. When you go to Antwerp,” they went on:

There is all this wheeling and dealing, the prostitutes—it’s the Jews who control them! When you go to Brussels, it’s the Jews again! When you go to Paris . . . it’s obvious that it’s the Jews!

An argument based on stereotypes explains the success of the Jews by a combination of two factors: personal greed and the strength of the ties maintained within the community. Anti-Semitic speech is sometimes used to refer to oneself in a dramatic way. ‘What? Do you take me for a Jew, or something?’ is an expression which is heard so frequently that it may have become part of ordinary social intercourse and have lost any deliberately anti-Semitic intention. Habib gives an example of this:

I’ll give you an everyday example. Suppose my friend is going to buy a beer. He drinks it all by himself. He doesn’t offer any to anyone else. They’ll say to him, “Fine, have it your own way—you’re just a f *** ing Jew!

Abdel, an Algerian descent youth living on welfare bene� ts sees in this type of ‘everyday’ expression a sort of spontaneity. He reacts indig-nantly to the idea that this sort of everyday remark could be taken for anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, keeping up expressions of this type which inevitably attack Jewish identity also serves to mark allegiance to a peer group in which Jews have no place and, in fact, no real existence:

Researcher: Around here, is it possible that some people say “I don’t like Jews” when they want to be what you call the ‘boss’?Youth: Yes! Even I do it when I’m with friends who are all against the Jews. I’m the only one who has nothing against the Jews.Researcher: And is it OK?


100 chapter seven

Youth: Well, no. I have to . . .Researcher: What do you have to do . . .?Youth: I speak like them. I say, “Yes, the Jews . . .”, but I don’t believe it. It’s just to avoid losing face with my friends in the area.

In connection with this, a North African descent girl at a state secondary school referred to the obvious and daily contempt, which she clearly distinguished from facts which she considered more serious and which she sees taking place in places other than Roubaix: “To my mind, hatred could end in murder. But writing on the walls, it’s just a lack of respect”.

Thus the � rst lesson that we learn from our survey is: whether it be young people living in working-class areas or people in administrative positions in education or social work, anti-Semitism, as it is expressed locally, is widely interpreted as an expression of the bitterness of ‘the have-nots’ with no direct consequence, attacking the Jews, whom they suppose to be ‘the haves’ and protected. The phenomenon appears, therefore, to be � rst and foremost a social one.

However, international current affairs have a considerable impact on opinions which are hostile to Jews: the phenomenon is at the same time ‘global’. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli, is the Jew who attacks Palestinians; Bush, the American, the international Jew who attacks the Muslim world. This type of amalgam is at the core of many commentaries on the news, for example following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. The Americans are both the Jews and the ‘sheriffs of the world’ and Bin Laden is said to have punished them for their aggressive policy in the Arab and Muslim world. Hence, social workers were not surprised to hear young people, whom they knew well, openly rejoicing at the news of the previous day, shouting from the rooftops, according to Gérard and Amar, “that it was a good thing, that the Jews should die [. . .], that the Americans were all Jews”. Some were waving newspapers with pictures of the collapse of the twin towers. Bin Laden became their hero, the person who had suddenly taken the edge off American supremacy and shaken the principles of the ragra, or oppression.

While in no way singling out Roubaix, where no anti-Semitic actions have been recorded by the specialised services or the community associations, the rabbi in Lille is anxious about the local climate of opinion. He claims to have been himself the victim of physical and verbal attacks in the street, particularly since 11 September 2001. He reported the facts to the local police and the local authority and for



several months was granted special police protection by resolution of the Prefet. Giving details of the most signi� cant attack to which he was subjected, he stressed its violent nature:

I was coming out of a shopping centre, Euralille, with my children, and, as I went through a door, a youth looked at me and said, “That’s dange-rous”. In fact, I was going through a revolving door and I thought he was saying that this type of door which keeps turning was dangerous when you were with children. I replied that it was. The youth went on through the door. Once I was outside, he shouted at me, “Yes, it’s dangerous to be Jewish, son of a bitch!” He and a friend were drinking beer out of bottles. Suddenly, when we were already about 20 metres away from them, they took the bottles and threw them in our direction. The bottles exploded. Luckily, none of my kids were injured. Then, they continued. They stood in front of us shouting unrepeatable things.

At the same period, stones were thrown at the synagogue—a matter, he noted with regret, which none of the representatives of the other religions in any way found offensive.

The Experience of Racism

Actions of this sort cannot necessarily be attributed to the children of North African and Muslim immigrants alone. Moreover, nobody is deceived into thinking so, and de� nitely not the rabbi who at no point during his account mentioned the cultural origin of his attack-ers. But the young people of immigrant descent in Roubaix, who are constantly being singled out in the prevailing climate, feel that they are being accused unfairly. Above all, they assert that they do not get the same sympathy when they complain of the racism which they experi-ence. That makes them think. They wonder if France is endeavouring to improve its image by pointing the � nger at new potential culprits behind whom it can hide its old anti-Semitic demons. Lydia, a young local elected councillor, reminded us that, “The communities of North African and Arab descent have nothing to be ashamed of, that they did not participate in the Holocaust, that they never supported that. To the contrary,” she stressed, “They have always protected the Jews whereas now people are trying to set the two communities against one another”. In her opinion, if there is a revival of anti-Semitism, it is in the French population as a whole that it must be checked. She added that the resentment that some immigrants felt towards Jews was to be


102 chapter seven

understood in the � rst instance as a product of the exclusion to which the children of immigrants feel they are subjected. This resentment is said only to feed the anti-Semitism to be found spread throughout the wider French population.

This hypothesis is constantly reiterated in the remarks of the children of immigrants. They think that in France everybody shares a vaguely anti-Semitic heritage. We do have evidence of this. For example, Jean-Pierre, a ‘native French’ maintenance technician considers that when Jews “have problems they always say that they were unhappy in the past and they never say they are happy. They are always looking back. They take every opportunity to do this.” Similarly, according to Mr. A., a lawyer, member of the bar in Lille, the Catholic Church still deserves to be indicted today for propagating the anti-Semitic prejudices which persist within it and in which he perceives an anti-Judaism which is theological rather than social: the Jew remains the eternal scapegoat, guilty of having ‘killed Christ’.

In any event, there is no denying that anti-Semitism is far from being either the only or the main problem of racism in the region. Moreover, a police commissioner reminded us that attacks against synagogues are no more numerous than those against churches or mosques—such as the one directed at the Omar-Al-Farouk mosque in Dunkirk in November 2003.

The director of one of the social institutions made no bones about it: “Discrimination in Roubaix—it doesn’t even bear thinking about. It happens at all levels! It’s simple—just about every alarm bell in Roubaix is ringing!” Already deep-seated, the phenomenon would appear to have worsened since 11 September 2001. Many people speak of a persistent distrust of Islam with which the children born to North African immigrants are associated. It affects every aspect of social life. The question of racial discrimination in recruitment and in employment is crucial. Bouziane, whose job it is to help with the integration of the youngest stresses the extent of the phenomenon: a foreign-sounding name is enough to bar the way to a job. He himself tried to set up a partnership with temporary employment agencies, to promote integration of the young people in the area where he works through employment, but in vain. Heads of � rms continue to specify racial criteria when they look for labour. He explained that it was a question of codes which allow employers to say, “I don’t want a North African”. He carried out a racial discrimination test by sending three young people—one who looked typically French and two of North



African descent—to a temporary employment agency for packing jobs that required no quali� cations: the ‘French’ applicant was offered three jobs and the other two none at all. Despite this type of demonstration which is proof enough of the gravity of the problem, legal action is rarely taken against discriminatory practices.

The manager of a community centre discussed the phenomenon which she said she had also come up against. Company managers wishing to take on only someone who is “Bleu, Blanc, Rouge” (BBR) or “Red, White, Blue” conceal their racism by saying that they do not wish to expose a young person to the racism of their work force. They thus neglect, or pretend to be unaware of the profound feeling of injustice which their attitude creates amongst those who are barred from the � rm because of the racism attributed to the workforce. Obtaining a diploma does not protect the bearer from this all-pervasive racism with its disastrous consequences. There are plenty of examples of this too. A young man with a DEA1 recounted how he was explicitly refused a job because of his foreign nationality. A married man, forty-� ve years old, with a PhD in science, was refused a post of senior lecturer which he thought was intended for him. He was born in Morocco. Many people become extremely discouraged and lose con� dence in the usefulness of investing in education. This disenchantment affects young people who, in the words of one of them, Nabil: “are not motivated because it leads nowhere”. Commenting on the experience of older brothers and sisters they are quite cynical, “I’m not going to go to school to be unemployed like my brother and sister”.

However, the racism of employers is not the only factor which explains the widespread unemployment of young people of immigrant descent. Do they themselves not have a role to play in the sources of the misfortunes which befall them? This accusation is sometimes explicit: “When they don’t � nd anything, they give up and blame racism,” according to one employee in a local of� ce in Roubaix. Others also observe the climate of discouragement and note how young people move from victims to accusers—which does nothing to solve the problem.

Are Jews in some way responsible for this sort of situation? Very few people mention the image of a Jewish boss turning down young Muslims or the children of immigrants. Racism in recruitment does not appear

1 Diploma of higher studies obtained at the end of the � rst year of a Master’s Degree (3e cycle).


104 chapter seven

to be the domain of Jewish employers; we do not hear anyone saying that Jewish employers control the labour market. At most, we meet a person aged 32 living on income support who suggests, without actually saying so, that it was perhaps just a ‘coincidence’ but that the person who rejected him after an employment interview had a Jewish family name. This type of remark, marginal in our interviews in Roubaix, must nevertheless be taken into consideration because it indicates, in its way, how an imaginary notion of the all-powerful Jew, can circulate.

The racism of which young people complain most bitterly by far is that of the police. Their accounts converge and begin with the very particular methods used by some police patrols. Many of them speak of physical and verbal abuse which occurs frequently and goes unpunished. One North African youth recounts, “He punched me in the stomach and butted me with his knee. He got me on the ground and said, “I’m going to kick your teeth in, how would you like that?” Latifa told of an incident involving one of her relatives. This person was coming out of a restaurant where he had been celebrating his birthday with friends, several of whom were of immigrant descent:

They came out of the Flunch restaurant and police arrested them. They searched them and everything. They saw Damien and said to him, “What are you doing with these Arabs? You’ll end up like them!

Gérard said:

At the time when I was fooling around, I often ended up in the police station. Then the cops would show me a photo of Le Pen inside their caps. Almost all the police are racist! In the police station in Roubaix, there can only be about twenty people who have nothing to do with all that!

Others objected to discrimination when attempting to go into a dis-cothèque or various leisure venues. Amar said, “No young people of my generation have been able to go to a club”. The manager of the community centre referred to above said, “Some of them wanted to do go-carting one afternoon but they couldn’t get in”.

Racism and injustice give rise to an intense feeling of incomprehen-sion in those who are excluded from the promises of the Republic. For them, equality of opportunity has become a myth and no longer corresponds to any reality. In these circumstances, the imaginary Jew personi� es all the sources of power which hinder or prevent social and geographical mobility. But this image is constructed in a way which involves identi� cation with the Palestinian cause and with Islam.



The Palestinian Cause

Young people in the working-class areas of Roubaix wholly identify with the Palestinians. “They compare their lives to those of young people there,” says Lydia, the local elected representative we have already quoted. The televised images of Israeli tanks confronting Pal-estinian children armed only with stones, or those, said Latifa, “of little Mohamed, dead” lying beside his father, arouse feelings of indignation tinged with intense excitement. Scores of these young people identify with the struggle of the Palestinians who have lost their land as a result of Israeli policy which treats them with contempt and despoils them. They share in the suffering of the Palestinians which also seems to them symbolic, at international level, of the suffering of all Muslims. Israel and the Israelis become the source of all the misfortunes of the Arabs and the Muslims. All Jews are identi� ed indiscriminately with Israel and its policies, no matter what their nationality.

From this point of view, which reduces them to imagined basic char-acteristics, Jews are said to be domineering and arrogant. The amalgam of Jewish people and Israeli policy leads to hatred of the Jews. Verbal abuse is commonplace in Roubaix. And since, in the locality, there are hardly any Jews, many hang onto the only justi� cation they have for their hostility and for their condemnation of the desire of Jews to harm Muslim identity and Muslim interests, such as the position of support for the war in Iraq which the rabbi in Lille stated publicly. “It’s a serious matter when a rabbi or a French Jew takes a stand in support of Israel,” said one youth. An imam in the Lille region had no hesitation in declaring that the rabbi had taken a stand to “eliminate the Muslims”. The latter, at our request, commented on the remarks which he is said to have made. He said he had declared that:

If it is effectively proved that these people are rascals [referring to the government in Iraq] . . . well, the position of Judaism is not: “Go on, be compassionate until the day when you really cop it. No! You react!” That’s all I said.

Whatever the case may be his remarks were widely discussed and referred to repeatedly, including in our presence, by adolescents who do not read the local press, but who nevertheless knew about it.

It was their support for the Palestinian cause rather than because of anti-Semitism which led the young people in the working-class areas to criticise the rabbi in Lille. Their remarks did not extend into any


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speci� c action, apart from a vague boycott, which may be real or sim-ply announced, affecting some products suspected of being a source of � nancing for Israel. In the words of Latifa, the secondary school pupil: “In fact, I saw a list of all the products which gave money to Israel. There was a long list of things. I saw Ariel, Coca Cola . . .”. Habib said that in the area where he lives, “In the street, I often hear: “Why do you wear Nikes? They’re American. Coke is Jewish”.

The Failure of the Institutions

There is a direct relationship between the present-day anti-Semitism and the crisis of the institutions, and there are numerous illustrations of this in Emmanuel Brenner’s book, Les Territoires perdus de la République. In the working-class areas of Roubaix, accusations are frequently levelled at the institutions of the Republic. Not only their shortcomings, but also their injustices are felt by all, which makes them the focal point for criticism of the nation. But it is the injustice which they imple-ment rather than their state of crisis which is described: they appear to work well but only for some people whom they protect and support while others are left to their fate. This is a shift away from the usual criticisms which claim that the Republican institutions have dif� culty in confronting present-day challenges. If they do not conform to the original concept and do not ful� l the promise of their resounding motto—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—it is because they endorse ratio-nales of injustice and social divides which work to the advantage of some and to the detriment of others. It is not because the institutions are falling apart and losing their grip.

To some extent, state schools escape criticism. Many still hope they will offer them the possibility of success in life, but in many respects they � nd them ill-adapted. In particular, they are said not to ful� l the youngest pupils’ need for knowledge. Thus, the Shoah, the Algerian War, colonisation and decolonisation, and slavery are all subjects which are either dealt with poorly or one-sidedly in the opinion of some. An educational advisor (CPE Conseiller pédagogique d’éducation) at a state secondary school in Roubaix commented, “The school curriculum in France has always been the outcome of a political choice”. He went on to refer to a subject of discontent: “There are history teachers today who have to talk about decolonisation, but they don’t really speak in any detail about what colonisation entailed”. Some claim that difference in its historical, political and cultural dimensions has never been dealt with



in schools under the Republic. Lydia, the local elected member whom we have already mentioned, complained about this: “I think that schools have a tremendous role to play here and that it is the responsibility of schools after some of the blunders which have occurred”. By way of illustration, she referred to the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict:

I think that if, in schools, there were a calm approach to the con� ict and the issues and who is who etc. were explained, we would arrive at a less volatile situation than we have at the moment.

Gérard, the local youth worker, thinks that schools should meet the huge demand people have for knowledge about religions, especially to defuse the tension surrounding religious questions at the moment:

We don’t learn about it in school! In school, there is no religious edu-cation. We are not taught. Those who are Christians because they have been to church in fact know very little. A Christian who has gone as far as their � rst communion knows very little about religion. Actually he knows nothing about it! A Muslim who is not practising knows nothing either. [. . .] There are no religions which call for evil.

He added, “That would calm things down a lot because we would know what we were talking about. Very often young people say ‘this and that . . .’, but they have no idea what they are talking about”. Some-times the school curriculum is described as old-fashioned and as not having evolved in keeping with a society which has undergone profound changes. Its content is said to be unfair and this observation is frequently based on the idea of a disproportion between the teaching about the genocide of the Jews during World War II and that of other forms of extreme violence which have marked the history of other peoples and which remain overshadowed or glossed over.

It must be said that in this respect schools have to compete with the media. For young people in schools, their opinions and even their knowledge are to a large extent shaped by sources outside school, in particular through the intermediary of television which, according to Gérard, only “twists the knife in the wound”.

Another institution—the family—is also described as being destabi-lised in the working-class area. Bouziane, a local youth worker, observes that many parents can no longer handle the tensions and crises they go through with their children. In these cases they often turn to him, even asking him to have a child they can no longer control taken into care. “They are in dire straits,” he says. “They think that we social workers will be able to sort out the problem of bringing them up.” Another


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youth worker, Moussa, remarked that the parents have given up their role, expecting organisations, such as the one in which he works, to do everything. Some no longer bother to attend when they are called to come and sort out a problem concerning their child: “It’s the older brother who comes along”. However, the days of ‘big brothers’ are numbered. Big brothers too are subject to discrimination and are so distraught, said Bouziane that “they openly admit they are powerless to help with bringing up their younger brother”. He added, “When they themselves are integrated, they retort, “What do you expect me to do? I’m not at home during the day. I’m working. I can hit him and shout at him but what then?”

Finally, the judiciary and the police stray from the values which they are supposed to personify. They are widely criticised for working in a way which is discriminatory and racist. A youth worker whose role is youth crime prevention con� ded, “The police in Roubaix is unbelievable”. Speaking about ongoing legal procedures, he said that the judges had exposed the way in which the police had set up � les unjustly accusing children of Muslim and North African descent. He referred to the experience of one young person known to him and to whom the judge allegedly said of the police, “The police have heard your name too many times”. The youth worker told us that in fact as soon as the boy was taken in for questioning the police had taunted him with: “It’s the electric chair for you! [. . .] Luckily,” he went on, “There are good lads in the anti-crime squad (BAC)”.

Amidst the tensions between the young people in the working-class areas and the institutions, the � gure of the Jew is not often mentioned. There are instances, but these are exceptional, for example when insti-tutions were suspected of protecting the Jews and of systematically punishing children of Arab descent, or again when the leader of a cultural organisation said that the targeted strikes and other forms of aggression committed by Betar, an extreme right Jewish organisation, would never be taken to court and punished—but, it was obvious that they were referring to incidents in Paris and not to local life.

It may be that, in the working-class areas of Roubaix, the Jews do take unfair advantage of France or of the Republic to the detriment of Muslims and more widely of the immigrant population as a whole. Moreover, Jews are not assimilated to the French and now and again the difference is recalled. “In my opinion, Jewish and French are two differ-ent things,” said Habib. However, there is no dif� culty in assimilating



Jews to Americans against the background of the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict. The resentment towards France refers to quite a different real-ity: the actual experience of racism and discrimination, the injustice experienced today weighed down with the memory of the colonial past which is frequently referred to in the most banal conversations. The Jews are resented quite simply because they are said to elude this injustice and, not assimilated but fully integrated, they seem to be particularly well treated by France.

A Question of Religion?

Could it be that Muslims and Jews differ profoundly over religion? Some people suggest this is the case. An imam in Tourcoing argued:

Why do the Jews not reply to our invitations? Because they fear that we will discuss projects involving religion. Now, in the Koran, the Jews say that they alone are recognised by God, they are the chosen people, and they refuse to discuss religion.

Others voice this opinion even more vehemently. Abdel, a young man living in Roubaix, spoke of an insurmountable religious con� ict. He differentiated between the anti-Semite and those who are ‘anti-Jew’ whose hatred is explained by religious factors. In his opinion: “The con� ict between Jews and Arabs is not a question of anti-Semitism but is a war of religions,” and he spoke of the contempt which the two religions have for each other. But according to another young person, Ahmed, “the Jewish religion is cursed”.

However, if there is religious hatred, where is it formented before surfacing here in Roubaix? In the mosques? Are there people who claim to be well informed who advocate maintaining a distance with the Jews, rupture and hatred? The rabbi in Lille told us that he had noticed a change: hostility between some Muslims and Jews was on the rise and today he personally was a victim of this. About � fteen years ago when he lived in Lille-Sud, a working-class area of the town with a considerable immigrant population, local people frequently came to kiss his hand considering him to be a man of God. It was customary to do so in Algeria or Morocco, as they did with the imams. “I had no problems,” he said. However, today things seem to him to be very different:


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Not long ago I had to go to the emergency chemist over there. The same chemist which I had gone to for two and a half years! Well, today it’s become a no-go area for me—I can’t go there, it’s no longer possible!

He recounted a further anecdote which he thought was very revealing:

Ten years ago I was in a train going to Paris and I happened to be sitting beside a Muslim woman who had got on shortly after me. It was right in the middle of Ramadan. Since I had no time to eat that day, my wife had made me a sandwich. I felt uneasy because I thought that I couldn’t eat in front of someone who is not allowed to eat—it wasn’t polite. So I said to the woman, “Do you mind if I eat a little of my sandwich?” She said she didn’t. Then, a little later, she said, “There’s something I don’t understand. When I was a child in Algeria, we were told that if we had no halal meat we could buy kosher meat—and that the animal had been killed according to the same rites”. I replied in the af� rmative and that my parents had told me that in Morocco they did that too. She replied, “Well, why is it that today, the imam in our mosque, who studied in Iran, says it is not true and that we must have nothing to do with anything Jewish?”

If we take this atypical case, some imams thus apparently foment antagonism between Muslims and Jews, in� uencing the minds of young people in particular. This was con� rmed by a priest in Tourcoing who was also in contact with young Muslims who apparently told him that there was an imam who said things about the Jews in his sermons. In particular, he did so at the time of the war in Iraq. “You will never be at peace with the Jews,” he is said to have declared, “It’s written in the Koran”. The priest said he was convinced that this sort of discourse could be taken as literally true by the youngest for whom, by his reck-oning, “the imam is the voice of truth”.

Do Muslim families fuel this opposition to the Jewish religion? It is dif� cult to answer such a question de� nitively given the number of examples and counter-examples on the ground. Some people stress a tradition of antagonism between the two religions. Others, on the contrary, stress the image of a historical and, in the main, harmonious proximity. Shades of opinion can be traced to the national origin—in particular, Algerian or Moroccan—of the children of second genera-tion North African immigrants, or to the urban or rural origin of their parents. Habib told us that he had overheard Muslim parents tell their son that he would be disowned if he married a Jewish girl. Latifa, the state secondary school pupil, could remember her father explaining to her that, “In the Koran, God spurned the Jews”, because they had



committed the sin of idolatry. Often parents had taught the younger children that they could “eat with a Jew but not sleep with a Jew”. Latifa, who had heard her uncles saying this in Algeria, discovered that this hostility towards Jews was not speci� c to Muslims. Her father had spoken to her about the feelings of French Catholics for whom the Jews ‘killed Christ’.

At a pinch, the � gure of the Jew, discredited and in the dock could bring the Muslim and Catholic faiths closer together. Can we go a step further and hypothesise that Christian anti-Judaism, as it is referred to in these remarks of Muslim parents, might in some way be liberating the Muslims’ anti-Judaism? Is there an alliance between two religions which are well represented in Roubaix against the third? The idea is never considered. At most, it surfaces on the quiet and at the fringes.

In fact, the references to Islam in the remarks hostile to the Jews are seldom the result of exegesis. They are much more likely to be based on snatches of sacred text unrelated to any analysis with no indication of the source, if not on television images. Conscious of the risk run by their religion which is suddenly being accused of promot-ing anti-Semitism in France, Muslim religious worthies endeavour, on the contrary, to recall the closeness of the link which brings Jews and Muslims closer together. This was the case when we met the rector of the mosque in Lille-Sud, Amar Lasfar, along with an imam and a teacher from the Averroes secondary school. This establishment, the � rst Muslim secondary school in France, opened at the beginning of the 2003 school year, is situated in the mosque complex. According to the rector, who is also a leading of� ce-bearer in the UOIF (the Union of Muslim Organisations in France), there is no insurmountable ‘allergy’ between the two faiths, but a tension due to the circumstances. Draw-ing on religious texts, he pointed out that: “By far the majority of the prophets are Jewish”. He considered that religious concord demanded efforts to restore harmony to relations and calm the virulent ideas of some of those who frequent the mosque:

We remind them of their history lessons: “Have you forgotten that the prophet’s neighbour whom he visited every day, was Jewish? Have you forgotten that the prophet died and his breast plate was in pawn to a Jew? Have you forgotten that there were Jewish ministers in the Empire of Andalusia?”

He added, “And that is something that the Muslim has to bear in mind”. According to the rector, by explaining the scriptures the mosque is a


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peacemaker and helps to rebut those ideas and generalisations which are too quick to accuse the Jews, thus making Muslims the enemies of Jews. It falls to the sermon to correct the misinterpretations of the Koran, which too frequently serve as a pretext for fuelling feelings of hatred and rejection.

For these Muslim religious leaders, Islam is the last major institu-tional pillar capable of socialising the young and preventing violence and other excesses precisely because of the in� uence which it exerts on them. As evidence, take the Riad Hamlaoui affair, named after a young man who was the victim of a police ‘blunder’ (a bullet � red at point-blank range in the neck one night in April 2000, although he was not armed): “Lille-Sud was in turmoil,” recalls a high-pro� le � gure of the Catholic clergy in the region. “The authorities had all but lost control on the ground. The police could no longer go in there. The mosque then took the affair in hand to calm everyone down and allow people to speak”. In such situations of crisis and extreme tension between the young people in an area and the institutions or political representatives of a town, effectively only the mosque and its of� ce-bearers appear to be likely to have any success in broadcasting assurances and appeals for calm. This was the case in Lille-Sud with Amar Lasfar, who thereafter was to become an undisputed Muslim leader well beyond Lille-Sud.

In the working-class areas, the reality of the religions is much more complex and ambivalent than it would appear at � rst glance. How can anyone claim to know precisely what direction the developments in progress will take when not everything takes place openly? Hence, it is fairly likely, but dif� cult to prove, that sermons are a factor in spreading hatred for Jews, if only in lending a structure to the discourse which accuses them of the worst evils. Religious hate speech, even when heard covertly, and no matter what its origin, can easily be adapted to cur-rent events and serves to interpret them. Local occurrences may also be combined with national events, and even with international current affairs, in interpretations which circulate easily and without making the slightest distinction between various levels of reality—and therefore of analysis. The experience of the Muslim here in Roubaix becomes an illustration of what Muslims are said to experience at international level and is constantly associated with images of the Israeli domina-tion of the Palestinians and the violence in� icted on the Iraqi people by the Americans.

Aware of the enormity of the problem and of its devastating effects in working-class areas, the representatives of the major monotheistic



religions decided to work together in the urban community of Lille. Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and Jews now join forces and act in concert. This also comes down to the personalities of each of their representatives. Amar Lasfar, the rector of the Lille-Sud mosque, makes no secret of his friendship with the assistant bishop in Lille, Jean-Luc Brunin, whom he refers to as ‘a friend of Muslims’, nor of his liking for the rabbi in Lille. Owing to current events at the time when we met him, he also voiced his agreement with the Jewish authorities on the Muslim headscarf, declaring that he had preached a sermon on Friday in which he quoted the chief rabbi in France. On the Muslim headscarf, he went on to say, “I agree with the approach of the chief rabbi and not with the chief mufti in France”.

In the context of tensions at both local and international level at the beginning of the year 2000, the religious factor is not devoid of strategies and the good understanding between the representatives of the various religions is open to criticism. For example, the assistant bishop regretted the ‘breakdown in religious dialogue over the past two years’. In his opinion, this is primarily due to the feelings aroused by the Israel-Palestine con� ict. He explained how one day he had been heckled by a Christian-Jewish friendship group inciting him to end the cordial relations which he kept up with Muslims. In response to the invitation of this group, he described what he had just witnessed during a trip to Palestine and in particular the horror of the daily bombardments:

I was summoned before the group who told me: “If you continue your dialogue with Muslims we will no longer take part in interreligious meetings with you”. One of them even took out a yellow star, placed it on the table and said, “If you persist, that means that you support what may happen”.

The rabbi, for his part, fears that his good relationship with his friend from the mosque may be under threat. Proof of this is what happened to him recently when he was in a bus and a young man wanted to speak to him:

He began to come out with all sorts of aberrations such as: there never has been a temple in Jerusalem; the Jews are renegades; even God has always rejected us; if the Jews had not wanted to accept Mohammed it was because they knew he was the Messiah and not Jewish [. . .]. I asked him where he had heard all this rubbish and that I had never heard such nonsense. I changed buses. He followed me. I took the Metro and he walked alongside me. I said to him: “I have a good friend. He’s called Amar Lasfar. I speak on the same platform with him every now and then


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and I have never heard him say anything like that. At the outset, we made an agreement; we decided to stick to the problem in hand and not shift the emphasis even if we had personal positions”. Thereupon, he said, “I don’t know what he tells you, but on Fridays, he tells us something quite different”. Then I asked him, “Do you know him?” He said he did and that he went to the Rue Marquillie2 every Friday. At that point I told him that he was getting on my nerves, that he was talking rubbish and only making things worse and I asked him to leave me alone. A week later, it was the beginning of January and in the calendar new year, here in Lille, we hold a meeting with representatives of all the religions to discuss a chosen theme. And that’s when I saw X . . . [an important Muslim leader] come in, along with Y . . . [another Muslim leader] and a third person. It was the same young man! [. . .] He did know him! I thought, “This is not good news”.

The rabbi fears that radical Islamists may be getting into the mosques. “There are extremist movements,” he con� rmed, “who have in� ltrated circles which are generally supposed to be moderate”.

It is possible to create an ongoing dialogue between religions. But the experience of this region demonstrates that many tensions are totally beyond the control of local leaders because their sources are at international level and because international current affairs have such an impact on the situation.

2 The street where the mosque is.


CHAPTER EIGHT

THE POWER OF THE IMAGINATION

In a place like Roubaix, the construction of the Jew is highly subjec-tive and acts as a prop to religious, political and cultural identities. To declare oneself pro-Palestinian may mean that one feels Arab or Muslim as well as subjugated, excluded and poorly treated. The distant merges with the immediate, the charge of brutality levelled at the distant State of Israel � nds its counterpart in the accusations of shortcomings levelled at the local institutions and the practices of discrimination are perceived as being ultimately equivalent in both cases. Opposition to oppression (the ragra) is always seen through the lens of one’s own sub-jectivity. Anger � nds expression in the hatred of capitalist America and the State of Israel; the � gure held in contempt is the Jewish American who is automatically pro-Zionist. Young people in the working-class areas in Roubaix quite readily declare themselves to be in favour of Bin Laden. A Bin Laden who has himself become the fearless hero of a battle against America and the Americans who, in the words of Amar, “do what they want in the world”. The source of international tension is a world away from Roubaix but its repercussions are visible there. Bin Laden drums up support and sometimes enthusiasm. Each individual, whether a local leader in the area or merely an inhabitant, expresses his or her hatred of the Americans condemned by all as the implacable friends of Israel. The American and Jew are now one and the same thing. “This over-simpli� cation captures the imagination of many young people of North African descent,” said the assistant bishop in Lille. “The United States support Israel under pressure from a Jewish lobby, so, for young people in Roubaix, the equation ‘Israel, United States, same struggle’ holds true.”

Effectively, it is not at all dif� cult to � nd echoes of this idea in the minds of the youngest, even though most of them do not attend the mosque and do not understand Arabic. The Jews are presumed to exist; they are encountered and from then on they are the root of all ills from which they and their people are said to bene� t.


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All Talk but No Action

All this leads to remarks and discourse which are confused and con-tradictory to say the least. As Samir, a youth worker in a community centre, commented, “There is a hotchpotch of ideas. Everything is jumbled together”. Abdel thinks:

The Jews have climbed very high up the social ladder. They even hold posts in the government. They are the great industrialists. They are the great doctors. They were shrewd enough to put in a lot of effort in the past. I admire that about them: they support each other.

Envious of their sense of community, he went on:

If there are two Jews walking down the street and one falls, the other goes to help him. If two Arabs do the same and one falls, the other will trample him some more (laughter). That is the impression we have of them. But, frankly, the Jews support each other. Paris, it’s the Jews. Television is run by the Jews. The cinema is made by the Jews [. . .] It’s in their blood. It’s business, it’s money.

These are traditional themes. The fact that they have cropped up here indicates that local anti-Semitism is a classical heritage in France, which is easily combined with the speci� cities of a strong identi� cation with the Palestinian cause and possible references to Islam.

Prejudice, stereotypes and rumours are rife. Nadia laments the fact that insults are commonplace: “I have heard ‘� lthy Jew’ in the street. Unfortunately this is an everyday occurrence for some people”. At the same time, and even though they are constantly being tarred with the same brush, it is possible to differentiate between the few Jews here—because there are some nevertheless—and their Israeli counterparts. “In our areas”, said Amar, “there are some Jews with whom we have a good relationship”. He added, “We see a Jew on TV and we see a Jew here. It’s two different things although it is the same thing! [. . .] OK, a Jew on TV is hated, but when he lives with us in our area, well, he just lives with us”.

In Roubaix, any contempt for Jews does not lead to actual action, but remains in the realm of the imaginary, even when it comes to its consequences. Anything which is remote and something of a nuisance or alarming is likely to be described as Jewish. “Lionel Jospin is Jewish, I think,” said Latifa. Anti-Semitic violence remains verbal and is akin to a form of provocation. It is a demonstration of a radical opposition which echoes the sense of injustice prolonging all the symbolic forms


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of aggression which young people of immigrant descent experience. It is an expression of their malaise, the social evils which strike a popula-tion with no illusions as to its fate and with no apparent destiny other than domination and relegation. “It’s a way of defending ourselves”, explained Said, a young man from Roubaix, “We just want to show you that we know how to defend ourselves too,” added his friend, Ahmed. This defensive re� ex is all the stronger the more young people feel isolated and deprived of the support which the Jews receive when they are victims of racism. “The Jews get the press to defend them,” said Ahmed, “Whereas, we Muslims are always the butt of criticism”.

Anti-Semitism operates at the level of declarations, in the form of remarks which are not followed by action but hurled at anyone, Jews and non-Jews alike. “In Roubaix, I have never yet seen a big movement with people burning cars because something had happened in Pales-tine”, stressed Lydia, the young elected representative. Some dogmatic young people sometimes declare that they are considering joining in the battle against the new American order and there is talk of taking up arms with other Muslims. But they remain undecided; they have not gone off to � ght. In March 1996, after a gun � ght in the Rue Carette, the police brought to an end the escapades of a gang which was wavering between an Islamist armed struggle and classic serious crime. The memory of the dramatic events in the Rue Carette is a reminder that those who underwent military training abroad were not necessarily Arabs, and that they were closer to organised crime than to any religious ideal.

The Importance of the Media

Television plays a role in building up images of Jews. Young people are very keen on television and it is one of their preferred sources of knowledge and information. The local councillor already mentioned describes them as “products of the telly” and observed that it exerted “a destructive and devastating in� uence”. But is television not a window on the world? There is nothing to con� rm that it stirs up and fuels hatred of Jews; but it is clear that it may have its part to play in that.

Television is one of the pillars of communication between groups, both in the family and on the street, providing images and news which, in certain conditions, can stir up and reinforce feelings. When listening to young people in working-class areas, it would appear that there is a


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recurrence of references to and commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict. In what we retain of the images of Israel, its army, and Ariel Sharon, its head of government, the imaginary Jew wins in reality. The image becomes one of a settler and a bloodthirsty soldier. Abdel exclaimed:

You take a Palestinian, a poor little Palestinian. He’s gunned down by the army. You hate them! You’re disgusted! You say to yourself, “My goodness, they throw stones and they’re shooting at them”.

Is the media not taking sides? In taking and broadcasting pictures, then sorting and selecting them, it may bias its public. Here the Israeli-Pal-estinian con� ict is the focus of criticism as if it entirely dominated the screen and attracted all the attention. A young pro-Palestinian militant con� rmed this as follows:

We cannot believe that all Israelis are against the Palestinians. If you know a bit about the situation and what is happening there, you know very well that that is not what is happening. Why doesn’t television show us all the actions undertaken by militant associations, the Jewish associations who are active and who also want peace and who work with the Palestinians? We are never shown that. Why not? Because there are other interests involved.

But television is also a commercial product which acts in defence of its own interests, and another suspicion is also sometimes voiced: do these interests not coincide with those of the Jews?

At times the national media do turn their attention to dif� cult areas and sometimes Roubaix is in the headlines. On occasion � nding them-selves the focus of the news broadcast, the inhabitants of Roubaix know what it is like to be stigmatised. Young people of foreign descent have been able to see, more than most, the price of being thrust into the spotlight. Roubaix, as an image, can be marketed and enables the media to sustain the fear and the sense of insecurity. Several highlights of this news item remain in people’s memories, such as the bloody epic of the gang in Roubaix which ended, as we have already said, one morning in March 1996 in the Rue Carette. The combination of terrorism and Islamism was so perfect that Roubaix suddenly became one of the favourite meeting places for organised crime, terrorism and Islamism. The town has paid all the more dearly for this disastrous image for it having hit the headlines in the national media on several occasions. Thus, in October 2003, an anti-crime squad (BAC) policeman was



wounded by bullets when he stopped two people in a high-powered car. The affair prompted the Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, to intervene directly on site. It was also in Roubaix that for the � rst time and in a most dramatic manner in July 2003, the March 2003 law on internal security was applied when two youths accused of squatting in the entrance to a block of � ats were arrested and sentenced to one month in prison. There was a lot of media coverage of the episode.

The link between the media, identities and attitudes to young people of immigrant descent operates in various and sometimes contradictory directions. Sometimes these young people use the media to support their denunciation of the injustice in the world. Sometimes, they see the media as the epitome of a power which is completely beyond their reach. At other times they claim to be victims of the media, and stress the ruthlessness of their approach and the devastation wrought by their impact on the everyday life or the reputation of a town. For the social workers the consequences may be catastrophic. A newspaper headline or the � rst item in a televised news bulletin may be enough to ruin several years of work. The media coverage of a government minister, an imam or both together can have a devastating effect on the ground. We should add here that there are many routes to stigmatisation and some may pass by the school. Thus Rachid, a secondary school pupil, was deeply disgusted when he discovered in a school book that Rou-baix was underlined in red indicating it was a high risk area. “When you see that, you don’t even feel like reading your book . . . You say to yourself that you live in a high risk area so there is no point in mak-ing an effort”.

A Political Context

On the whole, in Roubaix and even in the North, the prevailing climate of opinion is pro-Palestinian both at political and interest group level. The director of a community centre in Roubaix ran no risk of being mistaken when he said, “It’s 90% pro-Palestinian here”. Support for the Palestinian cause does not inevitably extend into hatred of the Jews. However, defence of the Palestinians appears systematically amongst those who express anti-Semitic opinions.


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The Local Authorities

As often elsewhere in France, this pro-Palestinian climate of opinion is taken up by the local authority which con� rms the young people in their conviction that they are defending a just cause. This was con-� rmed by our meeting with a young local councillor. The wall of his of� ce in the town hall is decorated with signs recalling his support for Palestine. He said:

For the moment, our main axis is Palestine. I think the town council has a position on this. We have taken strong action on Palestine. For the past two years, on a regular basis, we have received young Palestinians with whom we try to develop and set up initiatives. In other words, we work on Palestine every day and try to make a small contribution.

The idea of the town hall team, in any case his particular one, is to engage the population in support for the Palestinian cause. He contin-ued, “That’s what we are working on to try and alert young people to international problems, the problems of ethnic cleansing and discrimi-nation”. His discourse certainly never called for the maintaining of a tension between Jews and Palestinians, but it reinforced the image of the Palestinian reduced to the role of a victim with whom young people in the town readily identify. As a justi� cation and frame of reference for the work of the town hall, peace is the aim which is constantly borne in mind, but which can only be attained once the Palestinians have found full and entire satisfaction. But in the meantime, are we not witnessing a stirring of passions and the fervent and unconditional identi� cation of young people in working-class areas with the Palestin-ian cause and its history? The councillor wished to defend himself and came back to his work:

We want to show young people in Roubaix, young Palestinians and young Israelis that they all have the same aims, the same lives, that they all have the same expectations, and that they will have to get to the bottom of all this. We have to get to know each other better to understand that neither side are monsters.

A few kilometres away from Roubaix, in Lille, the town hall also openly supports the Palestinians. Recently Lille was twinned with Nablus. The rabbi in Lille complained to the councillors, in front of us, about the lack of fairness in their political positions, and their neglect of the twinning of Lille with Safed, an Israeli town, which dates back to 1988. One episode left him feeling somewhat bitter. Following an event in



support of Nablus in the town of Lille, which took the form of an exhibition of photos aimed at raising public awareness of the situation of the Palestinians, representatives of the Jewish community in Lille turned to the town hall. They requested that a balance be ensured and suggested that action be taken in support of the town of Safed which had been the scene of attacks some time before. According to them, they received no answer from the town hall.

Sensitivity to these questions is extreme. Any action or public stance may immediately fan the � ames. The Jews in France, as they appear in the media, are obviously not immune to radicalism, and the politi-cal positions of some of them, particularly when it comes to Israel, in turn promotes the association of which they know themselves to be the victims in other respects. In particular, this is what happens when they claim that support for Palestine necessarily conceals an underlying anti-Semitism. For example, the assistant bishop of Lille took up the case of the top magistrate in the town of Seclin, Jean-Claude Willem, after the Association cultuelle israélite in Lille had lodged a complaint about the latter. In his town, this mayor had called for a boycott of products manufactured in Israel, in particular by no longer serving them in the local authority canteens. His aim was to register his disagreement with the policies of Ariel Sharon. The rabbi in Lille also mentioned this episode. He was a witness at the trial, at the invitation of the Jewish community. He con� rmed that he wanted to remind people of the distinction that should be made between Jewish identity and the poli-cies of the State of Israel, and regretted that the mayor’s attitude had sustained this disastrous association. He complained that the trial at which he had been present and acted as a witness was a trial of Israel, as a Jewish nation, and the distinction was not always made between Israel and the policies of Sharon: “It had become a political debate. The very thing we feared had come to pass. That is, the problem was transposed and it was Israel that was judged in court.” In his opinion, politics overshadows everything and creates confusion. He complained of the association that he observes when the idea is put forward that “the Jews are not hateful because of Israel”. But that “Israel is hateful because the Jews have always been rotten”.

In fact, everything seems to be so interwoven and so tense in the minds of each individual that it becomes almost impossible to draw the line between criticism of Israeli policies and speci� cally anti-Semitic attitudes. The dangers of a breakdown in the dialogue between the representatives of the religious communities and the limits of social work


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are an even greater cause for concern when faced with young people who are in disarray and left to their own devices, to the rumours of their peer groups, to radicalised Islamist leaders or to television alone for their understanding of the political and cultural disorders in the world. The gap between the personal and the general, between the local and the ‘global’ is both substantial and reduced in the smoke and mirrors of anti-Semitic discourse which is the key to all misfortunes. Drifting identities, completely dominated by the sense of injustice, become a solid platform, a stepping stone to anti-Semitism.

Anti-Racism

Within the network of interest groups the MRAP is a strong supporter of the Palestinian struggle. Nicole is one of their activists. She explained that in the region, “Most people unite to support the Palestinian cause during the big demonstrations. People have a fairly strong political awareness here”. In these demonstrations, people of all origins (both political and national) come together. “We � nd the whites from the MRAP, the reds from Roubaix, the Arabs, etc.” Federating big groups in support of a common cause, these events, although they are organ-ised by movements against racism and other forms of discrimination, sometimes give rise to spates of anti-Semitic remarks which escape the attention of the organisers. “What is particularly distressing,” said the rabbi from Lille, “is that these demonstrations have degenerated on several occasions. Individuals have left the demonstration and gone into the pedestrian streets where there are shops, shouting, “Death to the Jews!” in front of the shop windows”. He regretted that these anti-Semitic slogans chanted during the demonstrations were not publicly denounced by the organisers. However, it should be stressed that many members of the associations represented who came to support the Pales-tinian people � nd this sort of behaviour offensive. Brigitte, for example, who is an activist in the Association France-Palestine Solidarité, considers “it essential to differentiate clearly between the politics of Israel and the Jewish question”. Catherine, from the same movement, added that there is such a � ne line between the two and the confusion is so widespread that it is, likewise, increasingly common for people to be accused of anti-Semitism when they support the Palestinian cause.

In theory, a distinction must be made between hatred for the Jews and support for the Palestinian cause, but, in practice, it is not uncommon for the two to be confused. And those who maintain the association



bene� t in fact from a favourable climate of opinion because a number of personalities in the region (local politicians, members of associations, etc.) who can in no way be suspected of any sort of anti-Semitism prioritise the defence of the Palestinian people at all costs.


CHAPTER NINE

A SOCIOLOGICAL INTERVENTION

We are beginning to develop a precise idea of what is at stake concern-ing anti-Semitism in the working-class areas of a town with almost no Jews and which is recovering only slowly and with dif� culty from the decline of its traditional industries. But several points remain unclear. In Roubaix, anti-Semitism is primarily the public expression of a hitherto private opinion: the question is, how does this process take place? Does it really not meet with the slightest opposition from those who are involved in the experience of the working-class areas? This opinion obviously falls within the category of ‘global’ anti-Semitism, but to what extent are its ‘global’ references to a national cause, that of the Palestinians, confused with its religious dimensions, those of Islam. Finally, there seems to be such a strong association between hatred of Jews and a situation of exclusion that we do have to consider whether, and to what extent, it would decline if the social inequality and injustice suffered by many of those who express it were addressed by policies suf� ciently robust to reduce them signi� cantly and if there were to be a genuine recognition of the historical memories of the inhabitants, many of whom come from North Africa. In other words, the � gure of the Jew in Roubaix is an imaginary construct, so much so that we cannot but hypothesise that we might see this � gure transformed or banished from people’s minds if the social and cultural realities of the population in question were dealt with politically.

To enable us to answer such questions, we adopted a method which we had already used in the past to study racism, including moreover in Roubaix.1 The method of sociological intervention, on which there is fairly extensive specialised literature,2 consists in inviting social actors, or others, to analyse their actions with the help of the researchers. The method was adapted on this occasion to deal with such a sensi-tive issue as anti-Semitism. Our approach involved bringing together

1 Michel Wieviorka , La France raciste, op. cit.2 Cf. in particular Alain Touraine , La Voix et le Regard, Paris, Le Seuil, 1978.


a sociological intervention 125

a varying group of young people and social workers from the area for a series of � ve meetings on the premises of a community centre in a particularly ‘dif� cult’ area, the Trois-Ponts, with the cooperation of the director of the centre.

The number of participants in the meetings which took place between October 2003 and May 2004 varied from session to session. There were between 15 and 25 people with constant comings and goings of various participants even during the meetings. The young people, who were mainly men and almost all of North African descent, had been invited by Kadour who plays a key role in the area. He is called in to all sorts of dif� cult circumstances, to settle problems within a family, or at work or in school, etc. He also mobilised the handful of social workers who took part in our meetings. What everyone in the group had in common was the shared experience of discrimination and sense of exclusion.

As required by the method used, the group received visits from several speakers who were invited for an exchange of views which could last as long as two, or even three, hours: a pro-Palestinian militant (Thomas Lancelot); a historian, well-known for her work on the Shoah (Annette Wieviorka); a representative from the church (Fr. Brunin, Deputy Bishop of Lille); the local mayor (René Vandierendonck, along with the man-aging director of the municipal services, Michel David); three journal-ists, or former journalists (Sabine Berthaux, Pascal Percq and Philippe Allienne). The researchers intervened during these discussions, the aim of which was to reveal the facts about the problem of anti-Semitism and, more generally, of racism and intercommunity relations. Their role was primarily to introduce elements of analysis and re� ection to the discussion to enable the work of the group to advance.

Before actually entering into the details of this speci� c phase of the research, perhaps we should say a few words about the area in which it took place. The Trois-Ponts lies to the south-east of the town of Roubaix and covers an area in which over 90%3 of the housing is multi-occupancy with almost 85% consisting of various types of low-rent, social housing (Roubaix-Habitat, Logicil, CALPACT and SONACOTRA). There are a few local shops. 95% of inhabitants are in rented accommodation. Built between 1967 and 1973, the towers and blocks typical of the area were originally intended to rehouse the people

3 Data from the Population Census, 1999.


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in Roubaix, then living in substandard accommodation (as part of the plan for dealing with housing un� t for human habitation—RHI); they were also intended to provide housing for the staff of the La Fraternité hospital and medical centre. At the end of the 1980s, considerable changes transformed the area which, till then, had been perceived as residential: the departure of a part of the population, who wished to buy property elsewhere, or who followed the medical centre when it relocated, left a lot of the accommodation vacant. In an attempt to halt the haemorrhage, the various leaseholders implemented a housing policy which aimed to attract a new population. This new population was to be characterised by its youth, its � nancial fragility and its high proportion of foreigners.

Today there are 5,000 inhabitants in the area. The population is still young with 40% aged under 19. There is a high percentage of single-parent families (29.2%), a signi� cant number with no quali� cations (44.3% of over 15s), and, above all, a rate of unemployment soaring to almost 50% (50.3% for men, 49.7% for women).

With a reputation for being a dif� cult area, the Trois-Ponts suffers not only from considerable socio-economic dif� culties which tend to lend it the appearance of a ghetto, but also from a poor image as a result of the stigma ( juvenile delinquency, drug addiction, violence, etc) which are associated with it, and which are sometimes relayed and ampli� ed by the local and national media. Nevertheless, some of the inhabitants do endeavour to make efforts to improve their quality of life and, consequently, the image of the area. Since 1992, this col-lective effort has resulted in the creation of a network of associations bolstered by the town’s policies and the classi� cation of the Trois-Ponts as an Urban Development Area (Développement social des quartiers) and, as such, eligible for public grants.

Hatred of Jews

From the very � rst meeting of the group, verbal attacks on Jews were made openly and unrestrainedly, and without any particular prompt-ing from the researchers. One young person maintained, “In fact, at international level, the Jews take advantage of the fact that they were martyrs during World War II”. Another suspected the Jews of burning synagogues themselves: “Perhaps it’s the Jews themselves. You never know! Don’t forget we’re dealing with real scoundrels here”. A third



observed, “Even in France, the Jews have good jobs. Even in France they have made a niche for themselves”. They referred to ‘fatty Sharon’ and invited the researchers to � nd out more:

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They had diabolical ideas from the start, didn’t they! How to take over the world . . . politics and the sex trade or reconstruct a State of Israel.

Another youth explained:

Take Antwerp—three quarters of diamonds produced go through Ant-werp—it’s the rabbis. If you go to London, you’ll see who’s � lthy rich! And they walk along in their clothes just to show how important they are and that nobody can touch them. In all the big capital cities, they’re there. I was in Paris, in the Sentier area or in Aubervilliers—they’re all talking Jewish. And any apartment that’s worth a lot of money is owned by them. They’re here, there and everywhere. In business, they’re very good!

Another stage is reached when this discourse, which, up to then has only been expressed sporadically, becomes the focus of the research and places the speaker at the centre of the life of the group. We were in the middle of the second meeting and the discussion was heated. We were trying to understand the widespread identi� cation of the young people in the area with the Palestinian cause. One of the youth workers in the community centre went out and came in again shortly after. He had with him three adolescents who had been squabbling noisily in front of the entrance to the building and announced that, if we wanted to know what young people thought, all we had to do was to listen to these three boys. One of them, Kamel, had the gift of the gab. Quizzed by a researcher about the Jewish question he expressed his feelings openly without beating about the bush: “We don’t like the Jews! We like kamikazes!” His two friends laughed. His crude remarks smacking of provocation were uttered in such a way that they triggered strong reactions within the group, the majority of whom did not share his feelings.

Some objected to the association which Kamel made between Jew-ish and Israeli. In an effort to arrive at a better understanding of his remarks, a social worker asked him whether he made a connection between his hostility towards the Jews and the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict. Kamel had no hesitation in saying, “Well, when you see what they do!” A researcher asked him how he felt about Jews who were not Israelis.


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Unambiguously but in a different tone of voice when speaking about religion, Kamel replied, “He’s an exile. There’s no difference—for me, a Jew is a Jew!” Sadia, a student, was visibly embarrassed by these words. She shouted at him immediately after he said he was a Muslim—and therefore, as such, necessarily opposed to the Jews. She was indignant: how could Kamel profess himself to be a practising Muslim and have such feelings of animosity towards Jews. She asked him: “What does it say in the Koran?” Kamel, for once lost for words, for a few instants seemed to be embarrassed by the trap into which he had just fallen—the tone of the discussion was de� nitely not what he was used to in the street with his friends. “You’re a Muslim and you know nothing!” taunted Sadia. “The Koran emphasises ‘tolerance’. It’s not for you to judge!”

Expressing one’s contempt for Jews under the cover of Islam did not meet with much support within the group for the time being. Finding other arguments, Kamel abandoned the theme of religion and returned to the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict; here he was on safer ground and he de� nitely expected to � nd support or backing within the group which was obviously completely behind the Palestinian cause. Kamel then justi� ed his hatred of the Jews by referring to Israel’s policy of despoil-ment as well as the atavism and cruelty of Israeli soldiers. He took as an example an incident which had been widely covered by the media, the death of little Mohammed. “Be honest—don’t you feel anything at all when you see a father holding his son in his arms and they are bombing him? After that, personally I see Jews as killers, not as Jews!” For Kamel, as for others, the � rst image of the Jew that comes to mind is the Israeli soldier and, more globally, Israeli policy, considered to be aggressive and unfair and relayed by the Diaspora: “They take money from France to send over there to kill even more [. . .] they send millions”. The construction of the image of the Jew also corresponds to what they and their friends want to believe. But, while this subjec-tive view may be circulated and maintained by some young people in the area, it de� nitely does not � nd the favour within the group which Kamel seemed to expect.

A friend of Sadia’s, Meriem, who is also a student and a Muslim spoke out for the � rst time and made a distinction between Jews in France and Jews in Israel. She stressed the dangerous tendencies of Kamel’s remarks. According to her, Kamel, like many others, made no distinction between ‘Zionists’—the word used to described anyone



who has a positive attitude to or who belongs to Israel—and Jews. He was treating them as though they were one and the same.

Next, Adel intervened. He is about 20 years old and is something of a leader4 in the area. He has a post-school leaving certi� cate quali� cation but he is not in employment. We met him for the � rst time at the foot of a tower ‘holding up the walls’ along with a few friends and listening to the hip-hop which was blasting out of the loudspeakers in his car. Adel’s remarks proved very thoughtful and he stressed the difference between Zionists and Jews. He referred to the extremism of the Zion-ists, pointing out that the same thing existed amongst some practising Muslims. “We have the same thing,” he said. He turned to Kamel and continued, “I treat Jews like anyone else. I’m above all that. You’ll see when you grow up. When you’re young, you make jokes.” Turning his attention to the group and speaking more speci� cally to the researchers he explained, referring to Kamel, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s still at the age of having fun”. The group was won over by this explanation. “I don’t think he’s very mature yet,” seconded Aziz, a father with many quali� cations who only has a temporary job.

Thus, the positions within the group began to crystallize. Most of its members, and in any event those who expressed their opinions, rejected the extreme opinions of Kamel, who put forward the image of the wicked Jew, a henchman of Bush’s America. It was undeniable that the group supported the Palestinian people and showed solidar-ity with them but this did not mean to say that they all developed a tendency towards anti-Semitism. Instead, they even endeavoured to correct the simplistic but all too frequently repeated associations and to put paid to the idea of the Muslim who is necessarily anti-Semitic. Adel remarked:

As soon as an Arab lays a � nger on a Jew or a rabbi, they say that all Muslims are against the Jews! You have to see each incident in its own right. If a synagogue goes up in smoke, perhaps it’s because it’s in a volatile area. That’s all. It’s not because we see 40 Palestinians who have been killed that we think we’ll have to burn a synagogue.

However, Kamel stood � rm, “It might be the Jews themselves doing it,” he retorted, holding his ground. “You’re capable of setting � re to a mosque to say that it’s the Jews who are doing it!” concluded Adel.

4 Translator’s note: caïd in the text—slang term.


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The � rst speaker invited to the group was a pro-Palestinian militant and it was clear that they shared his leanings. All, without exception, expressed their sympathy with the Palestinian cause—comparing the situation here and there. “It’s the same thing but on a smaller scale,” said Bouziane who is the key � gure in the community centre, summing up perfectly the general opinion of the group. Kamel’s hatred—and that of others—towards the Jews, is the outcome of a sense of injustice which combines two dimensions. On the one hand, it is due to a total lack of understanding in the face of the passivity of the world to the policies of Israel. On the other hand, they make a decisive associa-tion between the exclusion they experience and the discrimination to which they are subjected in Roubaix and the experience of the young Palestinians.

Now what had just occurred with Kamel was enlightening from this point of view: strong pro-Palestinian sympathies in no way meant that they were all swept along en masse on a wave of anti-Semitism. At the same time, it was on the basis of this powerful feeling of proximity with the Palestinians that the dreadful remarks made about the Jews by Kamel were able to surface. This boy, who turned out to be very clever and who had a highly developed sense of repartee, did not change his position in the slightest during the following sessions and abided by his positions, accusing TF1 of protecting Jews or complaining that at school they heard too much about the Shoah. “Why don’t we ever discuss Somalia in history? There are a lot of starving people there too.” He explained, quite simply, that the Jew who, like him, had grown up in the area, like him, and had had a tough time of it, did not bother him. Furthermore, the fact that strong resistance to his remarks was expressed within the group did not mean that he was totally isolated. The two friends with whom he made his dramatic entrance agreed with him. According to Mohamed, for example, Nicolas Sarkozy (at the time, Minister of the Interior) “was a Jew” and in Ali’s opinion, you have to make allowances. He remarked, “I don’t hate all the Jews. I just don’t like those who kill. But if they are born Jewish, well, it’s not their fault”.

Are these conversations not extremely telling? Should we not con-sider their signi� cance to be relative, if only because they emphasise the very speci� c nature of the situation from which they proceed? The � rst point relates to the fact that in a community centre which represents state institutions, in the presence not only of social workers but also of researchers who are outsiders both to the area and even to



the town, anti-Semitic remarks can be expressed so easily with neither let nor hindrance, constituting an opinion—and not the crime that they had become in France, in the words of Sartre, since World War II and Auschwitz. If Kamel can express such ideas, it is because he feels it is permissible and he even seems to feel that he is voicing the legitimate discourse of justice or of equity. This leads us to think that in the local area, and particularly in situations where young people are amongst friends, hatred of the Jews must have no dif� culty in � nding its niche.

As we have seen, the young participants in the work of the group have just expressed some resistance to Kamel. But how typical are they? Does the mere fact that they had come to take part in the research not mean they are very special people in comparison with the rest of the area where they would have nothing to do with sociological research? But it is perhaps better to return to the situation as well as to the nature of the group. These young people are exactly like any others. If they have come to participate in the research it is because their social workers encouraged them to do so and there is nothing else happening in the area or on television which might have appealed to them more at the time when the sessions were taking place. Moreover, as we have already remarked, they came and went, entering and leaving the meeting room. However, we should also specify that we were in a community centre and not in the street, where people hang out and ‘hold up the walls’ with their friends; nor were we in an Islamist mosque. Where the social workers keep in touch with the young people and are respected and listened to by them, they obviously help to avoid anti-Semitic trends, just as, in other circumstances, they pour oil on troubled waters when there is a risk of rioting in the area after, for example, a police ‘blun-der’. In this community centre, which marks an institutional presence and therefore a certain capacity to deal with the social dif� culties of the population, it is possible to glimpse a slide towards anti-Semitism but there is no room for it to go any further.

A War of Religions?

The oppression to which Muslims are subjected all over the world is a theme which comes back again and again in the sociological intervention group. Muslims everywhere are said to be the victims of hostile policies. Moreover, these policies are said to be mainly the work of Jews and


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Americans—staunch allies. At national and local level, the racial dis-crimination against young people of North African descent is entwined with this schema where it is interpreted as being a form of war against Islam. Have we not entered an age of religious confrontation?

In the middle of a session, Farid, who had not spoken until then, interrupted those who once again were discussing the identi� cation of the young people in the area with the Palestinians. This young man, who had a certain style and class, very carefully dressed, explained that he had to leave the meeting but before doing so wanted to express his opinion:

I’m going to tell you something loud and clear. It says in the Koran that the prophet said it is not us that they don’t like but our religion. Take Chechnya. Who are they � ghting? Muslims! Take Palestine. Once again, it’s Muslims! It’s the same thing everywhere. I tell you, they don’t like Muslims, that’s all!

As he was on his way out, one of the researchers spoke to him and asked him to back up his remarks and explain himself. His answer could not have been clearer: in his opinion, Jews and Christians nurture their hatred of Muslims and take advantage of Muslim countries’ low defence budgets to attack them everywhere and continuously. He said:

We Muslims don’t trouble anyone. We don’t have the means to do so! The Palestinians don’t carry enough weight to bother Israel. It’s the same thing with Chechnya. Iraq doesn’t carry enough weight to bother the United States. It’s you who are harming the Muslims, not the other way round!

He referred to the stranglehold of the United States on Iraq which was in the news at the time, allegedly to rid the country of a dictator-ship. In Salim’s opinion, it was a means for the Americans to oppress a Muslim people. He commented:

We Muslims are not strong enough to go over to the United States and ban the death penalty because we don’t have the means to do so. And even if we did we wouldn’t do it because it’s not our problem!

Returning to the situation in Iraq, one of the researchers stressed the dictatorial nature of the regime. But Farid, who was persistent, held his ground arguing that there really was a crusade against Muslims by the United States and the Jews. He used the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict to illustrate his point. According to Farid, this con� ict is a good indica-tion of the alliance between the United States and Israel “because you



know that the United States is governed by Jews”. Moreover, President Bush himself is allegedly Jewish. Another researcher intervened to point out the existence of other religious con� icts which have nothing to do with Islam, for example between the Catholics and the Protestants in Ireland. But Farid would have none of it. “No, it’s us. It’s the Muslims,” he exclaimed. At most, like Kamel whom we have already mentioned, he makes a distinction, amongst Jews, between “the clever people who think” and those who may happen to live in his area. He said, “They don’t bother me [. . .]. The Jew who is having a tough time of it here like me, he doesn’t bother me!” Farid associates the � gure of the Jew with everything he hates. In his opinion, “Lionel Jospin is a Jew. Most of the people who govern the countries in the world are Jews! We are governed by Jews!” Just as he was leaving, he shouted with panache, “We are all agreed that Muslims all over the world are being persecuted. I say it and you all know it. This will be my last word”. We never saw him again in any of the subsequent sessions.

Farid was the � rst person to have formulated the idea of a war of religions in explicit terms. The group was not indifferent to his remarks. He had barely left the room when voices were heard saying, “He’s not entirely wrong”. The next session gave us the opportunity to come back to this idea. They referred to a crusade against the Muslims launched mainly on the initiative of the Jews and the Americans. Kamel com-mented, “When Bush lists all the countries he would like to attack, it is all too evident that they are only Muslim countries”. Bilal, a newcomer to the group and who wears a Palestinian kef� yeh, observed along the same lines that all over the world, and in all sorts of ways an attempt was being made to demonise Islam and its followers. “They’re trying to � nd fault with all the good Muslims,” he said.

Similar issues also exist in France and the question of the Muslim headscarf was discussed on the initiative of Bouziane. According to a social worker, the current tendency is to ‘put the spotlight on Islam’ and to portray the Muslim as evil. Above all, the current discussions (on secularism and the wearing of the Muslim headscarf in schools) were diversions which allowed other social problems to be masked. Malik, who trained as a historian, agreed with Bouziane. He wondered why the issue of the headscarf had hit the headlines whereas the media only touched on many of the fundamental problems. Achim, a youth worker, intervened to give his version of the de� nition of Muslim. He mainly wanted to challenge the current generalisation whereby all North


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African descent people are Muslims. According to him, a Muslim must behave in a certain way.

Can we say that the North Africans who are not in the community cen-tre are Muslims? When I see the majority of the people who are there peddling drugs to my mind, they are not Muslims!

“We see them as in� dels,” added Nouredine, another youth worker. But gradually, and spurred on by the director of the centre who par-ticipated at this meeting, and several social workers, an idea began to gain ground: the social question should not be confused with either Islam or with Palestine, nor should it be masked by these issues. “I don’t understand what the relationship is between what is happening in our area in social terms and what is happening in Palestine,” said Achim. His argument was taken up by Adel who explained that the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict “was not about religion . . . Afterwards, people start talking to us about religion and we become confused”. Adel went on, “In any event, if it is true that over there it’s the Holy Land, it’s a republic here!”

We were in a community centre and while Islam may be an important reality in the area, this is not the place where it can be expressed to any great extent. Moreover the director is very careful not to let religious issues take over in the publicly funded social institution in his charge. But these exchanges are none the less instructive for that. They dem-onstrate how hatred of the Jews can be part of a Muslim piety which has become belligerent and is not restricted to the Palestinian cause alone—the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict is not Achim’s prime concern; he is thinking in terms of the war waged by the United States and the Jews against Muslims in general. These discussion which begin with the war of religions and lead to the emergence of social questions also suggest, but still rather ineptly, that when material, everyday problems are dealt with and when the issues of social injustice are seriously addressed, then religion, beginning with Islam, no longer concentrates all the feelings of injustice and all the hatred which may be focussed on the Jews.

A Meeting with the Mayor of Roubaix

The Social Question

To receive a visit from the mayor of the town is an exceptional occa-sion and both the social workers and the young people in the area



mobilised for him coming—there had never been so many people in the group. Faced with the leading public of� cial in the town the members of the group were keen to bring up not the general problems which to a large extent were imaginary, but the dif� culties associated with their everyday experience of exclusion, racism and discrimination. They listened attentively to M. René Vandierendonck and questioned him about local authority policies and more particularly about the measures implemented on their behalf. The � rst person to speak was Medhi, a man in his thirties who wanted the discussion to deal with the discrimination suffered by young people of foreign descent. He also wanted “to know what the mayor was doing in the area and what he was doing in the town of Roubaix for the young people in terms of employment, housing and health”. “Let’s stop always coming back to the same thing,” said So� ane, his friend, who was sitting beside him. The tone and the expectations of the discussion were thus set: the group wanted a discussion with the mayor of a type which combined criticism and demands. We know that, during the previous meeting, Kamel had adopted a distinctly anti-Semitic stance; but today, he also wanted to take advantage of the presence of the mayor to discuss certain issues which concerned the young people in the Trois-Ponts area very speci� cally. The discussion began with employment and the obstacles constituting injustices, which the youths in the area who want to start working and � nd a job encounter, even when they have quali� cations. What were the solutions? In response to the problem, M. Vandierendonck gave a long statement during which he listed the measures implemented by the town, the numerous partnerships set up with � rms to combat unemployment in Roubaix—in particular in favour of young people in working-class areas. He pointed out that over the past � ve years unemployment in the town had declined by � ve points. Above all, he asserted his desire to campaign against discrimination in the workplace.

Bouziane, the social worker, wanted to know more about the proce-dures to follow to end the injustices experienced by the young people for whom he was responsible in matters of access to employment. He described the process of racial discrimination testing which had allowed the racism in the functioning of an agency for temporary employment to be demonstrated. Without beating about the bush, M. Vandierendonck once again condemned such discriminatory practices and explained his commitment to the campaign against racism. He said that when speci� c facts were reported to him, backed up with evidence, he would make a complaint or write to the commission for the campaign against discrimination: “I have never omitted to take up


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a case. You are in a town where, even if we know it exists, we are not used to discriminatory practices. They are systematically denounced.” He invited any person who had experienced discrimination to come and see him. The group was receptive to his remarks. But, while they did not openly challenge them, they made their scepticism felt. They could not see themselves approaching him, given that racist acts are always so dif� cult to prove. “The mayor says we have to bring proof,” said young François. “Still, we can’t walk around with a Dictaphone all the time, all the same!” And Kamel recounted the experience of one of his close friends:

Do you know what they [the police] did to a friend of mine? They took him into their police car. They kept him in there and dumped him in a � eld 15 kilometres away from here. His father went to the police station to make a complaint and there they said to him, “You can make a com-plaint if you like, sir, but there’s no point—you won’t gain anything by it”. My friend was spat on and humiliated as if he was a louse.

The discussion thus moved from unemployment to the behaviour of the police, discrimination in employment and police racism. The attention of the mayor afforded an opportunity for condemning the abuse carried out by the police patrols: “Now that I can speak out, I will speak out! Yes, I’m speaking out! What right do they have to come and hit us?” shouted Kamel, who could have gone on for hours. This boy who has only just turned 16 shouted:

How many times do we get hit? Every single day, there are people who get hit [. . .] they come out like Starsky and Hutch. “Let’s go, we’re going to beat up the bougnoules 5 [. . .] Why do they hit us with their batons? Why do they use their Flash-Balls? Why do they take the liberty of drawing their pistols and pointing them at us when they ask for our papers? I’m not an animal! I’m a human being!

Examples � ew from all sides accusing the police very vehemently. Fran-çois, for example, described a scene which he had witnessed:

The police caught two youths, they beat them. There was a woman shouting from the top � oor of her apartment block: “They’re not dogs!” and the policeman shouted, “Yes, they are dogs!” They dragged them along the ground with a tear gas bomb at their heads . . .

5 Slang term meaning ‘dark-skinned foreigners’ usually used for North Africans.



Racism is also at work in the leisure domain, in access, for example, to bowling alleys, the cinema, or even shopping malls, although in this respect one does have to make allowances and not underestimate how the young people in the area sometimes behave. Bouziane differenti-ates between the ‘good’ young people and the ‘bad’ ones who “come to wreck everything, to insult and to create havoc, to put it politely”. And gradually, another image is superimposed on that of racism: that of an area which is becoming ghettoised. Mounia, a woman of about 30, wonders whether, “as a result of having been discriminated against, one does not oneself begin to discriminate,” and added:

What do the young people who are there amongst others like themselves know outside Roubaix? They keep themselves to themselves. I’m sure they stick with young people of North African descent and, of the people they know, none of their mates are French.

Nevertheless, “There is one who said he was French,” replied one of the researchers, referring to François. “He’s French, but he’s one of us!” added Kamel ironically, provoking hoots of laughter in the room.

The arrival of the mayor gave the young people of Trois-Ponts the opportunity to learn about local authority measures to deal with the dif� culties which they experience in their daily lives. Some of them, including Kamel, were not convinced by the answers they received, remained puzzled and left the session before it ended. And already remarks devoid of any illusions could be heard in the corridors of the community centre. But one important point should be noted: throughout the meeting, the theme of Jews, of Israel and of Palestine or anti-Semitism had been entirely forgotten. On several occasions, however, the researchers and Bouziane, the social worker, had sug-gested introducing it into the discussion: they were not successful. The young people in the area do not confuse everything and considered that they should not discuss issues with the mayor over which he has no control: Palestine “was not on the agenda,” said one young person [. . .]. “If we speak about Israel and Palestine, I don’t see how that’s going to help . . .”. This may lead to a relatively optimistic idea: when a political orator becomes associated with dealing with social problems, employment, police racism and access to leisure facilities, even if inad-equately, then there is no room for anti-Semitism. When, at the end of the meeting, the researchers suggested thinking speci� cally about this idea to the group, the members readily admitted that the more opportunities there were to discuss social issues, the less reason there


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would be to discuss the Jews or Palestine. But the hostility towards Jews did not disappear; it was provisionally put to one side: in response to a researcher who remarked that, “We haven’t mentioned the Jews this evening,” one young person replied, “No. But we know that it is the Jews who control the world anyway!”

Attachment to Algeria

This observation, namely that there is less room for anti-Semitism when the political treatment of speci� c problems is on the agenda, is reinforced by a comparable phenomenon, but this time historical and cultural rather than social. Once again the meeting of the group with the Mayor of Roubaix was decisive. Mehdi had already endeavoured, during previous sessions, to begin a discussion about the Algerian origin of a large proportion of the population in the area. He had not been successful as the group preferred to discuss Palestine, Israel and the Jews. In the presence of the mayor it was quite different. The mention of the attachment of the members of the group to Algeria and, more speci� cally, to the recent twinning of Roubaix with the town of Bouira, the origin of many of the immigrants, opened up new perspectives. In reply to Mehdi, the mayor explained that programmes of coopera-tion were being set up. A deeply felt reality was being expressed: that of a profound relationship between the town of Roubaix and Algeria, between the citizens of Roubaix of Algerian descent with clearly estab-lished roots, but also, in the opposite direction, between the population of Bouira and that of Roubaix. Mehdi put it colourfully:

In Bouira, each time we meet people who are over 60, they talk to us about Roubaix—for example they ask whether such and such a café is still there or if such and such a street still exists.

The two towns have a shared history which time has not diminished. This sudden mention refers to a past or not so distant history, the depth of a speci� c experience which is very much alive in people’s memories and which today extends the real relationship with Algeria. The researchers observed it and invited the group to think about it: here the reference to the Arab-Muslim world is rooted in the history of the members of the group, touching their innermost feelings, whereas the con� ict in the Middle East, so present in the discussions in the previous sessions, cannot take root in this way and functions much more directly in the realm of the imaginary. Everything to do with



Algeria is an extremely sensitive issue in France and is dif� cult to deal with: Mehdi’s remark enabled us to open a subject which is often not dealt with and the presence of the mayor suggested that a subject of this type could be dealt with politically, which would mean that the identity and the origins involved would then be recognised. “It’s true,” observed Mehdi:

In previous meetings, I had commented that we, who are of Moroccan or Algerian descent, perhaps speak too much about Palestine, forgetting that there are very serious problems in Algeria too.

The young people in the group were born in France and assert this, but this does not mean that they forget their origins. The theme of a strong link with Algeria, on the initiative of Roubaix and thanks to the endeavours of the local authority, was met with considerable enthusi-asm by the group. This desire to discuss it, prompted, but also made possible by the presence of the mayor, con� rmed the recognition of the history of the town which had to include that of the immigrants from Algeria. The mayor explained, “It’s a way of recognising that the town of Roubaix is aware that part of its wealth is due to people from Algeria”. Recalling this recent past is a way of reducing the sense of exclusion experienced by the young people in the area, offering them an enhanced, positive image of their identity and restoring their dignity which has been sorely tried by racism and social exclusion. At this precise point in the research, there was no question of discussing the Palestinians, Israel and still less of expressing their hostility towards Jews. The point at which there is recognition of a history, of a collec-tive trajectory and of tangible roots is the point at which imaginary identi� cations leading to anti-Semitic hatred begin to disappear.

Conclusion: Ghetto Anti-Semitism

We must of course be cautious and avoid making overhasty generalisa-tions on � ndings based on a restricted group and in very special circum-stances. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the sociological intervention that we carried out in Roubaix does provide very useful lessons.

The � rst is the con� rmation of a reality which is fairly widespread in France: the ease with which anti-Semitic remarks can be expressed, including in places which, if not public, are at least open. These remarks, which, as Kamel demonstrated to us, may be unrestrained, do


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not extend into the slightest hint of a move to action and we � nd all the themes of ‘global’ anti-Semitism described in the � rst part of this book. It is, in fact, the same discourse which circulates at the heart of the dif� cult areas or in some of the Middle Eastern media. We � nd the same themes, the same accusations, the same rumours and prejudices against a background of resentment and a sense of injustice. But there is something speci� c about the hatred of Jews in the situation which we have studied. It comes from a ghetto mentality, from a combination of social exclusion and racial discrimination. The driving force is a profound sense of isolation and con� nement to an area of relegation. This ghetto anti-Semitism constitutes a historical paradox: those who, in the past, lived in ghettos—the very term being derived from the Jewish experience—and have endured racist hatred have today become, in an impressive turnaround, the imagined root of the evils from which they themselves have suffered. They have become the enemies of those who suffer from ghettoisation and racism.

A second lesson is a further con� rmation: identi� cation with the Palestinian cause is widespread here, Islamism and a war of religions is another. In both cases, the image of a � ight into generalised anti-Semi-tism is excessive. It is possible to support the struggle of the Palestinians and to be a good Muslim without necessarily retreating into hatred of the Jews and even by refusing to do so and combating it.

Finally, the re� ections of the group in Roubaix provide us with a number of pointers as to the conditions likely to contribute to the decline of anti-Semitism. They demonstrate that in places where social work is ef� cient and active and where institutions are present and anxious to confront the social dif� culties of the inhabitants of an area, the discourse of hatred cannot spiral out of control as it does when young people are left to their own devices or left to radicalised religious leaders. It suggests that the political treatment of injustice or social inequalities, but also of racism, is a bulwark against anti-Semitism and in any event reduces its room for manoeuvre. It also suggests, as we have just seen with Algeria, that policies of cultural and historical recognition of difference leave less room for � ights of the imagination and that it is better to bear in mind the memory and history of individuals and groups than to let identi� cations get out of hand.


CHAPTER TEN

MUSLIM ANTI-SEMITISM: THE VIEW FROM PRISON

One of the many accusations behind the obsessive fear of Islam in France today is the idea that this religion constitutes the principal vec-tor of the present-day return of anti-Semitism. Usually, the thesis is stated baldly, maligning in the same breath religious af� liation, sympa-thy for the Palestinian cause and the North African or Arab origin of the populations of immigrant descent. But what is the reality? What place does anti-Semitism occupy in the speci� c experience of Muslims in France?

For a clear view of this, a good post of observation is essential. Researchers often � nd that places of worship make excellent obser-vatories. It is true that anti-Jewish remarks can be heard there, for example in some sermons, and that cassettes or anti-Semitic documents are sometimes in circulation there, links which ensure the ‘global’ dis-tribution of the worldwide discourse of hatred.1 But these places are often under police surveillance and speech is to some extent controlled. Furthermore, while the ‘� eldwork’ carried out in Roubaix did begin to put us in touch with a number of Muslims, it did not allow us to deal systematically with their perception and their images of Jews. Now, it happens that in French prisons there are a considerable number of Muslim detainees, most of whom come from working-class areas. For this reason, our research team headed for the prisons, bene� ting from the survey carried out by one of the researchers in our team,

1 Thus, for example, L’Humanité (17 January 2004) and Le Figaro (28 October 2004) gave an account of a cassette entitled “La Palestine, histoire d’une injustice”, distributed by the publishing house, Tawhid, in which Hassan Iquioussen , a preacher from the Union des organisations islamiques de France (UOIF), President of its youth organisa-tion, described the Jews as ‘ungrateful’, ‘miserly and usurers’, and explained: “The Zion-ists connived with Hitler . The Jews in Germany and France had to be encouraged . . . to leave Europe for Palestine. To force them, they had to be hurt.” Hassan Iquioussen said that he regretted these remarks made two years earlier and the distributors of the cassette stated that they had withdrawn it from sale several months previously.


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Farhad Khosrokhavar,2 who here draws lessons speci� cally on anti-Semitism from long interviews which he carried out with Muslim detainees.

A Varied Anti-Semitism

There is not one type of anti-Semitism alone amongst Muslims, and a good number of them could not be described as anti-Semitic: this is the � rst lesson to be learnt from the interviews carried out with several dozens of them in prison. Some of the detainees felt envious and resentful towards the Jews, which could be considered a form of anti-Semitism sui generis. Unlike Christian anti-Judaism, it is not a question of stigmatising the ‘deicidal people’ and unlike Nazism, it is not a question of the inferiority of the ‘Jewish race’. It involves � rstly a combination of a traditional attitude of ‘impurity’ felt in respect of all non-Muslims, Christians and Jews alike (they are both said to be najiss), and of an image which only applies to the Jews today: the vision of a mythical Jewish community thriving in France and in the world, whereas ‘Muslims’ fail in the country of Voltaire, as they do elsewhere. There is also the conviction, expressed with increasing frequency, that the West is on the side of the Jews, even if France, unlike the United States, does not have a pronounced pro-Israel policy.

The Muslim detainees—who may constitute as much as 75% of the population of a penal institution—make a vague link between two types of perception, some of which are internal to French society and others which are external to it. There is said to be a united Jewish community in the world, over and beyond national borders, in direct and close liaison with Israel; there is hardly any difference between a French Jew and an Israeli Jew, as regards the Palestinians, whose situation is said to be determined by the alliance between the United States and Israel. The Jews of the whole world are therefore thought to contribute to the oppression of the Palestinians. A comparison rapidly extends this vision: the Jews in Israel behave towards the Palestinians as the ‘French’ in France do towards the ‘North Africans’ (the French of North African descent). In the atmosphere of racism and disaf� liation which charac-terises them, the ‘Arabs’ are therefore thought to be doubly mistreated

2 Farhad Khosrokhavar , L’Islam dans les prisons, Paris, Balland, 2004.


muslim anti-semitism: the view from prison 143

by the French Jews who repress them as Jews, reproducing the model of the Israeli Jew towards the Palestinian Arab, and as French, racist and disrespectful towards them.

The theme of impurity speci� c to traditional Islam would not have an anti-Semitic impact were it not combined with a modern register in which the Jew is perceived as the accomplice of the West and in particular of the United States and the ally of the enemies of Allah. The combination of these dimensions, international and external, tra-ditional and modern, gives rise to modes of Judeophobia which can vary noticeably.

For young Muslims in the housing estates and the banlieues, the Jew is identi� ed with ‘success’, whereas Muslims are doomed to failure and ostracism by the West.3 This perception, which some members of the Muslim middle classes also voice, is not so much the expression of an idea of repression implemented by the Jews as a feeling of ‘denial of suc-cess’, the cause of which is projected onto them. If these young people do not succeed in breaking the vicious circle of juvenile delinquency and exclusion, if they are in a situation of insurmountable inferiority, if they are unemployed from father to son, it is, in their opinion, because of the racism of the French and, a fortiori, of the French Jews. The lat-ter are said to be even more successful than the average French citizen and their contempt for Arabs is conveyed every evening on television by the images of scenes of repression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. When the Jews are successful, they are French; when they repress, they are Israeli; when they are disrespectful, they are Franco-Israeli and when they pray, they are French anti-Muslims.

Young Muslims feel they are treated with suspicion, as if they were budding fundamentalists, while the Jews can worship freely in syna-gogues without being accused of opposition to secularism; and if syna-gogues are targeted by youths of immigrant descent, it might well be due to this disparity. The French Jew is the reverse of the young people from the banlieues who are excluded, perceived as dangerous because of their faith and placed in a situation in which it is impossible for them to succeed. In short, they cannot be integrated and see the Jews as over-integrated. In their imagined world, Jews belong to a community which will support them, come what may, whereas the young people

3 See Rémy Leveau , Gilles Kepel (editors), Les Musulmans dans la société française, Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, Paris, 1987.


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of immigrant descent feel rejected, with no real community to come to their rescue. Despite this, he or she has only to profess himself or herself a Muslim to be described as a ‘community oriented’ by French society. The Jewish community is said to provide Jews with the means to defend themselves not only economically, but also symbolically: they are over-valorised as Jews, whereas Muslims cannot claim publicly to adhere to Islam for fear of being stigmatised and suspected of fundamentalism or even radical Islamism. Finally, according to this perception, the Jewish community extends far beyond national frontiers, in particular as far as the United States, this country which is hated for its unconditional support of Israel but also envied and copied for its McDonald’s, its pop music and the legendary wealth of its sportsmen and women and its stars. The Jew, French and meta-French, national and world citizen, is said to be liked by the French for these two contradictory attributes, whereas the Arabs are denied the right to be both French and Muslim, to have a dual identity or a ‘hyphenated’ identity as the Anglo-Saxons call it. Therein lies the main source of the anger of the young people from the banlieues towards the Jews.

Amongst the converts who adhere to a radical version of Islam, one encounters an anti-Semitism which reproduces, by parrotry, part of that of Muslims. But there is a difference: it is an exclusively religious form of antagonism without the dimension of the denial of ‘Frenchness’ which is so widespread amongst young people of immigrant descent. This con� rms the link, amongst young people of immigrant descent, between anti-Semitism and the feeling of rejection which they experi-ence and which is due to the refusal of French society to recognise their French citizenship, whereas the Jews are said to bene� t fully from the same. This refusal is explicitly formulated by the extreme right in France when it refers to them as ‘French on paper’. The converts, of whom there are certainly several thousand in France today, do not have this problem of recognition of their nationality, at least before their conversion. On the other hand, their adhesion to the religion of Allah does sometimes give rise to a suspicion which may nurture in them a feeling of persecution. In prison, some mention the anti-Islamic rac-ism of the guards and, more generally, of the penal institution. The anti-Semitism which they may develop, modelled on that of the young people of North African descent, becomes meaningful in their desire to be one with Islam and the imagined Islamic community. According to them, this community is persecuted by a malevolent West, of which Israel in particular and the Jews in general are said to be an integral part and even the driving force.



There are two dimensions to the ‘Jewish’ problem, one general and the other speci� c to the prison situation, as it appears amongst Muslim detainees. The general dimension refers, in the � rst instance, to the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the Israel-Palestine con� ict; French society is a secondary preoccupation. The dimension speci� c to the prison situation is due to the difference in treatment in prison of Muslims and Jews (kosher and halal meat, religious worship). This treatment is easily observed and in many respects refers to the char-acteristics of French society and institutions. Thus the dual nature of anti-Semitism amongst young Muslims emerges clearly with dimensions which are simultaneously internal and external or global.

The external dimension is dominated by reference to the Palestin-ians whose humiliation is experienced by the prisoners by proxy.4 More generally, the involvement of the young people from the banlieue in radical versions of Islam, including in anti-Semitism, is largely due to their hatred of the society which, according to them, rejects them, just as Israel does the Palestinians. Some give an account of the injustice in Palestine while disapproving of the attacks of 11 September; others, while not justifying these attacks, consider them to be understandable given the international context in which Islam is given a rough time. Yet others, who consider these attacks understandable and legitimate, think that they introduce a form of reciprocity to the strained relations between the West and Islam. Some think that they were carried out by Zionist groups, with or without America’s help, to discredit Islam—the proof they advance is the presumed absence of Jews amongst the vic-tims. Sometimes even, the power of the media is such that the remarks depart from any political analysis and reduce the attacks to nothing more than a show put on by television. Abdelmajid, aged 26, in a frame of mind which recalls the sociologist, Jean Baudrillard, stated that:

Nothing has been proved. The media exaggerate too much. It’s a joke. It’s become like the Guignols de l’info . . . they scored a hit—what’s certain is that everyone likes the Guignols—you cannot help but laugh. What do you expect me to say . . .?

Finally, some do condemn terrorism and state that Islam is poles apart from violence against innocent people. But these people tend to be somewhat in the minority and are usually older—over 30.

4 See Farhad Khosrokhavar , L’Islam dans les prisons, op. cit., in which this dimension is analysed in detail.


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Finally, since they are detainees, we can also question them as to their possible commitments when they get out of prison: are they, or are they not, going to � ght for Islam, for the Palestinians, against Israel? Some prioritise their own situation: before establishing justice in the world, people have to sort out their own lives. Others consider it necessary to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Palestinians in the � ght against America and Israel. Others still refuse to take a stance. Finally, a great many refuse hatred of the Jews and reject anti-Semitism as being incom patible with faith in Allah. Obviously, these are only opinions and, moreover, expressed in prison. But their substance reveals a state of mind which does not conform to the stereotypes which would reduce Islam to a single homogeneous block.

The Dissociation of Registers

In prison, or elsewhere, in order to steer clear of anti-Semitism, Mus-lims must successfully carry out two dif� cult mental operations. Firstly, they have to dissociate the Palestinian situation from the French situ-ation, the repression of Muslims in Palestine from racism in France. Secondly, they have to dissociate the Jews in Israel from the Jews in France. Many detainees of North African descent do operate this dual distinction more or less successfully.

Kamel, aged 34, recounted how some Islamists whose ideology is based on the hatred of Jews, attempted to recruit him. He avoided this, thanks to the vigilance of his father. His despair (attempted suicide) and his impression that he did not � t into French society made him a potential recruit for this terrorist group, particularly as he was single and therefore available:

When I was 13 years old I went to the Jum’a [the mosque] in Roubaix, Rue Archimède. I washed myself. I wanted to pray. They were discussing politics there. That’s where the terrorists of Lille went. They talked about martyrdom, said that we had to go and help the Muslims, etc. It was fairly barbaric. A bearded man spoke to me. I went back for one week to listen and hear what they were saying and then I � ed [. . .]. I wasn’t married. That was a good thing for them. They wanted to lay things, bombs. There were two blokes from Roubaix, Dumont and another one—I can’t remember who—who went there, Rue Archimède. What they were saying was: the Ihudis [the Jews] and the Koufars [in� dels] have to be killed. Luckily, my father had the feeling that there was something



strange about them. He told me not to go there any more and that we had to pray for ourselves in life and not for the others, or do things for these people. Religion is between you and God. These people target [attempt to recruit] young people who are 19 or 20 years old to get them going and to do what they want them to do. They recruit young people who are in the shit, having a rough time. They send them to Afghanistan and make them do illegal things there. For me, my reference is my father in Islam. I’m the son of a harki. And I have a brother as well who died in a car accident in 1992 while I was in prison. I tried to kill myself.

Kamel made a distinction between the Middle East and France:

What also shocks me is [the situation of ] the Palestinians. It’s a problem that should be resolved with words, not with arms. To see small stones being thrown by one side and bullets and tanks by the other—that hurts. And what about the occupation of Jerusalem by Israel? They could all share everything—Jews, Christians and Muslims. We don’t hear from the Christians. But it’s not my problem. I live � rst and foremost in France and I can’t do anything about the situation over there . . .

Abel, a French citizen of Algerian descent aged 33, had a similar attitude: the Palestinian problem should be resolved through dialogue and recourse to violence should be avoided. When he spoke about the Palestinians, he contrasted them with the Israelis, whereas when he referred to Muslims, he compared them with Jews—he made a distinction between the national question and the religious question. In passing, he stressed the reinforcement of anti-Arab racism since the 11 September attacks which he considered as follows:

It’s politics. That’s not Islam. Islam means living peacefully, working, keeping your nose clean and not harming other people. I wish peace to everyone on earth. In Palestine, it’s dreadful and what’s happening is not normal. Normally, Palestinians and Israelis should make peace. What’s going on there serves no purpose. It should be stopped. They should have one single country and live together in harmony and that way there would be peace. Islam says that you have to be straight with everyone; you have to respect your neighbour whether they are Jewish, Christian or whatever. You have to be straight in Islam. Everyone has a father and mother. We’re all the same. But after 11 September, life got more dif� cult for us Muslims—it was dif� cult before, but it’s worse now.

Abdelha� d, aged 23, has lived in France for a long time. Not only does this Moroccan reject Bin Laden and appeal also for mutual understand-ing between Israelis and Palestinians, but he also referred to Jewish friends with whom he gets on in the spirit of mutual respect:


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Israel and Palestine have to make peace. Nobody should help them. It’s not up to Bin Laden to say when it’s the jihad [holy war]. I have Jewish friends and we respect one another. We are at peace with one another.

Hamid, 36 years old, roundly condemned the 11 September attacks:

It’s disgusting! That’s not Islam, even if people are rebelling. Islam does not say that. As long as nobody comes to throw you out of your own house, you must not attack them. The Palestinians have the right. The Israelis have the right. If you don’t respect other people’s religion, you are not a good Muslim. It’s written in the Koran in black and white.

Habib, aged 34, a Tunisian living in France, is profoundly secular and advocates a spiritual form of Islam which breaks with the militant and bellicose aspect of the Islamists (those ‘with the beards’). There is no trace of anti-Semitism or of a break with the West in his attitude, any more than there is in the attitude of several others, such as those we have just quoted. He clari� ed his conception of Islam:

Nobody has in� uenced me. God does not belong to anyone. For me, Islam is a philosophy and a way of life. I don’t know if I will go on praying but all that is just the result of my own personal re� ection. You know, the blokes with the beards who sell hash—I know a lot of them. I don’t want any bluf� ng. What I like about Islam is its cleanliness in the � rst place: you purify yourself � ve times a day. The Jews celebrate their Eas-ter5 like the Christians, and Islam celebrates Achoura. There are several sorts of monotheism, but there is only one God with different ways of approaching him. I like my religion in a spirit of respect for the religion of other people—the Jews, the Christians . . . I don’t like the vindictive aspect of religion. I don’t want to wear a beard. I want to be discreet and not ostentatious. Islam is a philosophy of life.

Habib referred to his elder brother humorously:

I have two married brothers and things are not going well for my elder brother who is a total in� del (laughter). He’s a person who indulges his pleasures before religion. He eats pork, drinks alcohol and all that . . . His wife is worse [. . .] He travels a lot and he often goes to Israel, he has a lot of Jewish friends. He’s even been to the Al Aqsa mosque.

He and a few others prove that, amongst people of North African descent, there can be relationships with Jews which develop on the basis of familiarity and not of difference—in this instance the Jews happened to be Sephardic. A further observation is that those who were once

5 Translator’s note: ‘their Easter’ = Passover.



close now � nd themselves overwhelmingly superior. The Jew is not the epitome of difference but is someone similar, if anything, inferior as a non-Muslim (as are the Christians) but who has become the enemy because of Israel.

Habib, who tends to be on the same wavelength as a large part of the French public, feels sympathetic towards the Palestinians, but at the same time rejects the principle of kamikaze action. He notes, like others, that the 11 September 2001 attacks have strengthened anti-Arab racism and suspicion of Muslims. Moreover, he charges the banlieues with rationales of segregation which he does not like:

I have friends of all races. It’s typical of Paris, unlike in the banlieues where they have all sorts of pre-conceived ideas: the Arabs are with Arabs, the Blacks are with Blacks. That’s why I don’t like the banlieues. In fact, I have always felt different from the people living in the banlieues. I have cousins who have done well in Nanterre. The ones in Seine-et-Marne are successful too, but they have this closed mentality—each with his group. I dated a Jewish girl and I don’t think I’m going to go to hell.

The Merging of Registers

Anti-Semitism recedes when a distinction is made between the registers, and the problems of French society are not totally merged with those of the world. Conversely, it � nds ample room for expression when rationales internal to France are combined with transnational rationales, which goes hand in hand with an inability to think of con� ict resolu-tion in terms of negotiation and dialogue, and with a radicalisation where violence � nds its niche. The association can take different forms. It involves levelling various accusations at Jews.

Benamar, aged 26, called into question the media, controlled by the Jews, and had his own ideas about who was responsible for the attacks of 11 September:

It’s the media, especially here. On TV, they say it’s the Islamists without the slightest proof. Bin Laden is an idol, a star for young people at the moment because of the media. But the Americans deserve it. They think they rule the world. They have been humiliated. Nobody is at anybody’s beck and call. But it’s not good for the innocent people who died—it would have been better if the attacks had targeted the state [symbols of the state]. And all that comes from Israel and Palestine. The Jews control the media and the judiciary—well . . . they do what they like.


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Omar, aged 25, comes from a family of Algerian descent, all of whom are integrated except him. He equated the Jews with the power of money and he wanted to help the Palestinian cause:

I was born in Algeria. My father was a miner, then he worked in textiles. My brothers and sisters are all working. They are stable. For my part, I have a grudge [dentier] against the Jews over the question of Palestine. I’d like to help the Palestinian cause. I’d also like to add that the Jews are in it for pro� t, that’s all. As Robert de Niro said, “You can buy anything with money,” and knowledge too.

He has a sense of the cruel injustice of the world and a very positive opinion of Bin Laden:

I feel abandoned by everyone. There’s nothing to keep me anywhere. There’s injustice everywhere. People need waking up. Bin Laden woke them up with what he did on 11 September. Israel and Scandinavia deserve what they get. I hate the Jews. Sharon was just waiting for that to raze Palestine to the ground. His strategy is good—� rst he wants to destroy the entire infrastructure in Palestine and then play for time.

The hatred of this young man was born out of the attitude of the United States towards Muslims and the military aid it offers Israel. He did not rule out the possibility that this hatred might spill over into violence:

You shouldn’t kill innocent people. The Americans do that to the PLO and in Afghanistan. They sell their tanks to the Israelis to kill the Pales-tinians. Bin Laden doesn’t do all that for money. He’s already rich. The Americans make people hate them with their policies, and what Bin Laden did was not good but he is paying too. It’s better to attack the state. The United States does serious things in secret, everywhere. All these people have to be woken up so that they will come to know the whole truth and that maybe the goodies are really the baddies, or worse still. They left the Muslims in Bosnia to die just for money! Then, when people of North African descent go to Afghanistan I say it’s normal. Young people don’t have plans any more. They don’t have anything any more . . . There are people who come to recruit them. They are good speakers and promise things and off they go. They sacri� ce themselves. It’s religion. We are attacked. We have to strike back. They are slowly killing us. A small part of it is religion, but it’s mostly the anger inside them that makes these young people leave and sacri� ce their lives in Afghanistan. The hatred is stirred up by the television. They show the injustice every day: politi-cians who are never imprisoned, dreadful pictures and it’s not good. It has nothing to do with me and I’m � lled with hatred, intense hatred. I



hope I’m going to get over it—if I don’t, I could be led astray [towards violence].

When hatred focusses on the West in general, or more particularly on the United States, in some cases the Jews may be ignored, so much so that radical remarks in favour of terrorist violence may be made with-out targeting them as such. Thus, Abdelhakim, aged 34, of Algerian nationality but resident in France for a long time, thinks that it is not Bin Laden who is responsible for 11 September but the Americans themselves:

[. . .] four planes, it was all planned. It’s Bush who pressed the button. He rules the world. Everyone sides with him but the poor have nobody to support them, except God, luckily for us. Perhaps it’s the American secret services that are concealing a lot of information. They have the keys to power. May God protect us, that’s all.

And he added:

One of my friends went to hospital. He was in the same cell as me, and he was my cell mate. A Jew came into my cell in his place, a Jewish druggie who took pills and all that. I accepted him. I’m not racist. I settled it peacefully with the guard because he was ill. But every evening he broke down and wept all the time, and at night he got up to get dressed. Was he going to run a race, or what? Some of the young people go off their rocker with the Jews but, if he’s not a druggie, he’s welcome, if he’s clean and he hasn’t done anything. I don’t judge people by their religion.

Nabil, aged 31, shifted between the problems which he had in prison and a global view of injustice. On the one hand, like many others, he denounced the inequalities in prison and the favouritism towards Jews:

It’s not halal so I don’t eat it. I sometimes eat kosher things, like the Jews, but I prefer our things. It proves that we’re not forgotten. They take care of the Jews and we want to be taken care of in the same way. It’s probably the Muslims’ fault, certainly even.

And on the other hand, he defended the principle of violence and, going beyond the question of anti-Semitism and Jews, he brought up the possibility of a major confrontation between an anti-Islamic West and a wronged and humiliated Muslim world:

It’s injustice which is the cause of these attacks. I can understand the kamikaze Palestinians. I wouldn’t do that but I understand them, and the


152 chapter ten

guilty ones are those who pushed them to do that. As far as the attacks in America are concerned, I’m sorry for the innocent who died but it’s a good thing that the Americans were humiliated [. . .]. The injustice which exists in Palestine, in Iraq, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan won’t continue for long, God will see to it.

Ali, aged 32, began by denouncing a social fact speci� c to France and to its penal system: the pathetically small number of imams in prison compared with priests and rabbis. He saw this as an injustice in the system which goes hand in hand with another global one, concerning Islam:

You have to slog at Islam here! It’s racism. There are only 17 imams in France for the prisons and eleven of them are not legalised.6 It’s critical when you consider that the prisons are full of Muslims. Here there are � ve Christian chaplains and two for the women and a Jewish rabbi. Nothing changes. The imam here does all he can . . . It gets on my nerves. It’s critical! If there are enough people, we’ll manage to assert ourselves as Muslims—here, even the exercise yard is disgusting.

We return to an articulation of the inside world (the prison) and the outside world (French society in general and the whole world beginning with Israel) with Ahmed, an Algerian detainee who proved sceptical as to the grip of radical Islamism:

The militants of the Tabligh Jamaat [a pietist Islamic movement] go around in their get-up in the middle of Paris. It’s a form of provocation for people living in France. You have to adapt. If you don’t agree, go back home, that’s all. In some respects, I do understand them. It’s not so much the content that’s wrong as the form! You shouldn’t aid gratuitous criticism of Islam. The Jews here in France have their locks and their beards and their schools and they do display external signs of their faith, but nobody says anything to them because they are organised and the Muslims really lack this. A mosque was machine-gunned in Villepinte: the media did not breathe a word. Islam is disorganised . . . But as soon as a synagogue is on � re, the CRIF is up in arms. It’s discrimination against Muslims. There are two hundred thousand Jews in France who support Israel and doubtless the ethnic cleansing policies of Sharon against the Palestinians. But as for radical Islam, I don’t believe in it . . . Here, in pri-son, the Jews can bring in whatever foodstuff they want for the Sabbath. They even have kosher products for the canteen, but I don’t want to eat

6 The disproportion between the number of imams and that of priests or rabbis is a fact, given the extremely high number of Muslims in prison. The � gures advanced are none the less inexact; the number of imams in prison was close to 70 in 2003. See L’Islam dans les prisons, op. cit.



kosher, even if it is halal: this might be a means of making a pro� t to support Israeli policy.

The criticisms which Hassan, aged 40 and of Lebanese origin, makes of the Jews also operate in internal and external registers. He explained his situation:

I committed a burglary. I went into a house and took some gold—that was in 2001 and it was the house of a Jew who is a fence7 I know in Paris in the 13th district [. . .]. I have nobody in France. My whole family died in Lebanon . . . they all died in 1983. The Israelis entered Beirut. There were bombardments and a bomb fell on our house. They all died. That’s what’s happening now in Palestine. I wasn’t there. I was a combatant at the time. Nobody did a thing—not like they do for Palestine. The Jews do what they like. [. . .] As a Muslim, we don’t have the same rights as other religions. The rabbi brings the Jews in prison what they want. We aren’t allowed. I don’t understand [. . .]. As for prayers, it’s the same thing [. . .]. I’ve seen the imam once, but he can’t do anything. He’s all alone [. . .]. The other religions have all the rights and we have none! [. . .] Here we need a mosque or a room to worship in the prison. Halal food once or twice a year is not enough. We should be able to buy it at the canteen. It’s not normal that the Jews should have it once a year plus every Saturday for the Sabbath and we don’t.

His remarks bring together in a single argument all sorts of elements broadly echoing some of the major themes of ‘global’ anti-Semitism already dealt with in this book. Once again we � nd therein an impor-tant dimension: it is not the real, material Jews, those whom one rubs shoulders with every day who are the clearest targets of the hatred, but a more remote, imaginary � gure. Hassan pointed out:

When I was being sentenced, I was ashamed: a gendarme said to me that the Arabs were doing nothing against � ve or six million Jews. They’re right. The Arabs don’t do anything because America is behind Israel. . . . There are Jews in prison here. I often look at them . . . I feel like hitting them . . . but I say to myself: it’s not their fault. They live here. Do I speak to them? No. And it’s not us [the Muslims] who set � re to synagogues outside. They just want to pin that on us. Maybe there are young people who do that, but it’s because they are angry: no school, no job, having a rough time of it, they want revenge. There were demonstrations in France on Saturday in support of Palestine—there were a lot of people and there were no problems. So why burn down synagogues? There’s the extreme right as well, and violent Jews, and so on. It might be them too.

7 British English slang for someone who receives stolen goods.


154 chapter ten

Hassan does not confuse the Jew whom he meets and the more abstract � gure that he denounces, and he is distinctly less hostile towards the former than the latter. Similarly, Lot� , aged 31, a Moroccan who has been living in France for the past 15 years, declared:

For me, the most important thing is Palestine [. . .]. There have been too many massacres. Frankly, I hate the Jews—it’s just too much all that. But I live near Belleville in Paris. It’s a Jewish area and I have Jewish friends, but when I get out I’ll ditch them.

He is preparing to distance himself from them, but he does not engage in hate speech about his ‘mates’.

However, hatred does extend into calls for extreme violence as soon as the Jew appears in symbolic terms as the root of all one’s own misfortunes and those of the world. Yacine, for example, a 31 year old Algerian who has lived in France since he was very young, was clearly delighted about 11 September and linked the Israeli domination of the Palestinians with American support for Israel, denounced the Muslim countries which do nothing, paid homage to Bin Laden who had saved the honour of the Muslims and concluded a long tirade by proclaiming:

This cursed race . . . It’s critical, it’s the hagra with no holds barred! The Jews—we should slit their throats. I’m really getting worked up about it . . .

For Fathi, aged 24, the Jew epitomises a lack of respect for Islam. He also holds the Jews responsible for the 11 September attacks:

My wife is French of Tunisian descent. She was born in France. Her family doesn’t give a � g for their race of Islam. They care so little about Islam, you’d think they were Jews: no prayers, no Ramadan [. . .]. [Spea-king about the 11 September attacks] . . . There are Jews who didn’t go to work. The innocent people went to earn their living. They had nothing to do with it. I felt sorry for them. Nobody knows if it was Bin Laden. There’s no proof. The Yids want Islam to take the rap. Take Palestine. Bush is all talk but no action, which proves it’s the Jews. I don’t give a damn about politics, but since 11 September I’ve been watching television a lot. The photos are all fakes. There are a lot of strange things. It was the Jewish New Year on 11 September, so it was the Jews. Bin Laden would not have done that.

There is thus a make-believe which now blames the Jews for all the evils, all the problems in the world, from the most general (the attacks on 11 September 2001) to the most immediate (the injustices of prison



life). It is not mere resentment which has become focussed on the Jews because of the Palestinian situation but a projection onto an imaginary Jew of everything which is a problem for the ‘Muslims’ and for the ‘Arabs’. Social paranoia is not far off in this attitude where the real is used to provide con� rmation of the generalised guilt of an abstract Jew, a source of all the ills from which the Muslims in France or elsewhere suffer. There is nothing surprising about anti-Semitism extending and becoming detached from the Israeli-Palestinian question to become an existential mode of identi� cation, providing young people of immigrant descent with a mythical origin for their dif� culties, a global explanation for all the trials which await them in life.


CONCLUSION

The views recorded in prison obviously owe a great deal to the penal situation. What is interesting from our point of view is that this situ-ation is characterised by a sense of injustice. This sense of injustice focusses readily on the Jews to the extent that their religious speci� c-ity is demonstrably recognised by the penal administration, which is not really the case for the Muslims who today are nevertheless much greater in number. But this speci� c situation in no way prevents us from making a number of generalisations and, on the contrary, enables us to improve our understanding of anti-Semitism in a Muslim environ-ment. In particular, we observe a difference between the people who distinguish between the problems of society and those of the world or of other regions of the world, and those who amalgamate everything at a level which extends far beyond the prison. When it is a matter, for Muslims, of practising their faith in prison, differences in treatment are only one radical, extreme case of discrimination in a society in which racism in employment, or on the part of the police, generally speaking, excludes, discriminates or marginalises these same populations. The focus on references to Palestine is a phenomenon which can be found both in prison and elsewhere.

For many young people of North African descent, Palestine is not a remote situation but one which is symbolically closest to their own, the existential problem par excellence which gives meaning to their lives. It does so by stressing the powerlessness of the Arabs in the world (and of themselves in France), the inability of Arabs and Muslims to help each other (they see it with their fellow Muslims in France) and of Muslim countries to come to the rescue of the Palestinians and � nally, the hegemony of a small country, Israel, over the Muslim world ( just as the imaginary Jew is thought to impose the interests of a small minor-ity community in France). They establish a mythical correspondence between the world, de� ned by the Palestinian problem and what they experience in France in the working-class banlieues where the number of Jews is usually derisory, and where their ability to in� uence the social and economic policy of the country is totally disproportionate to that attributed to them. In this imaginary world, television provides


elements which constantly nurture a mythology in which the Palestinian question corroborates a fantastical view of the place of the Arab and the Muslim in French society. The situation of these young people of North African descent whom we heard in prison undoubtedly contains elements of the idea of the interweaving of the local (exclusion, experi-ence of racism, the impossibility of building a future for oneself ) with the global (the modern economy which denies them any opportunity for development given their level of education and their means). But the global becomes pure imagination; world politics is transformed into a mythical scene reproducing the inchoate magma of the media, but at the same time polarising it in a very de� nite direction by giving it a meaning and a coherence which it often lacks. Unity is created around the Israel-Palestine problem which allows a structured view of the world when, in real life, events taken as a whole lack coherence and homogeneity. This is when anti-Semitism appears to be at its most virulent. And when this mythical structuring principle is unable to cope, for example with the idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’ opposing the West to Islam and no longer only Israel and the Palestinians, anti-Semitic hatred is likely to be replaced by hatred of the United States and by an anti-Westernism in which the Jews are no longer at the root of the misfortunes of the world.

Identi� cation with the Palestinian cause, at its most radical, is there-fore tacked onto the social dif� culties experienced in France. Amongst the Muslims of North African descent, but also amongst those from the Middle East or Africa, there is anti-Jewish sentiment characterised in the � rst instance by the dialectic between the internal and the external. The Jews in France are said to be accepted with their different reli-gion, and more broadly speaking, their different culture, whereas the Muslims are said not to be accepted as such. The French citizenship of Muslims is said to be denied in circumstances where that of the Jews is fully recognised despite their religion and their Jewishness which they display openly and of which they are proud. Moreover, socially, the Jews are said to come from the most af� uent classes, even wealthy, whereas racism and ostracism is said to deny Muslims economic inte-gration, and they � nd themselves trapped in exclusion and � nancial insecurity in declining banlieues. At the external level, Jews are said to be the agents of Israeli and American hegemony, which is based on repression of the Palestinians in particular and the Arabs, or even the Muslims, in general. It is the interaction between the internal and the

part two: conclusion 157


external which confers on the Jews their highly speci� c status in the eyes of young Muslims, in particular those of the banlieues, and which results in Jews being both envied and hated.

For a minority of people, this vision is either transformed or extended into an anti-Jewish paranoia: the Jews are then said to be the ultimate cause of everything negative in life. This perception is applicable to the United States and, moreover, to the 11 September attacks. The Jew, as such, is said to be the ally of America or sometimes, his or her master. The two form an entity, the archetypal expression of a profound com-plicity between the West and Judaism in their campaign against Islam. From this point on, the � gure of the Jew becomes that of the ‘Western’ block against the hard done by and repressed world of Islam. From this point of view, Islam is the religion of the oppressed ‘par excellence’ and anti-Semitism provides the main tie uniting the imagined Muslims in their struggle against Western hegemony.

This, � nally, brings us to ‘global’ anti-Semitism, in which we once again � nd many of the constituent elements we described in chapter six. Globalisation, in this case, operates in two complementary ways. On the one hand, the oppression which the Palestinians experience is symbolic of that of the ‘Arab’ or the ‘Muslim’ dominated and oppressed by the Jews, which is something new in history since it is linked to the creation of the State of Israel. On the other hand, the Jews appear as being themselves globalised, associated with an arrogant and anti- Muslim America, and therefore domineering and oppressive at international level. According to this view, a worldwide relationship of domination is relayed by the imaginary humiliation to which the Jews subject the Arabs and, more globally, the Muslims, by proxy. The young people in the banlieues are excluded, dominated and deprived of their dignity, while the Jews would appear to be included due to their far-reaching links with the dominant powers throughout the world. This is a Mani-chean view of the world: the all-powerful Jew personi� es evil, and the oppressed Muslim, good. Henceforth the violence of Muslims towards Jews becomes legitimate, a response to the humiliation experienced in the banlieues, magni� ed by television which shows Israeli tanks � ring on young Palestinians armed with stones.

158 part two: conclusion


PART THREE

ANTI-SEMITISM AND COMMUNITIES



INTRODUCTION

How does anti-Semitism fare when the Jews constitute a community which is very much alive, active, visible, capable of asserting and defending itself if necessary, in other words when their presence is real and tangible? In these situations, is the hatred limited and contained, given that it cannot be spread by the unbridled imagination of those for whom the Jew is a totally mythical or remote � gure? Does contact with a very real population put matters into perspective? Or, on the contrary, do we have to acknowledge that a strong Jewish community acting as a collective entity exacerbates anti-Semitism by, for example, arousing feelings of jealousy, or by offering physical targets, scapegoats to those whose social or political situation predisposes them to hostility or resentment?

Could it be that the ideas originating in the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the republican project which intended, as the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre stated in 1789, for the Jews to be given everything as individuals but nothing as a nation have ultimately failed? Whatever the case may be, the Jews in France are increasingly often described as forming, at national level, an organised and structured community. We have seen that it is true that there is a recent tendency amongst them, as indicated by Erik Cohen, towards a strengthening of a community-oriented lifestyle.1 But the fact remains that a signi� cant number of Jews in France are unaware, or almost unaware, of the com-munity, and many of them do not recognise themselves in the remarks of community leaders. This is why the analysis of anti-Semitism in the light of a living Jewish community gains in strength of conviction when it is carried out not only at national level but also, and above all, locally, in situations where the reality of the existence of a Jewish community acting as a collective entity is overwhelming. Although situations of this sort are not exceptional there are not many examples. In the Parisian region, Sarcelles is undoubtedly the best known case: it is in this town, where the Jews constitute a powerful community, but not the only one, that we chose to carry out our � eldwork.

1 Erik H. Cohen , Les Juifs de France. Valeurs et identité, rapport FSJU, 2002, p. 42.


162 part three: introduction

Well-known today for the diversity and size of its communities, Sar-celles had previously enjoyed the privilege, as from the 1950s, of being the � agship of a policy of social housing involving the construction of housing estates. Subsequent, and to some extent excessive attempts were made to stress the � aws of this housing, which were indeed real, without always recognising that it did represent a considerable improve-ment for those who were housed—homeless immigrants, workers and people of modest means from the Parisian slums or shanty towns in the banlieue. The reputation of Sarcelles as the symbol of the problem with housing estates is such that the errors of the city planners of the time are named after the town. They were accused of having cre-ated ‘sarcellite’ or ‘Sarcellitis’, a disease of overexpansion and idleness described, for example, at the time in the Communist daily L’Humanité (5 November 1963) in an article entitled “The reasons for Sarcellitis”. But we have left that period far behind now, and, in the midst of an agitated urban periphery, Sarcelles today is generally looked on as a relatively peaceful town.2

There are about 60,000 inhabitants in the town today and despite an unemployment rate of 20.9%, the speci� cities of this town in Val d’Oise which has fascinated the media and sociologists for the past half century are now cultural rather than social. For, while Sarcelles was developing its ‘disease’, it was at the same time acquiring a highly speci� c demographic con� guration. The 8,397 inhabitants of 1954 had become 35,912 in 1962 and rose to 51,520 in 1968, and the newcomers came from all four corners of the globe: 92 different nationalities are represented in Sarcelles. The population is said to be 22% African, 32% North African and 15% Turkish in origin.3 One remarkable aspect of this growth is the high rate of French nationality by acquisition: that is, by naturalisation, by marriage, by voluntary declaration and by children born in France on reaching the age of 18. In 1999, French nationals by acquisition represented 10.8% of the total French population in the town (6,282 out of 57,871).4

2 Cf. Hervé Vieillard-Baron , “Qui habite Sarcelles?”, Hommes et Migrations, no 1181, November 1994, pp. 11–18.

3 INSEE Population census, 1999.4 French nationals by reintegration (reintégre dans la nationalité française) are not counted

here since they are considered by INSEE as French by birth.


CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE JEWS, THE CHALDOASSYRIANS AND THE OTHERS

The settlement in Sarcelles of populations of different origins corre-sponds to the different phases of construction of the housing estates: French nationals repatriated from Egypt and Indochina; ‘pieds-noirs’ (French colonials born in Algeria), amongst whom there were in fact a large number of Jews, from Algeria, then from Tunisia and Morocco; North Africans, French Caribbeans, Africans, people from Pondicherry with French nationality and ChaldoAssyrians. The Jewish population, with 800 families as early as 1963, was the � rst to settle.

The Jewish Community

In 40 years, the visibility of the Jews in Sarcelles has become ever more pronounced and is one of the characteristics of the public sphere: there are kosher shops, places of worship, denominational schools, reading rooms and public events. Similarly, there are numerous markers of identity (signs in Hebrew, clothes, hairstyles, mezuzahs at the door of � ats, etc.) which contribute to the perception of a ‘Jewish area’ located in Lochères.1

Estimated at approximately 15% of the population of Sarcelles,2 the majority of the Jewish population in the town is of Tunisian descent and came, for the main part, after 1967 (the Six Day War). In 1990, 21% of the Jewish population in the town had been born in France, as compared with 45% in Tunisia, 19% in Algeria, 12% in Morocco and 3% in other countries (Egypt, in particular). The Jewish families

1 Cf. Hervé Vieillard-Baron , op. cit., p. 16.2 This � gure is of necessity approximate: since 1872, religious af� liation and ethnic

origin have enjoyed the secrecy guaranteed by the principle of secularism. There cannot be a census of Jews in France; this rule was only infringed by the State of Vichy France.


164 chapter eleven

began to settle in the blocks of � ats in ‘lower’ Sarcelles.3 For a while, the mobility of these families led to their departure for other towns. But with the possibility of buying property in the blocks of � ats in ‘upper’ Sarcelles, they then chose to move within the town rather than to leave it. As Laurence Podselver has explained, from 1994 onwards, the rela-tively recent and somewhat unexpected return of Jews to Sarcelles for reasons which were both economic and ideological, has emphasised the phenomena of regrouping.4

Upper Sarcelles, which is now described as a Jewish area, is Jewish primarily because of the concentration of families, places of worship and Jewish shops established within a restricted area. It is not rare for young people to live in the same town as their parents and thus main-tain the bonds between generations and family solidarity. The centre is also inhabited by those who have ‘chosen to live in Sarcelles’ in order to live their tchuva, or return to Orthodox Judaism and for whom the town, given the number of believers, is a little Jerusalem. Twinned with Natanya in Israel, Sarcelles bene� ts from the aura of the Israeli town. According to Laurence Podselver: “The attraction of Natanya is explained both by nostalgia for the Mediterranean way of life in the past [. . .] and by a taste for a community and family-oriented way of life”.5 The Jewish residents of Sarcelles therefore have a choice of two symbols: the holy city and the seaside resort.

Traditional charity (gemilut hassadim) is practised in the town in the form of calls for funds during religious celebrations or donations made in conjunction with religious acts. But its effectiveness is more symbolic than economic. There are no � gures available but it would seem that today requests for aid addressed to national community organisations are on the rise. As suggested by Laurence Podselver, it is possible to imagine that poverty, also very real amongst the Jews of the town, remains partly hidden because it contradicts the widespread image of the economic success of the North African Jewish population settled in France. The poor and families suffering from � nancial hardship tend

3 Even today there is a noticeable difference between ‘upper’ Sarcelles, the area of Lochères, where three-quarters of the housing is private-owned, and ‘lower’ Sarcelles, the area around the station where three-quarters of the housing is low-cost housing.

4 Cf. Laurence Podselver , “La communauté juive ou la singularité sarcelloise?”, Hommes et Migrations, n. 1181, November 1994, pp. 37–40.

5 Laurence Podselver , “De la périphérie au centre, Sarcelles ville juive”, Les Juifs et la Ville, Chantal Bordes-Benayoun (Ed.), Presses universitaires du Mirail, Toulouse, 2000, p. 83.


the jews, the chaldoassyrians and the others 165

to exclude themselves from the Jewish community because they have a negative image of themselves which is not in keeping with that of a strong and sheltered community.6

In Sarcelles, the North African tradition, in which religion plays a structuring role but nevertheless does not cover all aspects of social life, is becoming mixed up with the neo-Orthodox practices of the ‘young people’ for whom religion controls everything. This opposition is a de-structuring factor for the community which at the moment is dominated by a tendency to display religion openly. Those who do not participate in this renewal, even if they are faithful to the traditions and to the town, are gradually ousted from the public sphere.7 For others, and particularly those who remain in the lower part of the town, or who have returned there after the failure of an alyah, Natanya remains a utopia not to be abandoned. This hope also enables them to bear poverty, exclusion, unemployment and the break-up of the family.

The change in Jewish identity in Sarcelles, which has been notice-able since the 1980s, is characterised by the growing importance of religion, within which a distinction ought to be made between Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian rites. At the outset, when the greatest numbers of Jews were arriving in the town, assimilation to the majority French society seemed to them essential and secularism constituted a strong value. Today, the predominance of a mode of functioning focussing on religion means that religion is now emerging from the private sphere. Jewishness is no longer a speci� city to be hidden from the outside world, but a fact to be displayed as an inalienable part of one’s social being.8 The visibility of this religious af� liation and the fact that it extends beyond the boundaries of the private sphere not only breaks with the classical, republican model of ‘French-style’ Judaism but also, and perhaps to an even greater extent, with the discretion of the other religions in the town—Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist—the exception being the ChaldoAssyrians.

6 Podselver , “La communauté juive ou la singularité sarcelloise”, op. cit., p. 40.7 Annie Benveniste and Laurence Podselver , “Incidence du religieux dans l’organisa-

tion communautaire et la pratique des espaces urbains”, in Nicole Haumont (Editor.), La ville: agrégation et ségrégation sociales, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1996, pp. 19–30.

8 Cf. Chantal Benayoun , Dominique Schnapper , « Citoyenneté républicaine et spé-ci� cité juive », Les Nouveaux Cahiers, no 97, summer 1989; Doris Bensimon , « Sociologie des judaïcités contemporaines. Bilan et perspectives de la recherche française », Revue française de sociologie, vol. 22, January–March 1981; Pierre Birnbaum , La Logique de l’État, Paris, Fayard, 1982.


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The ChaldoAssyrian Community

What saved Sarcelles and rid it of the reputation associated with ‘Sarcel-litis’ was undoubtedly due to its Jewish population, which unaware of the drawbacks of concrete urbanisation, emphasised the positive aspects of a close-knit community-oriented structure.9 They provided the model for the ethnicisation of the town, and the strengthening of community ties promoted by various migratory movements, including forced trans-plantations, became an integral part of its running. The inhabitants of Sarcelles readily express their feelings about the characteristics of the various ‘communities’ which live side by side. For example, Mme A., the director of a local community centre explained that:

The Muslim community is a real patchwork—there’s not much co-ordi-nation. They don’t have the business element that you can � nd amongst the Jewish community or the ChaldoAssyrians. They understood at once. The African community has been here for ages and they have never been like that.

After the Jews, a second community dominates the local scene and their energy and mode of functioning is striking: these are the ChaldoAssyr-ians. This Christian community, which used to be known as the Church of the East or Persian Church, lived for centuries in the Baghdad region before being dispersed throughout the world as a result of the effects of various military and political con� icts. The ChaldoAssyrians assert that 250,000 of them were killed in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and actively campaign for the international recognition of a ‘ChaldoAssyr-ian genocide’. Their church has been linked to Rome since the 16th century and is characterised by its Eastern Christian rite. It is presided over by His Beatitude Mar Emmanuel III Delly, elected to the Vatican in December 2003. Its of� cial language is Syriac, an Eastern form of Aramaic. Approximately 16,000 ChaldoAssyrians, from Turkey, Iraq and neighbouring countries, settled in France after World War I, and then in the wake of the � rst Gulf War, of which 10,000 live in Sarcelles.10

9 Cf. Nacira Guénif , Farhad Khosrokhavar , Paul Zawadski (edited by Michel Wie-viorka ), « L’expérience de l’antisémitisme à Sarcelles », in Pour une sociologie du racisme. Trois études, rapport d’étude, CADIS/CNRS-EHESS, 1993, p. 23.

10 Sources: Association des Assyro-Chaldéens de France (AACF). 250,000 left Iraq after the Gulf war in 1991, mainly going to English-speaking countries.



The ChaldoAssyrians, the ‘most recent arrivals’ in Sarcelles, are the subject of numerous comments. Claudine, a young woman, suggests a parallel with the Jews who came from Central Europe between the two world wars:

They’re like the Jews [. . .]. They buy houses which are all next to each other [. . .], they marry their cousins [. . .], they work and they have chil-dren [. . .]. The Jews were in the Rue des Rosiers, in very distinct areas of Paris. But afterwards, they became doctors. In 30 or 40 years, it will be the same thing with them [the ChaldoAssyrians]. I hope so for them.

Mme B., the head of a secondary school in the town, pronounced a rather severe judgement:

The ChaldoAssyrians depend to a large extent on the Secours Catholique for their livelihood. They are very proud, arrogant people. They have no respect for France and they keep their Turkish nationality. There’s something anti-French about them.

But on the whole this community is well-liked in Sarcelles and tends to be described as hard-working and discreet. It relies on the support of the Association des Assyro-Chaldéens de France which endeavours to ensure “the development of ChaldoAssyrian culture in the community and to promote the maintenance of their cultural identity at the same time as the integration of its members into French social life”. This association has contributed to the recent construction of a ChaldoAssyrian church in the town and to the construction project for a socio-cultural com-munity centre in the neighbouring town of Villiers-le-Bel.

Often described as inward-looking, those who have the chance to come across the ChaldoAssyrian community in Sarcelles ascribe vari-ous characteristics to it: intermarriage; clandestine employment; young girls taken out of school at the age of 16; refusal by the adults to learn French and non-participation in social activities other than those of their own community. These aspects are referred to, however, without the community ever being judged negatively. Often recalled, the recency of the settlement of the ChaldoAssyrian community in Sarcelles is used as an excuse. Mme A., whose role as manager of a local community centre means she is in an excellent position to observe, was impressed by the rapidity of the process of integration of this population:

I have never seen integration like it. I saw them arrive with my own eyes. They had never had running water. They had never seen radios. You cannot imagine it. They had never seen a car. The strength of the ChaldoAssyrians lies in the solidarity of their community. They have a


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social hierarchy which is very important. The parents are highly respected and there is a very established way of doing things: they get married at a speci� c age; they have children at a speci� c age . . . Their integration is extremely rapid because they have a community-oriented form of organisation.

Living Together in Sarcelles

According to the descriptions of the town’s inhabitants, the Chaldo-Assyrians are directly associated with the Jewish community, which is also accused of being inward-looking, community oriented and also de� ned strongly in religious terms, whereas the other communities are de� ned in terms of their origins and their culture. The town hall lists four denominational associations (two are Muslim, one is evangelical and one is Jewish) as compared with 35 cultural organisations (from the Association franco-indienne to the Amicale des Congolais, including the Amicale des Tunisiens de Sarcelles).11 Sarcelles has chosen to recognise and valorise the ethnicisation of its population in an endeavour to ‘live in greater harmony’ which involves acknowledging the importance of associations and, since the 1960s, provides the town with a means of combating ‘Sarcellitis’. The 9 October 1981 law, abolishing the 1939 government decree, which restricted foreigners’ freedom of association, has encouraged the creation of these associations with ‘community-oriented’ connotations.12

In Sarcelles, the word ‘community’ is frequently used by inhabitants of all ages and by professionals, from local tradespeople to social work-ers, to refer without distinction to the various ethnic or religious groups. There is a distinct preference for social interaction between people in public places, courtesy visits and meetings of friends between people of the same ‘community’.13 And if social life is in many respects structured by the co-presence of communities, the same is true of the functioning of the local authority and, more broadly speaking, of local political life. This was explained to us by the mayor, Mr. Pupponi:

11 Mairie de Sarcelles, Bureau des Associations, March 2003.12 Cf. Rémi Junker , “Tissu associatif et relations intercommunautaires”, in Hommes

et Migrations, no 1181, 1994, pp. 30–34.13 Rémi Junker , op. cit., p. 30.



We have made a choice which is clear, and that is to build intercommu-nity relations starting from communities [. . .]. In my view, an individual cannot create an identity and become a citizen if nobody explains who they are in the � rst place [. . .]. I know that the whole of France accuses me of being community oriented [. . .]. But I say, look, we cannot all go forward together if we don’t respect people for what they are at the outset. There are communities of people which are religious, ethnic and geographical. I myself am of Corsican origin. I consider that there is a Corsican community which exists, which has its origins, its roots . . . It’s not all good, but we exist—we are what we are. And if I want to go forward, I � nd it dif� cult when I hear people say that my ancestors were the Gauls. You can tell me that at school every day, but the reality is. . . . They are not Gauls! [. . .] It’s dif� cult enough explaining to the Corsicans that their ancestors were the Gauls. It’s even more dif� cult when it comes to the ChaldoAssyrians, the pieds-noirs Jews and the Algerians or the Malians [. . .] It’s the same with the French Caribbeans. In a town like ours, Jacobinism just doesn’t work. We can’t explain to them that we are all descendants of Vercingetorix. In my opinion, there are communities. It’s a fact of life. What we have to do is to avoid being community oriented. I mean, don’t say, “There are communities, we’re going to make them of� cial, we’re going to develop them and then we’ll start.” No, that’s not the way. Why not begin with: “There are communities, we have to learn to live together, and we all have to respect each other”. Yes, I’m convinced that what’s happening in Sarcelles is the future of the France of tomorrow. Whether we like it or not, the France of tomorrow will be made up of ethnic and religious communities which come from elsewhere.

The cure for ‘Sarcellitis’, the acceptance of the mixed population, is part of the local population’s pride in belonging to the town, especially for the over 30s. In the words of an old resident, “Life is better in Sarcelles than elsewhere and a lot of the credit for that goes to the mix of the population”. Referring to the writings of a former communist mayor, Henri Canacos,14 Djamel, aged 30, explained to us:

He says that people have become attached to their town just as you become attached to a sick child and every day you � ght for him or her to get better and if you attack their town, they defend it just as an animal does—their reaction is completely chauvinistic. Sarcelles—it’s the one and only—like the Corsicans. It’s not like Marseilles, it’s not as big, but there aren’t many towns where people go around wearing a T-shirt with ‘Sarcelles’ on it. They have ‘Sarcelles’ sweat shirts and T-shirts—there are blokes who have things like ‘95200’ tattooed on themselves, things like that.

14 Henri Canacos , Sarcelles ou le béton apprivoisé, Paris, Éditions sociales, 1979.


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This is an important point: in Sarcelles, the sense of belonging to a town and not to an anonymous banlieue is strong, over and above other af� liations but inclusive of them.

Nevertheless meeting each other and living together does not just happen as a matter of course. The director of a socio-cultural centre, Saïd, observed that it required a learning process as demonstrated by the activities of his institution:

[The work of the centre] is to remove the ‘a prioris’ about the communi-ties by workshops on civics, sewing, hammam weekends, anything which enables us to speak to families in a pleasant environment. Everyone praises their own community. We are here to learn to live together. People have to learn to live together.

The local authority institutions, which include the local centres in each part of the town or the local Maison des jeunes et de la culture (youth and cultural centres), thus endeavour to work towards a harmonisation of relations between the inhabitants by promoting shared values and the wider interest. They rely on the community associations who are invited to participate in this approach to ‘living in greater harmony’. Events open to all (exhibitions, musical evenings, carnival, international banquet, trips to the hammam . . .), that round off the involvement of these institutions in the local area or school festivals, are organised with a view to getting to know each others’ culture and genuine ‘social inter-action’ between the ‘communities’, at least as far as the associations are concerned. They are thus catalysts for this process of attachment to a form of local all-inclusive community, to a town which can be summed up by the slogan: ‘Je suis sarcellois(e)’15 (‘I am a resident of Sarcelles’).

Any mention of ‘origins’ would imply from the outset af� liation to a ‘community’—these two ideas are frequently confused—which would be all the more appreciated for any ability to interact with others. Social workers and elected representatives are constantly referring to the cultural harmonisation of their town and their endeavours to this end are far from fruitless. The inhabitants are proud to call themselves ‘Sarcellois’ (residents of Sarcelles), stressing the multicultural aspect of this de� nition. Once again, we would like to emphasise the fact that, contrary to what is observed in the other towns of the Parisian banlieue, the feeling of belonging is extremely strong. The inhabitants do not de� ne themselves uniquely or in the � rst instance in terms of their local

15 Rémi Junker , op. cit., p. 33.



area or their housing estate but effectively as residents of Sarcelles, as ‘Sarcellois’.

When the project of living together fails, the responsibility of the Jewish community is invariably called into question. It is accused of refusing to play the game of community interaction initiated by local authority policy and of continuing its ‘process of voluntary conglom-eration’.16 The paradox is that a second criticism is levelled at the Jews in Sarcelles: it attacks their connivance with the local political powers where they are said to exercise control by functioning as a lobby.

Virulent to a greater or lesser extent, the resentment is directed against the local Jewish population and much less frequently against Jews in general. There is no attempt to globalise grievances or to impute a generic essence to the Jews; the de� nition is in terms of speci� c Jews whose ‘arrogant’ behaviour and ‘lack of open-mindedness’ is said to be made possible by their control of local political and economic resources.17 Apart from a � ght between ‘young French Caribbeans’ and ‘young Jews’ in the 1990s, we have never heard talk of confrontations involving Jews from Sarcelles and a group from any other community. At this time, it was excessive to interpret local tensions as intercommunity confrontations, and anti-Semitism, when it arose, was mainly the work of French Caribbeans or people of North African immigrant descent, for whom the Jews represented the ability to organise themselves as a community which they themselves were incapable of doing. Today the ethnicisation of the town has increased and anti-Jewish remarks tend rather to convey the reaction of a local population which thinks of itself as multicultural, heterogeneous, generous and socially deprived, faced with a community perceived as being closed, homogeneous, arrogant and politically advantaged.

Anti-Semitic Violence

Is the climate of opinion in Sarcelles particularly alarming for the Jews in the town and is there an increase in the number of violently anti-Semitic acts to be observed there? In view of the data available on

16 Annie Benveniste and Laurence Podselver , op. cit., p. 20.17 Nacira Guénif , Farhad Khosrokhavar , Paul Zawadski (Edited by Michel Wie-

viorka ), op. cit., p. 42.


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physical attacks affecting Jews, it is in fact dif� cult to say exactly whom and what the aggressors are attacking. In a town where a considerable proportion of the population is Jewish, the description and quali� cation of certain acts as anti-Semitic is dangerous: racketeering and theft, for example, may be well be interpreted as such in so far as the victims are Jews, whereas they were not necessarily targeted as such.

For the time being, let us focus on how various observers of the national scene explain anti-Semitic violence in Sarcelles and return to the data which they � nd signi� cant. Amongst the recent acts which they list18 we � nd the following (starting with the most recent and going back to the earliest—we recall them here mainly by quoting the terms used in the documents available to us).

25 April 2004: The mother of a young Jew, aged 17, lodged a com-plaint after her son had been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack (blows, insults and robbery) by a gang of young North Africans and blacks.

3 April 2004: A father and his family of four boys, wearing clothes which indicated that they were Jewish, were ‘chased’ by individuals who caught one of the children and hit him on the forehead with an object. The father was thrown to the ground and a person who came to their aid was punched in the eye. Complaints were lodged.

23 March 2004: On leaving his school, a male Jewish secondary school pupil wearing a kippa was accosted by a young man of European origin who asked him for money and then for his mobile phone. The school boy replied that he had neither. At that point about 30 other youths rushed towards him and hit him. A complaint was lodged.

20 March 2004: A father and his four sons who were on their way home after coming out of a service in the synagogue were very vio-lently attacked by about 30 youths from a ‘dif� cult’ housing estate, La Cité des poètes. Two men who came to their aid were also beaten. Complaints were lodged.

15 March 2004: A young Jewish boy, aged 14, with his arm in a sling as a result of an injury, was attacked by eight young hooligans who set upon him, kicking him and throwing stones. He was diagnosed

18 See here the CRIF, Proche-Orient.info and the book co-authored by the Union des étudiants juifs de France and SOS Racisme, Les Antifeujs. Le livre blanc des violences antisémites depuis septembre 2000, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 2002.



with several traumatisms to the liver and ribs. To avoid aggravating things further, his parents decided not to lodge a complaint.

12 May 2003: Anti-Semitic graf� ti: ‘F*** the Jews—Down with the Jews’ and swastikas were discovered on the walls of a block of � ats. A complaint was lodged.

2 May 2003: As school was coming out, a young Jew aged 13, was ‘nabbed’ by four North Africans who asked if he was Jewish. He replied in the af� rmative. The oldest amongst them then called him a ‘� lthy Jew’ and punched him in the face several times. He was taken to hospital where he had to have three stitches.

25 February 2002: In the morning, burning objects were thrown into one of the buildings of the Tiferet-Israel School in Sarcelles, starting a � re. The building went up in � ames and was totally destroyed.

23 January 2002: A school bus transporting 16 children from the Sinai Jewish School was attacked by a group of seven or eight youths. A stone weighing about one kilo was thrown at the bus, breaking a window and wounding a little girl aged 6.

24 September 2001: Anti-Semitic graf� ti on the walls of Sarcelles: ‘Death to the Jews!’

22 September 2001: Several children of North African descent around the age of 10 threw stones at women from the community in Sarcelles who were coming out of a religious instruction class.

18 September 2001: On Boulevard Branly in Sarcelles, a man had gone down to check that his car was locked. There, a group of North Afri-cans armed with knives surrounded him and molested him violently when they saw he was wearing a kippa and had a mezuzah in his car. He was threatened with the words: “We want to see the colour of Jewish blood”. A complaint was � led with the police.

12 September 2001: Three adolescents of North African descent entered a plot next to the Tiferet-Israel School in Sarcelles and threatened young children by brandishing what looked like ‘subma-chine guns’.

11 September 2001: Near the Ozar-Hatorah School in Sarcelles, a little Jewish girl was knocked down by a car and the driver did not stop.

In the night of 28 to 29 July 2001: The Tiferet-Israel School in Sar-celles was ransacked. Computers were stolen along with money and � les of some pupils.


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In the night of 28 to 29 July 2001: Stones were thrown at the Ozar-Hatorah School in Sarcelles, resulting in windows being broken.

6 July 2001: A threatening letter which stated, “Look out, there will be a raid on Sarcelles soon . . .” was received by the FSJU19 in Paris.

14 June 2001: In Sarcelles, a kosher pizzeria delivery boy was attacked by a man of North African descent.

18 May 2001: An anti-Semitic fax was received by the Ozar-Hatorah School in Sarcelles.

8 May 2001: Burglary and windows broken at the Torat-Emet School in Sarcelles.

4 May 2001: Anti-Semitic graf� ti and swastika at the foot of a block of � ats of a resident in Sarcelles.

End March 2001: Graf� ti reading ‘Long Live the Arabs—Down with the Jews’ on the Ozar-Hatorah School in Sarcelles.

25 February 2001: At the Tiferet-Israel School in Sarcelles, after the morning classes, an explosion occurred after an incendiary device was thrown, seriously damaging the building.

In the night of 24 to 25 February 2001: Stones were thrown break-ing the windows of the prefabricated building at the Tiferet-Israel School in Sarcelles.

25 January 2001: Attack with people wounded at the Tiferet-Israel School in Sarcelles.

25 January 2001: Two young North Africans entered the Tiferet-Israel School in Sarcelles and hit two children; one had a broken jaw.

This list is obviously not exhaustive and is not entirely reliable—we refer here to the remarks we made in the very � rst chapter of this book on the problems posed by this type of data. The fact remains that in Sarcelles, whether it be the municipal police, the police station, the mayor, the local authority employees or the representatives of the Jewish community, the tendency is to calm people down. For the past several years, the acts of violence affecting the Jewish population in the town have been closely studied by these people with a view, in the � rst instance, to sifting through the details and sorting out what comes under ordinary juvenile delinquency and what comes under anti-Semitism.

19 Fonds social juif uni� é.



Dr Marc Djebali, President of the collective of Jewish associations in Sarcelles, con� ded in us his concern not to lapse into excesses:

The task of putting rumours to bed has been central to the direction of my work as president of this community . . . These rumours are not necessarily started by the young people. The paranoia we are accused of is much more the world of mature adults than of the young people. Young people don’t feel attacked as Jews at the outset, but simply as indi-viduals. Parents or the elderly tend to read too much into things. There is work to be done, asking them for information to � nd out whether they have been attacked as Jews or not. Half the time it is not because they were Jewish but, all the same, that doesn’t mean to say that there has not been a rise . . .

Similarly, Salazar Benakoun (Raoul), responsible for security at the Sarcelles Town Hall observed that the feeling of insecurity can lead to psychosis and to extremes in perceptions of threats:

The only thing that has changed slightly when it comes to attitudes is their own ideas [the Jews in Sarcelles] about the lack of security. In their opinion, over the past few years a climate of insecurity has developed. Before that, we used to sit down in the evening, the women would bring in tea and everyone would tell stories. People could take the train at midnight. Over the past few years, unfortunately, not only in Sarcelles but throughout France, even the world, there have been various trends towards insecurity and they have led to psychoses. Little things happen. I solve the problem; sometimes I don’t even mention it to the mayor.

There are examples of anti-Semitism in Sarcelles but, according to those in charge, whether it be the Jewish community centre or the local authority, the general trend is to exaggerate them, creating a sort of paranoia or psychosis. Such remarks set these questions in the wider context of the feeling of insecurity and refer to the idea of a consider-able gap between the facts, the objectivity of the phenomenon and the way it is perceived and the subjectivity of the Jewish residents in the town or, at least, some of them.

Analysing anti-Semitism in Sarcelles involves not only studying it in a context in which the presence of the Jewish community is a vis-ible and widespread reality; it also involves considering a situation in which this community is listened to and heard by the local authorities. That is why there are several aspects to our survey. We carried out interviews with the non-Jewish inhabitants of the town to get to know and understand their impressions of the Jews. Our � rst interviewees were families, young people, shopkeepers, social workers and people


176 chapter eleven

responsible for institutions and associations. Our survey rapidly led us to take a particular interest in state schools, where we met both teach-ing and administrative staff. Finally, we met with Jewish families and residents of the town.


CHAPTER TWELVE

ANTI-SEMITISM AT LOCAL LEVEL

While not being necessarily anti-Semitic, the non-Jewish inhabitants of the town do talk a lot about the Jewish population in very harsh terms.

Criticising Jews in Sarcelles

Two aspects, which are often combined, come up again and again. On the one hand, the Jews in Sarcelles are accused of being community oriented and, on the other, of ‘controlling the town’. Although much less frequent, this may lapse into remarks which go further than mere political or cultural criticism, drawing an overall picture of the Jews in which relatively traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes are combined with the accusation that the Jews are so inward-looking as to shatter any possibility of living together in harmony.

For some of the inhabitants of Sarcelles, the Jews could well be the embodiment of a traditional version of evil. Some people are almost apologetic for this anti-Semitism, which for them is part of the culture, and which they ascribe to their parents rather than asserting it themselves. Nabil, who is in charge of a hostel for young workers, explained it thus:

So, I have lived with them too—but without getting to know them. For me, in my childish naivety, a Christian is someone who is not a Muslim, so you have to avoid them. Above all, you must not go into their house. There were Jews in my class and it was the same thing, in my childish naivety and with the education of my parents: my mother has never yet seen a Jew in her life. She doesn’t know what they’re like. She thinks they’re some sort of monsters. I’m telling you, it’s true! For us, a few years ago in Algeria, when you called someone a Jew, it was an insult. And if I say to my mother, “Look, Maurice is a Jew!” she’ll say, “What are you telling me now?” For her, it’s sacrilege to shake hands with a Jew. But that’s just ignorance, that’s the ‘very tolerant’ Islam of our parents!


178 chapter twelve

We � nd this observation in much less elaborate terms in the words of Ali, a fourth year secondary school pupil:

We don’t even know what’s happening [speaking about the Israel-Palestine con� ict]. All we know is that you must not like Jews, or so it seems [. . .]. That’s in the family. At any rate in the Arab families, I think.

And when a researcher asked him what people said in his own family (the boy is a Muslim of African descent), he added, “In fact, nobody knows but they just say you mustn’t like Jews [. . .]. For example, when you’re stingy, they say you’re a Jew”.

Others criticise Judaism for being a closed and intransigent religion. The director of a youth centre observed that:

With the Jews, the parents really do have to give their consent to a mar-riage. There is not yet the freedom that we in France can offer [. . .]. If you have your own schools for mainstream education, you can use them to give religious education, which avoids dispersal. For us Christians, there are Catholic schools but there aren’t enough for all the Christians. And only the people, who really want to go to the Church. Whereas with them [the Jews], it’s almost compulsory. So, that means—no dispersal [. . .]. It’s the cornerstone of their religion which is very hard. If you keep to a strict interpretation of the texts—it’s really hard. A woman does not have the right to reveal one inch of her calves or anything. She must have children. It’s a very backward culture.

The intransigence attributed to the Jews is therefore a source of schism between them and the rest of the population. It is also perceived as a mark of domination or alienation of Jewish women, a mark which is diametrically opposed to modern universalism and notions of equality and identical rights for men and women. Thérèse, who is 22 years old, insisted on recalling the story:

. . . of the well-known woman who was excluded from the Jewish com-munity because her husband left her. A single woman who is not accepted—it’s really hard. And then, she didn’t want to do the things for the � rst communion1 of the little girl, you know, the Jewish things. For example, she wanted to invite people who were not Jewish, people she liked [to her daughter’s communion]. She didn’t want a big celebration . . . so she was . . . [excluded]. What’s more I can prove it; she lives over there (a non-Jewish area).

1 Translator’s note: in the French text ‘la première communion’. The woman does not know the term for the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony.


anti-semitism at local level 179

Traditionally, the Jews represented money. But what is typical of Sar-celles is that this reasoning has an additional dimension to it: their wealth is said to be ostentatious. In this respect, young people are particularly critical. A secondary schoolgirl aged 17 said:

They have a very characteristic look: tight jeans, close-� tting tops. They have black hair and use lots of hair gel and foundation cream or UV suntan. They’re just like Jennifer in Star Academy! The � rst time I saw her, I knew that she was a feuj 2 [. . .]. They have the suntan and the clothes: the expensive out� ts, “like Mum’s”! They wear skirts with big trainers . . .

Another 16 year old schoolgirl revealed a different aspect: that this wealth might not be as great as people believe—some Jews look richer than they really are:

The Jews, in fact, show off their money a lot. I know because I have a friend who is Jewish and he told me, “Frankly, you see us showing off our wealth but you should see the loans that there are behind all that”. Then I said, “I believe you. But to get a loan, you have to have money all the same”.

Finally, the Jews are said to be in all sorts of positions of power. Accord-ing to the director of the youth centre:

Amongst the Jews there are some who are 100% practising Jews, but they are in the minority. These are the people whose wives wear clothes which cover them from head to foot, leaving only their faces unveiled. Then you have the Jews who do practise their religion, but only at the main festivals—they’ve changed and they’re already a bit closer to the French system. And then you have the others who are very clever, who belong to what you might call the intellectuals, who are doctors, pharmacists, who occupy all the important positions here, in France.

M. G., a 40 year old security of� cer, deplored the hold of the Jews on the world, and regretted that they did not de� ne themselves solely in religious terms and in a discrete, private fashion as they used to do, when the Israelites3 conformed strictly to the republican model:

I worked for a Jew in the Plaine-Saint-Denis. Look, the bloke was odd. He was authoritarian and he spoke to you as if you were a piece of meat. So, even if it was in his nature to act like that, all you’re going to

2 ‘feuj’—Juif ( Jew). See note on language.3 Israélite: this term is now outdated in French but was used to avoid using the word

Juif.


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say is that it’s because he’s Jewish. And one thing is for sure. What did he go and do? He appointed a Jew as head of the workshop. And the Jew who is the head of the workshop did not think twice about saying that, as long as the world is not run as the Jews want, there will always be problems. He said it openly [. . .]. You can’t say anything in reply since he’s above you. You can’t even defend yourself. It’s dictatorship, pure and simple. The fact is that these people are monopolising everything, directing people as they like because they have the money [. . .]. If everyone kept their beliefs to themselves, either in their synagogues or in their homes, that would be all right. But bringing them to hospital, to school or to the market, that’s altogether something else—it means society is splitting into different groups, whereas moral codes and civic behaviour should be one and the same for all.

The hostility here wears the garb of populism resentful of a popula-tion perceived as a powerful, supportive and closed community. For this reason, it is never very far from the accusation that the Jewish community tends to be inward-looking. Sometimes it is an extension of this accusation, sometimes it springs from it; it is always associated with the idea that there are great threats to French society and, further still, ‘society in Sarcelles’.

The Jewish Withdrawal into a Community-Oriented Lifestyle

The Jewish community was said to refuse to participate in interaction with other communities; it was said to be too arrogant on the one hand and too in� uential on the other. From this point on, its attitude was seen as a threat to the equilibrium of the town which was ensured by the meeting and mixing of the populations.

The phenomenon was said to be relatively recent, and the observa-tions of Laurence Podselver and Annie Benveniste referred to above help us to understand that there had indeed been a major change within the Jewish population at the end of the 1980s,4 with a move from an attitude favourable to assimilation and integration into the majority society to the assertion of its religious speci� city.

Apart from a few dissenting voices, the over-30s readily referred to a past when the Jewish community still mixed with the others. Mourad, 35 years old, remarked on it on the basis of his experience in sport:

4 Cf. Annie Benveniste and Laurence Podselver , op. cit., p. 20.



We did not used to be so aware of communities acting as collective enti-ties. There are not so many events organised in the town. I have always been a member of a sports club and, in the past, at school and all that, I had Jewish and Turkish friends. It wasn’t a problem. Then they set up Jewish and Turkish sports associations, on the basis of communities and then I was rejected. It’s simple, from the very � rst time I was relegated [he was referring to a match where he should have played but where he did not belong to any of the communities present].

Ahmed, 32 years old, attributes this development to the withdrawal of Jews from state schools:

When you look at the school photos of the past 20 or 30 years, there have been a lot of changes to the social mix. Young people don’t know the young people in other areas. That creates a fear of the unknown and you withdraw into yourself. I think the Jewish community has withdrawn into itself, particularly through the creation of private primary and second-ary schools [. . .]. Whereas when we were young, we had people from the Jewish community, today the fact that there has been a split, that there are private schools and things like that, means we don’t meet any more.

Serge, aged 41, a secondary school teacher who lives in Sarcelles, con-� rmed that the expansion of private Jewish schools weighed heavily in recent developments:

Before, it [the Jewish community] was very large [in state schools]. There are still some in the secondary schools, but effectively numbers are tending to decline because some of the pupils are leaving for private schools. Or else, because a considerable number has also transferred to the neigh-bouring town of Saint-Brice because Saint-Brice is quieter. But it’s true that at the outset it was a very big population. It began to decline around 1980–1985. But the change has extended over a fairly long period.

But even if young Jews were educated in state schools, that did not mean to say that they mixed with other pupils. Mme. D., a supervisor in a secondary school, told how when she was at school in Sarcelles, ten years previously, the Jews:

. . . were always together. But, on the other hand, that’s always been the case. It’s funny because I actually experienced that. When I was at second-ary school in Saint-Brice there was really a community of Jews. Although there were lots in my class and I got on very well with them, at break time it was as if there was a barrier [. . .]. It was a case of ‘We’re sticking together and you can’t enter our world’. It was their strength.

The Jewish pupils, who were in actual fact more present in the public sector ‘before’, did not, for all that, have the reputation of mixing with


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the others. At that time, there were already various ways of differentiat-ing between groups, including design and fashion.

Today a signi� cant proportion of Jewish young people have deserted state schools in Sarcelles and the gap between the Jews and the other young people is widening. Brigitte, a teacher in a secondary school in the town, has noticed it and observed that it even involves clothes:

There are Jewish schools and there is a sort of withdrawal of the Jewish community all the same. Once, I remember that we had happened to go to the fairground during a week of cultural events and there were pupils from the Jewish school who were playing. They were all wearing V-necked pullovers, black trousers and their kippa, and our pupils really saw them as something different. So that does enter into it, all the same.

In fact, the youngest are very aware of this dimension: the Jews make a point of being different, including in their way of dressing. Abdou, a fourth year secondary school pupil thought that: “In the town the Jews could � x things up. If they didn’t go out of their way to be noticed, if everyone dressed normally, if they didn’t wear special clothes . . .”.

During an exercise which consisted in ‘writing a newspaper article aimed at informing the readers about an event’, this is what a second-ary school pupil wrote in September 2003:

The Jews are in the minority in this banlieue and they are not very popular. When you walk around in the banlieue of Sarcelles you � nd anti-Jewish slogans. When you ask young people why they don’t like ‘Jews’, they can’t answer the question. Then you realise that the young people have been ‘brainwashed’.

What the secondary school pupil described is a fairly good summary of the impression which is formed from the remarks of the youngest inhabitants of Sarcelles regarding the Jewish population in the town: they do not seem ever to have really encountered them or mixed with them.

The older people, 30 years and over, can compare the past and pres-ent and observe the gulf that has been created: the youngest people have always known this gulf which means that, for them, the Jews are a strange, different, little known population. But who is responsible for this situation? The Jews here are presented as having chosen to with-draw into their own institutions. If the criticism has become virulent, it is because they are blamed for the local dif� culties of ‘living together’: rather than the ideal of a harmonious multiculturalism, they have



opted for the position of the ‘poor sport’. A group of state secondary schoolgirls put it in no uncertain terms:

A.:—But the Jews are really looking to make themselves unpopular. They are withdrawn. They don’t mix.B.:—And why do they always feel obliged to be so snooty? [. . .] They know they’ve got everything, so . . .C.:—Sometimes they say it’s because of the Torah that “they aren’t allowed to mix, and all that” . . .B.:—I’m sorry but it’s not true. God created several communities and I don’t see why we should stay stuck in our own. Take me. I’m a Christian but I learn a whole lot of things about the Koran!

Withdrawal into the community is presented by many as a major error and we have no examples to suggest the contrary. The school-girls we have just quoted did endeavour to � nd some without much conviction:

A.:—Anyway, you’ll never see a Jew marry a renoi [black person] or a. . . .C.:—Yes, I know one case—there’s a Jew where I live who married a babtou [toubab: a white woman of French descent] and in fact, she converted for him.A.:—Yeah—I know one too—on Skyrock I heard about a rebeu [an Arab woman] who was going to marry a Jewish man!C.:—In the house next to the stadium there’s a Black man who married a Jewish woman!

But despite these attempts to put the accusation into perspective, it is clear that the criticism is extremely widespread: the Jews are said to be responsible for the resentment which targets them which is the outcome of their own intolerance, described here as a community-oriented lifestyle.

The Social Implications of a Community Oriented Lifestyle

Closed community-oriented concepts of organisation focus on issues of culture and identity, but they also involve social values and, conse-quently, the Jewish community is sometimes held responsible for what is perceived as a deterioration in the climate of the town. From this point of view, the activities of various socially-orientated institutions are described as a response to the inadequacies in community life from


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which some people suffer. They are intended to compensate for the lack of community. This is what Mme. A., who is in charge of one of them, explained:

The local community centre has been functioning for ten years now. It’s in one of the � rst areas to be built in Sarcelles, after Les Sablons. It’s a neighbourhood where there were no social institutions at all, the local associations were not very active—there were three or four small associations where the people met in each other’s homes, things like that. When we were setting up this structure there was very little else. It gradually got going. There was not the community spirit that you � nd in some other areas [. . .]. We don’t have that; we don’t really have com-munity associations.

In this instance, the legitimacy of the social activities seemed question-able. They did not � nd their niche in the vacuum left by community life and which they were intended to � ll. Many of those in charge in this sector remarked that the more resources a community has, the more it takes care of itself without its members contributing to the overall social fabric of the town. Saïd, the director of a local com-munity centre, said:

The two richest communities are the ChaldoAssyrians and the Jewish community. They are also the most community oriented. They have their own community and cultural centre. The general population takes a dim view of this.

Similarly, Djamel, who had worked with young people for the local author-ity, observed that the Jewish community kept out of joint initiatives:

At the moment we have a colleague in Sarcelles who’s organising a Festival of Cultures and Generations [. . .]. We sent out invitations to everyone to � nd out who wanted to participate. She didn’t receive anything from the Jewish community. They are not taking part. They don’t mix. Why? I don’t know [. . .]. There’s a festival. All the associations are coming and they will not be present. They didn’t reply to the invitation. There’s no desire to try to do something with the others. They even have private nurseries as well. They have time slots on Sunday afternoons, apart from the school holidays, at the swimming pool. They have their own swim-ming teachers. They are the only people who go there.

The Jewish tendency to a closed community-oriented way of life thus leads to isolation which is noticeable not only in schools but also in the shops, housing and social activities. It is frequently compared to that of the ChaldoAssyrians. Saïd explained:



We haven’t seen much of the ChaldoAssyrians—that’s the main problem. Take their family structure: the grandmother looks after the children while the parents go to work. There are ChaldoAssyrian weddings every Saturday—they’re all cousins! So, it’s true that if they have a party every Saturday they don’t need any more. We see them opening businesses: fast food restaurants, cafés. They’re springing up all over the place. There must be � ve fast food restaurants in the centre of Sarcelles. I mean the ‘Greeks’, � ve ChaldoAssyrians, � ve cousins. To begin with, it’s the Jews who open them and when they are sold, it’s the ChaldoAssyrians. There are still Jewish businesses. In the Flanades shopping mall, lots of shops are closed on Saturday because it’s the Sabbath. The Jewish community is in the Charcot area . . . The Jewish community has its own community centre, its cultural centre. There are lots of Jewish schools. If they have a problem, they go straight to their community centre.

Thus, the way these two communities operate differs from other groups in the town. Mme. A., who, as we know, is the head of a local com-munity centre, stressed the difference:

We have a large DOM-TOM5 community, but they have no dif� culty in coming to the various initiatives and activities here. What’s more, they don’t even go to the Maison de l’Outre-Mer (the Overseas Centre). They use the services here.

The Jewish tendency to withdraw into a community-oriented way of life is described as a form of sel� shness, speci� c to the well-to-do who can afford to pay no heed to the social dif� culties of the other com-munities, so much so that they put paid to any plan to live together in a harmonious and equitable multicultural society. Saïd regrets this:

It’s true that for a while the main question was: “How can we get all the communities in Sarcelles to live together?”; “What should we do to bene� t from the cultural wealth of each of them?”; “How can we live together?” . . . Nowadays people tend to take the line that “to survive, you have to live in a community”. It’s worked for the ChaldoAssyrians and for the Jews. If we create a community, we’ll have a bit more power: ‘my own little world—everyone has their own little world’. They don’t care about what’s happening elsewhere. Then, for the Jews, there is the historical context and the religious context. What interests them is the well-being of their community and not of society at large.

5 DOM-TOM—Département d’Outre Mer and Territoires d’Outre Mer.


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Does withdrawal into a community-oriented way of life not imply that the group is exerting pressure on or even coercing its members? Dalila, from the Femmes solidaires et actives association who sees, amongst others, Jewish women who encounter personal problems, observed that it was a source of dif� culty for them: “If you have a problem, you go to the synagogue. They can help you. But if you go outside, it’s as if you are betraying your community”. Similarly, Thérèse remarked:

They don’t mix much and if someone does then they are no longer part of the clan. It’s very, very rare. There may be other ethnic groups which move into the Jewish neighbourhood but it’s very, very rare to see a Jew-ish family settling anywhere other than the Jewish neighbourhood. The only Jewish family that we know are nevertheless Jews who have been excluded from the clan.

The community workers at the local community centre and the MJC (Centre for Youth and Culture) clearly express their desire to curb community-oriented tendencies by organising joint activities. However, their work is set in a context of social action aimed at compensating for the general inadequacies of the deprived banlieues or the dif� cult neighbourhoods, not only with a large population of North African immigrant descent but also, and clearly, of Sub-Saharan African descent and others. Such inadequacies include unemployment, social exclusion, poverty, discrimination etc. One could accept that on the whole the Jews in Sarcelles want to be identi� ed with this picture and dissociate themselves from anything which might identify them with immigrants or applicants for social welfare. They are helped in their efforts not only by a system of internal solidarity, but also by an identity which is meant to be religious and not ethnic. This sort of identity cannot be presented through folklore or by highlighting a culture of origin, as is the case for other communities who may participate in intercultural events—for example during festivals, or meals where everyone from the neighbourhood is invited to taste the dishes from other countries and display their dances, etc.

Ultimately, their withdrawal into a community-oriented way of life is perceived as a form of contempt on the part of the Jews in Sarcelles, a sort of affront. While many other inhabitants play the game of coming together as communities as best they can, the Jews clearly refuse the very principle. Moreover, they do so much more obviously than the ChaldoAssyrians who are said to endeavour to integrate better.



Robert: Being a Non-Community Oriented Jew in Sarcelles

In a situation where there is a strong tendency to a community-oriented lifestyle, individuals are enjoined to submit to the law of the group. The fact that religious or community-oriented Jews in Sarcelles hardly join in any of the activities of the social institutions of the town, or in its intercultural diversity projects can have unpleasant consequences for other Jews who are non-practising or non-community oriented. Either they are not seen as Jews or if they do participate in town activities their contribution is never highlighted. Or else they feel thwarted in their aspiration to combine a Jewish identity with full and entire participation in the universal values of reason and the rule of law, which in the past allowed a strong identi� cation with the town of Sarcelles.

We carried out a sociological intervention in Sarcelles, as we did in Roubaix, this time with a group of teachers and other Education natio-

nale staff, which will be of use to us when we study the dif� culties of state schools in general. But this intervention also provided very useful information about the experience of Sarcelles starting, precisely, with the dif� culties experienced today by those Jews in the town who were able, in the past, to articulate their � delity to Judaism, their love of the town and their contribution to the values of modernity and universalism.

Robert took part in this intervention and, on several occasions, he played a key role. He remembered the happy years:

I arrived here when I was 15 years old. I feel as if I was born here in this cultural melting pot. That’s what made me a Sarcellois through and through. It was extraordinary because there was nothing like it anywhere else . . . in the local gangs—the gangs wearing black bomber jackets—there were young people from all over the world. But today this is less and less the case. I also lived in Sarcelles in 1967, when the war broke out in the Middle East. I had a classmate who asked me . . . in fact who wondered whether this might mean a con� ict between us. We understood imme-diately that there was no con� ict between us two. That really did not exist—I’m saying it now and I will say it again.

At that time, he was completely integrated as an inhabitant of Sarcelles and not as a Jew, but today he feels he is assigned to an origin which he is ordered to justify. He noted:

an intensi� cation . . . perhaps even the beginning of a community-ori-ented way of life which did not exist 30 years ago. Sarcelles was truly a wonderful town. It was a town where people mixed with one another,


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both inside and outside school. With the general evolution of France, and of the world perhaps, the impact was really felt in Sarcelles, people began to become withdrawn. But despite everything, I maintain that I remain a true ‘Sarcellois’. In fact, Sarcelles is my identity. I’ve lived in Morocco. I was a Moroccan Jew in Morocco, in a country which was com-pletely westernised, ‘Europeanised’. In the towns, people spoke French. I attended the French secondary schools and cultural missions . . . In short, I had an identity which was a bit vague. Really I feel as if I was almost born, culturally, in Sarcelles. Sarcelles is an identity for us. At one point I used to say that my country was Sarcelles. And despite the changes, despite it getting tougher, etc., Sarcelles is still my home. Sarcelles will always be my home.

But now this identity has been disrupted, not only as a result of Jewish religious and community pressures, but also for other reasons which two incidents during the sociological intervention were to reveal. The � rst occurred in a meeting (3 December 2003) during which the group comprising, as I said, teachers and other Education nationale staff, in keeping with the principle of our method of intervention, received a guest, Mr Lasfar, the rector of the mosque in Lille and director of the Averroès Secondary School in Lille-Sud, the � rst private Muslim school to be set up in France which had just opened. The discussion was about intercommunity relations, racism and anti-Semitism. Mr Lasfar related an anecdote:

Recently, my daughter’s French literature teacher who, as everyone knows, is Jewish, but she is a very good teacher, said to my daughter [who is in the fourth year]: “Tell your father that I don’t agree with the school he’s setting up. We are a state school. We support state schools. You’re father’s in the process of . . .”. My daughter broke down in tears; she came home completely . . . “Daddy, she humiliated me in front of the class”. My daughter doesn’t even agree with my school! So my daughter was not even asked if she agreed with it or not, but she was made to take responsibility for something her father had done. Well, when I went to see this woman, I said to her, “Listen, as a colleague, I’m a teacher. I think that you do not have the right to say what you said in class. Be careful, there are limits. You have to respect the principle of neutrality and secularism”. And to this very day my daughter has retained a nega-tive image of her French literature teacher.

Robert then spoke up:

I can’t let what you have said pass. Because there is something which shocked me and if I didn’t say so it would not be honest of me. Now I don’t want to make a case against you based on assumptions not facts. I quite like you, in fact, but you said two things. The � rst is that you said



the teacher was Jewish. I don’t think it was necessary to point that out. If a teacher said that to your daughter, she was already in the wrong. The fact that she was Jewish tells us nothing more. I don’t quite under-stand why you said it, and, excuse me, but you did say, “a Jewish teacher BUT very competent” . . . I don’t want to put words into your mouth but I can’t help hearing what you said. Perhaps I’m over-sensitive, I have a sixth sense . . . but I can’t let it pass because I think I would lose my own self-esteem and I think that we won’t get anywhere.

The rector then admitted that he had not chosen his words well and the meeting continued. Two weeks later, it was the turn of another guest, M. G. . . ., a local community worker to voice his opinion:

I play football here with my association. We have games against other associations from other local areas but when the Jews come we ask them to come and play with us and they refuse. They set themselves apart. We wonder why. Either they don’t want to mix because they’re Jewish, or else they don’t want to mix because they are more intelligent, better, or I don’t know why.

Once again, Robert reacted sharply:

I’m really very shocked by what you’ve just said. You’ve just accused the whole Jewish community on the basis of a group of footballers who don’t want to play with you. I’m not a community oriented [. . .]. You’re castigating a whole community—it’s unacceptable [. . .]. You gave the impression that the Jewish community bene� ts from certain advantages. This feeling that the Jews are socially advantaged and that this is what creates ill feeling is an outrageous idea. There’s as much poverty there as elsewhere.

Once again, the incident was quickly over, the guest protesting that he had spoken in good faith. But the two incidents left Robert bitter. During the last meeting he drew his conclusions from these two episodes:

Until recently, when I heard people who are Jewish saying that they don’t feel safe any more, I thought that some sort of paranoia was in the process of mounting and that there was nothing in it. Now over the past two or three months, I’ve been to three or four meetings and, each time, I’ve had to take someone up on something . . . an anti-Semitic remark, you could put it like that. These may or may not be intentional, but all the same . . . There is something going on.

As we know, Robert is and professes to be a Sarcellois. At the begin-ning of the research, he introduced himself as also being of Moroccan Jewish descent, explaining that coming from elsewhere was one of the conditions for the population mix. During the incidents which we have


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just referred to, he reacted to remarks which appeared to him to be anti-Semitic, being careful not only never to mention his origins, but especially to point out that he is against all forms of a community-ori-ented lifestyle. This is indicative of a malaise which he shares with other non-community oriented Jews in Sarcelles and elsewhere: expressing their opinions in the name of universal values, they have the impression that if they reveal their origins they will automatically be con� ned to a community to which they have nevertheless never belonged. Countering anti-Semitic remarks obliges them, paradoxically, to distance themselves a little further still from the Jewish community. Robert knew a golden age which he possibly sets up as something of a myth in which the three main elements of his identity were harmoniously linked: he felt at ease as a Sarcellois, as a Jew and as a modern individual—a French citizen. Today this model of integration is falling apart. The town is no longer what it was. Being Jewish is to run the risk of being engulfed in an unwanted community-oriented lifestyle and he has to face a ris-ing anti-Semitism that will have to be fought in the name of universal values and not uniquely as Jews.

His situation brings us closer to a fairly general observation: the people who are most exposed to anti-Semitism born of resentment are not perhaps the well integrated Jews in the community, comfortably settled in the heart of the Jewish neighbourhood in the town and whose children go to the private denominational school but, on the contrary, those who are a little apart, through personal conviction, like Robert, or because of the twists and turns of life, like some young people whose parents continue to send them to state schools where they may feel a bit isolated and threatened.

‘The Jews Control the Town’

Hostility towards the Jews presents itself in the � rst instance as the response to their refusal to contribute to a multicultural Sarcellois identity. This refusal is in turn associated with what, to all appearances, is a suc-cess: their integration and their social advancement, which is regarded as a demonstration of their functioning as a lobby, according to a model which is inaccessible to any other group. The symbol of this success, their presence in the geographical centre of the town (Les Flanades in Lochères) and in the political centre (the local authority), sustains ill-



feeling on the part of those who are ‘excluded’ from these places. We have just heard M. G. . . . who comes from Cameroon, to whom Robert replied forcibly. M. G. had further criticisms to make:

Do you think I get the same grants or that my application for a grant is processed as quickly as that of the Jews at the town hall? [. . .] I think it’s due to their lobbying. They have a strong lobby here, with very strong economic interests, which mean that they really can tip the balance one way or the other when they want. Why do you think Mr. Strauss-Kahn is here [he was Mayor of Sarcelles from June 1995 to June 1997 and has been deputy mayor since June 1997]? I have nothing against him, I quite like him, and he’s an extremely open-minded person. But don’t you think there’s a reason why he’s here? And why can’t I be Mayor of Sarcelles if I have French nationality? Do you think I would be accepted as a candidate? And why do you think he was accepted? It’s not because he’s the biggest professor of economics in the world!

For their part, the state secondary schoolgirls already mentioned have ready tongues:

A.:—At some point, they [the Jews] send all their children to their own schools whereas we all mix together. Now in Sarcelles, they have a boys’ school, a girls’ school and another one, I’m not even sure.C.:—But it’s because Sarcelles belongs to the Jews! The mayor is Jew-ish!B.:—He’s CorsicanC.:—I tell you, he’s Jewish!A.:—Strauss-Kahn is a feuj ( Jew)! [In fact, the mayor’s name is Pup-poni].D.:—They do everything for them, everything for them to feel at home in Sarcelles! They’ve already widened the road beside their synagogue but, do you realise, the 368 bus used to start from the synagogue and in fact, on Saturdays when I used to go to judo with my big brother, it had to make a detour! Do you realise that we had to walk because they were there. They were all over the road and the bus couldn’t get through!A.:—You know what they did for 14 July (Bastille Day)? There were � reworks for us and � reworks for the feujs ( Jews)!

The Jewish population in Sarcelles is often presented as ‘controlling the town’, either because of their voting strength, which enables them to bring considerable pressure to bear, or because they are said to hold the key posts. Whatever the situation, they are always said to act in their own interests with no regard for the interests of the neighbouring communities. A gym teacher noticed this in the secondary school of the town where he works:


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It’s a community which brought pressure to bear right inside the schools on problems of food as well as the phenomenon of the kippa at one point. The pupils arrived wearing a kippa. A certain number of things were done to emphasise difference and it’s true that this did pose a problem within the schools. It has always happened in the deliberately vague way that we still know today.

The director of a community centre observed for his part that:

At the time of the celebration of the Jewish festivals, they drive in proces-sion in cars, blowing their horns and � ying Jewish � ags (sic). When there are Jewish religious celebrations, you mustn’t walk on their pavement.

But this remark was above all to stress a move away from a time when Christians monopolised public parades and set Jewish identity in a context which had become diversi� ed. “There are other religions [other than Christian] which do the same thing in Sarcelles,” added the director of a community centre.

Finally, this relatively shared opinion is summed up by this conversa-tion between a mother and daughter:

The daughter:—The Jews—well, they are the chosen people [. . .]. It’s a closed community.The mother:—And what’s more, they don’t contribute anything to the town of Sarcelles.The daughter:—Are you joking, or what? They control Sarcelles! Who was Strauss-Kahn?

On the whole, it can be con� rmed that it is not the Jews in general who are targeted but those of Sarcelles. The Jews are not postulated as having inherent characteristics, along the lines of classical French or European racism; they are described in terms of an intercommu-nity confrontation, in which an over-arching, multicultural Sarcellois community is pitted against the Jewish community, criticised for its overwhelming superiority and control of available resources.

The Racist Jews

To say that the Jews in Sarcelles operate in a community-oriented man-ner or to stress their access to local political power is not necessarily anti-Semitic: on the contrary, this is merely to give an account of the reality. However, this type of statement rapidly leads to questionable remarks, or even to discourse which is openly hostile and veers towards



anti-Semitism. Thus, one secondary schoolgirl blurted out, “All the problems there are today are connected with the Jews. They stay in their own little corner and insult all the races”.

The Jewish population is sometimes accused not only of being sel� sh but of subjecting the town and the inhabitants of Sarcelles to periodic sacri� ces. These allegations sometimes comprise the denunciation, expressed in distinctly anti-Semitic terms, of connivance between the Jewish community and the mayor, the judiciary or the police, as wit-nessed by the considerable amount of graf� ti on the walls of the town since 2000 and recorded by the municipal police. In a staircase, beside the drawing of a swastika the following words had been scrawled: ‘The mayor, son of a bitch. Your children. Your wife. Your secretary and you, of course. Filthy Jews’. Elsewhere we read: ‘Police, public prosecutor, BAC (anti-criminality brigade), Sarkozy, � lthy Jew’, also accompanied by a swastika. The word ‘Jew’, synonymous here with power and authority, is as good as an insult while, at the same time, revealing other aspects of the town: Sarcelles is also a dif� cult banlieue. And the Jews are said to be the only people who escape being, if not stigmatised, at least tarnished. Worse still, they are said to behave in a way which contributes to the belittling or the discrediting of the members of other groups, who are already worse off. This may be the result of indifference, as one of the of� ce-bearers of the mosque in Sarcelles suggests:

The Muslims are scattered [. . .]. And the Jews, I mean the Jewish commu-nity, are united. I mean to say they speak with a single voice. Nobody pays attention to us—unlike other communities which shall remain nameless. There is nobody who defends us, nobody who takes care of us . . .

But is it not also as a result of racism? A state secondary schoolgirl recounted how:

One day we were training on the hurdles with my class. There was a class from the feuj ( Jewish) girls’ school next to us. There was a renoi [a black boy] in front of them who was playing the fool, pretending to fall each time. After a while, one of the girls said to him: “Filthy negro!” Well, then, he hit her. She fell down and since she was asthmatic, she couldn’t breathe and all that. The Jewish girls’ teacher came over and she started shouting at our teacher. And, what a coincidence, we got the worst of it!

M. G., who, as we have seen, is a Cameroonian and a Christian, con-siders that he was the victim of a racist refusal to sell:

The Jewish community here is a bit odd. They have their own bookshop, they have their . . . They do everything to set themselves apart. It seems to


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me they do their best to make people angry with them. They don’t want people to enter their community, and they don’t want to get involved with other people. Once, I made a mistake. I didn’t see the notice. I went into a Jewish butcher’s shop to buy meat. I asked them, “How much is it?” First the bloke looked me up and down like that. Wait a minute—what’s the butcher looking at me like that for? I’ve just come in to buy some meat. He told me the price per kilo . . . It was extortionate. I said, “Wait a minute, is your meat made of gold or something?” He replied, “It’s a bit different here”. “What’s special about it?” So, he said to me, “Listen, friend, this is a Jewish butcher’s shop”. “Oh! You have your own butchers, do you? Sorry, you can keep your meat,” and I left. [. . .] He didn’t sell it to me [. . .]. But that’s how it manifests itself and also by the fact that they’ll never take on a young black girl to go and work in their shop, or their bookshop.

The stigmatisation is thus presented as being produced by the Jews. Their racism is said to be aimed in the � rst instance at restricting the Muslims’ � eld of action. M. T., a history and geography teacher in a secondary school in the town, said:

At the moment, the young people are talking a lot about these TV programmes, you know, Nice People, and especially about this young man called Prosper, who comes from a Jewish family, what’s more a very rich Jewish family, since it’s the Partouche family which owns casinos. One pupil said to me, “Yes, but it’s normal, he’s rich, it’s normal, he’s a Jew!” I said to her, “Young lady, you’re stupid: he’s not rich because he’s Jewish but because his parents own casinos”. But the thing is, two days later, on France Inter, I heard that he was the subject of a huge controversy because they were guessing a riddle in their loft—it was a sort of Piction-ary or something like that—as a clue for sheep he asked, “What’s curly and smells bad?” and Prosper joked, “It’s a Beur!”6

Saïd, in charge of the community centre, considered that the Jewish community systematically put the Muslim community at a disadvantage. It might be a question of places of worship: “Today the Muslim com-munity in Sarcelles is demanding a mosque in Sarcelles and the Jewish community doesn’t want it.” It might also be a question of recognition of the speci� city of dietary practices: “There are kosher products in schools, for example, but there’s no halal meat”.

The Muslims have dif� culty organising themselves as communities and, over and above being different from Jews, we � nd the underlying

6 Slang for Arab.



idea amongst some people that the Jews would actively do all they could to prevent them. The inadequacies in community life are then no longer one’s own fault but are due to the group that one envies. In Sarcelles, the Jew is never imagined to be a victim but always a privileged person and, from that point, it is easy to move to the idea that the Jew is responsible for the dif� culties encountered by the others.

There are occasions when the very term ‘anti-Semitism’ is challenged. A state secondary schoolgirl who had come as a guest to one of our meetings during the sociological intervention observed that it was not always used properly:

Well, it’s certain that there is anti-Semitism. But in the � rst instance, it’s not always aimed at the Jews. This word is used any old how. It applies to all Semites including the Arabs . . .

Ahmed added:

There are times, it’s true, when you can be branded and you can’t deny history but, at the same time, people use the word ‘anti-Semitism’ in all sorts of circumstances. You can’t say a thing, you see, and it’s the same thing for the journalists, they’re all hung up on this whole issue.

Above all, the term, anti-Semitism, is paradoxically said to denote an injustice, a form of protection for the Jews which no other group enjoys and an underestimation of other forms of racism. This is what Saïd said:

In relation to Arabs or to Blacks, people immediately speak about rac-ism, but in relation to the Jewish community, they immediately speak about anti-Semitism. I hear that every time [. . .]. For me, there are three principles: liberty, equality, fraternity. Whenever these principles are not respected, we start speaking about inequality, so as far as I’m concerned, racism is the same for everyone.

Whenever it is a question of anti-Semitism, the media, the political classes and public opinion mobilise. Saïd would like them to do the same for the racism which affects North Africans and Blacks. And he considers that by using a special term, speci� c to the Jews alone, they are made preferential victims, with a term which is speci� c to them to designate the wrong which is directed at them, a term which has such historical connotations that the protection from which they bene� t is much greater than that received by other victims of racism.

The inequalities and abuses also concern the interest which the town has in its residents. Some pointed to how injustice was said to operate


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in matters of security and referred to an ‘unequal’ scheme set up in the town to protect the Jewish population—and the Jewish population alone. M. G. exclaimed:

When there is a demonstration, you only see the police in their part of the town. Go to the synagogue, you will see the police; go to their cultural centre, you will see the police. The police are in the parts of the town where they mostly live. Why don’t they send the police here? Things can go up in � ames here too!

Vigilance is said to bene� t only the Jews and the slightest incident which can be construed as anti-Semitic is blown up and given media coverage. M.T. expressed his doubts about a recent affair concerning an attack, immediately described as anti-Semitic: “That astonishes me [. . .]. But, on top of that, they say it’s a one-off [. . .]. It just so happens that in this instance the person was Jewish, but it could have been a Black . . .”

Injustice is also said to be due to the way in which pupils in the private Jewish schools are protected from the risk of accidents. Djamel has long been sensitive to the difference in treatment and his resentment combines awareness of social inequality, of income and of consideration by the institutions, in this instance, the police:

Fifteen or 20 years ago I lived here, near the Jean XXIII church. At the time, we went to the Jean-Lurçat school. We crossed a big intersection with a major road. There was nobody to help us to cross. The Torah-Emet School is near ours. All the parents came by car to drop the children off in the morning and, for the one road that there was there, between the car park and the school, morning, noon and night there was a police-man to help them cross. I’m talking about 20 years ago now. There was a policeman who helped them cross there, in the morning at 8 am, at midday, at 2 pm and at 5 pm for a one-way street. They all came by car, and we had to do all that on foot.

The Jews and the Shoah

The racism attributed to the Jews is also revealed in some of the tradi-tional themes, now widespread, which claim that the Jews ‘exaggerate’ about the Shoah. By giving prominence to their misfortune, they are ousting from public view many other tragedies in history, contributing to the injustice from which the survivors of these tragedies suffer. In fact, in Sarcelles, most of the Jews were born in North Africa and their



history is not that of the destruction of the European Jews by the Nazis. In the words of one mother:

The Jews are very racist. The Jewish population has changed. I mean, the Jews we saw in World War II were Jews from Eastern Europe. They are not the same as . . . They are not the same at all. What bothers me about them . . . [the Jews from North Africa in Sarcelles] is that they have taken for their own a tragedy which occurred in World War II and which didn’t affect them. The ones who are here come from North Africa. They are not the same at all [. . .]. They’ve taken over the tragedy which occurred before and which is not theirs, because nothing happened to them.

Above all, by giving prominence to the speci� city of their misfortune, the Jews are said to be depriving other groups of the same possibility. This theme is ever-present in Sarcelles and we will meet it again in school.

The Muslims (and we could make similar observations about other groups in Sarcelles, with the notable exception of the ChaldoAssyrians) cannot turn to their advantage a memory comparable to that of the Shoah, either at school or during national festivities, and the fact that they are often of Arab descent, or even that they could perhaps be considered ‘North African’ makes no difference. There is one source of the resentment against the Jews here, which is all too apparent when-ever there is mention precisely of the destruction of the European Jews by the Nazis. The ‘proportioning’ of concern with victims is said to be profoundly unjust and some people, teachers in particular, lament the fact that in education the Shoah receives so much attention at the expense of colonisation, other genocides or slavery.

Sometimes, the teachers in Sarcelles feel ill at ease, like this teacher of mathematics from a secondary school in the town who explained, looking back on the history lessons which she herself had attended in the past and on what was said about the Shoah:

From that point on in the teaching of history, I felt as if I had been labelled: you aren’t Jewish so, obviously, you are in the ‘don’t do it again’ category. Because it was just not possible to imagine that the Jews might gas other people. No, it would always be the Jews who would be the ‘eternal victims’. In my mind, it is the Jew who is the eternal victim. They could never be the ‘baddies’. We owe them something, so, I haven’t the right to say . . .

On the whole, the Jews in Sarcelles have made a fairly close link between their religious practices, their history, dominated by the Shoah and Israel. In state schools, the Shoah marks out Jewish pupils


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whose parents have not chosen the private sector and creates a special atmosphere around them, which is as much of their making as of the possible ineptitude of the teachers. One teacher, as a matter of fact, explained:

In my opinion, the Jewish children who go to the college are not called names any more than any of the others at the outset. Later, the context becomes tragic because the teacher dramatises or they themselves know that it is a case apart. In my opinion, they are given to understand that it is a case apart, that there is a history to it, that we don’t have the right to treat it lightly—and what’s more, that’s not funny.

But this speci� city is quickly perceived as unjust and the injustice is associated with the State of Israel. M. L., who teaches in a secondary school in the town observed that the Jews in Sarcelles:

have no family links with the Shoah, but they are brainwashed. It’s the past which has to justify the fact that � rstly, we show solidarity; secondly, we have been victimised; thirdly, we have the right to oppress others because we have been victims and the Jews in Sarcelles have this mentality [. . .]. You have to read Hannah Arendt on that again—because for 20 years, reference to the Shoah was not a problem. It was an acknowledged fact. There was no need to impose it on society as a whole. Suddenly, the State of Israel pushed it to the forefront to justify its policies. Just take all that propaganda put out during the 1967 war, fuelled and facilitated by the attitude of the Palestinian leaders at the time who said, “We’re going to drive the Jews into the sea”. That played a very important part in structuring the Jewish community.

It is dif� cult here to deal calmly with the Shoah: the theme immediately triggers emotional reactions and, frequently, the suspicion of anti-Semi-tism. Djamel observed this, particularly in relation to the comedian, Dieudonné, already referred to above:

With the Shoah, and the whole works, each time that you bring something up, you’re an anti-Semite [. . .]. We often discuss that . . . Sometimes it’s true, you can’t deny history, but at the same time, anti-Semitism, well, this word is used to mean anything. [In relation to Dieudonné] people said it was anti-Semitic, that he didn’t recognise the existence of Jews, the Shoah, and everything that has happened . . .

Thus, as in many other situations, the Jews are accused of making of the Shoah a universal reference, imposing unfair limits on freedom of speech. But one of the particularities of Sarcelles is that this universal status of the Shoah enables us to perceive a convergence between the attitudes of the Jews and that of the ChaldoAssyrians, as opposed to



the inadequacies in community life from which the Muslims apparently suffer on account of their not having been subjected to a persecution of this type. This is the conclusion drawn by Saïd:

Before, in their country, the ChaldoAssyrians were persecuted by their government which is something dreadful, all the same. And it is true that these two communities do nevertheless share common denominators. If the other communities are to be as well structured, the Muslim community at least, Islam in France would have to get organised once and for all.

The move from the suffering of the Jews and the ChaldoAssyrians to the present-day set of problems concerning the organisation of Muslims in France reveals one perception of social reality: from this point of view, it is a matter of power struggles between competing communities and, in this game, the Muslims are at a disadvantage. Jealousy towards the Jews is at least partly due to the destruction of which they were victims and which lends their tendency to be community oriented the weight of considerable historical legitimacy.

The discourse about Jews in Sarcelles is anchored in the idea that they are going too far and even indulge in forms of racial discrimination at work in various local spheres. It is laden with resentment and jealousy, which leads to remarks which are often sharp and hostile rather than hateful, but which could hardly be described as a fully-� edged ideology of anti-Semitism. The Jews in Sarcelles are perceived as a community which has power and uses it in a sel� sh, to some extent, racist man-ner, and, above all, as self-centred. At this stage in our investigations, the themes tend to relate more to a local version of anti-Semitism, bearing little relation to the traditional and general categories of the phenomenon.


CHAPTER THIRTEEN

AN UNUSUAL VARIANT OF ‘GLOBAL’ ANTI-SEMITISM

The hostility towards the Jews in Sarcelles, a product of local circum-stances, seems fairly far removed from that observed at national level. The ‘new Judeophobia’, seemingly speci� c to populations of immigrant descent, does not have the strength encountered in Roubaix, nor does it veer towards the set of themes characteristic of leftism, third-worldism or post-Communism which can be observed in more politicised forums, for example in certain universities. Nevertheless, local tensions, resent-ment towards a community which seems to have considerable political and economic resources on the ground and which is said to refuse to participate in local multiculturalism, does not explain everything: anti-Semitism in Sarcelles is also a product of widespread, world rationales. It is also ‘global’. To understand it, the link has to be made between its local dimensions and other international, transnational ones.

The fact is that in Sarcelles people are keenly aware of what is happening in the Middle East and of what is broadcast by the media. True, their knowledge is not always very exact as witnessed by this conversation between four state secondary schoolgirls:

B.:—But in fact I don’t even know where Israel is! Where is it exactly?C.:—It’s next to Palestine, beside Iraq.D.:—It’s somewhere near the countries around Russia etc., it’s not very far away.B.:—I was shocked when they killed the child beside his father, it’s mainly that. War’s tough; usually I’m not too keen on war. But didn’t you see that image on telly? It stayed on telly for a long time.A.:—It’s tit for tat, they hurt each other.B.:—And the Americans provide the arms.

The Local Presence of the ‘Global’

If the whole world features in the references and the remarks of those who, in Sarcelles, show hostility towards the Jews in the town, it is due to the media in the � rst instance and, primarily, to television. Television


an unusual variant of ‘global’ anti-semitism 201

is usually designated as the main in� uence behind globalisation in its local impact. The president of the MJC even considers that, for some people, it contributes to the move to action and not simply to the form-ing of opinions: “They see a news � ash on television, one hour later you see them spraying graf� ti or throwing a pot of paint at the door of a synagogue or a church or other things like that”.

Television is not only Palestine, Israel or Bin Laden. There are also all sorts of programmes which shape a culture in which the normal taboos and prohibitions may easily be ignored, and where oversimpli-� ed images, extremes and confusion of the real with the imaginary are possible, a good example being the puppets in the Guignols show on the Canal + channel. In Sarcelles, theories are bandied about which go the rounds all over France. Some people suggest copycat behaviour, an imitation effect which inspires young people to imitate what they may have seen on television. Others stress that the in� uence of television is all the more harmful for competing with school: what is said on televi-sion is thought to be more ‘reliable’, less open to doubt or questioning, more worthy of interest than what the teachers say. Mme. F., who is in charge of a Parents’ Association, considers that the actual presence of populations from many different countries is an asset because it goes some way to counterbalancing the imaginary vision of the world which young people form on the basis of television:

When they show what happens between the Israelis and the Palestinians, as soon as you see an attack . . . or what is happening in Iraq or the Ivory Coast, some of them do feel embarrassed at the things which they say amongst themselves . . . They try to imitate what they have seen but there is no real con� ict. Afterwards, everything goes back to normal. These children do grow up together, the parents know each other, and we do have the advantage of living with all these communities.

From this point of view, and since Sarcelles is pluricultural, the ‘global’ news does not have an impact on local experience: the ‘harmful’ mim-icry triggered in children by what they see on television is supposedly reduced by the cultural diversity of the town which creates points of reference and acts as a barrier to the uncontrolled � ow of global images provided by television. The multiplicity of national origins may coun-teract the � ights of imagination generated by television. The different groups in the town, each the bearer of its own history, introduce the ‘global’ into local life.


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Mme. B., who was the headmistress of a school, had witnessed how cultural diversity could offer hope for the best, but also sometimes sus-tain the reality of the worst, with local violence being an extension of con� icts originating elsewhere than in Sarcelles:

And, as from a certain date . . . the � rst North Africans began to arrive, they came before the people from sub-Saharan Africa. And one day, I had an idea . . . In one class I asked where they came from: “I come from Algeria” [. . .] “I come from Morocco” [. . .]. And I had the feeling that I had the whole world before my eyes. I had pupils who came from all the islands. One of them said to me that she was French. She could not tell me anything else, so she was very poor [. . .]. We were still in a period of tolerance. We thought that diversity was enriching. All these advantages gained from diversity meant that the poor French girl was only French and the others were a source of enrichment. And then � ghting broke out in some local areas . . . The town of Sarcelles tried to organise meetings there, but afterwards we had to go through these areas to come home and one person was killed. It was really dangerous. People who came from Garges, or people who wanted to go there, couldn’t cross the bridge.

A ‘Global’ Town

The historical processes of immigration have established the ‘global’ as a social reality at local level, at � rst a source of enrichment, then a source of violence in the town and its surrounding areas. Diversity at local level is therefore not only a pole of resistance to the rationales of globalisation, in particular as conveyed by television: it may well involve the inhabitants of the town themselves in heated behaviour and discourse, possibly hatred, on the basis of distant or global history and geopolitics which cannot be veri� ed. Memory, religion, language, transnational family bonds, cooking or clothing customs may create ties at local level (for example by justifying intercultural meetings) but equally well become factors of separation or con� ict.

Sarcelles is a ‘global’ town, subject to international rationales in which categories of community life in both the public sphere and in private conversation are increasingly ethnic, if not racial. The keys to understanding this community life are now cultural, national or reli-gious rather than social. This ethnicisation can easily extend into pure racism which then amounts to naturalising what, at the outset, was ethnic. This is a widespread phenomenon in Sarcelles, where individu-als are constantly reminded of their difference, in a way which may be



humiliating but is not necessarily so. Mme. B., for example, when she referred to an incident in a school in which she was head, remembered “a pupil who had dealt a blow with a machete, or a knife, or I don’t know what, because someone had stolen his cap” and had no hesitation in describing community attitudes: the ChaldoAssyrians “have a Middle Eastern mentality, but they are Catholic [. . .]. The ChaldoAssyrian girls like to have the upper hand and the Caribbean girls don’t like being humiliated”. Value judgments, insults and jeers also come under this rationale which consists in perceiving the inhabitants of the town in terms of an image with ethnic overtones which can become racist. This is how the state secondary schoolgirls we met in a café expressed themselves completely spontaneously:

• For example, the Turks are Muslims and the ChaldoAssyrians are Chris-tians. And to distinguish a Turk from an Arab, you look at his head: if it’s � at, he or she is a Turk! Honestly, you wouldn’t believe it!

• And the ChaldoAssyrians—they all have the same name. If you look in the telephone directory, you’ll see 50,000 Yalaps.

• And the family name of the Dougs is DFGHJK. It’s got all the letters of the alphabet.

• But even the Arabs, what about them? For most people, it’s Moham-med! Mohammed!

• And for the Blacks, it’s Mamadou (laughter)!

The ‘globalisation’ of the town is also visible in another sphere: leisure and especially football. The confusion, but perhaps also the strength of the media is such that some people will identify with a national football team which has just won a major international competition in the same way as they do with a terrorist group which has just success-fully accomplished a glorious feat. In this respect, M.G.’s remarks are signi� cant: this Cameroonian said to us:

When the Turks won the World Cup, just imagine—I was there to see it. The Turks paraded around with Turkish � ags everywhere in France. I saw them in Sarcelles, they had a parade, and you could see that it was the Turks who were happy. When the Senegalese beat France in the last World Cup, the Senegalese did everything possible to show they were Senegalese. It just shows. Even those who had French identity cards were no longer French, they were still Senegalese, that’s all. Do you get the gist of what I’m telling you? When Bin Laden attacked I saw people were pleased, whereas I wasn’t happy at all, but I saw people were pleased.

The drift in this discourse from supporters of national football teams to Bin Laden and to terrorism is signi� cant. It in fact indicates that



a remark which refers to a world phenomenon provides the speaker with a forum where images which do not necessarily have anything in common, can circulate. In this case, the unity of the images refers to the rejection of everything which is foreign to France. In his rationale, M.G. can thus challenge the principle of the minute of silence for the victims of the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States, as much as he deplores the jubilation of those who were really happy about it. And while he disapproved of the fact that a Jewish community centre in Sarcelles had been named after the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by an Israeli extremist, he is equally criti-cal of the Turkish � ags of the supporters of the Turkish national team and the satisfaction of the Senegalese football fans.

Islam and Palestine

In Sarcelles, does France’s colonial past have a speci� c impact on anti-Semitic remarks and attitudes? In fact, it would seem that this question mainly arises in schools. For some teachers, the presence in Sarcelles of a population whose origins frequently refer to a colonial past is a chal-lenge which calls into question the school curriculum and jeopardises the harmonious life of the school. Thus Mme. D., until recently the head of a secondary school, observed ‘the hatred of colonialism and the wrongdoings of France’ on the part of ‘young Algerians’, ‘young Tunisians’ and ‘young Moroccans’. However, the reference to colonial-ism was practically non-existent in the remarks which we were able to record outside school, which means that the extent of this ‘hatred’ and of the political dimension which the history of the pupils of North African immigrant descent introduces into the school is relative. When memories are solicited, it is mainly personal recollections and feelings which come to the fore with no direct or strong link with the colonial past. This was expressed by an of� cial from the mosque in Sarcelles:

The � rst generation thought they would be there for two, three, four or � ve years and would then go back home. But they did not realise that they were putting down roots here. They had children, they had busi-nesses, and they had many things which kept them here instead of going back there. I too thought I would go back to Morocco, but my children wanted . . . I was waiting for my eldest son . . . to � nish his studies, and when he � nished then it was my daughter who was beginning hers and



we had to stay here . . . And now, I’m still waiting. So, it was then that I understood that . . . well . . . France was becoming my country. I was forced to recognise it.

There is no reference here to the colonial past either in Morocco or in France.

The Muslims in the town may be anxious to show solidarity at inter-national level with their fellow believers and also to identify with the Palestinian cause. The of� cial from the mosque said so clearly:

We have to talk about the Ummah (the global community of Muslims) . . . but each individual contributes what he can. I’m not going to . . . for example, I did not do my military service. I have not . . . I am not going to help the Ummah by buying a Kalashnikov, I wouldn’t even know how to use it, nor . . . nor . . . that’s the . . . OK, so what I can do, as a Muslim, is, for example, help the Palestinians � nancially, send donations, because there is the Secours islamique, there are Palestinian associations which col-lect money, they collect clothes, they collect everything.

This type of remark, where the speaker alternates between Islam and Palestine is indicative of a tendency, whenever the question of the Middle East arises, to associate elements which concern the situation of Muslims, and therefore a religion, with elements which refer to the Palestinian cause, which is a national issue. This tendency may be fur-ther accentuated by the fact that other identities may be introduced: in particular Arab and North African identities. It is sustained by another corresponding tendency, according to which Jews in general throughout the world identify with or are identi� ed with the Israelis, who are often quali� ed as Zionists and are therefore de� ned in terms of a political project and not uniquely in terms of a national and civic af� liation. In Sarcelles, not only is the confusion intense and frequent but, further-more, it is nurtured by a high level of ignorance, while at the same time being of astonishing proportions. Thus the older generations of Jews, on the one hand, and Muslims on the other, sometimes communicate in Arabic. Saïd, who directs a community centre, remarked on it:

It’s true that Sephardic Jews have cultural references which they share with Muslims. Just go to the market in Sarcelles, you’ll see the people speaking. You don’t even know who is Jewish and who is a Muslim because they are talking in Arabic.

But the young Muslims hardly know how to speak Arabic let alone write it and the Arab language TV channels to which they have access via



satellite dishes mainly operate in an Arabic which is not that spoken in the Maghreb. The globalisation which the Arabic language could ensure operates more on the plane of the imaginary than the real.

For some people, their dress is a way of carrying on a tradition, for others it displays a political conviction. Dress enables young people to demonstrate their sympathy for the Palestinian cause, or radical Islamism, even in school. This type of demonstration is not allowed in class. A teacher of French described a scene from the previous day:

Yesterday I was with the CPE (educational advisor) who is a Tunisian woman. We saw a young fourth form boy come in wearing a Palestinian scarf. The educational advisor took it off him and said, “You can come and collect it later, because if the head sees that . . .”

Some complain of a polarisation which in their opinion is excessive; M.G., for example:

But when we wanted to impose a minute’s silence, I also thought, we’re in the middle of an equilateral triangle where there are Christians with the Westerners in the North, the Jews in the East and the Arabs in the West. Who am I? You understand this triangle where you are with your Americans and all that because there is one minute’s silence. Because of what happened in the United States . . . But was there a minute’s silence to commemorate what happened in Rwanda? More than ten thousand people died there. Was there a minute’s silence to commemorate what happened in the Congo? Was there a minute’s silence to commemorate what happened in my country? [. . .] There are the Westerners here, the Arabs here, the Jews there. They have divided the world into a triangle and we are inside it. We follow them. I personally am nobody.

To some extent, this Cameroonian is right: in Sarcelles, the question of the Middle East casts a shadow over the multicultural reality of the town.

Many inhabitants of the town maintain transnational bonds of kinship and friendship and may even have economic ties which imply relations with other political and cultural spheres than those of France. But only the Jews and the ChaldoAssyrians maintain strong links with the Middle East. A factor speci� c to the Jews is that they are linked to a state, Israel. The local references to the Israel-Palestine con� ict are therefore of a different nature, depending on whether the Muslim populations of African or North African descent who have practically no ties of kinship or even friendship with the Palestinians, are under consideration or the Jews of Sarcelles who maintain a relationship with Israel which is not just imaginary or somewhat dreamlike. But this



observation does not mean that the attachment of the populations of Arab or North African immigrant descent to the Palestinian cause is any less strong. In the words of one secondary school head: “At home, it’s Arafat � rst and above all, not Sharon. That often comes out in class”. And, contrary to an oversimpli� ed idea, the identi� cation of Muslims with the Palestinian cause is increasingly described as being inherent to the North African family, like a family heritage, almost in the genes and not only a consequence of the social situation, of exclusion or of the racism experienced here and now.

The Impact of Current Events

As an exercise, a teacher of French in the Evariste-Galois school asked her fourth form pupils to write a newspaper article. The themes chosen by a third of them are a clear indication of the international events which are on their minds: the war in Iraq (three scripts), the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict (two), terrorism (two, one on 11 September and the other on the attacks in Casablanca in 2003). One script, to which we have already referred, dealt with racism and another with anti-Semitism in the banlieue. The teacher had allowed considerable freedom in the choice of the theme for the article: this shows to what extent current events in the Middle East weigh on the minds of young people.

More generally, the 11 September 2001 attacks made a profound impact on attitudes in Sarcelles and played a considerable role in the development of intercommunity relations in the town. In the � rst instance, they revealed strong anti-American feelings, suf� ciently strong to go beyond the bounds of or check the horror provoked by the spectacle of the extreme violence. One of the teachers of French in a school in the town noted it:

In fact, when there was the attack on 11 September, almost all the pupils said, “It serves the Americans right,” that was the general opinion [. . .]. For example, it’s true that Bin Laden was in a way as much a hero for the Africans as for the Muslims: according to them, “He is � ghting the Americans, it serves them right”; he’s a hero.

But the intensity of these anti-American feelings, which were also very hostile towards Jews, who were identi� ed with Israel and its links with the United States, did not mean that they were based on very accu-rate information. On the contrary, once again, what is striking is the



somewhat immature and vague, but also volatile nature of the factors on which the expression of these feelings is based. The same teacher went on:

Recently, when studying a text, second form pupils discussed the war in Iraq, but not all participated. But I think that a lot [of the information] comes from television since, straight away, some of them said to me, “I can’t see it because my brother wants to watch the music channel”. I think that the 11 September attack had a profound impact. But I don’t think they understood. It also has to do with trends.

Television does not form stable attitudes, with well-established ideolo-gies, it disconnects everything it deals with from reality, possibly making a mockery of everything; but it also promotes ‘trends’ and a sort of wholesale ‘zapping’ with the result that you � ip directly from Palestine to Star Academy and you may have a perception of Bin Laden compa-rable to that of a top model or a famous footballer. A supervisor in a school was particularly aware of these dimensions:

At the time of the attacks in New York, we received feedback fairly quickly. Most of the children I knew said things that were not of their own invention. And then on top of that there was the whole Les Guignols de l’Info (on TV Canal +) and all that, so, for them, it was a joke. They imitated Bin Laden and I had the feeling that they did not understand, and then it did not correspond in the slightest to the racist remarks that they made about Jews.

But this supervisor, like many other observers, also noted that in this climate of opinion, anti-Semitism was expressed much more strongly than previously:

And what’s more, there was a real movement against the Jews, not only by the Muslims but even by those who were of Caribbean or African origin, even Catholics. It was like a fashion and everyone knew it was the fashion.

In Sarcelles, many of the teachers and other Education nationale employees were struck by the indescribably confused impact of the 11 Septem-ber 2001 attacks and the way the event was dealt with on television, distorted and possibly mocked.

The local impact on the young people in Sarcelles took an aston-ishing turn, provoking reactions at once naïve and extremely serious, reminiscent of some sort of game, as if the international event of 11 September 2001 was of utterly no consequence. The impact was in fact felt in an admiration for Bin Laden and an upsurge of anti-Semitism



and anti-Americanism. And in both cases, insults, justi� cations, igno-rance and current trends came together in two rationales which were at once contradictory and present. On the one hand, everything that mention of the date of 11 September stands for (terrorism, Islamism, the attack on the United States, etc.) fell within the scope of the widespread practice of zapping which resulted in it being treated like an event on a never-ending TV channel, slipped in between the � nal of a European championship and the closing episode in a reality show. On the other hand, the event did � nd a niche for itself in a process of radicalisation of identities which had begun with the outbreak of the second intifada, and which continued with the war in Iraq—a process, moreover, which has undoubtedly led to an increase not only in anti-Semitism but also in racism against Muslims and Arabs. Thus Saïd observed, “When the con� ict began again (the second intifada) a synagogue was burnt” and Dalila, for her part, declared that:

For every Muslim, or every Arab, the problem [of racism] has become more sensitive and we feel bad about 11 September. That created an absolutely enormous malaise because we do not really approve of what Bin Laden or the al Qaeda group did and we � nd ourselves lumped together with them. That really hurts with the restrictions that there are on jobs now, especially for the young people of North African descent.

In Sarcelles, where the Jewish population demonstrates a very strong attachment to the State of Israel, acrimonious confrontations, at least at an ideological level, might have been expected to pit the Jewish population against groups of followers of Islam and in particular of the Palestinian cause or groups stating their opposition to American policy in the Middle East. In fact, the climate of opinion in the town is surprisingly calm, and the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict is rarely brought up in the public sphere. Caution is the watchword, or calls for discre-tion as in the remarks of M.G.:

After the 11 September attacks, things did happen. I saw the synagogue set alight a bit. Now, whether it was the Arabs who burned it, well, I wasn’t there to see. If you go over there [he motioned through the win-dow to an area of Sarcelles in the distance], you’ll � nd a Jewish cultural centre in memory of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Personally, I think that the Jews also bring in problems which do not exist in France and introduce them into France. Why do things in memory of Yitzhak Rabin in France with signs that everyone can see? Why do they do that? The message it gives is that the Arabs who are here too, whether they be Palestinian or not, are also the target of this demonstration by Israel



and that it is possible to sing the praises of Ariel Sharon here, whereas that should not happen.

In Sarcelles the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict is not forgotten, of course, but is not mentioned in public, at least less than one might have expected; it is repressed, as if it were a subject which had to be avoided if a certain capacity for living together were to be maintained. Dalila observed that:

Quite a few people realise that the problem is serious, that it is going to have consequences for them and they do all they can to demonstrate that the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict is not the problem here. But it’s hard because it’s like a time bomb. At the moment, nobody discusses it because they are frightened of how others might react, but at the same time everyone knows that all these things come from our own countries, each individual supports a particular position or a particular country. Why do they want this history to remain a taboo subject? People don’t want to discuss it—in my opinion it’s impossible not to discuss it. There’s a big Jewish community and a big Muslim community. We have to deal with this problem together. Why is it that in Paris, not far from us, people speak about it, there are demonstrations and yet when you come to Sarcelles, you must not speak about it any more?

Throughout our inquiry, we observed that anyone who had responsi-bilities in an institution, particularly in the socio-cultural organisations in the town, refrained from expressing an opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict, or referred to it very cautiously, in very controlled terms. Many spoke of a ‘latent’ violence, a profound difference of opinion, an ‘internal’ violence which any overly precise reference to the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict or start of a discussion might awaken. There is de� nitely a link between the Jews in Sarcelles and Israel on the one hand, and the Muslims in the town and the Palestinians on the other, but everyone avoids dealing with it directly. Sometimes it is revealed in a slip of the tongue, as when Saïd remarked, “Another problem is that the Muslim community wants a mosque and the Israeli community is not very keen on the Muslim community having its mosque”—the quali� cation of the Jewish community in Sarcelles as ‘Israeli’ clearly reveals this association of relations between the two denominational groups in Sarcelles with the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict.

The Jews in Sarcelles are thus sometimes described as Israelis, which is what the third form pupils in the Evariste-Galois school said:



H:—What’s more, we see them on TV the whole time, they are talking and complaining.Researcher:—What do they complain about?I:—About what’s happening in their country. They’re never happy.‘Their country’ is obviously Israel in this context.

When speech is more controlled, amongst adults, particularly those with responsibilities in the institutions, the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict is put to one side not only, or not necessarily, out of a more or less conscious desire to avoid the descent into violence. It may also be an attempt to preserve what is left of the golden age of the town when it was a place where the universal and the speci� c could be successfully combined. It may even, quite simply, comprise personal emotional ele-ments or involve friendships. Djamel, who is of North African descent, stated it clearly:

You can’t say that there are things happening the whole time. Because most of us grew up with the Jewish community. We worked in the markets together, we all knew each other, we have strong relationships. We grew up together. There’s one thing that comes up, Palestine, and for him [a Jewish friend] It’s the same thing. There’s the community. He’s already been there [to Israel]. I mustn’t mention it. He might say something dif-ferent to his own friends, just as I might sometimes say something different to mine. But we grew up together. It’s something else and it’s stronger than us. The truth is, it’s a long time ago. It’s just crazy.

The relative taboo concerning the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict may act as a protection for existing relationships. But the tendency of the Jews in the town to a closed community-oriented lifestyle does suggest that this explanation, which is valid for those who are already a little older, is less and less so for the younger generations. The ‘global’ dimension, represented primarily by the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict, forces its way into the ‘local’ against the will of all concerned. Looming so large as to be out of all proportion, it tends to eclipse the aims, solidarities, friendships and ideals of those involved in local life.

Finally, in the plurality of meanings which globalisation1 can assume in Sarcelles four major differences emerge.

The � rst is the difference between what is controlled and what is not. When teachers deal with the content of the curricula which could enhance understanding of the diversity of the origins of the

1 The French usually use the term ‘mondialisation’ to translate this concept.



pupils and of their history, their intention is to introduce globalisation into school life in a controlled manner: for example, lessons on the history of colonisation and decolonisation, on the history or literature of African countries or about present-day international events are a way of ‘channelling’ the uncontrollable dimensions of the ‘global’. The global dimension is experienced as intrusive to social relations, a source of violence and anti-Semitic hatred and its main in� uence seems to be television (especially the Arabic channels). When controlled, the ‘global’ dimension is used by those who invoke it to explain or justify an interpretation of local life, whereas the uncontrolled ‘global’ dimen-sion destroys the capacity for local action in favour of rationales of suspicion, rupture and hatred.

The second distinction is not very different: globalisation can unite or, on the contrary, divide. When the Arabic language is a reminder of the shared history of the Jews and the Muslims in North Africa, it constitutes a bond in local life. When it is connected with Islam, it introduces a point of difference between Jews and Muslims in Sarcelles. The history of the immigration of the various populations in Sarcelles can act as a unifying factor: people feel at home in Sarcelles and in their own world because they have shared origins in the Mediterra-nean Basin. But this history can also form the basis of the differences between the communities; in this case, mention of the Israeli-Palestin-ian con� ict suf� ces.

The differentiation which highlights the way in which globalisation can unite or on the contrary, divide, brings us to a third dimension, that of the demand for the recognition of an identity. Reference to international events or historical memories may indeed be connected with the image of a local harmonious multicultural society, one which refuses injustice and listens to the demands for recognition. But, on the contrary, it may also exacerbate the differences, reinforce the sel� sh-ness of the better off and contribute to the racialisation of social or intercommunity relations.

Finally, globalisation may serve to justify and explain local situations, allowing us to confer meaning on the most banal and basic relation-ships. But on the contrary, it may also contribute, to the loss of one’s bearings and frames of reference and destroy all meaning.

These four differences can help to improve our understanding of global anti-Semitism in Sarcelles. Global anti-Semitism is rife when globalisation spins out of control, when it radicalises differences, harms



any multicultural project and dissolves the frames of reference and relationships between individuals and groups. On the contrary, global anti-Semitism is thwarted, not when globalisation is less noticeable but when it is controlled and channelled, when it leads to a well-ordered multiculturalism and allows the interrelating of differences.


CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“WHY THERE WERE NO CLASHES IN SARCELLES”

In Sarcelles, the criticisms made of Jews are aimed at real and not imaginary Jews; they refer to a visible community; in other words they are undoubtedly less a product of the imagination than those which we heard in Roubaix. But to what extent do they distort reality? Do they give a distorted and inaccurate image of the Jews in the town? To further our analysis, we questioned families in the ‘Jewish area’ of Les Flanades, people in charge of Jewish associations, pupils in denomina-tional schools and local Jewish � gures; we also included people who, while being Jewish, do not claim to adhere to the community and do not even necessarily make a show of their Jewishness.

One fundamental point was immediately obvious; the descriptions of the Jewish community made by the rest of the population and the arguments advanced criticising them, which were a priori negative, were corroborated by the members of the community themselves. Not only did they adopt them, but they con� rmed and justi� ed them.

A United and Structured Community

The Jews in Sarcelles have developed considerably over the past 40 years or so and they have learnt to mix, but amongst themselves—not with the rest of the population. The following dialogue between a mother and her son is instructive here.

Mother:—Habits have changed—it used to be that the Sephardis and the Ashkenazis didn’t mix. The Algerians, the Moroccans and the Tunisians didn’t mix with each other either. I remember that at that time, when I was 18 or 19 years old, if I was silly enough to tell my father that I was going out with a Moroccan Jew, it was the end of the world. “You’re Tunisian,” he would say, “Stick to the Tunisian boys”. Whereas nowadays, what is important for us as parents is that he or she be Jewish. But for my father, there was no question either of a Moroccan Jew or an Algerian Jew, let alone an Ashkenazi.Son:—We are a group of 10 friends. There are Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians. There’s everything, even an Israeli.

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“why there were no clashes in sarcelles” 215

Mother:—I have a friend who is a Moroccan Jew. I don’t call him by his real name. Just to tease him, I call him ‘the Moroccan’.

Being ‘Moroccan’, ‘Tunisian’ or ‘Algerian’ for these Jews from Les Flanades means being a Moroccan Jew, a Tunisian Jew, etc. It also means participating in a community culture which reproduces, in certain respects, the North African model. This is how Marc Djebali, president of the collective of Jewish associations in Sarcelles, describes his area:

The Jewish community in Sarcelles is highly concentrated in this area, Les Flanades. The result is that it’s really wonderful here. When you go out, you meet people of all ages, all the generations . . . My parents are here and they are very happy to go out, meet friends, sit at a table in a café, go and collect the grandchildren from school and give them their meal. There’s a reconstitution of what I would almost call life in a North African village, which means that we maintain a way of life very similar to what are traditional oriental Jewish customs.

The community here presents a rather harmonious way of life in a particular area.

The high density of Jews in the area also seems to offer an element of security: in the words of Jef, aged 18, “In this area, we know that there are a great many Jews and if anyone touches a car, everyone will go down. So it’s not worth even so much as going near a car. Everyone knows each other”. This sort of statement is typical of those which tend to make a comparison or identi� cation of a sort with Israel. Another young man who had just come back from Israel added:

In Israel, there’s an army, the police, the people, everyone—the people are very supportive of each other. You won’t see a youth grabbing a mobile phone from a little old lady. Automatically, there would be 10 or 15 people who would run to return a mobile to an old lady.

Belonging to a community also means adopting a code of behaviour which may contrast with the laxness of other residents in the town. Salazar Benakoun, employed by the town hall in Sarcelles as head of security associates this rigour with cultural attributes as well as social ones:

Amongst the Jews, the parents don’t abdicate responsibility. If I were to see my son going out wearing jeans full of holes, even if he tells me it’s the fashion . . . I would tell him to go home at once, that he can wear them when he’s on the Côte d’Azur . . . I won’t let my son go out dirty . . . He knows that he won’t do that because he knows what his father


216 chapter fourteen

will say. I don’t mean to say that the Arabs are dirty or anything like that, but some parents . . . I’m speaking in general. I know that in the Jewish community, parents don’t abdicate responsibility. But I also know that in other ethnic groups, there are parents who abdicate responsibility: 1. Because they are not working; 2. Because they are unemployed since they don’t have a job; 3. Because they are depressed; 4. Because they are not suf� ciently educated, etc. But all that gives children a certain amount of freedom . . .Because, I know Muslim parents . . . If the kid is not in at 7 p.m., the father goes down into the street and gives him a good hiding . . . If I go and tell the father that his son has done something, he’ll give him a thrashing, no doubt about it. They are amongst the parents who don’t abdicate responsibility.

The community apparently sets standards high and forbids juvenile delinquency. “You won’t � nd juvenile delinquents amongst the young Jews,” said Mme. D.—a statement which nevertheless had to be rapidly quali� ed: one of the heads of the community remarked:

I have a Caribbean replacement. When she learnt that I look after Jewish juvenile delinquents or drug addicts, she said to me: “I don’t believe you. Are there drug addicts amongst the Jews? Are there prostitutes?” We’re just like other people.

However, the Jewish community is capable of self-discipline and, for example, of preventing the outbreaks of violence which the radicalised sectors within it are tempted to organise, such as the Betar groups, these ultra-Jewish militants of whom Salazar Benakoun notes:

They don’t budge. We forbid them from doing anything because we explain to them that there is a republican law and that if they move they are guilty and they’ll go straight to prison. Now and again there are small incidents when there are demonstrations or things like that, but they don’t budge.

Does the Jewish tendency to act as a collective entity not give rise to various expressions of racism towards the members of other groups? Marc Djebali admitted that it was possible, immediately adding the proviso that it was a defensive reaction and never an active offensive:

There is anti-Arab Jewish racism, but it’s not the same thing. The racism of the Jews is a form of self-defence. “It’s because you called me a � lthy Jew that you’re a � lthy Arab”. There isn’t a racist ideology in the Jewish community . . . The Jews are the champions of anti-racism because we have understood that, being a minority, we could never be a majority. We could never show the world the way with three people—that’s impossible. We have a responsibility towards other people to some extent—to ensure that others are better off. We are the chosen people, but not so that we



can be the best-looking, the strongest and the cleverest, but so that we can be responsible towards others.

The Jewish community makes no secret of its pro-Israel feelings and everyone is well aware that this is a source of hatred or hostility towards them. Marc Djebali was the � rst to say so, while taking the opportunity to criticise the media in passing:

The majority of Jews, 99%, support Israel; since Israel is the oppressor of the Palestinians, it’s normal that people don’t like the Jews because they support the oppressors. It’s logical. And seeing as the media has presented the situation in such a simplistic way for over two years, well, for many people, of course mainly the French Muslims or the North African Muslims, the media has given rise to twice as much hatred.

As we have said, the strengthening of the tendency of the Jewish com-munity to withdraw into itself in Sarcelles went hand in hand with the increasingly central role of religion. Not only does the town attract new Jewish residents for whom religion is very important, but a tendency to move back to religion is also observed amongst the more long-standing residents—a phenomenon, moreover, which is not speci� c to the local situation alone. What Claudine describes in relation to her father is by no means exceptional:

He didn’t used to be practising. My father was a traditionalist. We used to eat outside, we used to eat pork, and we ate everything, at home as well. But at the same time, we observed the Sabbath. We laid the table on Friday night. We celebrated all the Jewish festivals. But he wasn’t a practising Jew. Now he is.

The upsurge of the religious in no way masks another aspect of Jewish identity in Sarcelles: the alliance between community tendencies and the pro-Israeli feelings which are particularly strong in the town where these two dimensions sustain each other mutually. The phenomenon is constantly gaining momentum. M. L., a teacher, observed, “Everyone has moved in that direction. I’ve seen it with my father [. . .]. There’s been a swing. It’s true that the Jews who criticise Israeli policy are a tiny minority today”.

In Sarcelles, there are of course some Jews who are critical, not only of Israel but also of the community, like M. L., to be more precise:

The Jews in Sarcelles � nd themselves in the role of the dominant com-munity. But if you say that, you are called an anti-Semite. If you tell it as it is, that is, that the Jews have a community-oriented lifestyle which is public, tolerated, practised and never criticised, just wait for the reaction.



There is a community-oriented lifestyle amongst the Jews which should be discussed, but any criticism of the Jewish tendency to be community oriented is also instrumentalised. Take Tariq Ramadan for example. It’s very easy to see how he uses the Jewish tendency to act as a collective entity—he uses it to justify his own tendency to be community oriented. It’s important for the Jews to take a stance, institutionally, against the ins-titutional position in favour of Israel and against the tendency to promote community ties. It’s a tricky issue because whatever you do, you’re trapped. It’s that simple: you attack the Jewish community-oriented lifestyle and you are assumed to be pro-Muslim; you criticise anti-Semitism and you are assumed to be pro-Israeli.

M. L. is de� nitely not the only person to think like this and to feel ‘trapped’, increasingly powerless, in the end, to articulate the Jewish identity which he asserts and universal values opposed to any form of community-oriented lifestyle, be it Jewish, Muslim or any other. But there is very little space for a voice like his in the public sphere in Sarcelles—moreover, it is similar to Robert’s whose nostalgia for the 1970s and 1980s we have already seen.

Just as the young people of immigrant descent identify their suffer-ing, exclusion and the racism which they experience with that endured by the Palestinians, similarly the most community-oriented and most pro-Israel Jews recognise themselves in the image of besiegement. As M. L. says, “They have an image of an Israel under siege and this is their justi� cation for their own image as Jews besieged by six million Muslims in France. There is a sort of projection of their image”.

Finally, one signi� cant aspect of the Jewish community-oriented lifestyle in Sarcelles is the social pressure which the community exerts on its members who are encouraged to conform to some extent, par-ticularly in their dress, and which attaches considerable importance to appearances. This is a further source of jealousy according to Salazar Benakoun:

The fact that the people in the Israelite community are always well dressed and clean . . . They are clean. I don’t mean that the others are dirty, but when you see them go by in the street, especially on the Sabbath etc. [. . .], that creates problems.

This constancy in the endeavour to keep up appearances in the public sphere can be interpreted as a sign of wealth. M. N. thinks that the ChaldoAssyrians are particularly inclined to move in this direction: “I don’t know what the ChaldoAssyrians have against the Jews. They keep saying: they’re all rich, or rubbish like that”. One effect of this group



pressure on its members is that some of them live above their means. Mme. D. observed that:

In Sarcelles, which is very poor at the moment, the Jews who are poor seem to be very rich because everybody sees how they live. They buy things, they are consumers. They buy food. I mean, they don’t scrimp on food, on a coffee, a little cake. They treat themselves.

This rationale of ostentatious consumption enables the Jewish shops that rely on a Jewish clientele to survive in times of crisis. This in turn reinforces the tendency towards an increasing social and cultural gap between the areas densely populated by Jews and the others: “Go and look in the shops in the other areas. They’re closing down, one after another,” exclaimed Mme. D.

The Perception of Anti-Semitism

The vitality of their community does not prevent the Jews in Sarcelles from being confronted here and there with various expressions of anti-Semitism. In general, the school is one of the places most conducive to aggressive forms of behaviour which include aspects of anti-Semitism. Many of the Jewish families in Sarcelles send their children to private schools, but this is not the case for all. A shift has even been noted by various observers who observe a recent, if modest, return of Jewish pupils to state schools. We therefore have to consider two categories of possible problems, those which concern Jewish pupils in private schools and the others which concern state schools.

In the � rst case, numerous incidents are reported, of the kind re-counted by two schoolgirls from the Ozar Atorah secondary school, recalling a tense encounter but certainly not one of their making:

O.:—There were young people, a mixture of girls and boys, who asked me why I didn’t reply. They told me I was a � lthy Jew. I didn’t answer. I went on my way. They said, “Anyway, they think they’re a superior race”.P.:—They’ve labelled us, in fact. In my opinion, we’re all equal. I don’t feel superior in any way.O.:—Everyone is targeted by the attacks, the lack of security. There are girls who are raped everywhere. But we don’t often hear about Jewish people who attacked anyone at all.

In the public sphere, these young girls constantly feel that they are likely to be attacked and they observed that anything to do with the Shoah frequently nurtured obscenities. One of them said:



The worst has to do with World War II and the concentration camps. “Go back to the camps”, for example [. . .] Sharon and Hitler . . . When you come out of the synagogue with your family, etc. It’s very easy to see . . . It can be seen and it attracts attention and sometimes remarks, the worst is that even sometimes when we are in a group, sometimes one or two young people are not afraid of shouting at us, “Get back into your ovens”, “Go and get incinerated”, things like that. In the street.

Our survey was carried out over a long period of time in several schools and state secondary schools in the town and we were able to observe that anti-Semitism, contrary to our hypotheses, was not particularly virulent. The only noteworthy incident that was recounted to us had been exposed in the media at the time by the head of the Evariste-Galois Secondary School. She explained that while she was busy with a group of pupils, a Jewish pupil had almost been lynched in the play-ground. She began by saying, “Not one adult intervened. There was no reaction. Why? Because he was Jewish, it’s subconscious. They all have the same a prioris. It’s the little rich boy . . .”. The boy who had been attacked in the playground:

had tried to integrate [. . .]. There was a � ght. One of them had said, “You’re wearing feuj jeans”. Then they had forced the Jewish pupil to say all sorts of things. It’s true that what he said was dreadful. I think he said to the ChaldoAssyrian girl: “You don’t have a country”. But he had said it because he was alone against all of them. Then the two girls got the whole playground up in arms by saying that he had said that the Malians had no country etc., that nobody had any country… And then, several pupils began to crowd round him and insult him. He said, “F*** all the races”. The children began to crowd round and hit him on the head. He lost his temper. A supervisor came over to protect him. He had to stand in front of him and corner him between himself and a glazed door to be quite sure.

The affair ended in a disciplinary committee for all concerned and primarily for the young Jewish boy whose family took him out of the school and sent him to a Jewish boarding school outside Paris. It was an exceptional incident and not at all indicative or representative of a general climate of opinion. In the main, the state schools in Sarcelles are not particularly troubled by incidents of active hatred of Jews.

The Jews in Sarcelles can easily observe here and there graf� ti and other anti-Semitic obscenities and swastikas, including in their apart-ment buildings and in the lifts. They are also aware of a degree of tension, laden with hostility, which is expressed in looks and avoidance tactics or negative remarks. A girl from the Ozar-Atorah secondary school told us:



When they [the Muslims] pass us in the street, we don’t say anything. We look at them in silence. We say hello and goodbye and that’s as far as it goes. It’s not just the young people amongst themselves, sometimes even an adult to a child. The other day I was in a bus. There was a Muslim [. . .] and I offered him my seat. I had a seat and he was quite old. He looked at me and said that he wouldn’t sit down after a Jewish person. It’s not just young people amongst themselves. It’s adults too. They must brainwash young people to tell them that they are fed up with the Jews, and they mustn’t have anything to do with them.

The Jewish inhabitants of Sarcelles are well aware of the hostility, resentment and jealousy and this is perhaps particularly true for the younger people. But on the whole, there is nothing that stands out, no major incidents. The town is not in danger of being set alight and, while anti-Semitism may be undeniable, it is not structured along ideologico-political lines. Hatred of the Jews in Sarcelles remains more a problem of intercommunity relations or of jealousy on the part of those who feel they are not supported by a community than a strong anti-Semi-tism—and this is exactly how it is perceived in the � rst instance.

Putting Lack of Security in Perspective

Let us remember that Sarcelles is a town in the banlieue with all that may imply in the way of urban violence and lack of security. The danger is even said to come from outside, rather than from inside the town. In Salazar Benakoun’s words:

Because the 9–3 is the neighbouring department where people are much more aggressive and there’s the Cité des poètes and the Cité rose, there’s all that, everything in the neighbouring areas. We know very well that there are a lot of people who attack Sarcelles but who don’t live in Sarcelles. You know, in Sarcelles, there were only about a dozen juvenile delin-quents . . . who stirred up trouble, quite a few of them have been locked up, but it’s the ones from outside who are uncontrollable.

This explains why events which may affect or worry the Jewish inhab-itants of Sarcelles, robbery with violence in particular, should not automatically be interpreted as anti-Semitism. The Jewish inhabitants do sometimes acknowledge this. A teacher in a Jewish denominational school explained that he had taken his daughter out of the state school for general reasons:

I decided not to send my daughter to the state school. Not for religious reasons—I can teach her the basics myself. But to avoid the problems



of violence, racketeering and all you hear about state schools and security in general. It had nothing to do with the speci� c question of anti- Semitism.

If anxiety is frequently expressed, it is more often with reference, not to the town, but to all that can happen when one leaves the town, outside it, and in particular on public transport. A schoolgirl from the Ozar Atorah secondary school noted a deterioration in comparison with the past:

Things have changed. Today we’re even frightened to take the train, whereas my mother says that she wasn’t frightened to take the train at midnight. Today, even during the day, I’m frightened.

In July 2004, a young woman, Marie L. reported an anti-Semitic attack which was pure invention: she claimed, until her story collapsed, that a gang of young North Africans and Africans had robbed and insulted her and had daubed a swastika on her body in a carriage on the RER underground in front of other passengers, who did not react. This pure fabrication, which made huge waves in the media and politically, spoke volumes about the state of French society, its phantasms and anxieties. What is particularly interesting for us is that by demonstrating anti-Semitism in action, not in the town, but on the RER line between Sarcelles and Paris, it expressed in its own way, the anxieties of many Jews in Sarcelles, which contributed further to its plausibility.

Despite what we reported above, Sarcelles almost appears to be a haven of peace and security in the midst of a particularly hostile and menacing environment. Many people corroborate this, thus relativising the image of a town where anti-Semitism is gaining ground. In the words of one community leader, “In Sarcelles, life as a Jew is better than anywhere else”.

He added:

Sarcelles is great and I don’t want to move. All my friends, my family and everyone else have left. They’ve gone to Paris; Neuilly is a very good location. I see my nieces who have gone to Neuilly . . . They come back to Sarcelles. I ask them why they deserted Sarcelles. There are a lot of anti-Semites in Neuilly and it’s much more dangerous than here. Here, you can go out with no problem, whereas in Neuilly . . . So in Neuilly, when they were celebrating our Easter1 they heard shouts of “Heil Hitler, death

1 Translator’s note: [. . .] de fêter Pâques’—the speaker is Jewish but he refers to Passover as ‘Pâques’ or ‘Easter’. In French Passover is sometimes referred to as ‘la Pâque juive’.



to the Jews” at the foot of their apartment building. It wasn’t Arabs; it was blond, blue-eyed people . . .”

Salazar Benakoun, head of security, also considered that, all in all, Sarcelles is fairly safe for its Jewish residents:

At the time of the second intifada the whole of France was affected. The CRS mobilised in every town. We were perhaps the town with the least police, but there were never any problems. I can guarantee that there were no problems in any of the synagogues here during the second inti-fada. True, there were some � res but I don’t think it was arson. There were some young people who wanted to do that to . . . But afterwards, there were robberies instead of arson [. . .]. There were petty thefts of no consequence but no books in Hebrew or the Hebrew library were affected. I went to the mayor and I told him that it wasn’t the Arabs who had done that. I don’t believe it.

At the beginning of our book about Sarcelles, we listed a number of anti-Semitic acts with the reminder that this type of data must be approached cautiously. Now, during our meeting at the police station, we had the opportunity to carry out an interesting experiment on the subject: comparing the list which we already had with that of the data logged in the form of complaints made to the police.

What emerged was that, in fact, very few of the acts on the list came under anti-Semitism, strictly speaking. In other words, according to the information held by the chief of police, as far as attacks were concerned, almost none of the people attacked were attacked because they were Jewish. If anti-Semitic obscenities had effectively been formulated, they only worsened the nature of a robbery or damage which, in themselves, did not appear, at the outset, to have been carried out on the basis of a speci� cally anti-Jewish design.

We shall now return to the information from the CRIF about the events concerning the Tiferet-Israel School, and hasten to point out that this school is in fact a kindergarten which was built without a permit and consists of pre-fabricated buildings—a type of construc-tion which is a prime target for everyday vandalism. The Tiferet-Israel School was the scene of serious incidents, the anti-Semitic nature of which, on analysis, was relativised. The incident on 25 February 2001 concerned arson and not an explosion. On 28 April 2002 another � re destroyed a facility used for storage. The cause of the � re has still not been established. The attack on two children, one of whom had a fractured jaw (25 January 2001), and the raid on the school play-ground by people armed with ‘submachine guns (12 September 2001)



had not been reported to the police. Furthermore, nobody in Sarcelles mentioned these two attacks in our presence.

Let us now come back to other incidents. On 11 September 2001, a little girl was knocked down by a car and the driver apparently did not stop: the incident was reported but no complaint was � led. According to the chief of police, this incident described as a hit-and-run could not be quali� ed as anti-Semitic, even if a Jewish person had been harmed as a result.

On 20 March 2004, a father and his four sons who were on their way home after coming out of a service in the synagogue were very violently attacked by about 30 youths from a ‘dif� cult’ housing estate, La Cité des poètes. Two men who came to their aid were also beaten. Complaints were � led. The incident was dealt with by the police sta-tion in Sarcelles, but there is nothing to link either the victims or the assailants with the town. None of them lived in Sarcelles. The attack did not take place in Sarcelles. The assailants were not arrested in the town . . . The � le was handed to the Pierre� tte police station.

On 3 April 2004, a father and his family of four boys, wearing clothes which indicated that they were Jewish, were ‘chased’ by individuals who caught one of the children and hit him on the forehead with an object. The father was thrown to the ground and a person who came to their aid was punched in the eye. Complaints were � led. This is the only incident of those dealt with by the Sarcelles police station in recent years which is undeniably anti-Semitic in nature.

Thus, both the general climate of opinion and the acts themselves would indicate that anti-Semitism in Sarcelles is not non-existent but is less marked than suggested, and that it is under control, reduced mainly to opinions and prejudices and feelings which � nd little opportunity to be expressed to any great extent and even less to extend into action. This calls for closer examination.

Anti-Semitism under Control

“There is,” said Robert, “a phenomenon which I would very much like to understand: why were there no clashes in Sarcelles? If there’s one place where that should have happened, it’s here . . .”. The explanation which he offered was somewhat brief:

Sarcelles is an old town where people have been living for a very long time now. And they have lived together for a very long time. The pro-



blems didn’t exist 30 or 35 years ago. Perhaps there have been suf� cient exchanges of opinion, dialogues and proximity in Sarcelles to allow this climate of appeasement, in inverted commas, to continue to last.

In fact, to be satis� ed with this idyllic image is to ignore the fact that in Sarcelles the Jewish community is also de� ned in political terms, and that it is far from being cut off from the local authority power structures and the republican institutions responsible for public law and order.

The local authority power structure is not a ‘Jewish’ power structure and the multicultural nature of the town tends to be respected by the town council. But it is also true that part of the foreign population does not vote. As M. L., the somewhat critical teacher referred to above, said, “In Sarcelles, a town council cannot be elected without the Jewish vote. That’s inevitable”. The political weight of the Jewish community is not restricted to a political representation which renders those elected mindful of its expectations. It also comes through the ability of this community to set up relations fostering close cooperation with the authorities. Marc Djebali is particularly well placed to describe these relations. Let us hear what this community leader has to say. His remarks are illuminating:

We have close links with the power structure at prefecture level and with the General Intelligence Service (RG (Renseignements Généraux))—as well, which means, for example, that at the beginning of the intifada . . . We have a neighbouring town (Garges) which is a powder keg. All the unfortu-nate incidents which we managed to avoid came from outside and mainly from Garges. For example, nearly � ve times, there have been incidents triggered by an association or groups of Islamic origin in Garges which, knowing that Sarcelles is said to be controlled by the Jews, wanted to come and destabilise the Jewish way life in Sarcelles. Each time there were attempts to demonstrate, for example, on local authority premises [une maison des jeunes—the youth association], with the slogan ‘End Israeli settlement’ . . . always on pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli issues and very often anti-Jewish. Our experience in the community was that each time there was a demonstration of this type it was followed by anti-Semitic acts. The � rst time . . . (they were always smart enough to announce it two days in advance) . . . they were handing out lea� ets in Garges at the station, because it’s the station for Sarcelles-Garges. They put posters up there. Always two days beforehand so as not to be caught out and to ensure that no action would be taken against the demonstration. We were informed immediately and we had to warn the mayor that there was going to be a demonstration on his premises which could get out of hand . . . That’s what I do. We do it for the good of the citizens of Sarcelles. It’s not just for the Jews . . . My duty is to give advance warning. The � rst time he could not cancel it: there were two Molotov cocktails in the synagogue in Garges.



He went there as mayor of the neighbouring town and I accompanied him. The Prefet came. Everybody came. From that time on, each time there was an event planned, I saw the general secretary take the necessary measures (cancellation, get the CRS to come, warn the public prosecutor, the Prefet and the chief of police . . .) even before I had heard about the gathering. And that happened on two or three occasions, and the last time was at the MJC in Valéry where they were to show the � lm Jénine, Jénine. The mayor had not been informed and the hall had been booked through the elected representative of the Verts.2 I telephoned the mayor and I said to him, “Listen, Mr Mayor, we have already told you, and you are aware of this. You have experience of this . . .”. He replied, “Doctor, I can assure you that I do not know who hired the hall . . .”. There were posters for this � lm everywhere, all over Sarcelles. Do you know what the mayor did? He delegated a local authority team to take the posters down. He called the Prefet. There were CRS buses and he telephoned me, I remember it very well. He said, “Doctor, I’m standing in front of the MJC. There’s nobody here. Don’t worry”. But I’m not worried. As a Jewish community leader, I’m effectively responsible for my fellow believers, but I pity the town of Sarcelles and the responsibility that will be yours if . . . No, in any event, we have a very good relationship on the political side—the mayor is really someone who’s in at the grass-roots. He’s not someone behind a desk, you know . . .

In Sarcelles, the Jewish community, in liaison with the political authori-ties and those in charge of the police, check that pro-Palestinian issues do not make their way into the public sphere and suppress anti-Semitic feelings at an infra-political level. The various sorts of intercommunity or social resentment in the town concerning them are indeed revealed in an aggression which may show through in individual and sometimes in collective interaction. Insults are cried out. Here and there, the outside walls of buildings, letter boxes and staircases are covered with graf� ti, swastikas and tags . . . ‘Death to the Jews’, ‘F*** the Jews’ and ‘Down with the Jews’. But all this is contained and fragmented, has dif� culty in � nding a structure for itself, is not really integrated and cannot very well be helped on by an anti-Semitism which is said to come from the neighbouring banlieues outside the town.

The action of the Jewish community as a collective entity is not a bulwark against anti-Semitic feelings, hatred, hostility, resentment or jealousy. Moreover, it contributes to the globalisation of anti-Semitism rather than to the integration of the local rationale of hostility into a national rationale. But when it succeeds in cooperating with the political

2 Translator’s note: Les Verts: political party, ‘the Greens’.



power structure, or even acceding thereto, it does prevent expressions of hostility from invading the public sphere and the transnational or international dimensions of anti-Jewish hatred from developing and becoming organised. That being the case, the ‘true’ Sarcellois may chal-lenge the withdrawal of the Jewish community into itself, or even its ‘lobbying’ ability, but without overstepping the mark in the ideological and political hatred of the Jews. The set of issues which are very present elsewhere, as we will see when discussing Alsace and the anti-Semitism of the extreme right, makes little substantial contribution to the de� ni-tion of the situation in the town.

Therein perhaps lies the paradox of Sarcelles: the community- oriented structure of the Jewish community and its political ef� cacy lend anti-Semitism both international and local dimensions which unite in a manner which, to all intents and purposes, bypasses the national level.


CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE MARSEILLES COUNTERPOINT: THE PIEDS-NOIRS1 AND THE JEWS

In Sarcelles, it is said that “99% of the Jews in the town come from North Africa”. The town also includes many people of North African immigrant descent, Algerian in particular, who, as we now know, fre-quently regard the local Jewish community with a resentment tinged with jealousy. However, there are hardly any so-called ‘European’ pieds-

noirs, or at least not in any signi� cant number. Now if the weight of the colonial past has an impact on present-day anti-Semitism in France, it is essential to take this population into consideration and more spe-ci� cally, those amongst them who, in their remarks or in keeping up their cultural practices, manifest their ‘nostAlgeria’. This is why, as a contrast to the survey carried out in Sarcelles, we went to Marseilles to meet the ‘Christian’ European pieds-noirs who form cultural associa-tions, the prime aim of which is precisely to keep ‘nostAlgeria’ alive. These pieds-noirs have a reputation for being, in the main, anti-Semitic, and of providing the Front national with considerable electoral support, especially in the departments of the PACA region (Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur). They have a view of the Jews as being people who are usually old enough to have preserved vivid memories of Algeria. It is not the same view as that of their descendants, at least when the latter have moved on from this past to merge into French society, or when they succeed in mourning the passing of the Algeria of yesteryear while not reneging on a pied-noir identity.2 The pieds-noirs whom we are going to describe therefore make a cult of nostalgia and see the present through the prism of their past experience.

1 Translator’s note: pieds-noirs page xvi.2 This chapter is an extension of research which has just been published, Clarisse

Buono, Pieds-noirs de père en � ls, Paris, Balland, 2004.


the marseilles counterpoint: the PIEDS-NOIRS and the jews 229

The Crémieux Decrees

As in former times in Algeria, these pieds-noirs perceive the population today as being made up of three ‘clans’: the Europeans—the clan to which they belong—the Jews and the Muslims (the ‘Arabs’). This is obviously a speci� c aspect of the French colonial legacy. The knowl-edge which the pieds-noirs claim to have of the Jewish populations stems from the same a priori as does that of the Muslims: they ‘know’ them because they have lived alongside them. We therefore do not meet here with any false sense of propriety, any reticence or taboo when speak-ing about a community which has always held itself apart—sometimes despite itself, as in 1870 with the Crémieux decrees.3

Some people question the import of a differentiation which separated the Jews from the Arabs. Albert, aged 60, said:

There is the French nationality after the Crémieux Decree following the 1870 war or the 1914 war which the Arabs never obtained. This was already a problem. These problems are always created. They do not come out of nowhere. Barriers are created. Why were the Jews made French but not the Arabs?

Others tend to recall the discrimination which affected their ‘European’ grandparents, in contrast to the Jews. Robert, 71 years old, said:

If you like, I can bring you a document which shows how my grand-father, who was born in Algeria but to Anglo-Maltese parents, was not French. When he married my grandmother, who was French, she lost her French nationality. And one year later, under the same minister, a paper was published explaining that they were both to be re-integrated French nationals. But the Jews were French. . . .

Similarly, Jean recounted the misadventures of his ancestors who came from Alsace:

I have ancestors who were born in Alsace and came to Algeria some time around 1845–1848. Well, in 1870, when Alsace became German, they were forced to apply for French nationality. I have the naturalisation acts.

3 On 24 October 1870, Adolphe Crémieux, Minister of Justice, submitted nine decrees to the Conseil du gouvernement which rati� ed them. The most important decrees established civil law and one of them granted full French citizenship to all Jewish inhabitants of Algeria. This � nal decree was, from the outset, the subject of consider-able criticism, particularly from the heads of the army. But, as a result, France gained 37,000 new citizens.


230 chapter fifteen

The fact that the Jews were offered French nationality by the colonial powers at the time remains a mystery for the majority of the pieds-noirs who have always felt abandoned by the French.4 This sense of injustice merges with the sense that they are still considered foreigners today. Marie, aged 66, said:

Not so long ago, when the pieds-noirs applied for their identity cards to be renewed [. . .] they had to prove they were French [. . .]. My husband was not born in Algeria. He was given his identity card. But when they saw mine, they said that I wasn’t born in France but in Algeria. My husband had to bring my polling card . . . There isn’t even a photo on it . . . And who was requesting my papers? It was a North African Arab woman!

Similarly, it is frequently stressed that the origin of the present com-munity dissensions lies in arbitrary decisions taken by the metropolis5 in colonial times.

A Golden Age for Intercommunity Relations

More speci� cally, for some people, the problem lies in the simple fact that the hierarchy and the unwritten rules of colonial society have disappeared today. Felix, aged 68, explained:

My wife comes from metropolitan6 France. She cannot tell an Arab from a Kabyle, or a Jew from a Christian . . . We have lived alongside them, so we know them. Given that we know them, we know how to deal with them. That doesn’t mean to say we should mistreat them. But the government hasn’t succeeded in de� ning the problem because they haven’t taken everything into account. These are people who want to deal with the problems but they don’t know the ins and outs of the affair. It’s as if I was going to deal with a problem with the Chinese.

4 It was the 26 June 1889 law which decreed that all the sons of foreigners born in Algeria should be automatically naturalised—except if they refused. Young people of foreign descent with their residence in Algeria could renounce French nationality before they were 22 years old or wait until that age to do military service if their father had not been born in Algeria.

5 Here ‘metropolis’ refers to the home territories of France as opposed to its over-seas territories.

6 ‘Metropolitan France’: this word is meant in the sense of a person belonging to the home territories of a country, as opposed to overseas territories.



Remarks are not necessarily critical when they refer to the past which, on the contrary, is often presented as a sort of golden age in terms of intercommunity relations. Paul, who is 61, remarked:

Let me tell you right away that all sense of community relations has vanished. It’s just not possible. The harmonious community relations we had in Algeria would be impossible in France. That would come under utopia.

“The only thing that we didn’t do”, added Simone, aged 72, “was that we didn’t marry . . . either a Jew or an Arab. But we always lived on good terms with them”. This was con� rmed by Georges, aged 69, or René, aged 64, amongst others. The former remarked:

I was born in 1935. The war was not far off. I never had the slightest doubt or suspicion about a Muslim or a Jew. We mixed with them and we didn’t pay attention to that. It was partly political events which changed all that.

The latter said:

I have nothing against the Jews and we grew up with them. The word ‘racism’ didn’t exist. It’s a word which hurts me because we got on well together, with our differences [. . .]. I think it was the least racist country in the world.

Nevertheless, we would do well not to believe that this reconstructed harmony was exempt from all racism and it quickly rose to the sur-face in remarks, especially when discussing Arabs. Louis, who is 65, explained:

The history of this is in France. We didn’t have any problems in our country. We were smart. We organised dances in the village square and not a single Arab came and bothered us. These were restrictions that they imposed on themselves. We didn’t reject them. They didn’t come [. . .]. They’re � ne if you’re careful. But there is something a bit uncivilised about them. They don’t want to integrate.

And very quickly, in fact, the image of the golden age gives way to the more realistic one of a colonial society with its tensions.

Tensions between Jews, Arabs and Europeans

Whether it be a question of Jews or of Muslims, the pieds-noirs speak of their former ‘compatriots’ in terms of value judgements and on


232 chapter fifteen

the basis of the image of a French society which is apparently still organised into communities, as in colonial times, or which is even more fragmented than it was in the days of French Algeria. As we have said, they each apparently have their own community, that of the Muslims (or Arabs), which is the � rst to be criticised and that of the Jews. The real or supposed proximity which our pieds-noirs informants had with the Jews and the Muslims in North Africa is advanced as a proof of their knowledge of them. Two scenarios are put forward. In the � rst, the Jews and the Muslims, as former ‘natives’ are said to be ‘hand in glove’ and, despite their differences, would always be ready to stand up to the non-Jews and the non-Muslims. Many points in common are said to create an unbridgeable gulf between them and the Europeans and, at the same time, to bring them closer to each other, as Jean, aged 68, explained:

In business, the Jews and the Arabs are people who are capable of working together. There’s the image that people try to attach and then, in fact, you see that these communities do nevertheless live together. Because knowing each other, each knows how to approach the other and get on with them.

It may be that this rapprochement is stronger today than it used to be. This is what Robert suggested:

In effect, the Jewish and Arab communities are � rst and foremost reli-gious and then French [. . .]. They have an identity. They say they are Jewish or Muslim, before saying they are French. It’s not traditional. It’s something which has gradually emerged. These people have been allowed to assume an identity which is quite different from the one they had at the outset. The parents, the grandparents . . . In fact, the French State is being fragmented and divided. They are no longer ethnic communities but religious ones.

In the second scenario, the Jew is described as being different from the Muslim, but is nevertheless not likened to the European. Remarks of the type: “We can’t integrate those people” ( Jean), or “They’re sav-ages” (Mariette), are applied to Muslims and are expressed in a way which marks a difference between the two groups. Whereas it might be expected that, in contrast, the Jewish population’s faculties of integra-tion might be stressed, it is, on the contrary, a ‘manipulation’ of France by the North African Jews which is put forward as an explanation for what is apparently an integration of this group in appearance only. The North African Jews, who are Sephardis, are said to have mixed with



the Ashkenazi community already present in France rather than with French society as a whole. Albert, aged 75, recounted:

When the Jews from Algeria arrived in France they still had a different mentality. But the Jews in Marseilles immediately rallied round and protected them and helped them to settle in. The pied-noir community which arrived even later was different, but it wasn’t welcomed in the same way [. . .]. There was an enormous difference and all that means there are differences in behaviour and attitudes. That’s why, even within the Jewish community, there are differences. When speaking about the Jews in France, you have to know if you’re talking about a metropolitan7 Jew who has always lived in France or a repatriated Jew from Algeria or Tunisia.

For the pieds-noirs, the last straw, and one which constituted an additional injustice in their eyes, was that their image had long been ‘hijacked’ by their Jewish ‘compatriots’. The case of Enrico Macias, long identi� ed with the pieds-noirs for his songs before appearing primarily as Jewish, a friend of Israel and heir to a North African musical tradition which owed nothing to the ‘Europeans’, drew a number of rather caustic comments. As 64 year old Lucette explained:

[. . .] one Jew who is well known is Enrico Macias. Why don’t the pied-noirs like him? Because he wanted to embrace everything . . . become known in the Muslim world with his music . . . And the pied-noirs have never accepted that [. . .]. He used us to make his fortune. He used our misfortunes. He went down the wrong path. He is just like the Algerian Jews, in fact. They are self-suf� cient people. They are capable of doing things together that we don’t know how to do, because we don’t know how to rally round and show solidarity. When they left for Israel their aim was to do the same as in Algeria, to use Israel as well, but over there, it was another story.

This image of key Jewish � gures being perceived by public opinion as the embodiment of the pieds-noir identity is constantly reiterated. As Robert remarked, “As far as the public is concerned, all the pieds-

noirs are called Roger Hanin, or Enrico Macias . . .”. And this opinion, widely shared, appalled more than one person. As Marie indignantly pointed out:

There are the Tunisian Jews who have their own way of thinking. That’s what we hear about the whole time . . . There’s a language, a way of spea-king, which is vulgar . . . that’s the Tunisian Jews. But in France, people don’t make the distinction. It’s normal. Nobody has ever explained things

7 See footnote 6 above for sense of ‘metropolitan’.


234 chapter fifteen

to the metropolitan8 French. There are Tunisian Jews that we hear about the whole time in the media, and the pied-noir community is seen through these people. It’s wrong. It’s completely false.

Not only is it ‘wrong’, but it may have harmed the pieds-noirs. “The Jews have done us a lot of harm,” said 80 year old Philippe, bluntly. Robert elaborated:

When the Tunisian Jews came here, they did a lot of things in Marseilles, and that’s why the people in Marseilles harbour a grudge against us pieds-noirs. It was only several years later . . .

In the discourse of these pieds-noirs, the wrongs of the Jews are not restricted to the time of their arrival in France. As early as the Algerian War, they were already traitors. Robert said:

I would like to add a footnote about the Jewish question. During the Algerian War, without our knowledge, the Jews tried to come to an unders-tanding with the FLN. And the FLN rejected these possible agreements. You can’t trust these people. They’ll stab you in the back . . .

And if they are not traitors, they are pro� teers, never workers who lend a hand, as the following dialogue recorded in the meeting of a pied-noir association suggests:

• I’ve always heard tell that after Algeria, there was a Jew who went to Israel (it’s just a story, you know . . .). The � rst thing he did was to say that he wanted to buy a plot of land [. . .]. He was told that the land of Israel was not for sale. Just to give you an idea of the business side of things!

• The Algerian Jews have a bad reputation in Israel.• Yes, because they were only cloth merchants.• They were cloth merchants, chemists and doctors. Good doctors, for

that matter . . . and lawyers. But an engineer, a builder, a painter and decorator . . . I’ve never seen a Jew paint a house.

• They didn’t go to Israel with the aim of doing what they did in Alge-ria, I mean, to have businesses . . . But they were told that they would have to use picks and shovels there, and suddenly they didn’t agree anymore.

8 See footnote 6 above.



In the Face of Israel

What looks like unsettled business between the ‘Europeans’ and the North African Jews is complicated further when the issue of the State of Israel is broached, and further still when the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict, rekindled since September 2000, is mentioned. Against this background, the reference to the Jewish ‘settlers’ once again brought up the issue of ‘settlers’ in French Algeria. In the light of the confrontation between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the pieds-noirs are inclined to make the comparison with their own fate, sometimes even revive the Algerian War once again. Support for the Jewish people is almost systematic, on the one hand because of their af� nity with the so-called cause of the ‘settlers’ and on the other, by virtue of the fact that many Israelis are said to be from North Africa and therefore, actually, pieds-noirs.

However, nobody takes the comparison very far, as the difference between the support and aid which Israel enjoys and the isolation which the French in Algeria experienced seems to be so great. Thus any ref-erence to the Israeli-Palestinian situation only serves to underline the extent to which French Algeria was exemplary. Thereafter, arguments emerge suggesting that the pieds-noirs were much less ‘settlers’ than the Israelis possibly are, that the Muslim population of Algeria was treated much better than the Palestinians are today and that, despite all that, the Israelis receive considerable support, unlike the repatriated who are nonetheless still accused of all sorts of wrongs. A dialogue between Georges (69 years old) and Josiane (58 years old) illustrates to what extent the pieds-noirs’ treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian question is ambiguous:

• But it’s true that the problem is Islam because Islam wants to dominate the world. It’s Islam and the Jewish world, because in fact they’ve been at loggerheads since 1945 and they � ght one another, but it’s true that they are still together. They do live together. When we were in Algeria there were the Jews, the Arabs, the French and the Spanish . . . They all lived together and they didn’t � ght one another. It’s only now that it’s got out of hand. But the Jews and the Arabs . . . All it would take is for the Arabs to be given back their land. We pieds-noirs were criticised by people who said we had been colonialist and that we had taken land from the Arabs when it wasn’t true, but the Jews, however, did take land from the Arabs. Why don’t they give it back? Let them give it back and make an end to it and end all this. But it can’t be done.

• I don’t really agree with you, because if you go back to the Bible, it was there. It was Palestine. It’s true that they [the Jews] didn’t have a


236 chapter fifteen

nation because they were scattered all over the world. When the Lord gave them this piece of land, they should have stayed there, had children and created a nation. A few did stay surrounded by the Muslim world which did multiply. They should have stayed, built a nation and then spread out. When in 1948 the UN gave them this land, they should have stayed there. Well, they did stay and they thrived. The desert was transformed into � elds of wheat, all green. This was when the Arabs attacked, saying that this land was theirs. In Algeria, it was the same thing. When they were the invaders, there was not so much civilisation. When you see the Roman ruins in Algeria, it wasn’t the Arabs who built them. There were the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Vandals and the Arabs . . . from Arabia. Some went as far as Poitiers. In 1492, the Catholic kings told them that they would have to become Catholics to stay in Spain or else leave. They left and stayed in North Africa. In Algeria they were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, so it wasn’t their land. Other people had been there before them.

The af� nities which some pieds-noirs may thus discover between them-selves and the Israelis by no means extend to the Jews of France or North Africa. On the contrary, many of them speak rather of an abso-lute refusal to mix on the part of the Jewish community. This refusal, obviously perceived as an affront, is interpreted in the framework of the tripartite colonial model of intercommunity relations—the ‘Europeans’, or Christians, the Jews and the ‘Arabs’. Josiane recounted:

I had a Jewish school friend who used to tell me that it was something that she didn’t like about the people in her community. Not being open to others [. . .]. She said that she had Muslim and Catholic friends who invited her to all the festivals. Her parents allowed her to go, but they never allowed her to invite one of her friends to one of their festivals.

Reversing the hierarchy, the pieds-noirs even began to assert their ‘prefer-ence’ for the Muslims and, more speci� cally, for one very special group amongst them, the harkis. Philippe remarked:

We are closer to the Muslims because we know the harkis and the French Muslims who fought alongside the metropolitan French to defend the country in 1914–1918 or in 1939–1945, even in Indochina. To my mind, the Jewish community is there to do business, become integrated into a social circle, not cause any trouble . . . They’re a bit like the Chinese who come to France. They are there. They group together and support each other. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what we lacked. Perhaps that’s why we don’t have much to do with them, precisely because these are people who don’t really need us.



All that remains to do is to recall the happy memories of the colo-nial period and of living together in harmony, dominated by the good relations between the pieds-noirs and the Arabs. Albert, aged 75, exclaimed:

Listen, I lived in a village in Algeria. There were no tensions with the Jews or the Arabs, but there was an af� nity between the pied-noirs and the Arabs which didn’t exist with the ‘Israelite’. When it was the ‘la fête du mouton’ (Eid), the Arab would knock at your door [. . .] it was shared [. . .]. I’m closer to the Muslim community. Always have been.

We should, however, point out that this proximity has its limits, that it is set in the context of a relationship in which the theme of trust (and therefore also of distrust) rapidly � nds its niche and in which the good Muslim was the one who, in the past, had chosen to � ght against the FLN. Marie said, “I feel very close to the harkis. Even if they are Muslims. I would be more inclined to trust a Muslim than a Jew, really . . .”.

The experience which the pied-noir believes he has of a community oriented lifestyle, even enables him to intercede (at least in discursive mode) in favour of the Muslims who, in his opinion, appear to have been wronged by way of comparison with the Jews. As, for example, when it is a question of recalling the Crémieux Decree, one may be forgiven for thinking that the intention here is to criticise the poor management of community affairs in France rather than to incriminate the Jewish population. Henri, who is 61 years old, reminisces:

However, I was also in the Education nationale. When I was appointed to the educational authority in 1990, even then the rabbi in Marseilles used to send us the calendar with all the dates of their festivals and exams were forbidden on those dates [. . .]. The problem was that, amongst the candidates, there were ‘Israelites’. They constitute the majority in the profession of dental technicians, whether it be in France or Marseilles. But there were also North Africans. And as head of the centre, I had young people coming to me and asking, “Why for them and not for us?” That’s a bit of a problem. You’re faced with a dilemma. What do you do? I said, “You’re quite right. I’ll inform the education authority”. Now, if in the same week you have Yom Kippur on Monday, Eid el-Kebir on Tuesday and a Christian festival on Wednesday . . .

At least for the oldest, the experience of French Algeria does not seem to have contributed in any great way to the pieds-noirs’ tolerance when it comes to the Muslims or the Jews. For this reason, Georges has the last word in this chapter:


238 chapter fifteen

However, if I were to meet a Jewish pied-noir, well, we’d chat like in old times, 40 years ago. It’s not because he’s Jewish . . . I don’t make any distinction. It’s not because he’s Jewish that we’re going to murder him, you know . . .


PART FOUR

IN ALSACE



INTRODUCTION

Alsace is at the heart of the European history of the Jews, as it is of anti-Semitism. Jews have lived there for a very long time and were victims of violent attitudes of rejection very early on. So it was that in the middle of the 14th century, almost all of the Jews in Stras-bourg, some two thousand people, were burnt alive by a population who accused them of having poisoned the wells and caused the Black Death. Banished from the town for four centuries, due to the extreme reticence of the local governing powers, the Alsatian Jews were the last in France to bene� t from the civil and religious equality decreed by the French Revolution. The recent past of the region, an integral part of Germany after the defeat in 1871 which was returned to France after victory in 1918 and which, during World War II, was not simply occupied but incorporated into the National Socialist Reich, serves to perpetuate a particularly heavy past. This includes the drama of those who ‘despite themselves’ were incorporated against their will into the Germany army, the clashes of identities in a region which has twice been brutally severed from France and the adhesion, barely more than 50 years ago, of whole sections of the population to National Social-ism and its ideology.

Under the Concordat, which is a direct legacy of this history, the relation between the political sphere and the religious sphere in Alsace (and in the Moselle) assumes a speci� c form. Religious education1 is carried out in state schools and the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergy are paid by the State. Beyond these legal speci� cities, religious life, particularly in Strasbourg, is as if set in stone: there are numerous places of worship, denominational schools and theological faculties, impressive administrative complexes for the denominations like the Synagogue de la

Paix, the Episcopal Palace or the Protestant Saint-Thomas seminary, etc. The law regulating associations in Alsace is another regional speci� city which is conducive to a more dynamic development of community life

1 The Concordat deals with the organisation of worship and not with schooling. Instead, it is the Falloux Law (15 March 1850) which acts as the legal framework, at least for primary schooling. In fact, the situation of secondary schooling in Alsace is complex.


242 part four: introduction

than in the rest of the country. Far from being con� ned to the private sphere, the major religions are at the very heart of social, political and economic life through the associations which sustain them. This being the case, the political authorities may expect the representatives of the ‘religious communities’ to ensure social order, as witnessed by this letter in which the Mayor of Strasbourg seems to make the building of a large mosque dependent on the ability of the imams to bring juvenile delinquency under control:

[. . .] we have a vivid memory of M. Boussouf and his associates explain-ing to us how much effort they were putting into campaigning against juvenile delinquency in local areas. Unfortunately, in the past few weeks, there has once again been a rise in juvenile delinquency and we are barely feeling the effect of your efforts in these areas. We are well aware of the fact that you are only one set of players amongst others and that nobody can be held responsible for these outbreaks of criminality except the offenders themselves, but your situation in Strasbourg and this project for a new mosque should nevertheless have had positive effects in terms of the in� uence of your leaders on the populations that you associate with. We only mention this point for the record.2

Another speci� city of Alsace, in this instance political, is that it is a stronghold and, above all, a source of votes for the Front national and another party on the radical right, Alsace d’abord. These political move-ments maintain close links with anti-Semitism. Furthermore, it is in Strasbourg that Mohammed Latrèche has created a Muslim political party, the only one in France to date.

Alsace has a considerable population of foreign origin, especially Turkish and North African, and Islam is well established there. It has even on occasion been suggested, in national debates, that advantage should be taken of the institutional speci� cities of the region, and in particular of the regime of the Concordat, to accelerate the nationwide institutionalisation of Islam in France by creating a training centre for imams there, for example. Now, as we know, immigration and Islam are very often designated as the source of the rise in anti-Semitism.

Finally, the anti-Semitism we witness in Alsace has dimensions which are speci� c to it. While the region may not have the monopoly on

2 Letter of 10 November 2003, sent by Fabienne Keller, Mayor of Strasbourg, and Robert Grossmann, president of the urban community in Strasbourg, to ‘Messieurs les administrateurs de la grande mosquée de Strasbourg (the administrators of the large mosque in Strasbourg)’.


part four: introduction 243

the desecration of Jewish cemeteries, it is obviously a pioneer in this respect, and has been for some time, and it is still the scene of the most numerous and most frequent desecrations.

Alsace is therefore an intriguing region and one where we have to differentiate between what is exceptional and what is banal in its experi-ence of anti-Semitism.


CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE FEARS OF THE JEWS IN ALSACE

A tradition set in the stone of ‘local law’, that is, the Concordat, tends to emphasize the importance of belonging to a community and there-fore in many respects conditions the political life of the region. That being the case, the presence of Islam, a religion which has now become important and nevertheless is still far from being fully incorporated in the public sphere, destabilises a political order which is based on the representation of a model—doubtless idealised—of the institutional coexistence of the major religions. Present-day anti-Semitism in Alsace could also be the outcome of a con� ict between an ‘established’ Jewish community and a ‘Muslim community’ endeavouring to � nd its niche. This spontaneous interpretation is so frequent, particularly amongst the Jews in Strasbourg, that it is the obvious starting point for our research.

A Destiny?

The Jewish community in Strasbourg is one of the largest and most structured in France. Although it is scattered throughout the urban community, it does have a religious visibility in what is considered to be the Jewish area of the town (approximately de� ned by the triangle constituted by the Boulevard Clemenceau, the Avenue des Vosges and the Avenue de la Paix, in the north of the historical centre of Stras-bourg) and which includes the Synagogue de la Paix—a place of worship and a community centre—the Bas-Rhin Israelite Consistory and the denominational schools. Religious Judaism, which is at the core of the institutional concept of ‘community’, has various tendencies. They exist alongside less distinctly religious Jewish forms of identity, some of which are openly secular or atheist: the ‘Jewish community’ is a product of a shared historical and social experience and not only of a religious dogma.

Besides the move from the rural areas to the town (a gradual move-ment which had been ongoing since the end of the 19th century and


the fears of the jews in alsace 245

was brought to an abrupt halt by World War II), various waves of immigration have profoundly transformed the face of Alsatian Juda-ism: the Jews from Eastern Europe from the beginning of the 20th century until the 1930s, then from North Africa at the beginning of the 1960s. Jewish identity in Strasbourg is pluralist, crisscrossed with lines of divide some of which are those of French society, the right-left split for example, and others which are more sophisticated. This does not mean to say that the identity is fragmented and its members tend to insist on its ability to absorb or manage differences, particularly in times of peril.

Now since the turn of the millennium, this community has been taken over by a palpable fear. This fear is felt to varying degrees but nobody escapes it. “On the whole,” remarked a local observer of the life of the community, who is usually moderate in speech, “nobody feels one hundred per cent safe”.

The fear linked to the reappearance of anti-Semitism affects each individual personally and the community collectively which it tends to unite. This is expressed by the person in charge of one of the big community social organisations, the Appel uni� é des Juifs de France (AUJF): “When it’s a case of anti-Semitism, everyone rallies round”.

However, there is a tension between the desire to present a united front in the face of the danger of anti-Semitism and the diversity of the perceptions and interpretations of the perpetrators and the issues involved. This tension is maintained by the anonymous nature of some of the anti-Semitic actions, amongst the most symbolically signi� cant (stone throwing (‘caillassages’) or attempted arson of synagogues, setting � re to the kindergarten minibus at the beginning of 2004, desecration of cemeteries, beginning with the one in Herrlisheim).1 As these acts have not been cleared up, anti-Semitism in Strasbourg presents the disturbing picture of an expression without face which is very real but of which the causes and the perpetrators are left to the imagination.

Apart from these acts, which remain to some extent a mystery, the sense of a threat is not supported by facts which are said to be more numerous and serious locally than elsewhere. The very people with the most radical discourse have no hesitation in recognising that the nature of the danger is ultimately not immediate. Thus, Mme. A.,

1 The same goes for graf� ti. This practice appears to have considerable cultural con-notations and is spontaneously attributed to the young people in the ‘dif� cult’ areas.


246 chapter sixteen

a teacher, is in fact worried about a problem which goes beyond the bounds of anti-Semitism to assume the appearance of a war on the West, modernity and democracy:

In my opinion, this problem of anti-Semitism is linked with a much bigger problem [. . .]. The radical Islamism which is ravaging the banlieues is extremely activist, very much on the offensive, extremely anti-Semitic and extremely anti-western; and I think that anti-Semitism—well, the Jews are subjected to it and will continue to be so—but it is just the prelude to something very violent which will attack all of us, including democracy and everything . . .

She mentioned an attack:

A few months ago a 15 year old boy was attacked very violently on Place Kléber, in the centre of the town, by a group [. . .]. He was seriously in-jured. It’s true he was wearing a kippa [. . .]. I don’t know if the assailants were arrested.

But she insisted that there was no real reason for her to be afraid:

[. . .] in the secondary school where I was working until September, there were quite a few Muslim pupils, but we’ve never had any problems of that sort to date . . . At local level? No, I’m not afraid in the street, but it’s mainly when I see what’s happening in Paris . . .

Effectively, the Jews in Strasbourg usually believe the most obvious manifestations of anti-Semitism to be taking place elsewhere: in Paris and its banlieue or in Marseilles, which they hear about in the media. In comparison, their town seems to be spared. Mme. A. con� rmed this: “In everyday life, for the moment at any rate and de� nitely in the town centre, it seems to me that we are protected”.

The sense of being currently protected does not prevent people from feeling worried. At the moment, the anxiety is not localised but tends rather to be linked to a speci� c danger, although the fear of a terrorist attack for example is sometimes observed. But the dif� culties speci� c to schools (violence between pupils, insults targeting teachers known to be Jewish . . .) are more frequently touched on, which points to the general theme of the crisis in educational establishments and not to any particular speci� city in Strasbourg or Alsace.

One theme prevails: hatred of the Jews is said to be part of a histori-cal continuity, possibly even a destiny, a Jewish destiny, which makes it dif� cult to think in terms of what is speci� c to the here and now or of the variety of sources and manifestations, and may even lead to an outright refusal to analyse the situation. Thus, one of the leaders of



the CRIF-Est, despite being responsible for keeping an eye on possible developments, stated:

In my opinion, there aren’t all that many levels or modes of anti-Semi-tism . . . There’s not an anti-Semitism of before, after or during . . . In my opinion, there’s anti-Semitism period. Well, if you think about it, you can always point to masses and masses of reasons for it and ways of communicating it, some more appropriate than others. That’s well known! But I think that that’s what they call anti-Semitism and from that point on, there is no tolerance . . .

The further one moves away from analysis, the greater the emphasis put on the suffering of the victims and the anxiety of the virtual tar-gets. A militant from the LICRA-Alsace, M. R. explained to us: “My problem is that we are dealing with reality. We are not dealing with vague phantasms. We are faced with people who are suffering and whom I have to help”.

The Fault Lies with the Immigrants and Islam

The idea of a fate which is socially indeterminate and has travelled down the ages is not very convincing when pitted against � rmly held beliefs: Islamism, the ‘Muslim community’, associated to some extent with a speci� c population, the young people of North African immi-grant descent, are the perpetrators of this anti-Semitism. M. R., from LICRA-Alsace, was explicit:

The new form of anti-Semitism which we experience, which is frightening, which sets up a form of apartheid and prevents harmonious intercom-munity relations in schools, this sort of anti-Semitism has its origins in Islamism, and it’s particularly active in the region.

The remarks are not necessarily crude, widely expressed or lacking in subtlety. In the institutional circles of the Jewish community, it is pri-marily evidence of a widespread perception according to which Islam is an ‘outsider’ standing on the threshold of a system of management built around the relations between religious communities from which it is excluded, attempting to gain entry at the expense of the Jews. But who are these Muslims? What exactly is the ‘Muslim community’ in Alsace?

Alsace has recently taken in considerable numbers of immigrants or populations of immigrant origin from North Africa and Turkey.


248 chapter sixteen

In the course of the second half of the 20th century, Islam thus suddenly burst into this world which is steeped in religion, Muslims becoming the second largest community after the Catholics. The relative size of this community is a source of anxiety for the other religions for at least two reasons. Firstly, because Islamic proselytism might ‘recruit’ more than it converts and therefore might lose them some of their � ocks. Thereafter, and this concern is speci� c to Alsace, because, against the background of the debate about secularism—that is, the debate about the Islamic headscarf—the questions regarding Islam might end up rebounding on other religions and lead to a general challenging of local privileges. A high-ranking dignitary of the Catholic Church explained quite plainly:

We sometimes have the impression, Christians included, that the whole debate about secularism, which is really due to the presence of Islam and Muslims in France, even if people are constantly saying the opposite, has suddenly made people a little suspicious of all religions [. . .]. The presence of Islam has changed the agenda [. . .]. People ask questions they didn’t ask before.

From this point of view, the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish religious leaders have an interest in rapidly normalising their relations with Islam and in integrating it into local law, and they are beginning to come out in favour of this. Now, not only does Islam not have a place in local law but, due to the social exclusion from which the popula-tions of recent immigrant origin in the region suffer, the situation has reached an impasse.

For the time being, Islam in Alsace cannot claim to present the image of a homogeneous and structured community ‘controlled’ by duly elected representatives. The origins of the believers are extremely varied, the religious practices, the historical references and the memo-ries are not the same and there are signi� cant differences in particular between the two main groups, the Moroccans and the Turks. The attempts in Strasbourg to encourage the emergence of a single body representative of Islam were considerably frustrated at the time of the negotiations concerning the plan of the then socialist local authority for a large mosque. The recent creation of a Conseil regional du culte

musulman (CRCM) might lead, in future, to a more rational percep-tion of Islam in Alsace. However, we would have to see evidence of a genuine political will, which we may be forgiven for doubting where a large mosque project is concerned.



The origins of the populations from the Muslim world are very diffuse geographically, and in Strasbourg itself they are, for the main part, concentrated in the peripheral areas, in social housing estates some of which have a local, and even national, reputation for being dif� cult—Haute-Pierre, Neuhof, etc. Social conditions (poverty, vulner-ability, exclusion, etc.) and Islam, in the Strasbourg imagination, are rapidly associated with the inhabitants of these areas, which are further stigmatised by considerable media coverage. One of those in charge of the AUJF, who had recently arrived in Strasbourg, repeated what he had been told:

…there is something which is more at grass-roots level, which is the upsurge of fundamentalism [. . .] I think everyone has heard of M. Latrèche, the President of the PMF [Parti des musulmans de France] which we have had in Strasbourg since 1997 [. . .]. He’s under the spotlight, I think there are other people who do another type of work behind the scenes, who are not in front of the cameras and who, effectively, stir up trouble in the banlieues.

He went on to describe a whole operation including sermons, the � nancing of studies, etc. This perception is widely shared even if, as one researcher, Franck Frégosi, stressed, it calls for criticism and scepticism:

The category ‘fundamentalism’ has one advantage. It is a bit of a hotch-potch [. . .]. To go from there to saying that the Turks2 are going to ‘stir up trouble’ in the banlieues, I personally would be inclined to say that they tend to control them. In any event, they give the impression of being people who can control their youngsters. [. . .]. The banlieues don’t need Islam to ‘stir up trouble’—they can do that for themselves. There are just so many groups which are created and which collapse, but here, they want to operate openly—not in an underhand way.

The letter from the local authority to the Muslim leaders referred to above emphasises the paradoxical nature of the instructions given to the Muslim community. The Muslim community was ordered to bring itself up to the level of the demands of the community-based system of management, although the system is closed to it; yet at the same time the local authority expressed its desire to see the Muslim community

2 ‘The Turks’ are referred to here in the context of an interview in which a speci� c question was asked about their Islam.


250 chapter sixteen

participating. There is always an element of suspicion. A high-ranking Catholic leader explained:

Between you and me, even when we get a visit from Nabaoui (the presi-dent of the CRCM), however well we get on, it’s all very fraternal etc., you can’t help but wonder: “What does he want?” [. . .] and be open and welcoming but not naive at the same time. We know very well that the relationship with Islam will never be easy. Because there is nonetheless that background of insisting that in the history of religions, coming after Judaism and Christianity, the religion which has reached perfection is Islam.

Tensions and Divisions within the Jewish Community

The members of the Jewish community, organised and a fortiori extended to all the Jews in Strasbourg, do envisage other sources of anti-Semitism than Islam and young people of immigrant descent. Thus, a 60 year old woman, who is not the only one, said:

In Alsace, an enormous number of villages voted for Le Pen [. . .]. We should not neglect a single factor but he’s [the leader of the Front national] even more. . . . Let’s say, he’s cleverer.

She differentiates between two main categories of Jews in Alsace. The oldest, rooted in history and local culture, who lived through World War II, and the most recent, for whom the experience of living in North Africa is said to form the basis of their interpretation of present-day anti-Semitism. Mme. L. explained:

The Jews who come from Algeria and North Africa put many more things down to the Middle East. They don’t know the attitudes in Alsace very well yet [. . .]. Strasbourg is special . . . I think that they tend to hide the problems that the Jews who came from the Rhineland countries, or Alsace, suffered—either personally or their parents or grandparents, many of whom are worried that they are going to relive what happened before the war . . . There are warning signs. . . .

Whether it be the radical right tending towards fascism or Islamist youngsters pushing for a place in the regional, institutional system, the interpretations of local anti-Semitism within the Jewish world of Alsace tell us about those who formulate them. Divides and even splits are indeed revived on occasions when anxieties are aroused: between believers of various orientations; between believers and non-believers; between those who would like to discuss this with the Muslim leaders



and those who are not keen to do so; between those with an Ashkenazi history, those of old Alsatian stock or from central or eastern Europe and the Sephardis who came from Morocco in particular, etc.

These divisions shed light, not so much on the reality of anti-Semi-tism in Alsace as on the perceptions that Alsatian Jews form. When they point to Islam or recent immigration, these perceptions operate in three distinct domains. The � rst is that of a con� ict between the Jewish religion, which is long-standing and established and may feel threatened by the emergence of Islam, an outsider which intends to carve out a place for itself and bene� t from the Concordat and the advantages which are associated with it. The second concerns the juvenile delinquency or the criminal acts of a population judged to be a social threat and which projects onto the Jews a hatred which is predominantly social in origin. Finally, the third is a partial synthesis of the two previous ones; in this scenario, anti-Semitism highlights a problem of integration which the Jews have succeeded in resolving and with which the Muslims are now faced; the obsessive fear of anti-Semitism reveals, exacerbates or recalls a particular malaise, speci� c to the Jews in Alsace and which is linked to the conditions in which they themselves became integrated in the past.

In the Alsatian Jews’ memory, the arrival of the Jews from North Africa at the beginning of the 1960s was a resounding success, marking a somewhat idealised intra-community solidarity. It did not wipe out the memory of a less glorious episode: the lack of warmth and often rejection and hostility towards the Jews from Eastern Europe seeking refuge in Alsace in the 1930s. This drama still has an impact on the way in which the present community thinks of its own cohesion. It also affects the perception of the dif� culties faced by the populations of immigrant origin in integrating today. The comparison does not necessarily lead to understanding. Mme. A. referred to the social and cultural dif� culties of the present immigrants:

I’ve decided that there was no need to give way to what I call a ten-dency to dwell on the sordid side of life at any price. To begin with for the pure and simple reason that to take pity on someone, whatever the circumstances, instead of helping him, just makes things worse. When people are in a dif� cult situation—and I’ve no doubt that some of them are—it’s much more helpful to pull them up out of it than to sympathise with them [. . .]. The Jews were already here at the beginning of the 20th century, when there were pogroms in Eastern Europe, and then there was a second wave of immigration in the 1930s.


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Confronted by researchers who recalled the painful nature of this experience, she admitted:

It’s not a very pretty page in the history of the Jews in Alsace, the Alsatian Jews didn’t see any similarity between themselves and these Jews who [. . .] were very visible, very poor and didn’t speak French, and they were frightened that their own status might be challenged and that they would be identi� ed with them. They did not behave well. That’s for sure.

But the newcomers “pushed their children and their children succeeded [. . .]. It is possible to pull through”.

Not many people call for solidarity with the present-day immigrants. The hypothesis of an anti-Semitic threat carried by the most recent arrivals acts as a reminder of the past and reinforces the withdrawal of the Jewish community into itself today. This consequently leads to the marginalisation of those who regret such tendencies to closure. M. H. was one of those who came to France from Morocco in 1962 and is an active member of the Collectif judéo-arabe et citoyen pour la paix:

I lived in Haute-Pierre when I arrived in Strasbourg 30 years ago—we saw these blokes [the Jews from North Africa] move from Cronenbourg or Haute-Pierre into the town centre and now . . . they are doctors, dentists, lawyers—not all, but some of them—they have forgotten. They came from Haute-Pierre where now there are almost exactly the same tensions and dif� culties as they themselves suffered barely 30 years ago [. . .]. I remain convinced that the young French people today whose parents are of North African origin can have access to the same social mobility as these young French people whose parents were of North African Jewish origin, and who found a social solution to their problems and their destinies [. . .]. It’s up to us to build bridges and to our Algerian Jewish comrades in particular. These people speak Arabic . . . they are more Arab than Jewish! . . . [But] it’s the opposite that’s happening. It’s as if the Jewish community, now that they’re well-established, consider that they are clear of any obligation or duty to give back to the community as a whole.

The sociologist, Freddy Raphaël, who despite the fact that he often disagrees with them is undeniably highly regarded in the community—particularly on account of the extensive knowledge that he is acquiring of it—expresses a very similar point of view. He refers to:

a return to the ghetto, a total withdrawal of the Jewish community into itself . . . For me, it’s a gradual defeat; it’s the complete opposite of every-thing I’ve fought for in this community.

The Jewish community’s withdrawal into itself is inextricably linked to their anxieties. The anti-Semitism by which they feel threatened



obviously includes objective elements; but their perceptions are all the more fantastical for being an outcome of the withdrawal described by Freddy Raphaël or M. H., � gures whom they barely recognise as Jewish.

The Israeli-Palestinian Con� ict

By attributing present-day anti-Semitism to the young people of immi-grant descent, to local pressure from Islam to break into the institutional system, and to the radical right parties, are the Jews in Strasbourg not doing without a ‘global’ explanation, focussing on the Israeli-Palestiniancon� ict?

There are other political anxieties, in addition to those accusing the extreme right or the Front national, which tend to target the extreme left. M. R. put it bluntly:

Anti-Semitic speech is no longer taboo and the taboos have been lifted by those leftist bastards—I’m really sorry to have to say this, I’m on the left myself . . . but it’s dangerous . . . Take a look at this. [ He showed us a lea� et announcing a demonstration organised by the Collectif judéo-arabe et citoyen pour la paix.] Look, turn over: José Bové and co., constantly challenging Israel’s right to exist—and the Jews—focussing on Israel, all the time, all the time, all the time. The massacres in Darfur leave them cold: there is only one problem in the world and that’s Israel, and what’s been done to these poor Palestinians. Fair enough. But these people are troublemakers. In the present context, they are the real anti-Semites . . .

Those who refer to the extreme left in their discourse suggest that the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict, although distant in geographical terms, is nevertheless present in national and local life. In fact, this is particu-larly the case in Strasbourg as the Jews in the town maintain a special relationship with the Hebrew state: almost everyone has a few close relatives living in Israel. Most of them have close relations with that country, as is illustrated by this conversation between two regional of� ce-bearers from the CRIF:

Mme. L.:—I can tell you that when there is an attack in Jerusalem or in Tel Aviv the telephone lines between Strasbourg and Israel work very well!M. U.:—They don’t work at all, because all the lines are engaged.

This strong attachment to Israel might lead us to believe that the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict is at the heart of present-day anti-Semitism in France. M. U. lamented this fact:


254 chapter sixteen

The con� ict in the Middle East should not have consequences in France, a republic with laws which govern us. It’s not because barbarous actions were committed in Algeria that I’m going to take up arms and go there [. . .]. I just wish the same were true of the con� ict in the Middle East. Unfortunately, it’s not the case.

But M. U. also thinks, contradictorily, that the attachment of the Jews in the Diaspora to Israel should be given pride of place in our analysis:

I really approve of what you are doing, trying to understand, but you might not have the key and today the key is the State of Israel with all that it represents for the community, for the Jews throughout the world.

The ‘global’ (the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict) and the local (the way in which this con� ict is interpreted on the ground) become confused, the reference points are blurred and perhaps the ability of the Alsatian Jews to analyse the situation also suffers.


CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

MALAISE IN THE ALSATIAN COUNTRYSIDE

At once near and far, the Alsatian countryside with its quaint appear-ance and timeless air is a striking contrast to the ‘capital of Europe’. It is, however, impossible to separate arbitrarily these two worlds which are in fact only one. Firstly, because the urban and rural imaginary worlds are both sustained by the perceptions conjured up of the world in which we live and the world in which we do not wish to live. In Stras-bourg, we have the world of modernity and its drawbacks which risk contaminating and already do contaminate the age-old village havens. In the countryside, behind the geraniums on the window sills of the colourful houses, we have the continuation of traditions and the fear of the upheavals represented by the big city. Secondly, because town and countryside are politically, economically and culturally integrated. In particular, there is an Alsatian cultural identity with its history, its language which is still widely spoken and its special forms of religious life—all elements which contrast sharply with the France ‘of the interior’ and of which the considerable rural population remains the guard-ian. What is the situation of anti-Semitism today in these rural areas inhabited by Alsatian Jewish populations until the mid 20th century, atypical examples in France of a rural Judaism ended by World War II,leaving behind, after centuries of close proximity with the Catholic and Protestant villagers, a physical vacuum and a de� cit in memory. The question is highly sensitive and M. C., a journalist who has been reporting on life in the Alsatian countryside for a long time, warned us, “[. . .] � nd people who are anti-Semitic? In my opinion. . . . In any event, they will not admit to it!”

The Extreme Right Vote

Since the � rst stir created by the Front national in the mid 1980s, Alsace has been one of the regions to provide this political party with the larg-est number of votes. This particularity is frequently attributed to the


256 chapter seventeen

Alsatian countryside1 and its inhabitants who are resistant to change, frightened by the evolution of a world in which there is no longer any place for rural life and its values. This general explanation is reinforced by the staggering success of the extreme right in some rural villages in Alsace, symbolised by the commune of Eywiller where, in the � rst round of the presidential elections in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen had his best result, winning 45.65% of the votes.2 To what extent is the vote in rural areas for the two main extreme right political parties in the region, the Front national and Alsace d’abord, imbued with anti-Semitism?

There is practically no mention of the ‘Jews’, a category with which the inhabitants of the rural areas are undeniably familiar, when it comes to commenting on electoral behaviour in rural areas in our presence. When invited to express their opinions about Jews, an activist from Alsace d’abord whose husband, formerly in the Front national, had been elected mayor of his village as an ‘independent’ and the young man who came with him, did not seem to consider them one of their main preoccupations:

M. S.:—[. . .] the Jews . . . we rarely discuss them, because it isn’t a problem [. . .]. At the moment, the problem is more with the North Africans.Researcher:—Do you think there are no longer any problems because the Jews are integrated, or is it because they are no longer present, or because. . . .Mme. T.:—They are there but that’s all!Researcher:—That’s all?Mme. T.:—That’s what I think.Researcher:—Don’t you see them?M. S.:—Well, we see them, but it’s not . . .Mme. T.:—My former employer was Jewish. A man like you and me. I had colleagues who were Jewish, but, well, they’re just people like you and me. It has to be said that they are integrated. They do practise their religion, we all agree: they have their weddings, there’s Yom Kippur and the Jewish festivals.

1 In fact, this shift of responsibility to the rural areas for the electoral success of the extreme right, which is frequent amongst our interviewees in Strasbourg, is in part a denial of the reality. An examination of the ballot by polling station shows that in Strasbourg itself, the vote in favour of the extreme right did achieve high scores, con-tradicting the idealised view of a mainly rural vote and, in these instances, interpreted as the outcome of archaism and resistance to modernity.

2 Eywiller also made a name for itself on the back of the exhibition of the ‘Heil-willer’ photographs, on the initiative of Ambroise Perrin, which was reported in the national press.


malaise in the alsatian countryside 257

M. S.:—[. . .] despite what people think, when we deliver furniture, we even get tips from Jews, so (laughter). It’s true that everyone says: the Jews . . .Mme. T.:—They are people who are completely . . . the problem is the North Africans.

Does anti-Semitism play absolutely no part in the decision to vote for the extreme right? While it is dif� cult to obtain direct and explicit com-ments, the accounts of third parties suggest we should avoid drawing overhasty conclusions. Several of them pointed to the expression of a virulent anti-Semitism in the private or professional spheres as an accompaniment to, or an extension of the xenophobic and anti-Arab sentiment which clearly underlies the extreme vote. The � gure of the outsider which was long associated with the Jews in the Alsatian countryside now serves to characterise the North Africans, the Turks or the travelling communities, a persistence which ensures continuity in the discourse described by an activist from the Protestant network Comprendre et s’engager:

M. K.: [. . .] when we talk to people who are really very racist and make no secret of it, they begin by talking about these Arabs and then, when the discussion goes on for a while, an association is made with the Jews.

The malaise which sustains the extreme right vote goes back to the history of the relationship between the Alsatians and ‘their’ Jews—the possessive, used by several of our interviewees, is an illustration of the ambiguous nature of a bygone intimacy.

What is immediately striking is the awkward silence surrounding the issue of anti-Semitism and the processes of denial which it evokes, suggesting that the way Jews and Christians, each with their own faith, lived alongside one another in the Alsatian countryside, with its abrupt end, constitutes a past which has not yet been adequately mourned. The memory of this period of living alongside each other is eclipsed because the population has not undertaken a labour of re� ection on its own past. The exceptional size of the extreme right vote in Alsace (almost one third of the electorate in the � rst round of the regional elections in 2004, for example) and some of its characteristics (the dif-� culty in determining its causes, its astonishing manifestation in con-texts where immigration corresponds to nothing material, or in others where living together with the immigrants is described as going well, its inadmissible nature . . .) point to the relationship of the Alsatians with their identity, including their memories and the otherness which is its counterpart. The history of rural Judaism in Alsace is a fundamental



aspect here: in this instance, the past sheds light on the present, includ-ing its electoral aspects.

The Remains of the Vanished World of Rural Judaism

The bygone relationship between the rural Christian and Jewish popu-lations is a subject about which the present inhabitants of the Alsatian villages either say little in the presence of third parties or do so in a way which sheds little light. As one protestant minister put it, this is not only because “the Alsatian will say anything and everything so that you do not know what he actually thinks”, but mainly because there is a genuine tangle of memories in which the reality of this living together is buried under layers not only of what is said, but also of what is left unsaid. In 1976, the sociologist, Freddy Raphaël carried out a survey on the ‘stereotype of the Jew in an Alsatian village’ and the complexity of the techniques which he had to employ to reveal and de� ne this type of data is a good illustration of this problem3—a problem which is all the more acute for the oblivion of the past apparently having been ‘con-structed’4 by all the parties concerned, both Jewish and Christian.

For four centuries, there was in Alsace a rural Judaism which was sometimes considerable. Many villages had a numerically sizeable Jewish community. Today, almost nothing remains of this exceptional experi-ence in France: there are a few isolated people, synagogues which have been transformed into private houses and Jewish cemeteries which are regularly desecrated. Now, as we have said, while the rural exodus of the Jewish population had begun at the end of the 19th century, World War II meant a brutal end to this shared way of life which was gradu-ally dying out, rendering this experience and its conclusion unthinkable or, at least, not thought about together. Whence the comparison which Freddy Raphaël suggests, with the experience of the Jews in Poland:

3 “Stéréotype du juif dans un village alsacien en 1976”, Revue des sciences sociales de la France de l’Est, n° 222, Université des Sciences humaines, Strasbourg. This text is also available online with the permission of the author on the website of Alsatian Judaism: http://www.sdv.fr/judaïsme/.

4 See, by the same author, “Une singulière présence des Juifs en Alsace—La construc-tion d’un oubli”, Plurales Deutschland—Allemagne plurielle, Mélanges Étienne François, also online on the website of Alsatian Judaism.



Even today, in some hamlets in Alsace, as in Poland, it is by the empty spaces and their absence that the Jews have left their disturbing and some-times unbearable mark in the memory of village folklore, which is far too simplistic and consensual. The Jews of Radom [. . .] haunt the streets of the town where everyone claims to have forgotten them and, in a nearby hamlet, there’s an area which remains hopelessly empty. The old Jewish cemetery used to be there. The residents pulled up the gravestones and turned them over to pave the entry to the Christian cemetery.5

Today in the Alsatian villages, the concern to hide the memory blots associated with this past is the rule, with a tendency to impose the idea that there are no longer any problems and even that there never really were any. The memory of the past has dif� culty emerging, and when it succeeds in so doing, it has dif� culty embracing the subtleties. It goes through a process of idealisation of the shared past and denial of anything which caused a problem. What does remain of this process of total eclipse is, still today, capable of fuelling anti-Semitism.

The Images of the Jew

“There’s no longer any problem with the Jews” is a phrase which comes back again and again. It sometimes extends into the idea that there never has been any problem. The idealised perception of the shared past stresses the positive aspects, the strong symbols of ‘living together’ in harmony—the familiarity, the practical nature of the services ren-dered by the Jews to the village, or the businesses they had there . . . It highlights interaction, including religious interaction, the presence of Jews in the church for a burial or a marriage, the visits of Christians to the synagogue in the village, etc.

This harmonious image is no doubt based on real elements. But there is something missing and the elements which betray that it is a mask reintroduce the stereotype of the Jew. In the � rst instance, it is dominated by the association of ‘the’ Jew with business. M. D., a country priest, recalls:

They used to come to us as well, without having anything to sell but . . . they were pleasant people, you know, who had a sense of conviviality. They had a way with people and . . . well, they were tradespeople at heart . . . at least those that I knew in my childhood . . . anyway, that’s what I under-stood afterwards too.

5 Ibid.



This image of the shrewd Jewish businessman remains widespread, as witnessed by M. C., a journalist, whom we have already quoted: “the Jew . . . the idea that we had, at least that I had, and many other people had, was that. . . . the Jew was the shrewd businessman”.

Some recollections lead us into a grey area where it is dif� cult to know exactly what we are dealing with. The � gure of the shrewd Jewish businessman and, in particular, of the shady dealer—the livestock dealer who was usually Jewish on whom the Alsatian farmers depended—indi-cates the persistence of some of the characteristics of the Jew which suggest anti-Semitism. Mme. A., a militant from the Protestant network Comprendre et s’engager, unlikely to be suspected of anti-Semitism, had this to say about the shady dealer:

Mme. A.:—I think he � xed the prices. There’s a saying which goes: “the Jews are very fond of money”, and when they can . . . [She asked her son to translate a word in Alsatian: it was ‘swindle’] they like to ask for more than it’s worth. They used to say: “I’m paying you well. I offer the best prices. I give the most”. It was probably not entirely true, but these things are not very serious.Researcher:—Did people used to make fun of them, a bit?Mme. A.:—Yes, people used to say, “There’s none worse than the Jews for money”, and “There’s none like the Jews for complaining they’re poor when they have lots of money”.Researcher:—We have also been told that there used to be jokes and plays, where people made fun of Jews . . .Mme. A.:—Oh yes . . . They made fun of other people too, of course. My son told me a joke [she told the story about a rabbi who turned out to be particularly miserly]. So, as far as money was concerned, they had a very good idea of the value of money. They were good at counting money, and they were good at grumbling about things (little laugh).Researcher:—Do people still tell jokes like that today?Mme. A.:—They say that there are none better than the Jews for mak-ing a fortune or grumbling that they are poor when they have money. Perhaps there’s some truth in that . . .Researcher:—And these are jokes that people tell in Alsatian dialect?Mme. A.:—Yes, some are . . .Researcher:—Do you think these are old jokes?Mme. A.:—Yes, some are. But there are jokes about the parish priests too and about the pastors. Well, I’m not too keen on jokes about religion but when people say, “I’m waiting for the change” [an allusion to the punch line of the joke she had just told], that means (little laugh) that a person is interested in money. But that’s not a reason for not liking them, you see? I’m sure that the Jews in Kolbsheim behaved correctly or else, perhaps they thought, “Well, perhaps I can ask that farmer for a higher price because he has the money. And then to another, perhaps . . .”, you see? You had to bargain. I think they enjoyed bargaining.



This conversation reveals several aspects which can be applied to the wider picture. In the � rst instance, the jokes about the Jews, frequent in the small plays in dialect, introduce a lighter element into issues which constitute the ‘heavy’ background of the development of the anti-Semitic � gure of the Jew. With the shady dealer, historical or socio-economic explanations are advanced to explain the hostility towards the Jews and to justify it retrospectively,6 while the jokes about the presumed attachment of the Jews to money are presented as harmless remarks which people refuse to admit could have anything to do with anti-Semitism. M. D., the mayor of a village, questioned about anti-Semitism in Alsace, could � nd hardly any trace of it:

No . . . perhaps something but . . . people who are 40 or 60 years old or over, no, no . . . Well, people always tell a few jokes about Jews. But that’s just for fun. And if there’s a Jew present, he laughs with us. I mean, the Alsatian Jews behave in a way that can’t be criticised, they behave correctly. They have their religion . . . their Saturdays off, etc . . . but that’s . . . no, no . . .

Referring this tradition of mockery back to a more general practice of interdenominational bickering—“But there are jokes about parish priests and about pastors”—is a way of masking the particular fate of the Alsatian Jews to which we shall return. Finally, the reference to the ‘correct’ behaviour of the Jews is double-edged: it is supposed to indicate the good understanding between the Jews and the Christians in the villages in bygone days, but it indicates too that anti-Semitism can only be the result of bad behaviour on the part of the Jews. And, as this was not the case, there can be no anti-Semitism in Alsace—which had yet to be proved.

Even though they are aware and involved in the � ght against racism, our interviewees had dif� culty recognising latent anti-Semitism. Thus, a couple who were well-disposed towards our research and were as far as possible from any anti-Semitism, were slow in mentioning an important fact in the interview, namely the campaign against an Israelite mayor in the village 30 years previously, and would have said nothing if the researchers had not insisted:

6 We were talking to M. C. about the shady dealers who, according to him “buy very cheap and sell dear”. “Look, that was 50 years ago, relations were not friendly, because of that the farmers were always convinced they had been swindled by the so-called Jew, and that’s where it all began, but it’s marginal, as they say. In my opinion, there isn’t a Jewish problem in Alsace any more”.



M. E.:—Well, as I said, a good half of the [ Jewish] community did not come back, at least half [. . .]. You see, as there are no longer any here, in Paffenhoffen . . . Yes, there is one. There’s only one left . . .Mme. E.:—Nevertheless, we did have an Israelite mayor.M. E.:—Yes, but at the time there were a few left, there was still (he listed some names) . . . There were at least 15 people of the Israelite faith . . .We had a Jewish mayor. He was very, very good.Researcher:—And did that not pose any problems?M. E.:—Well . . .Mme E.:—Well, there was a small campaign that was organised . . .M. E.:—People no longer want it to be a Jew who. . . .Researcher:—When did this take place?M. E.:—Oh, 30 years ago? Yes . . .Researcher:—In the 1970s?M. E.:—That’s right.Researcher:—And there was a campaign?Mme. E.:—It was very insidious.M. E.:—It was insidious. It was not straight out, like ‘that’s Jewish, etc’. No, it was ‘how come . . .?’ But now, to speak of the Shoah here, no! Since there’s really only one Jew left.

The idealisation of the past shared with the Jews is complemented by the lack of realisation of what were expressions of hostility towards the Jews and, ultimately, the loss of content and meaning of the very idea of anti-Semitism. The lack of realisation possibly extends to the total-ity of this past, a direct manifestation of the ‘construction of oblivion’ described by Freddy Raphaël. Thus, it can happen that when we ask whether there were Jewish people in the village, the answer is negative in the � rst instance:

Researcher:—Were there any Jews in these villages?M. C.:—No, no, no . . .Researcher:—Never?M. C.:—Never (slight hesitation). There were Jewish colonies until the last century, just before the war. A quarter, say a � fth of the population of the village was Jewish. I wouldn’t say the relations were friendly at the time, but, well, they were neutral. It’s over because there are no more Jews.

Or again, with M. D., the mayor of a village:

Researcher:—There were Jewish communities in quite a few of the vil-lages before the war . . .M. D.:—Oh, yes. There were Jewish communities.Researcher:—Were there some in Marlenheim too?M. D.:—No, not in Marlenheim. But that was at a time when the Jews did not have the right to spend the night in Strasbourg. They could only



work in Strasbourg. So there were some communes where 20% of the population was Jewish. It always worked very well. They went home at night to sleep and the next day they left for Strasbourg to work, to do their business and they had to be back by 10 p.m.

In this case, the experience of rural Judaism was reduced to a mere parenthesis during which the Jews made of the Alsatian villages their dormitory towns. We should mention, in passing, that every year this commune of Marlenheim, whose mayor is close to an extreme right party, celebrates the marriage of L’Ami Fritz, a novel by Erckmann-Chatrian in which the character of the match-making rabbi is one of the rare Jewish � gures in the literature of the late 19th century not to be a caricature in� uenced by the all-pervasive anti-Semitism of the period.7 In apparently contradictory fashion, the Marlenheim town council protested unanimously against the attribution of the ( Jewish) name of the historian, Marc Bloch to the University of Strasbourg.

Denial

The war period constitutes a black hole which the idealisation of a past shared with the Jews cannot mask and about which the denial is strong. Memories, evidence and studies (somewhat rare concerning the fate of the Jews and, in any event, poorly, if at all, passed on into collective memory) paint a picture of the complex and mixed reality of this period made up of the departure of some, but also of the allegiance of others to the Reich,8 or at least of a sense of normality in the face of this state of affairs, as well as genuine suffering, acts of resistance and of solidarity. In some ways, what emerges about the fate of the Jews and its perception by the Christian population recalls the Polish experience

7 “In the book by Erckmann and Chatrian, the Jew is a human being. The speci� c value conferred on him contradicts the legitimacy of the silence which, elsewhere, has surrounded him. In the book by Erckmann and Chatrian, the Jew exists. The numer-ous details, which form his image, ensure its authenticity and mark out his place in the game of fortune. Finally, in the book by Erckmann and Chatrian, the Jew, with all his faults and all his virtues has a speci� c reality in time which is comparable to his non-Jewish neighbour from the human point of view” quoted in, “Les Juifs d’Alsace dans l’œuvre d’Erckmann-Chatrian”, Richard Néher, revue Évidences, 1950, November, pp. 30–36; article online on the website of Alsatian Judaism.

8 At the time, Alsace was not occupied but annexed, and a number of those whom we interviewed, when they were old enough, had given the Nazi salute at school or had joined the Hitler Jugend.



glimpsed in Claude Lanzmann’s � lm, Shoah: there is at the very least a hostility towards the Jews, which is deeply rooted but in a context of close proximity composed of stereotypes, some of which persist and which were outstripped by the racial policy implemented by National Socialism, and therefore by its most directly sinister effects. Whence the Jewish community’s sense of having been ‘abandoned’ which was felt particularly acutely since they had believed themselves to be perfectly integrated in Alsace—Freddy Raphaël recalls the following:

It was a while before the Jews understood what had happened during the war. For a year or two, their main idea was to recover [the property they left behind]. The attitude of the community was extremely responsible and it consisted in saying, for a time: we are not going to build a syna-gogue again; building a synagogue means trusting people and we can no longer trust people after the way we were abandoned in 1940, after the indifference of a large part of the population . . . .

The policy of remembrance, spontaneously adopted by Alsace in the post-war period—concerning Nazism as well as the fate of the Jews—is the direct outcome of the ambiguity of this situation in which a sense of guilt and of having a ‘guilty conscience’ are to a large extent eclipsed by a powerful sense of victimisation—an ambiguity which in many respects recalls that of Austria. The result is a fairly widespread uncertainty about what did actually happen during the war and about the lessons to be drawn from it. A pastor remembered:

[. . .] as from the Occupation, the annexing by Germany, by the Nazis, there was nevertheless a movement to leave . . . to departure, deporta-tion . . . It was never very clearly explained, I would say, in my childhood and my youth. Even at school, these were issues which were not dealt with very openly. So people have a guilty conscience about that.

As an illustration of this dif� culty of situating the fate of the Jews within the framework of an ‘Alsatian’ memory of the war, we note also the indirect and, to say the least, euphemistic way in which they are mentioned in an application made in 1976 to the President of the Republic by the Groupement des anciens expulsés et réfugiés d’Alsace et de la

Moselle for the recognition of their status as ‘victims of Nazism’: “[there were amongst the refugees] those who, for political, racial or denomi-national reasons, could not submit to the Nazi regime”.9

9 Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, 31 October 1976.



The crux of this process of concealment includes the memories of those Alsatians who ‘against our will’ were forcibly incorporated into var-ious units of the German army and even into the SS.10 Freddy Raphaël and Geneviève Herberich-Marx show how the events which occurred in the region annexed by the Third Reich have left a permanent scar on the images which form Alsatian identity and the importance to their development of the � gure of those who were incorporated ‘against our will’.11 Their survey also reveals how a process of competing victims has allowed anti-Semitism to be recycled:

Those who blame French incompetence—“it was the defeat in 1940 which brought us to that”—sometimes go as far as declaring that the conditions for those in Tambov (a Soviet camp where many of the ‘against our will’ were deported and where they remained long after the war) were worse than for those deported to Buchenwald whose daily rations were, according to them, bigger than theirs. They criticise the fact that the deportees were discussed on television—“the Holocaust was shown”—whereas a silence had been maintained on their experience in the Gulag. Some go as far as to assert that the money paid by Germany which was intended for them had been misappropriated and that it was “the Jews who bene� ted from it”.12

The denial of the drama experienced by the Alsatian Jews is revealed in at least three ways, each in turn constituting the stages of a tendency which is all the more subversive for not preventing the recognition, implicitly or even explicitly, of the particularity of the destruction of European Jews.

The � rst stage consists in moving away from the drama itself by referring to the prior exile of a good number of the Jewish population to different regions of ‘free’ France—until there were none left. Few Alsatian Jews were deported directly from Alsace and, consequently, the persecution of the Jews appears as distant as the region of Bordeaux or the Midi:

10 At the beginning of the 1950s, the drama of those incorporated ‘against our will’ was given national coverage during the trial of the former members of the Das Reich SS division, guilty of the massacre in Oradour-sur-Glane, and amongst whom there were Alsatians who had been incorporated against their will.

11 Mémoire plurielle de l’Alsace—grandeurs et servitudes d’un pays des marges, Freddy Raphaël and Geneviève Herberich-Marx, collection Recherches et Documents, vol. XXXXIX, published by Société savante d’Alsace et des régions de l’Est, 1991; cf. in particular the chapter devoted to the “Provocation de la mémoire chez les incorporés de force”, pp. 45–66.

12 Ibid., p. 60.



Mme. A.:—I think they must have gone to the Midi, or to other regions. They were forced to leave, but they came back again afterwards.Researcher:—Are there any who did not come back?Mme. A.:—I think there are some who did not come back and whose names are on the war memorial . . .13

This idea is frequently expressed and even repeated by the president of LICRA-Alsace:

There was no Shoah in Alsace because the Alsatian Jews had been eva-cuated and they did not come back again [. . .] the Alsatian Jews who died, died following deportation, like the other French Jews, but from other regions in France. They did not come back. When the Nazis said, “Come back to Alsace,” the Jews, who were not crazy, did not come back. The Shoah is something that the Alsatians know nothing about.

The second stage in the process of denial is a step in the direction of recognising the genocide, but by comparing it immediately to some-thing else. It may be a direct continuation of the previous stage. Thus, Mme. A. said:

[. . .] There are some people who did not come back . . . like the Catholics and the Protestants . . . I also have an uncle who did not come back, but I think it was from World War I . . . And in 1939–1945, inevitably some people did not come back but, as other people had to leave. . . . My husband had to leave for Périgueux too. I think he came from Cronenbourg. . . . They left, but they came back.

At this level, any reference to the fate of the Jews leads to that of other drama, sometimes implicitly presented as more genuinely Alsatian. The Alsatian aspects of the Jewish tragedy are relativised as in M. C.’sremarks . . .:

Here we really suffered under the Nazis. [. . .] We didn’t suffer as much as the Jews, but there are all those ‘against our wills’. [. . .] That’s why I would say that in Alsace, as we lived through the same dramas, we basically stand by the Jews. So, if there are people who say there is a problem of anti-Semitism with the Jews, I don’t believe it.

Questioned about the possibility of anti-Semitism in the immediate post-war years, M. C., who was born during the war, relativised it by setting it in context:

13 The list of deportees from the Bas-Rhin, online on the site of Alsatian Judaism, includes six people for the town concerned here.



We had lived through the same drama: the ‘against our wills’. How many men are there in the village that lost their lives wearing a German uniform, perhaps 30 or 40? And so we detested Nazism . . . and the Jews were the same . . .

A parallel is therefore drawn between those who were conscripted ‘against our will’ and the Jews, both being victims of Nazism.

From this point of view, it is the very concept of anti-Semitism, or the possibility of its existence, which is watered down to end up, ultimately, with the idea that anti-Semitism is structurally impossible.

Finally, in the third stage of this process of denial, the genocide is noted, but uniquely through the memory which the Jews retain of it and for the purpose of deploring, if not the exaggeration, at the very least the anachronism involved in retaining this memory. Thus, in the opinion of M. D., the country priest we have already quoted, the Jews “tend to be untouchable”. Despite the usual precautions, the remarks of a high-ranking dignitary in the Catholic Church were along the same lines:

I think the Jews are paranoid. The other day, at the Prefet’s New Year reception, the chief rabbi was behind me in the queue, speaking to one of his colleagues. I think that half the time we spent waiting, they were discussing the Shoah. Amongst them, obviously . . . it’s something which has left its mark on them to such an extent that one has the impression they can’t really get over it.

The most virulent anti-Semitic remarks, like those reported by Freddy Raphaël and Geneviève Herberich-Marx for the 1960s or 1970s, are expressed less often than previously, and the forms of resentment which are most directly associated with the war fade with time. But this in no way signi� es the disappearance of a malaise around the memories left by this period. A sort of deterioration of the memory lingers on.

An Atmosphere

In the rural areas, it is dif� cult to break the silence which surrounds anything to do with Jews and anti-Semitism. And if the manifest, explicit hostility towards the Jews has disappeared, this is � rstly, and perhaps uniquely, because they themselves have disappeared. This is summed up in the remark which at � rst sight is surprising: “In my opinion, Jewish anti-Semitism has been evacuated. Perhaps I’m wrong. I may be wrong, but it won’t cause any more problems”.



The few ‘Israelites’—a term which is still frequently used here—who have remained in the villages were systematically pointed out to us as such; one person to whom the researchers had handed their visit-ing cards stopped at one of our names and suggested, with a smile of complicity: “That’s a Jewish name, isn’t it?” The atmosphere was heavy, making it quite clear that there was no longer any place for the Jews in the rural areas of Alsace. This did not prevent the speaker from going on to remark that in town, in Strasbourg, as the journalist, M. C. said:

There aren’t any problems either. The big problem in Strasbourg is perhaps something else . . . Since, well, they have their areas, you know, areas where mainly Jewish people live, with a school . . .

Nor did it prevent him from sympathising with the suffering caused on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict, even preaching tolerance. But there is no longer a place for the Jews in the villages of Alsace, and perhaps even in France, as indicated by M. D.’s suggestion that they have a ‘home’ in Israel. “It’s all very well for the Jews to preach tolerance in Strasbourg, they should also practise it at home . . .”

It is true that in the past few years there has been a renewed interest in the Alsatian Judaism of yesteryear: tours offer the chance to discover the rural Judaism of bygone days with its synagogues, its cemeteries and all the traces which it left behind. Sometimes even the will to remember inaugurates a labour of re� ection on the past. Thus Freddy Raphaël observes that:

In town, but even in small towns, study groups, for re� ection, for know-ledge of Judaism, even ecumenical meetings have been formed . . . I was thinking about it the other day, in Saverne, where, over and above sym-pathy for the victim, there is a desire to make amends. That does mean that there is acceptance of responsibility—I’m not speaking of guilt, far from it—a responsibility in the face of history, a desire to � nd out more about Judaism, to be interested not just in feelings, compassion, in being genuinely, intellectually and spiritually involved. Things are developing which have never existed here, the study of texts, people who have started to learn Hebrew . . .

But who is involved in all that? Certainly not the young people in the villages whom we did not succeed in meeting, despite our insistence, and whom we were kept away from by all our interviewees, as if to avoid misunderstandings. M. C. told us:



I spoke to some young people the other day. They said they didn’t know any Jews and they didn’t know anything about a Jewish problem. They’re not interested . . . That doesn’t interest them any more. So it’s com-pletely . . . in my opinion, this problem doesn’t exist any more—at least from what I hear, and in my experience.

Except that, by a disturbing coincidence, in this same village where we met the journalist, the demand for a ‘youth centre’ daubed on the wall was accompanied by a swastika and a Celtic cross, the symbol of the Oeuvre française—a Petainist movement founded at the end of the 1960s by Pierre Sidos (who in the 1990s invited its members to join the Front national ). M. J. said:

[. . .] oh . . . that’s just a reaction. . . . Rather stupid, it’s not relevant because they don’t know . . . In my opinion, these young people, you ask them a bit about history, they’re useless. They don’t know. They’re simple-minded . . . The swastika. . . . It’s provocation. But the crux of the problem, in my opinion, doesn’t exist.

What can become of a generation brought up in a climate of wide-spread amnesia, with the � gure of Adolf Hitler in the guise of the ‘bogeyman’—a � gure whose merits are still recognised now and again in questions of social order and social model? In Mme. T.’s words:

There’s one thing for certain. When you see all that’s happening today in the world . . . everywhere, whether it be in Germany or. . . . There’s no doubt that when Hitler was there—I’m not talking about all the geno-cides now, I’m not speaking about extermination—but there was a sort of order and respect. That’s true.

Thus there are people who regret the absence of the iron rod, as in the villages where living alongside travellers (gipsies) has recently become a catastrophe and where, as witnessed by M. C., “You have reactions like: ‘We need Hitler back again’. . . . ‘Hitler should come back and gas them’”.

There is no end to the way in which the ‘outsider’, be he Jew, gipsy or Muslim crystallises the identity crisis in the region. The persistence of a malaise contrasts with the ‘myth of living together’ in ‘beautiful Alsace’ which Freddy Raphaël describes; it provides a particularly favourable breeding ground for political exploitation. This is why the question of the extreme right must be re-examined.


CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

TWO EXTREME RIGHT POLITICAL FORCES, TWO ANTI-SEMITIC RATIONALES

Two political groups share the extreme right vote in Alsace. The Front

national (FN ) is, as its name indicates, nationalist (‘centralising and Jacobin’, as they have no hesitation in saying) and anti-European. Alsace

d’abord (AA = Alsace First) just as its name suggests, is � ercely regionalist (‘opportunist’ in the words of the FN ) and, in addition, pro-European. Is it an appendage to the FN, a parallel political formation? Or is it instead a splinter group, as demonstrated by the political careers of Robert Spieler, its leader, who was elected as a member of the FN in 1986, and Stéphane Bourhis, its spokesperson, a town councillor in Hoenheim, who, from the age of 15 years onwards, was an activist in the FNJ, the youth movement of the FN ? However, some senior AA of� ce-bearers have never been in the FN, such as Jacques Cordon-nier—who objects to the extreme right label—or Anne Kling, an RPR renegade and activist following the short-lived Millonist tradition.1

In 1998, there was an outright confrontation between the Front national and Alsace d’abord: Stéphane Bourhis, the second in command of the FN in the Bas-Rhin since 1991, followed the ‘traitor’, Bruno Mégret—and most of the senior of� ce-bearers went with him. He became the local leader of the MNR which he lost no time in merging with the regional-ist political formation led by Robert Spieler under various names since 1989.2 From then on, Alsace d’abord appeared as a political rival to the Front national, having picked up most of its active members.

1 From the name of Charles Millon, who attempted to create an alliance between the traditional right and the extreme right in Rhône-Alpes; for further information on Alsace d’abord, we refer the reader to News d’Ill, “L’inconnue Alsace d’abord”, February 2004, n° 75, devoted to the regional elections in 2004; this issue is the work of students from the Centre universitaire d’enseignement du journalisme de l’université Robert-Schuman, who carried out a survey of the members of AA as well as of its voters, showing the complexity of this formation and the diversity of the motives of those who support it.

2 Robert Spieler explained his departure from the FN in “Poursuivre le combat—Robert Spieler s’explique”, published in Nationalisme et République, n° 1, summer 1990 and in Espace nouveau.


two extreme right political forces 271

If the split in the extreme right was able to create two apparently permanent, distinct organisations, it is for reasons which are profound and of major importance to our research. For, in Alsace d’abord, the in� uence of the Nouvelle Droite (the New Right) is considerable, and with it goes a form of anti-Semitism, the meaning of which contrasts with that of the Front national in Alsace which is run by Catholics who tend to be fundamentalist. Before starting to examine this question it may be useful to present the balance of power between the two politi-cal formations.

The Front national, despite its lack of a sound militant structure and with practically no canvassing of the electorate very rapidly obtained its best results in Alsace and, as we have seen, particularly in the rural areas. The values which it represents (order, rejection of immigrants, etc.), the symbols which it uses (its initials, the logo, the name of the leader) had an impact which outweighed its inadequacies in organisa-tion and its lack of � rm ties in the region.

In the case of Alsace d’abord, its regional anchoring on the ground is undeniable. This allows it to play subtly on the various characteristics of Alsatian culture—ranking top is an attachment to the Alsatian identity, the distrust of ‘Parisian centralism’ and of the ‘France of the interior’ (as opposed to the frontier regions) or else the strong European aspira-tions of the Alsatians. Moreover, it is in Europe, particularly in countries of Alemannic culture that Alsace d’abord seeks its models, including the CSU in Bavaria and the Flemish Vlams Block which have succeeded in combining national populism with a degree of modernisation. Thus Alsace d’abord has succeeded in providing an alternative to the FN at local level which is rather more solid than Bruno Mégret’s short-lived MNR. Despite its relative infancy, it won almost 10% of the vote in the most recent regional elections, an increase of almost 60% on its 1998 result. But it did not quite achieve the 10% required to be represented on the Conseil régional, a particularly important platform.

The Front national vote is sustained not only by the frustrations of the Alsatians but also by their anger. It is the expression of a rebellion in a region where ‘weightings’ and a ‘consensus culture’ are traditionally presented as being the core values. This probably explains its shame-faced nature and is perhaps one of its local limits. Conversely, the applying of lessons learnt from the Nouvelle Droite, as much in terms of handling ideas as in communication, totally rids the representatives of Alsace d’abord of all complexes about their position and guarantees them a formidable air of respectability. They are not in the slightest afraid


272 chapter eighteen

of the greatest possible openness to the outside world, they present themselves as ‘Europe-wide regionalists’ and, in comparison with the FN, are usually considered ‘moderate’.

The Front National, or the Persistence of Traditional Anti-Semitism

David Heller, deputy head of the Front national group in the region, thinks it is an exaggeration to say that the local wing of his party has fallen into the hands of traditionalist Catholics. Himself a non-practis-ing Catholic, he estimates that 10% of the senior of� ce-bearers have traditionalist tendencies. But Magalie Boumaza, author of a thesis in political science on the involvement of young people in the Front

national, demonstrates that this tendency has suf� cient weight to permit its members to occupy the best places on the electoral lists, and that it is even a family affair, even if it means candidates’ maiden names being put forward when wives appear on the lists.

M. Codderens, the regional councillor whom we met, does seem to come into this category, even if he explained to us that, “There is no such thing as fundamentalist Catholicism. A Catholic is a Catholic, that’s all”. When we invited him to comment on the Archbishop of Strasbourg’s position in favour of the inclusion of Islam in the local legal regime, his reply was an immediate indication of the most readily recognisable position: “This raises the whole problem of the power of freemasons in the Church . . .”.

Not many sets of beliefs are more rigid than those professed by the Catholic counter-revolution since the 19th century. But unlike Abbé Barruel of bygone days, it is no longer in Voltaire’s correspondence that M. Codderens seeks the proof of conspiracy and the work of the devil, but in contemporary documents:

I remember a report written by Coca-Cola I had read, which said that the Soviet Union did not die of excessive bureaucracy but of a lack of it. That’s what Coca-Cola said . . . a lack of bureaucracy, the Soviet Empire died from a lack of bureaucracy. What does that mean? It means that they have management methods, and we can see that. Take, for exam-ple, the management of worldwide population movements. They know how to channel things, to organise, to implement, to make cuts and decisions—some are given the pill, others are decimated and others are bombed. They know how to do things! They know perfectly well what they are doing . . . [. . .]. They have vision [. . .] When Simone Veil and Professor . . . all the freemason lodges . . . Simone Veil—I mean the one



who is a minister, not the philosopher—Simone Veil decides along with all those post-war members of parliament [. . .] that abortion should be legalised in the 1970s—they decided that 30 years before it took place. Thirty years in advance, they decide on social developments . . .

In this type of scenario, pride of place is reserved for the Jews and, while this may be attributed to them guardedly, it is de� nitely as a result of legislation and, in particular, of the Gayssot Law:

Judaism, by its very nature, is not expansionist by vocation. . . . That is, it lives—a bit like mushrooms! There’s nothing negative about that. What I mean—it’s just to give you an idea—I mean they adapt to the coun-tries where they live. They adapt: they live in communities. They adapt to the countries where they are. But their community is their commu-nity alone! They don’t give anyone any trouble. They live in their own community and at the same time they integrate into the public sphere to some degree. They integrate into the country where they are. And then it’s true that there is a Jewish elite which participates in the life of each country. . . . Now what’s the connection between the . . . Jews and the Freemasons, what relation is there between the world powers and the Jews, that’s another question!

The persistence of this type of thinking astonished even Stéphane Bourhis, the former Front national member who went over to Alsace

d’abord. He joked:

[. . .] you � nd all sorts in the United States. There’s the central power, that’s clear . . . I suppose that Codderens must have fun every morning trying to work out the family tree of the whole Bush administration!

This radical conception, of which anti-Semitism is one of the main constituent elements, if not the central theme, does form a real block. It is not readily transmissible. It is based on viewing history in terms of a conspiracy and is, furthermore, dependent on the mastering of a corpus of texts and of knowledge which assumes an above-average level of general culture. Furthermore, it is strongly linked to a constant religious involvement which cannot be described as constituting a par-ticularly fashionable model nowadays. It looks like a survival and those who adopt it usually tend to withdraw into themselves, cultivating a real paranoia towards the outside world.

An interview with two young FN militants, A and B, nevertheless demonstrated how some of its components might be transmitted. When we referred to the problems of the world and they saw them as the damage wreaked by ‘globalisation’, we reminded them that in the FN, some people think that the responsibility for such damage lies



with certain individuals, and we mentioned the name of the regional councillor. One of them then stressed the competence of M. Codderens in this � eld: “He’s highly specialised. He’s the technician. He’s really more specialised”. The other showed an interest and asked, “What did he say?” We then introduced the idea of the existence of pressure groups—freemasons, for example. The reaction was immediate:

[. . .] Yes, of course, freemasonry has something to do with it, that’s for certain! No doubt about it! Freemasonry is well-established in Strasbourg. And so, it must have something to do with it. There’s no point in delud-ing ourselves.

While at no point did these militants engage in the exercise of putting things into a historical perspective, conversely, the signs of an explicit hostility towards Jews were evident in their remarks throughout the conversation, at times becoming structured:

A.:—Here’s another example; they always include the Jewish festivals in the calendar. I’m sorry but . . . why is it always the Jewish festivals, why not the Muslim festivals or others? Why always the Jewish festivals? I don’t agree with that. They should all be included and since that is not possible, well, let’s just put in ours. That’s normal, all the same [. . .]. Why should preference be given to . . .B.:—One religion rather than another?A.:—Yes, that’s what I mean.Researcher:—Do you have the impression that preference is given to the Jewish religion in certain respects?A.:—Yes, that’s what I was saying before.B.:—Yes, they have a lot of in� uence, that’s for sureA.:—It’s the memories, the infamous memories of the concentration camps. It was terrible, but there are lots of . . .B.:— . . . genocides.A.:— . . . genocides.B.:—Why is there not a monument . . .?A.:— . . . to commemorate the Armenian genocide?B.:— . . . to commemorate the Armenian genocide in Strasbourg?A.:—It makes me wonder. Nowadays do we calculate the suffering of such and such a person?B.:—Or else the victims of Communism: 50 or 60 million people died . . .A.:—It really is sinking pretty low, in terms of behaviour.B.:—I always ask those sorts of questions. I wonder if we shouldn’t also put up monuments for those who died under Communism.A.:—So, there you have it. Why should Jewish festivals be given prefer-ence over other religions in the calendar? Now if I say that to anyone in the street they’ll say, “Yes, you’re being racist”.



These comments regarding the Jews, perhaps more structured than the remarks we noted amongst ‘ordinary’ Alsatians, are nevertheless very similar to them, and seem to have the same sources: repression of the past, off-loading of guilt, lack of recognition and rejection of the drama of the Alsatian Jews . . . Furthermore, once again we come across an idea we have heard before:

A.:—This is perhaps going to shock you but, if I say it now, but you see, my thinking is so objective that I can even allow myself to think that even Hitler, who is a criminal, a heinous villain, a monster . . . well, even him, if we analyse things objectively, obviously he can’t be all bad!B.:—Everybody says that it’s negative. But if you talk about that today, it’s negative . . .A.:—Like all human beings, he must also have had perhaps one or two good ideas, even if he is the worst of criminals.

Within the Alsatian FN and no doubt amongst those of its voters who adhere most � rmly to its ideology too, anti-Semitism de� nitely resonates and is extremely banal. For all that its ideological dimension does not seem to have much in� uence on its commonly held forms, on the contrary, it gives the impression of � oating on the surface of the quiet river of ordinary anti-Judaism with no other effect than to reveal its resonance. The hostility towards the Jews is attached to the global vision of the Front national activists. It is one of many elements, which do not need to be explicitly expressed, and which is often eclipsed by more immediate preoccupations and ones which are more likely to mobilise feelings: immigration, tax, and the fact that tomatoes are now tasteless . . .

Above all, anti-Semitism is henceforth an integral part of rationales which focus on Islam and Muslims as the main preoccupation, as in these remarks by M. Codderens:

[. . .] what is happening, in my opinion, [. . .] immigrants are encouraged to come and we’re importing problems which were not French ones. France was a country which was at peace. It has become a country at war. [. . .] They say, “It’s the second intifada . . .”. No, what’s happened is that wherever the North African and Jewish communities are living side by side, they’re at war. People have to realise that, before colonisation, the life of the Jews in North Africa was dreadful. They were under Muslim domination and it’s thanks to France and the Third Republic in France that the Jews were able to breathe freely and prosper, and that’s why they were proud to be French. And it’s an aspect of colonisation which it is very important to know about. Well, by bringing in Muslims again, well, they’re recreating the conditions they were in before . . . And now they’re



asking the Republic to defend them. But it’s easy to see that today the Jews are leaving the state schools and going to denominational schools. Damn it! People say the Jews are keeping out of the Muslims’ way [. . .]. But nobody says anything about the poorer white children who have been keeping out of the way for much longer. Do you see what I mean? And when the Jews are concerned—well, it’s true that in a way minorities are ‘go-getters’ so to speak . . . well, let them make demands. But all I want to say is that we have our demands to make for our own as well. You always have to see the other side! Well, it’s true that they have problems with the Muslims and in my opinion, that’s not going to get any better . . . In the banlieues everything is ‘feuj ’ ( Jewish), you get ‘feuj ’ pens, ‘feuj ’ chairs. . . . Oh look, that’s a ‘feuj ’ chair . . . that’s what they say in the banlieues.

These viewpoints make of the ‘Arabs’, the Muslims, a problem which is said to be faced � rst and foremost by the Jews. Do they not indicate the possibility of a move away from anti-Semitism and a rapprochement with the Jews in the face of a new threat? Amongst the activists, the changes in the public debate have been noted. In the words of B.:

[. . .] We have noticed a change in the sense that the Jewish community has also become very aware of immigration. They’ve become very aware of it, so they pay a great deal of attention to us, and you have to bear in mind that there were rabbis who called on people to vote for Le Pen in the second round of the elections.3

But this remark did not lead to any practical conclusion and did not indicate any signi� cant shift in the tendencies of the Alsatian FN. The Weltanschauung of the Front national is stable, at least as far as Jews are concerned.

Alsace D’abord: A Repositioning?

The leaders of Alsace d’abord (AA) present a different image: a strong mobilisation on the question of the ‘new anti-Semitism’, a good com-mand of the facts and the issues of the problem, an excellent knowledge of the terrain and a taste for debate and analysis. One of the strengths of the Nouvelle Droite is to encourage exchanges of opinion and discus-sion. It is also one of the major assets of Alsace d’abord in matters of

3 In fact, the reference is to the owner of a well-known restaurant in the Rue des Rosiers in Paris who, between the two rounds of the presidential elections in 2002, made headlines by saying that the presence of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round was a ‘warning’ to the North African immigrant population.



communication. But the in� uence of the Nouvelle Droite also clouds the issue and has some surprises in store. M. Codderens of the FN said of Robert Spieler, president of AA, “He’s got quite a few strings to his bow . . .”.

The leaders of Alsace d’abord to whom we spoke had all taken note of the distress of the Jewish community faced with the rise of anti-Semitism, and noticed that it was widely attributed to the populations of Arab-Muslim descent. A distress which they understand all the bet-ter—and this is one of the few points on which they agree with the Front

national—for the fact that for many years they have been denouncing Islam in general and the Islam of the immigrant populations in par-ticular: a threat symbolised by a drawing which for a time appeared on the walls in Strasbourg, and which showed the face of a traditional Alsatian woman covered by a chador. Without exception, senior of� ce-bearers and ordinary militants alike all relayed this apparently obvious idea: Islam is said to be totally incompatible with European culture and, equally, with the Republic, despite its claims of assimilation. In Robert Spieler’s words:

We see how it functions: the very structure of Islam means that it will never work. There will never be any unity, historically it has never existed. There’s no hierarchy or clergy in Islam . . . It’s not Sarkozy who’s going to create it just because he has decided to do so! A few idealists are not going to succeed in doing something that nobody has ever managed to do anywhere in the world.

From this point of view, the emergence of a latent disagreement between Jews and Muslims, seen uniquely from the perspective of the importing of the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict into France,4 seems to afford an oppor-tunity for an alliance in the name of the Judeo-Christian civilisation against the invader. The Jews are merely the � rst victims of a con� ict which is becoming globalised. Robert Spieler went on:

[. . .] You know, the Jewish community is nevertheless on the front line as far as the problem with Israel is concerned. So, even if people say there is no transposition of the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict here in Europe, or if

4 . . . in passing, this tends to reinforce some of the hypotheses stated by the Nouvelle Droite: “Another conclusion that I draw from this con� ict is that it proves the impos-sibility of two communities which are fundamentally different and opposed to one another living in harmony in the same place”, Robert Spieler explained to us; as for the importation of this con� ict into France, he declared—still from the same perspec-tive—that Europe would be the scene of the global confrontations of the future.



people refuse to see the reality, well, the reality does exist all the same: it affects the Jewish community . . . it may affect other communities less, but it does affect the Jewish community whether you like it or not. I think that the Jewish community has effectively become aware that there is a real problem there, and for a long time it hid behind the designation of the extreme right as the vehicle of anti-Semitism . . . As the facts are nevertheless undeniable, many Jews have realised that it is not as simple as all that. Even if there are lunatics who scrawl swastikas on cemetery walls—anyway, goodness knows, who’s behind it all—the majority of anti-Semitic acts today are the work of non-European populations who import tensions from the Middle East. . . . If tensions increase further tomorrow, it’s the Jewish community which will be on the front line all the same. The hostility of the fanaticised masses of [. . .] � ghters will target the Jews as a priority, more than any other community . . . Well, it will come to all of us, but the Jews will be � rst.

Stéphane Bourhis, the spokesman for the movement, makes no secret of the political conclusions that he draws from this type of analysis:

[. . .] so, are we pro-Palestinian, anti-American or anti-Israeli, or anti-Zionist in this case? That’s the question! The fact remains that gradually we have effectively seen in the banlieues . . . ultimately, the young people in the banlieues prefer to see themselves in Arafat, after Saddam Hussein, or possibly as Bin Laden, rather than imagining they are Zidane or Mehdi Bala—he’s the Alsatian sportsman who scores a lot. He is well-known here. And it’s true that, from a political point of view, we saw it all coming.

As a result, to test the water, a ‘Letter to the leaders of the Jewish community in Alsace’ signed by Robert Spieler and Anne Kling, was sent to the leaders in question on 8 December 20035 in an attempt to bring about the rapprochement imagined by Alsace d’abord. This letter was couched in violently anti-Muslim prose with the traditional themes: the consubstantially political dimension of Islam, the exposure of “its expansion which was deliberate and incredibly encouraged by the state at the highest level”, a warning concerning the demographic risk to the nation (‘the law of numbers is ruthless’), etc. It also played on the association of identities—‘France, its civilisation and its Judeo-Christian identity’, ‘our Alsatian, French and European identity’—and intra-community divisions: “We each have in our communities people who, for ideological reasons or others, are working to destroy our identities. Let’s � ght them with all the energy mustered by our will to survive”. Thus it pits the LICRA (and its unremitting efforts to oppose the members

5 Shortly before our survey was carried out.



of Alsace d’abord ) against the association Avocats sans frontières6 presided over by the lawyer William Goldnadel—he is also the vice-president of the France-Israël association. The letter presents the latter as the defender of Anne Kling in an action brought against her for incite-ment to racial hatred by the LICRA (a lawsuit which the LICRA lost) and ended, in conclusion, with an invitation: “We would be delighted if it were possible to set up a dialogue with you and meet you with a view to exchanging the results of our analyses”.

Indeed, this is not the � rst attempt by the extreme right ‘to open the debate’ with the Jewish community and Stéphane Bourhis reminded us “[. . .] this was begun by the Front in other places, in the south of France, also in Nice . . .”. Similarly, elsewhere in Europe, the rapproche-

ment between the Vlaams Block and the Jewish community in Antwerp sets a precedent and is an example of a process which is already well under way. The leaders of Alsace d’abord insisted on the importance of this letter. M. Cordonnier remarked:

[. . .] at one point they considered it permissible to write to members of the Jewish community, because they knew that the time had come when they could take the liberty of writing this letter, and see what sort of reception it would get—good, bad or indifferent . . . They would never have dared to write it three years ago. Because they knew that it would be taken very badly. . . .

The members of the Jewish community were generally extremely dis-creet about this letter, and often quite simply made no mention of it at all.7 M. Cordonnier did point to three or four positive replies—from older people, living in Haut-Rhin. But, above all, he assured us that:

[…] there were absolutely no negative reactions. None whatsoever. Nobody wrote to say: “We don’t want your letter, keep your mail to yourself,” nobody. And that’s what we would have been letting ourselves in for if we had written to them a few years ago, I’m sure.

Robert Spieler considered that this letter meant he was right:

[…] I’ve had reactions in particular from someone, a community leader I’ve known for a long time […] who regularly attends various meetings

6 There is another association with the same name which bears no relation to that of William Goldnadel.

7 In retrospect, the manner in which this letter was handed to us (by Jewish com-munity leaders who preferred to remain anonymous) does seem to us, beyond the apparently innocuous gesture, somewhat enigmatic.



and who keeps up a bit with politics. . . . He said, “You know, I read your letter. I can’t say so openly but I entirely agree with you. You’re right” [. . .]. And the wife of this gentleman, whom I’ve met on various occasions and who a few years ago explained to me that my remarks were racist, etc., too extremist . . . explained to me [. . .] that she had an Arab Muslim cleaner who was extremely moderate etc., which is proof, therefore, that there are moderate people. I ran into her a while ago [. . .]. She came up to me, saying, “Do you realise what’s happening in Israel? It just can’t go on. It’s starting here too”.

Could the Jewish community veer towards the extreme right? Stéphane Bourhis does note a growing tendency to move in that direction along with, he remarks, at the same time, the inevitable resistance thereto:

Everyone knows that the letter caused quite a stir, and that’s doubtless why there was no reply: because people felt uncomfortable about it. Because they know very well . . . they know perfectly well that in the inner sanctum of the community, many people are thinking, “Let’s get our priorities right”.

The new found acceptability of some remarks about Islam leads to the ‘whitewashing’ of some of the more nefarious authors—“Del Valle is practically a member of the UMP today. It’s quite amusing. We who know his past can’t help smiling”, said Stéphane Bourhis, and the implacable enemies of the past glimpse the possibility of � nding shared interests. In his own way and for ‘his’ community, William Goldnadel, the lawyer whose services Alsace d’abord can boast of having used more or less directly, is the embodiment of this option. Robert Spieler recounted how the cosignatory of his letter, Anne Kling, had for several years been in contact with the lawyer who had defended her in a lawsuit in which she was attacked by the LICRA, and how he had “effectively had the opportunity of meeting him and having dinner with him”. In the opinion of Stéphane Bourhis:

Goldnadel has a fairly complex attitude—I really think he’s fairly close to the Likud . . . But Goldnadel is one of these people in France who are trying to explode a certain number of divisions and � nd allies for the Jewish cause, and the Israeli cause which lies behind it. But at one point Anne Kling had been attacked because she had attacked Islam, and Goldnadel offered at some point to defend Anne Kling whom he already knew because he had set up a collective in France which was a collective against a lack of security, and Anne Kling was the representative of this committee in Alsace. That’s another reason why he defended her. They were friends, you know . . . and, on top of that, since we had invited Del Valle, etc., that corresponds to . . . not that there’s anything organised there



either. It’s true that on some issues there are things which can be done, and on others it’s not possible . . .

Did the AA’s appeal to the ‘Jews in Strasbourg’ achieve its goal? How receptive was the community to it? Here is what one of the leaders of LICRA-Alsace had to say: “Goldnadel is at the fringes”. In his opinion, this ‘extreme right activist’ de� nitely does not play fair, but:

at the same time he is easily spotted all the same [. . .] You can’t be seen with him. But, for example, he came to give a lecture to the Israelite community in Strasbourg. I called Jean Kahn (President of the Israelite Consistory of Bas-Rhin) and said to him: “Listen, you shouldn’t really have anything to do with Goldnadel”. He almost hung up on me [. . .]. If you want my opinion, he’s not a legitimate spokesperson. He’s outrageous and his message is outrageous. . . . But, it is perhaps a form of populism as well. The Jews are no smarter than anyone else! That’s what everyone says . . . that at the moment the Jewish population is being victimised. Nobody wants to hear it. [. . .] They say, “It’s their own business. It’s between them . . . the Jews, the Arabs . . . they have to sort out this Israeli business [. . .] they have to sort it out. They’re annoying us with their carry-on”. . . . People are not stupid. They know where this anti-Semitism is coming from. They know it’s not a French matter and they wash their hands of it, and so we end up with a confrontation between communi-ties . . . so Goldnadel is right!

This position is not tenable. Our interviewee seemed to be caught in the cross� re. At one and the same time he seems to lament and to take responsibility for a dilemma which allows this seduction of the Jewish community to take place.

For his part, Robert Spieler seems to trust the strategic understanding of part of the Jewish community.

I have my approach. I think there are an increasing number of people in the Jewish community who are aware of the reality, and I hope that those who are not aware will succeed in overcoming the schizophrenia that awaits them.

As far as we could see, he was somewhat distant from the anti-Semitic obsessions of some groups, open to the Jews if need be:

We have among us people who are close to the Jews or of Jewish origin. We also have people who are extremely pro-Zionist and very militant—I mean people who are not Jewish, for example one of the people in our team [. . .], who was, I think, in fourth place on the list in the regional elections . . . is a fervent admirer of Israel and the Jewish world. I wouldn’t say that you’ll never hear people say, “I’m fed up with all that etc.”.



But generally speaking [. . .] our people are not anti-Semitic [. . .]. There’s no awareness of a Jewish problem, there is an awareness around the problem of the massive presence of non-European and especially Muslim communities. That’s where the problem lies. It’s not with the Jews.

The neutrality which the leader of Alsace d’abord displays today is suspect because it was not always acceptable or, at least, in the past, had no dif-� culty in accepting close proximity with the “small groups obsessed with the Jewish problem” from which today he wishes to distance himself � rmly.8 And it is quite possible that his strategy will come to an abrupt end. The fact remains that it indicates a considerable gulf between the anti-Semitism of the Front national, which is set in the context of a view of history based on a theme of conspiracy, and fraught with an appar-ently impassable anti-Judaism, and that of Alsace d’abord which appears, on the contrary, to be open to strategic adjustments.

In France, Alsace presents the image of a region in which anti-Semitism does succeed in rising to the political level to some extent, which is rather exceptional. But this movement is limited. There is no rapprochement between the two extreme right formations, at least not in their strategy and explicit discourse.

8 Apart from a career which “speaks for itself ” and of which some of the milestones are recalled in the magazine News d’Ill, Robert Spieler was a member of the editorial board of the journal Espace nouveau for six issues, which, at the beginning of the 1990s brought together the � rst dissidents from the Front national. Strongly in� uenced by the Nouvelle Droite, we regularly � nd expressed there a violent anti-Semitism and quota-tions or references to Mabire, Coston, Brigneau, the ‘late François Duprat’, Barrès, Maurras and even Drumont, accompanied by the denunciation of the ‘progressive monied-ethno-religious powers’ or the ‘gofers of stateless capitalism’.


CHAPTER NINETEEN

MOHAMMED LATRÈCHE AND THE PARTI

DES MUSULMANS DE FRANCE

Could anti-Semitism in France make its way by means of forces legally established in the political system? We have already seen that in Alsace the extreme right does offer an af� rmative answer to the question, although it is cautious and limited. Another speci� city of the region, unique to France, is that it is the stronghold of a political party claiming to represent Islam, the Party of Muslims of France (the PMF—Parti des musulmans de France), founded in 1997 at the time of the general elections when it won 0.65% of votes cast. Now the leader of the party, Mohammed Latrèche, uses language with strong anti-Semitic connotations.

The general public had the opportunity to make his acquaintance on 17 January 2004 when he took the initiative and organised a big demonstration in Paris in favour of the wearing of the Muslim headscarf in state schools. But the inhabitants of Strasbourg have known him for some time, � rst as a politico-religious leader and then as founder of the PMF. Despite the fact that he is not in any way representative, his action has made him a well-known � gure: he has organised demonstra-tions in Strasbourg (where chants of ‘Death to the Jews’ were heard for the � rst time since World War II), then in Paris; he participated in the ‘human shield’ operation in Iraq in support of Saddam Hussein when the second Gulf War was declared and, along with other militants of theradical ‘anti-Zionist’ cause, was associated with the publication of the Judeo-Nazi Manifesto of Ariel Sharon. Mohammed Latrèche has no hesitation in being seen in public with � gures who also smack of the heresy of hatred of the Jews, Serge Thion, the notorious negationist and friend of Robert Faurisson, Hervé Van Laethem, the leader of the Belgian ultra right, Nation, with whom he went to Iraq, or Ferdinand Moschenross, a familiar � gure on the Alsatian separatist scene. He spent seven years in Syria where he seems to have formed relations in the upper echelons. His action is supposed to be not local (to Strasbourg) or regional (Alsace) but national, if not international, and at the moment there are as many Parisians as residents of Strasbourg among the active


284 chapter nineteen

militants of the PMF. But he does truly constitute an important � gure in the ‘game’1 being played out in Strasbourg and in Alsace.

Mohammed Latrèche is the worst nightmare of the Jewish community in Strasbourg. Mme A. expresses the fear which he arouses:

[. . .] you know very well that all it needs is for some crackpot to decide to take action . . . It is well-known that in some of the mosques here, the message, the slogan is: ‘anyone who kills a Jew is doing a good deed’ [. . .]. I have had to do battle with Mohammed Latrèche [. . .]. Moham-med Latrèche is simply dreaded, here, even amongst [. . .]. My husband teaches in the university. A Muslim colleague told him that he is a person to be feared.

The demonstrations which he organised in Strasbourg—one of which was prevented at the last moment from passing in front of the synagogue

de la Paix, in the heart of the ‘Jewish neighbourhood’—had an impact which was more than symbolic. The leaders of the CRIF indicated that calls for murder chanted by the crowds led by Latrèche were followed by anti-Semitic acts:

M. U.:—After the PMF demonstrations which are vicious demonstrations, there is regularly damage to Jewish institutions for a few days, whether it be in the cemeteries, or stone-throwing, graf� ti and so on. There are regularly consequences.Mme. L . . .:—There are also attacks!

The man and his capacity to mobilise—the extent of which is however dif� cult to estimate with any kind of precision—creates a climate of fear in the Jewish community. It must be said that Mohammed Latrèche does impress observers with his outstanding qualities of organisation, as witness the demonstrations launched by the PMF: the stewards are impressive as are the number and diversity of the participants. The daily newspaper, L’Alsace thus reported the presence, during a demonstration in support of the Palestinian cause, of people who had come by bus from Mulhouse, Paris and also from Belgium and Germany.2

1 The term was used in signi� cant fashion by Robert Spieler who told us: “Moham-med Latrèche, who is someone extremely intelligent and talented and who has also played this game very skilfully”.

2 L’Alsace, 1 April 2002, “Palestine: trois mille manifestants à Strasbourg”.


mohammed latrèche and the PARTI DES MUSULMANS DE FRANCE 285

Politics and Religion

The discourse of Mohammed Latrèche merits consideration, or rather the variety of forms of discourse, since it would appear that he has made considerable changes in recent years. A previous inquiry,3 which had already led to our meeting the leader of the PMF, had revealed that he accorded considerable importance to religious themes which tend today to be relegated to a position of secondary importance. He explained to us:

[. . .] the PMF has no religious activity . . . this is in no way our sphere of activity. We are not going, in my political activity. . . . We are not � xated with which religion or community a person belongs to. We are more concerned with adherence to our cause, or to what we defend.4

The political dimension of his approach differentiates his approach from a religious one—which does not prevent him from endeavouring to become the voice of protest on the Muslim headscarf and from leaving a place, although restricted, for Islam. As Robert Spieler puts it: “Islam is almost only one aspect of the approach . . . moreover, of a political approach”. In fact, the issues which have been used to support his national media coverage are mainly political: the resentment of the harkis; the Gulf War then the Iraq war; the Palestinian cause. . . . In Strasbourg, the political nature of his involvement is even clearer: when Catherine Trautmann headed the town council, the PMF was mainly concerned with campaigning tirelessly against the Parti socialiste (PS). Franck Frégosi reminded us:

When it was created, its aim was nevertheless to defeat the PS, the ‘parti sionisé’ (the ‘Zionised’ party) at all costs [. . .]. At the time, Latrèche was nonetheless clearly on the right. His target was � rst and foremost to beat the PS which is what explained the fact that he could tend to play in favour of the right.5

3 Cf. Michel Wieviorka, editor, Violence en France, Paris, Le Seuil, 1999, the chapter on Strasbourg.

4 Interview with M. Latrèche, 10 June 2004. Unless otherwise indicated, the quota-tions which follow come from this interview.

5 On this point, we would like to mention the existence of a polemic concerning the presumed relations between M. Latrèche and M. Grossmann, President of the Urban Community of Strasbourg—a polemic of which the key points (accusation and denial) can be consulted on the website: http://www.proche-orient.info.



The anti-Semitism of Mohammed Latrèche is particularly evident in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian question. He begins by accusing the media, and more speci� cally the television:

Moh. Lat.:—I’ll give you an example. We held a fantastic demonstration in March 2002, when the massacre took place in Jenin. The journalist did some good reporting, Elisabeth Schonberg said on Saturday evening, “and the demonstrators dispersed calmly”. The following day, Sunday: “When we know that yesterday the demonstration in Strasbourg ended with anti-Semitic slogans . . .”.Researcher:—Is that the demonstration where people were accused of shouting ‘Death to the Jews?’Moh. Lat.:—No, that was another one. . . . The journalist who reported it called me because he wanted to interview me. He said, “Mr. Latrèche, it’s just incredible, I assure you. Contact the ombudsman. There are people on the editorial committee who are intervening. I can’t say any-thing more . . .”. So I know that the editorial committee of France 2 is not independent, that’s all.

He then presented himself as the victim of blackmail:

[. . .] I’ve already been blackmailed like this. . . . I’ve already met people who are clearly in� uential in the region, whom you must have met, in the Jewish community—Israelite is the word I prefer to use—who have said quite simply, “Look, you shut up or we’ll � nish you off . . .” Just like that . . . I mean to say, they themselves admit to it. They say, “These are our methods” . . . It’s most interesting.

What he says about the Shoah puts him in the camp of those who banalise it or who relativise it, and who are quick to denounce the ‘Jewish lobby’, the ‘Shoah business’ and its use by the Zionists:

[. . .] no other genocide will be as bad as that. What does that mean? Are they predicting the future? [. . .] Yes, it’s true, what happened was wicked and unique. But to say that this horror has no equal means that we are no longer in the domain of instrumentation. It’s a sort of . . . I don’t know . . . it’s become . . . a catechism or something like that. [. . .] Anti-Semi-tism is being instrumentalised by the Zionists, it really is, by Zionists who are more than convinced, Zionists for whom it has become not only an ideology but almost a doctrine [. . .]. So there’s a whole outpouring that is taking place. It’s as if they’re lecturing you about everything because of this and that and the other—in my opinion it leads nowhere. If the phenomenon gains momentum like that, it means that ultimately those who are behind it have some sort of interest in it gaining ground so that they get something in return. I’m sorry, you’ve probably read The Holocaust Industry, the book. Well listen, some strange things have happened all the same. There is something at work. The Shoah has been an industry



for some all the same. . . . When the author talks about himself, I think his father worked in a camp, he received compensation from Germany. And his mother was made to � ll in an application for compensation, but nothing happened to his mother. And when the money was paid, the global Jewish lobby collected the lot and she got nothing at all, and they said, “Listen, it’s a settling of old scores”.

Mohammed Latrèche � nds it unacceptable that the singularity of anti-Semitism be advanced as a way of differentiating what, to his mind, should be only one of many forms of racism:

[. . .] anti-Semitism has become, well, something which is characteristic and which has no equal. . . . Even racism does not rank as high. Whereas, normally, anti-Semitism is supposed to be a type of racism, do you see what I mean? And that’s the problem we have today: to tell someone that they are racist should be enough, shouldn’t it? Then they are racist in all respects, but when they become anti-Semitic, it’s a particular sort of crime, but one which ranks higher than racism, practically, today. And, believe you me, that’s exasperating. It does nothing to help in the struggle against . . .

In his opinion, anti-Semitism is an ideology in the service of Zionism and in a way, if it did not exist, the Zionists would have invented it:

[. . .] you only have to read the Zionist speeches in the pre-war and post-war years. You’ll detect that some people, more precisely the fanatic scholars of this ideology, are convinced that if anti-Semitism did not exist, it would do nothing to help their cause . . . therefore, to some extent, anti-Semitism serves this ideology. It’s something that allows them to pull the wool over people’s eyes. It’s like a punch, you no longer see a thing. So it’s clear, it’s an instrumentalisation. . . .

Moreover, can we be so sure that anti-Semitism really does exist? Mohammed Latrèche is doubtful:

[. . .] To go a bit further into the subject of anti-Semitism, personally, I’m looking . . . does anti-Semitism really exist? That’s the question I ask: has anti-Semitism ever existed? Are there really people who are against them? I don’t like the word ‘anti-Semitism’, I call it ‘anti-Jew’. . . .

In these circumstances, in his opinion, it is not relevant to accuse him of anti-Semitism, which he expresses in terms which merit our attention:

You can give people to understand that the President of the PMF is anti-Semitic. That leaves me completely cold, because it is completely misrepresenting anti-Semitism.



And, just as he challenges the reality of anti-Semitism, he asks questions about the Jews themselves and their ‘Semitic’ characteristics:

I personally reject anti-Semitism. I don’t accept it . . . because, in the � rst instance, if it were the Hebrews who made no secret of being Semites, it’s disquieting. Are the Hebrews Semites? Today, it is a well-known fact that less than 10% of the global Jewish population, less than 10%, is Semitic. Therefore, the problem is already there in the very construction of the word ‘anti-Semitic’, and when we look at the people who are Semites, we � nd people like the Palestinians who are almost all Semites, so what does it all mean? It means that there are people who have the right to be Semites and others who do not . . . whereas . . . Semitism is a form of racial af� liation through language, that’s all. It’s not a religious matter. Today, in Semitism, there’s a desire to construct a race around what would be the Jewish race and I’m sorry but the Jewish race does not exist, just as the Muslim race does not exist any more either . . . The word ‘race’ is something that . . . when people mention ‘race’ . . .

The discourse here is never direct or clear-cut and opens up the pos-sibility of no end of meanings and interpretations being attributed. The reader might thus like to contemplate the following sentence for an instant:

We know that today, if there is anywhere where there are more Jews who die, it is effectively in this part of the world (Israel), unfortunately . . .

A Representative Figure?

The anti-Semitism of Mohammed Latrèche is sustained by the sense of injustice aroused by the situation in the Middle East (particularly amongst the population of North African origin, but not uniquely) and by the anxiety of an Islam which is stigmatised by a society whose modernity has no consideration whatsoever for its identity. But how politically representative is he of the poor and the Muslim banlieues? In what respect does he express the expectations of the low-cost housing estates which are becoming ghettos? To what extent are these at least his canvassing areas?

While claiming to represent Muslims in France, Mohammed Latrèche does at the same time continue to move on the fringes of Alsatian Islam. To say that his is an ‘ultra-minority group’ would be an exaggeration. But he is clearly held at arm’s length by most � gures of the Muslim community in Alsace. That is why he decided not to stand as a candidate for the Conseil régional du culte musulman (CRCM—Regional Council of



Islam). Franck Frégosi explained to us, “The Muslim community does tend to keep him in quarantine”. However, he immediately added, “[. . .] this does not prevent him from having contacts with individuals: some people go to his demonstrations . . .”. Latrèche � nds his public at the margins, in instances where his radical approach does gain him an audience, as was the case during the preparations for the demonstration on 17 January 2004 against legislation to ban the wearing of ‘ostensible’ religious symbols in state schools. Franck Frégosi described for us the climate in which these preparations took place:

[. . .] ultimately, he [Latrèche] gives the impression of being the per-son who shouts the loudest. And at community level, there have been repercussions. That is, there were young girls who said to Abdelhaq in particular (Abdelhaq Nabaoui, President of the CRCM), “Abdelhaq, you have to organise some buses, or whatever, for the demo in Paris. You have to react � rmly because otherwise we’re going to go . . . look, we’ll go with the PMF, but we know what they’re like!” There was pressure from the grassroots, from the young girls especially who said, “You have to react more � rmly. The CRCM must have a position on this matter. We can’t let Latrèche take over the whole protest movement”.

However, that is what happened, as witnessed by the media coverage in which he was the central � gure.

Thus Mohammed Latrèche, if need be, presents himself as the visible, political arm of radical Islam, but with no stable following to support him. He is likely to stir up trouble in the banlieues to serve his own interests, a leader who lends a public face to what otherwise would not appear so visibly. Thus Elie Chouraqui, in a televised documentary on anti-Semitism which attracted some publicity,6 after having driven all round Montreuil in search of non-existent Muslim fundamentalists, � nally showed snaps of the leader of the PMF, perched on a truck. But M. Nabaoui, President of the CRCM, stressed the non-representative nature of Mohammed Latrèche, and invited the Jews of France not to be unduly worried by his verbal blunders:

All that I can say concerning this Latrèche phenomenon is indeed that he doesn’t represent anyone or anything, so it’s not worth worrying unduly about him and remember, he has everything to gain by encouraging people to go to extremes. He can exploit that [. . .]. So, to our Jewish friends, I say, it’s not worth magnifying the problem.

6 “La haine ordinaire”, Élie Chouraqui, broadcast 15 April 2004 on France 2.



The Paradoxes of the Extreme Right

While, as we have seen, they do not exclude a rapprochement with the Jewish community, the leaders of Alsace d’abord nonetheless keep a par-ticularly close and attentive eye on Mohammed Latrèche and his PMF. In the � rst instance, they sense unwritten links between Latrèche and another important Alsatian � gure, Thomas Milcent,7 who converted to Islam in the 1980s. The latter also enjoys considerable standing in the media which he was able to secure for himself, in particular, by his exploitation of matters associated with the wearing of the Muslim headscarf in state schools. Under the name of Dr. Abdallah, he is the author of a book published in 1994 devoted to this question: Le Foulard

islamique et la République française: mode d’emploi.8 Furthermore, he travelled extensively in Afghanistan, in a humanitarian aid capacity, during the war against the Soviet Union, tending to do so with some of the future Taliban rather than on the side of the royalist forces—as did many of the ‘French doctors’. It was in Afghanistan, and by his own account before the Debré Commission, in the heat of battle, that he converted to Islam. Today he holds of� ce in the Conseil régional du culte musulman (CRCM)-Alsace and in the Conseil français du culte musulman (CFCM).

In the opinion of Stéphane Bourhis, who we know has responsibili-ties in Alsace d’abord, Thomas Milcent is the institutionalised equivalent of Latrèche, and his accomplice in agitprop:

[. . .] I can’t help thinking that there are obvious links [. . .]. Milcent is French, from Normandy, but I can’t help thinking that their actions are nonetheless correlated. For the past ten years or so, Milcent’s action has focussed on legal matters: the creation of jurisprudence to ensure that sooner or later, the headscarf will be allowed [. . .]. In that way, it will be decreed by jurisprudence, it will not be religious. It will be a matter of French law. That’s a clever thing to do [. . .]. The Italian left referred to that as metapolitical action, as did the Nouvelle Droite. By that is meant, an action which is on another level and which at some point or other will connect with the political level, or in this case, with the religious level. I can’t help seeing the development . . . and I mentioned it once to Latrèche, but he didn’t answer me. . . . Seeing the way they are both going, the media coverage of the two, which, moreover, occurred at the

7 Cf. the portrait drawn by Jocelyn Bézecourt, director of the website www.atheisme.org: “Qui est Thomas Milcent? La face peu cachée de docteur Abdallah”.

8 Translator’s note: the translation of the title of the book is “The Islamic headscarf and the French Republic: instructions for use”.



same time . . .? Milcent was cautious enough to remain in the background and to join the Conseil représentatif musulman, which Latrèche couldn’t do because he has too many enemies in Strasbourg—and nevertheless, and within the Conseil musulman, Milcent remains a player, pleading for thedefence at Thann or elsewhere . . . whenever there is a problem with the headscarf. . . . And then from time to time, Latrèche stirs things up on the right and the left, organising demonstrations which are very, very well organised, with a huge team of stewards, a real organisational feat.

It is true that Thomas Milcent did not refuse to have anything to do with the demonstration organised by the leader of the PMF on 17 January 2004. A priori, there is therefore nothing to prevent points of contact forming between them or a degree of af� nity. But, given his obvious concern for respectability, it is dif� cult to see exactly how the agitation created by Mohammed Latrèche could serve Thomas Milcent.

The fact remains that the � gure of Latrèche is a godsend for the leaders of Alsace d’abord. He renders credible, at least in appearance, the idea of a political dimension of Islam—which the West so fears—lending credence to the idea of powder-keg housing estates for which Islam would act as the spark and, moreover, gives substance to an anti-Semitism which makes it possible to envisage a rapprochement between this extreme right group and the Jewish community. Is Latrèche not the ‘token anti-Semite’ for Alsace d’abord? The discourse of its leaders reveals a perceptible admiration for Mohammed Latrèche, for example, in the words of Robert Spieler:

He’s an excellent public speaker. I think he’s well trained. . . . I don’t know who trained him, but it’s good. . . . They say he goes to Syria frequently. . . . People who know him describe him as extremely cultured and extremely clever.

Robert Spieler refuses to accept responsibility for the argument that the PMF is not representative, doubtless because the existence of this bugbear suits him and also because, basically, he and Latrèche are developing comparable rationales of political action:

[. . .] he doesn’t represent anything much in electoral terms because when he stands he’ll get 1% of the votes but this type of consideration, when about it comes to the communities, does not have much signi� cance. He may only represent 1% of votes at elections but that does not mean that he cannot mobilise tomorrow. . . . He has people on his side who will stop at nothing [. . .]. They realise that they can make an impact, today or tomorrow. . . . I think we can rely on someone like Latrèche to continue in that vein.



The remarks of Stéphane Bourhis—who, Jacques Cordonnier explained to us, is on � rst name terms with Latrèche (they use the familiar ‘tu’ when speaking to each other)—are even more disturbing. Stéphane Bourhis makes no secret of his personal interest in some of the actions entered into by the leader of the PMF:

During the Gulf War, he went to Iraq along with people on the extreme right from other places and he invited anyone interested to go to Iraq. It’s true that it was nice of him to do that. At one point I was tempted to go myself: what the Americans are going to do is ridiculous. There are no weapons of mass destruction. They don’t realise what’s going to happen afterwards [. . .]. In the event, I had other business to attend to. There were the elections to prepare for here and so on.

Stéphane Bourhis notes the profound similarities between the two undertakings, those of the PMF and Alsace d’abord:

[. . .] there is a natural charisma and a natural empathy which results in . . . sometimes even people who may be militants in our movement say, “Yes, but he’s all right!” And at the same time he is essentially playing on an anti-Semitism which is hidden to a greater or lesser extent [. . .]. He says, “I’m pro-Palestinian” but so, it’s all right. You see, that’s his niche. He does it in a very clever way and he thoroughly enjoys himself—the fact is, he’s a gambler. And then, you have to admit, he handles the media well.

Thus, over and above appearances, totally remote from the bitter hatred which the ‘Islamist fundamentalists’ and the ‘defenders of Alsatian identity’ have for each other, a shared notion of political action and its underlying meaning takes shape which brings a shared idea of irreducible identities into play. Far from the predicted clash of civilisations, strange alliances sometimes emerge which the magazine REFLEXes reports:

A few days before 17 January, the date on which the Parti des musulmans de France called for a protest demonstration against the introduction of legislation banning the Muslim headscarf in state schools, it is worth recalling two or three anecdotes about the party. Of course all the papers have been discussing the creation of this party, its religious orientation and its anti-Semitic logorrhoea. But not a single article has commented on a few facts which are admittedly minor but telling. For example, in January 2003 militants from the PMF attended the annual symposium of the GRECE and handed out stickers and small lea� ets calling for a demonstration in support of Iraq on 8 February 2003. They were also to be seen during this symposium in deep discussion with certain known militants on the neo-right or even neo-Nazi scene. Their openly displayed



political af� liation did not appear to bother the people they were speaking to. Moreover, militants from the PMF can also be seen in the nationalist Parisian bookshops, either at the Licorne bleue or less frequently at the Librairie nationale, searching for old 19th or 20th century anti-Semitic texts. Finally, it was through a network set up by the PMF that European neo-fascist militants like Hervé Van Laethem [from the Belgian movement, Nation] were able to go to Iraq last spring. In Iraq itself, their relations with the French militants from the PMF were, moreover, excellent, their hatred for left-wing militants opposed to anti-Semitism being shared. In short, all of this makes the PMF a particularly despicable party and a political opponent to be fought in the same way as nationalist movements.9

This gives us a better understanding of how Alsace d’abord can at one and the same time attempt a rapprochement with the Jewish community and respect, indeed value, the action of the PMF and its anti-Semitic leader.

9 This text is available on the website of REFLEXes, Magazine antifasciste radical, under the title “Un drôle de parti . . .”: http://re� exes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_arti-cle=192.


CHAPTER TWENTY

DESECRATIONS

Desecrations, particularly of cemeteries, are not a new phenomenon in Alsace. In fact, this is an old practice,1 the anti-Semitic nature of which, especially when it is a question of Jewish cemeteries, has long been stressed. Pastor Chavannes mentioned the desecrations of Chris-tian cemeteries and evoked evidence of a possible link with Satanist groups. He went on:

Nevertheless, in the � rst instance, it is the Jewish cemeteries [he thumped the table]. We know why they are desecrated since, for example, you have swastikas on the tombs, with things like that, and you know it’s speci� cally against the Jewish people, if I can put it in so many words.

Strange Happenings and Mysteries

In Alsace more than elsewhere, Nazi symbols must undoubtedly be interpreted with caution, avoiding over-simpli� ed explanations. To what extent do they systematically refer to a speci� c ideology, or a special intention? The fact remains that whatever the level of spontaneity or preparation of the operation may be, there is not the slightest doubt that the majority of the various profanations and this practice itself are closely linked to the confusion surrounding memories in Alsace referred to in the preceding chapters.

The repeated de� ling of the concentration camp in Struthof (located some 30 miles from Strasbourg) is a good example of this relationship and its ambiguous nature. We should recall here the most spectacular of these: in the night of 13 to 14 May 1976, the hut used as the camp museum was destroyed by arson; a date—27 January 1945—was written

1 For an overview since 1984, in Alsace and elsewhere in France, see L’Alsace of 11 August 2004, “De trop nombreux précédents en Alsace”, article online at: http://www.alsa-presse.com/jdj/04/08/11/IGF/article-24.html. Cf. also, for the previous period and for a consideration based on a comparative France-Germany approach: Simon Epstein, L’Antisémitisme français aujourd’hui et demain, Paris, Belfond, 1984.


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in yellow paint on the memorial as well as on one of the watchtow-ers. In the regional press, the � rst thoughts were that it was a form of revenge linked to local history: after the Liberation, the camp had been used as a detention centre for German prisoners of war, as well as for collaborators and suspected collaborators, who had been subjected to ill-treatment, to which the date seemed to refer.2 A few days later, the press broadcasted the hypothesis that the date corresponded to the liberation of the Auschwitz camp and that the yellow colour was a reference to the yellow star worn by Jews during the war. Ultimately this was the explanation which was favoured by the Fédération nationale

des déportés et internés résistants et patriotes a few days later in Strasbourg.3

2 See Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, 14 May 1976.3 See Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, 18 May 1976. During the demonstration organised

by the LICA (Ligue internationale contre l’antisémitisme, forerunner of LICRA) and which brought together 1,000 people in Strasbourg, the Bas-Rhin FNDIRP (Fédéra-tion nationale des déportés et internés résistants et patriotes) made this speech which is interesting in many respects and, in particular, for the insight it offers us into the long history of the desecration of Jewish cemeteries in Alsace:

Should research not focus on the Nazi or neo-Nazi circles which are constantly appearing on both sides of the Rhine?

What are the aims of those who feel nostalgia for racist National Socialist ideology? They aim to tarnish the Resistance, destroy all trace of the crimes committed between 1933 and 1945, and, instead glorify Nazi propaganda, reviving racism by means of anti-Semitism.

Thus we see the desecration of graves in Jewish cemeteries, graf� ti scrawled on synagogues, the sale of objects used by the army of the Third Reich [. . .], the sale of books and records of war songs, publications from the Mouvement autonomiste alsacien, the windows of the FNDIRP of� ce in Strasbourg broken by stone-throwing; now they dare to attack Struthof and set � re to the irreplaceable relics of the Museum of Deportation. The FNDIRP considers that this commando operation is intended to be both political (neo-Nazi) and anti-Semitic, which goes hand in hand with it.

We have to bear in mind that the liberation of the Auschwitz camp took place on 17 January 1945 and remember that the Nazis assigned the colour yellow to the Jews, as did the Inquisition.

Now at the foot of the silhouette of the deportee carved on the enclosure of the memorial, appear the � gures 27-1-45 in yellow paint; this graf� ti in the same colour is also to be found on the watchtower.

Is this just a coincidence? We do not think so.We should point out what differentiated Struthof—the only concentration camp

listed on French soil—from other camps which served as death camps for the Jewish populations (Auschwitz in this instance) mainly intended for the detention of political prisoners (opponents, members of the Resistance), it does not seem to be the case that the population of the concentration camp was mainly Jewish, quite the contrary. However, a gas chamber was in operation for experiments carried out on Jewish and gypsy deportees brought from other camps specially for the purpose—in collaboration with Professor Hirt from the University of Strasbourg who thus succeeded in enriching his collection of skeletons.


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The episode, old as it may appear, has nevertheless had repercussions recently and mobilised all the aspects of this bygone incident in curi-ous combination. Here is the text which the same federation devoted to it in November 2003:

The concentration camp in Struthof—a place of remembrance, a ceme-tery and a historical monument—was de� led in the night of 28 to 29 October 2003. Graf� ti of a separatist nature was sprayed on the walls of the ticket of� ce and the guard’s shelter, located at the entrance to the camp, door handles were twisted, diesel oil was thrown on the snow so that the red colour brought to mind the red and white � ag (rot und wiss) which the separatists have adopted.

At the scene, a letter addressed to the ‘hautes autorités d’Alsace (the highest authorities in Alsace)’ recalled the:

numerous Alsatian collaborators or those in a similar category [. . . who were subjected to] all sorts of ill-treatment, humiliation and torture equi-valent to that to which the Nazis subjected their prisoners.

Referring doubtless to the burning of the hut used as the camp museum (13 May 1976), its desecration and its destruction on 27 January 1978, the text added:

We are not against the fact that one of the huts is used as a museum, but against the fact that it presents only the German share of the truth while concealing the French share of the historical truth.

The whole text was signed ‘Wotan’ (the most important god in Ger-manic mythology).

Wotan reiterates in its wording the remarks made at the hearing before the tribunal in Mulhouse more than 20 years previously by the authors of the attacks quoted above. They belonged to the ‘Loups noirs’ (Black Wolves), an organisation with European rami� cations, and were sentenced to imprisonment.4

We would like to point out that on several occasions, during recent desecrations, the initials ‘HVE’ and ‘HVE junior’—which recall a small sectarian Alsatian group, the Heimattreue Vereinigung Elsass, or ‘Association

patriotique alsacienne’ (Alsatian patriotic association) disbanded by judicial decision in 1993—were scrawled on the graves or the walls of the

4 Extract from “Autonomistes à l’œuvre au Struthof ”, text published on the website of the Fédération nationale des déportés et internés résistants et patriotes: http://www.fndirp.asso.fr/ indignation.htm.


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cemeteries. But in the meantime, on 19 December 2002, two young people from the Parisian region were sentenced by the Public Prose-cutor’s Of� ce in Saverne for having written negationist remarks in the Struthof visitors’ book. Since they had apparently come to the region with this sole aim in mind, it would appear that they had no connection whatsoever with the Alsatian separatists, tending instead to frequent the Unité radicale (known today as the Bloc identitaire)5 movement.

The turmoil created by the desecrations was ampli� ed by the mystery which, on most occasions, surrounds the authors and their motives, which are open to the most diverse interpretations. The code used does not give all the information and may even have been used to confuse the issue. Only a � nal conclusion to the inquiries with the guilty parties unmasked will shed light. In the absence of an outcome of this sort, we can only envisage rash assumptions. Now the vast majority of the desecrations of cemeteries which took place in Alsace in 2004, and in any event the most important ones, have not been cleared up to date: in the Jewish cemetery in Herrlisheim, 127 tombs were daubed with graf� ti in the night of 29 to 30 April;6 in the cemetery in Meinau in Strasbourg, approximately 50 tombs in the Muslim part of the cem-etery were desecrated in the night of 13 to 14 June; in the national necropolis in Haguenau, seven tombs were broken and 48 others daubed with graf� ti in the night of 23 to 24 June—all housing the remains of Muslim soldiers who died during World War I or II.

A Varied Phenomenon

In Herrlisheim, the motives seem clear. The use of relatively sophisticated Nazi symbols (not only swastikas and SS signs, but coded abbreviations

5 Information available on the website of the LICRA-Alsace: http://licra.en-alsace.net/.

6 In fact, on 5 April and therefore three weeks previously, the interdepartmental head of� ce of the ex-servicemen in Strasbourg had already announced that four Muslim headstones had been desecrated, two of which were broken, and that a Jewish tomb-stone had been daubed with swastikas. In December 2004, a 24 year old lumberjack, a member of the FN, had been arrested for this desecration. But he claimed he was innocent, and to this day no light has been shed on probable accomplices. This arrest is far from a satisfactory outcome to the episode in question which, in many respects, remains a mystery. We note in passing the considerable imbalance between the emo-tion aroused by the desecration itself and the very little publicity given to this start to solving it.


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like HH or 88 for Heil Hitler or slogans such as Juden raus ( Jews get out!), Ein Reich, Elsass, Sieg für den Führer (one empire, Alsace, Victory to the Führer!), ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (one people, one empire, one Führer), the care taken to create a macabre setting (German � ags hung on the gravestones, ‘decoration’ of the entry gate . . .), thought given to the choice of the targets (the oldest tombs rather than the more recent ones, the stone of which would have been easier to clean) all tend to indicate that this is the work of people who are organised and deeply imbued with ideology. Jean-Pierre Roth, the president of the association responsible for the management of the tombs, believes:

We are not dealing with amateurs in role play or kids. These swastikas are drawn perfectly. The person who did them has an excellent knowledge of Nazism. It can only be the work of anti-Semites and ideologists.

Similarly, in the opinion of the Public Prosecutor in Colmar, Pas-cal Schultz: “On reading the graf� ti it is obvious that its authors are undeniably imbued with a National Socialist philosophy which has been perfectly assimilated”.7 All these elements suggest that we should distinguish between this event and the desecration, discovered on 28 July, of the Jewish cemetery in Saverne (34 tombs were daubed with graf� ti); Le Figaro wrote:

This is quite different from Saverne where swastikas were discovered daubed upside down, Satanist type graf� ti and some stars of David had been scrawled. The Deputy Public Prosecutor in Saverne, Jean-Luc Jaeg, alluding to the swastikas found in the Christian cemetery, came out with: “In Herrlisheim, the perpetrators had a good knowledge of the subject. Here, it is more like the desecrations in Niederhaslach”. The culprit, a teenager, had been rapidly identi� ed.8

Since the desecration in Herrlisheim, the most important events seem to be followed by rejoinders on a smaller scale which are more spon-taneous in appearance and the perpetrators of which are sometimes quickly discovered. Thus the Christian cemetery in Niederhaslach was

7 Remarks reported by Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, “Cimetière israélite profané: les grands moyens pour l’enquête”, 1 May 2004; the same edition recalled that it was the fourth time in 40 years that this cemetery had been desecrated: “In August 1992, 193 of the 400 graves were desecrated. Headstones were overturned and stones broken with a sledgehammer. No graf� ti was found. “At that time, it was de� nitely vandals”, recalled Bernard Lazarus, in charge of maintaining the site. The inquiry never led to the detection of the authors of this crime.”

8 Le Figaro, “Profanations au cimetière juif de Saverne”, 29 July 2004.


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desecrated barely 48 hours after the Jewish cemetery in Herrlisheim, then a second time one month later: in neither instance was there any sign of any particularly racist connotations and the swastikas were upside down. Three days after the second desecration, a 14 year old schoolboy was charged with this affair. Similarly, the four perpetrators responsible for the ransacking of an oratory dedicated to the Virgin in Leimbach were arrested on the day after their crime: swastikas and the initials HH drawn in charcoal during a barbecue washed down with plenty of alcohol, earned the only adult in the group a suspended sentence of eight months for having defended crimes against human-ity and destruction in a meeting. On the day of the verdict, 1 June, pro-Nazi and racist graf� ti were found in the covered part of the playground in a school in Lutterbach, near Mulhouse (‘Hitler, we love you’, ‘Hitler, we’re waiting for you’, ‘Niggers into the oven’, ‘Long live France’). Three days later, two 14 year old schoolboys were caught, who explained they were “very, very racist” and “fed up with the Arabs” and that they also would scrawl graf� ti. On the morning of 13 June, the inhabitants of Wittersdorf, a small town near Mulhouse discovered racist and neo-Nazi graf� ti scattered around the village streets, some of which mentioned the name of the mayor of the town as the target. An article in Le Monde pointed out that “several people must have been responsible for this graf� ti, some of which is daubed in black paint and some of which in white paint” and that “the height at which some of the graf� ti has been scrawled indicates that it must de� nitely have been adults”.9 Ten days later, a resident of Breitenbach, the mother of two adopted children from the Congo, discovered a swastika and homophobic and racist graf� ti scrawled in chalk on the wall of her house; then, again, the following morning: ‘Homos live here’, ‘Nig-gers to Africa’ (spelt A� c instead of Afrique), ‘France for the French’ apparently scribbled in haste.

At the same time as these reports of the desecration in Herrlisheim, in which the press saw copycat behaviour provoked by the intense media coverage of the initial event, in the night of 13 to 14 June, the desecra-tion of approximately 50 graves in the Muslim cemetery of Meinau, south of Strasbourg, revealed a series of anti-Muslim acts which also went back several months. Thus, at the end of May, a � re had been lit in a rubbish bin near the home of Aziz El Alouani, the spokesperson

9 Le Monde, 16 June 2004.


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of the CRCM and graf� ti reading Heil Hitler and Elsass frei (Alsace free) had been daubed on the façade of his house. These acts had been preceded by others of this type: a � re started in the Turkish mosque Eyyub Sultan, in Strasbourg (the biggest one in Alsace), another in the mosque in Haguenau, damage done to a grocery shop and a funeral parlour owned by Muslims in Strasbourg. The Meinau cemetery, apart from having its graves covered with swastikas or Celtic crosses, with HH or 88, had its wall covered with graf� ti not only with racist and Nazi connotations—Sieg Heil, ‘Leave Alsace’, ‘white race’, ‘white power’ and ‘Adolf ’—but also with more ‘political’ ones: thus there was a call for the murder of the President of the CRCM, (Regional Council of the Muslim Faith) Abdelhaq Nabaoui and also graf� ti targeting the President of the Conseil regional d’Alsace, (Regional Council of Alsace) Adrien Zeller. This time, the public authorities reacted in a spectacular manner: there was a visit from the Minister of the Interior and a mes-sage from the President of the Republic was read. In connection with this, Le Monde reported the possible repercussion of the desecrations for the public sphere and for the media:10

The government, criticised on Sunday on Europe 1 by Fouad Alaoui, the Secretary General of the Union des organisations islamiques de France (UOIF) for their ‘disproportionate’ reaction in the case of attacks on a Jew, has reacted rapidly and sharply to the desecration in Strasbourg. Alain Juppé, President of the UMP, expressed ‘the extent of his emotion and his indignation’ in the face of ‘heinous acts’. Local elected members, not wishing to be outdone, like Philippe Richert, the (UMP party) Senator and President of the Conseil general du Bas-Rhin, or the (UMP) conseiller général of the local area, Jean-Philippe Maurer, requested ‘a massive and rapid reaction by the authorities’.11

In the night of 23 to 24 June, the military cemetery in Haguenau was the scene of the desecration of approximately 50 graves of Muslim soldiers who ‘died for France’ during the two world wars. There were indignant reactions; according to the terms of the communiqué of the Ministry of the Interior, it was an insult to those “who had commit-ted themselves to the supreme sacri� ce for the freedom of France”. Furthermore, and the list does not end here, the desecration of Mus-lim tombs in the military cemetery of Strasbourg-Cronenbourg on

10 . . . which, as we shall see, seems to have been avoided in Alsace itself.11 Le Monde 16 June 2004.


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6 August,12 that of the Christian cemetery in Wol� sheim on 25 August,13 and another death threat addressed to the President of the CRCM, M. Nabaoui, this time daubed on the wall of his wife’s surgery. Finally, we would like to point out that while the phenomenon is developing particularly strongly in Alsace, desecrations are perpetrated elsewhere in France—as, on 7 May, in Douaumont, in the Meuse, where neo-Nazi slogans and swastikas were discovered on the war memorial to the Jewish soldiers who died in the Battle of Verdun (for which two young skinheads were caught),14 or in Lyon on 9 August, where 56 tombs as well as the 1939–1945 war memorial in the Jewish cemetery in La Mouche were daubed with swastikas and other graf� ti (an affair for which a suspicious character, going by the name of Phinéas and who had previously attacked a person of North African origin with a hatchet, was charged).

The information available suggests that not all these acts are of the same nature. Some appear to have been premeditated (perhaps this is why the police has dif� culty � nding the culprits), others seem to have been more spontaneous—and, in that case, do not reach the spectacular proportions of the desecration in Herrlisheim. Within the latter category, there seems to be a considerable difference between what is strictly copycat behaviour when, for example, in the course of an evening’s drinking, young people damage an oratory dedicated to the Virgin, and the racism explaining the very speci� c attack on a family where two black children are living. The argument that media coverage encourages copycat behaviour is rather inadequate and, if used too systematically results in the elements of racism and hatred inherent to the various events being concealed.15

12 Adrien Zeller, President of the Conseil régional, offered a reward of 10,000 to 15,000 euros to any person who would enable the perpetrators to be found and arrested; on 10 August, two young people ‘close to the extreme right’, were charged, but there is nothing to permit us to presume their involvement in this affair.

13 According to the local authority, the latter is a matter of ‘local revenge’, and in any event has ‘no racist connotation’ (that is, the swastikas were daubed upside down…).

14 Cf. Le Monde 16 August, 2004, “La dérive d’un jeune skinhead, profanateur d’un mémorial juif ”.

15 In this respect, it seems to us that the explanation which was originally imagined after the desecration in Herrlisheim, where several aspects had suggested that it could have been committed by neo-Nazis from Germany, lived on in the minds of numer-ous Alsatians and long after the local dimension of the wave of violence had become undeniable; it was as if it was a question of laying responsibility on others across the Rhine.


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Feelings and Suspicions

Beyond the unanimity of the condemnation prompted by the acts, the reactions were, to say the least, mixed. On the one hand, the Muslim and Jewish communities appeared to be anxious to support each other. The public demonstrations of support for each other as the various desecrations occurred and the concern for equity demonstrated by the authorities in the handling of the affairs allowed any competition between the victims to be avoided. On the other hand, the perception of these events by an Alsatian population who tended to be onlookers, revealed disturbing feelings. The majority were shocked and regretted the disastrous reputation which the desecrations entailed for Alsace. But also, the fact that the dead were being attacked provoked indignation, as we observe, for example, in the case of Mme. P., who is a member of the Comprendre et s’engager network:

Researcher:—We’ve been discussing here what happened in Herrlisheim; do people talk a lot about it?Mme. P.:—Oh, yes, they talk about it. And then we keep up with the ceremonies. No, it’s quite unacceptable. It’s simply not done. Whether it be Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, Israelite, graves are not desecrated, that’s not done. That shows a lack of respect for the dead, a lack of respect for the deceased, a lack of respect for what they did. We don’t have any right to do that. Of course we discussed it, it’s dreadful.

This unconditional respect for the dead, which is, in itself, highly hon-ourable, leaves the political dimension of the desecrations to one side and, in particular, the racism or anti-Semitism which motivated at least some of them. It may be complemented by a sense of inequality: the political and media reactions provoked by the desecrations are strong when it is a question of Jewish or Muslim cemeteries, but not for Christian cemeteries. M. D., the village mayor whom we have already quoted expresses this feeling well:

Researcher:—. . . for example, did people talk about the desecration in Herrlisheim, were there reactions?M. D.:—Yes, yes, people did speak to me about that and they said it was unacceptable. But you know, a Catholic cemetery in Niederhaslach was desecrated [. . .] people in the street tell you, “It’s unacceptable,” but there should be the same reaction when it’s a Catholic cemetery.

Usually this feeling is part of a more widespread sense of the disregard from which Christians in France suffer today:


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M. D.:— Oh, that’s nothing new (laughter). It’s been going on for years, since the � rst desecrations of Jewish cemeteries, Catholic graves have been desecrated as well. At the time nobody even mentioned them!Researcher:—How do you explain the difference?M. D.:— It’s part of the disregard for the Christian religion, this negative prejudice that there is against anything Christian.

From an exposure of one’s own status as a victim, there can be a drift to the privileges granted to certain groups—and hostility towards Jews emerges, as in this text found on the website of the Dernières Nouvelles

d’Alsace:

Well, we have to admit that there is a hierarchy of misfortune depend-ing on origin or religion. The ‘ready-made reaction’ is also doing well: the desecration of the cemetery in Herrlisheim also � tted well with the usual clichés of some people about Alsace, which explains the extent of the media coverage.

Perhaps one day we will � nally have to understand that there is no hierarchy amongst religions and peoples and it is the very fact of being over-protective towards one religion or other and neglecting the others which is one of the main causes of racism or religious tensions in our time.16

It would be dangerous to claim to evaluate the extent of such feelings amongst the Alsatian population, particularly as several people pointed out to us that, in the circles they moved in, reactions were noticeable mainly by their absence: “No, we didn’t discuss it”, conceded a coun-try parish priest laconically when we asked him if the desecration in Herrlisheim or its media coverage affected his parishioners in one way or another.

Nevertheless, many hypotheses are bandied about with varying degrees of con� dence. Some people play down the acts, which they attribute to marginal youths, ‘bastards’, possibly neo-Nazis. M. C., the journalist already quoted, put forward the following argument:

I asked young people [. . .]. It’s a problem which appears remote to them. It’s a few swastikas. It doesn’t mean a thing. It’s just stupid. It is no longer the problem of young people [. . .]. Young people are above that. Even if ten cemeteries are desecrated tomorrow, they think that it’s very marginal: “they’re bastards”, “it’s not a big problem”. I think the same thing. It’s not because there are few swastikas, here, now, that there are neo-Nazis,

16 Article signed ‘Isebahnler’ and dated 19 June 2004, discussion forum on the website of the Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace.


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it’s . . . neo-Nazis can be tiny groups . . . on the right and the left—I don’t know—but it’s marginal—and there isn’t any risk. I don’t think there’s the slightest risk [. . .], not for the Jews in any case, even if you do � nd swastikas on the graves . . .

Others, however, are not indifferent to the political dimensions of the wave of desecrations. Hence the leaders of Alsace d’abord have their own ideas, which Stéphane Bourhis, spokesman of the political party, expresses:

I sincerely hope that the police or the constabulary (gendarmerie) will � nd the culprits because that would also help us to understand. Because, for example, two weeks ago when a representative of the Conseil régional du culte musulman had his house daubed and his rubbish bin set on � re: well, obviously there are two explanations: the extreme right—of course—and possibly Jewish fundamentalists [. . .]. I think that the people who resort to this kind of action—whoever they may be moreover—do it to get publicity in the media, and I also believe that there are wheelings and dealings within communities aimed at attracting attention to one particular community at a given point in time.

In fact, Stéphane Bourhis’ main argument is:

[. . .] but I must admit that if I was a Muslim today and I wanted to be provocative, I wouldn’t go and spray inch’Allah in a cemetery, or Allah u Akbar . . . � rstly because you’d have to know how to write in Arabic and therefore, obviously, if someone knows how to write Arabic correctly, even when using a paint spray, well, you’d know perfectly well where it’s coming from!

And other leaders ultimately think along the same lines. Robert Spieler commented:

[. . .] even if there are some lunatics who daub swastikas in cemete-ries—and who knows who is doing it—the majority of anti-Semitic acts today are the work of populations of non-European origin, and who are importing the tensions from the Middle East over to France.

And James Cordonnier, echoing this belief, thinks he can con� rm that:

[. . .] what’s happening today would never have happened twenty years ago and, in any event, not before 1962–1963, since there were no Muslims on French soil, or hardly any. No cemeteries were ever desecrated until ten or � fteen years ago, no synagogues were ever daubed until ten years ago. That never happened. It’s happening now.


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For their part, the young Front national militants are puzzled or cau-tious; while not ruling out a ‘fanatic’ from ‘our ranks’, they prefer the explanation of a ‘community’ which they do not name:

B.:—We asked our people about the cemetery in Herrlisheim. I know all the young people. In my opinion, if it was one of our militants they would not have daubed the swastika upside down. It’s completely stupid! And to have spelling mistakes like that! In my opinion, it’s people from another community, de� nitely, and not from the Front national. Perhaps a Catholic, or perhaps a Protestant—to create tensions between communi-ties, of course. They put swastikas on Arab graves. It’s nonsense! That they put them on Jewish graves; it’s true they did suffer enormously from Nazism. But on Arab graves, I don’t even see why they would do it. What does that mean—it doesn’t mean a thing!A.:—In relation to Nazi ideology it does have a meaning all the same.B.:—Yes, it does have a meaning, but then you have to guess it.A.:—I mean, on every grave, it’s stupid.B.:—It’s just stupid, it’s nonsense!A.:—Because attacking the dead, it’s . . .B.:—It’s nonsense. And, what’s more, it’s ex-servicemen who fell for France. So, if you ask me, it’s a con� ict between communities. Now which ones?A.:—That we can’t say . . .A/B.:—We’ll � nd out, we’ll � nd out. Perhaps the inquiries will get results.A.:—Perhaps. One of us? Because, you never know . . . We can’t control everything. There are fanatics who come because they think we’re going to come to power, and that afterwards they’ll be able, through revolution . . . It takes all sorts. . . .

‘Intercommunity con� icts’, small sectarian neo-Nazi groups, ‘fanatics’ from the Front national, young people involved in copycat behaviour . . . the hypotheses, the suspicions, which tend to be manipulated, and the silences all go to make for a very heavy atmosphere in the region. In this context, clearing up the various incidents becomes an urgent necessity that goes far beyond the legitimate requirement of justice. Demonstrations of good intentions and various unanimous declara-tions will apparently not be suf� cient to make up for this absence for very long.


CONCLUSION

An anti-Semitic tradition persists in Alsace, but it is not rigid. The ‘global’ (Israeli-Palestinian con� ict, changes in Islam) is invoked in vari-ous ways to interpret the present manifestations of an anti-Semitism which, in most cases, does not have a distinct face. This may confuse not only the analysis which various players make of it, but also the rationales for action of local political groups (Alsace d’abord, the PMF, possibly the FN). In this sense, the ‘globalisation’ of anti-Semitism has had an impact in Alsace. But the sources of the phenomenon seem to be local in the � rst instance, and this is perhaps why cemeteries are so frequently desecrated in this region, much more so than any other.

There are signs of a traditional anti-Jewish hostility in the rural areas where there are nevertheless scarcely any Jews any more since World War II. Moreover, anti-Semitism � nds its own special niche within two major extreme right formations, the FN and Alsace d’abord which, on the one hand, are its political mouthpieces and, on the other, as ever appear ready to instrumentalise it in their strategic games.

Above all, Alsatian anti-Semitism contributes to a general climate, speci� c to the region, in which at the present time ‘community’ rela-tions, complicated as a result of the arrival on the scene of a newcomer, Islam, combine their impact with the weight of a past which has not really been digested. In the rural areas, little thought is given either to the historical presence of rural Judaism or to the mode of its brutal disappearance. In urban areas, the community is anxious. The memory of collaboration, at times ambiguous, the drama of the ‘against our wills’ make the war a period which is dealt with poorly and inadequately, as if the labour of re� ection which this period necessitated either cannot or should not be instituted. As a result, Alsace has dif� culty in ridding itself of a malaise which owes a great deal to this unusual past, both concealed and present and to the repression of remembrance which culminates in a turgid form of focussing on community-oriented identi-ties, thereby paralysing communication, the setting up of debates and the demanding dialogue between components of the regional society. From this point of view, Alsace is more like Poland or Austria which have dif� culty in confronting their anti-Semitic past, than Germany which was able to work through its dif� culties with tremendous effect.


part four: conclusion 307

We did not carry out a survey in the working-class areas of the towns in Alsace, but we know, if only from previous research,1 that, as in the Trois-Ponts in Roubaix, we would have encountered an explicit hatred of the Jews, reinforced by social and political identi� cation with the suffering of the Palestinians, or conveyed by a more or less radical Islamism. From this point of view, Alsace is not all that different from other regions in France. Its speci� city lies in the other dimensions which have just been mentioned, which render its anti-Semitism more resonant and perhaps also less ‘global’ and, therefore, more likely to rise closer to the regional, political level.

Finding its imagined world in a speci� c local situation and an un-usual history, anti-Semitism in Alsace has in fact risen to the level of the political system in a way which is unique in France, with the two extreme right forces of the FN and Alsace d’abord, and with a PMF whose electoral scores, derisory as they may be, remind us that it is to this day the only attempt to set up a Muslim political party in France. The Alsatian paradox is that this region constitutes an original labora-tory for present-day anti-Semitism, as well as for an Islamophobia of which we have seen countless manifestations, while at the same time offering, in its institutional and cultural speci� cities, in particular the Concordat, opportunities which do not exist elsewhere for dealing with these same problems.

1 Cf. The chapter on Mulhouse, in La France raciste, Paris, Le Seuil, 1992, and the chapter on Strasbourg in Violence en France, Paris, Le Seuil, 1999.



PART FIVE

IN THE UNIVERSITIES



INTRODUCTION

In the past, anti-Semitism in the universities was a speciality of the extreme right. A few faculties, in particular the faculty of law, were known to harbour tutors with fascist tendencies or who favoured the ideas of Charles Maurras and other heirs to various trends, be they nationalist, monarchist, traditionalist Catholics, counter-revolutionar-ies and, more recently, revisionists and negationists, sometimes even revolutionary nationalists. Moreover, usually within these same faculties, small sectarian groups of extreme right students were able to � nd a base for their action including a degree of violence and possibly with anti-Semitic dimensions. These phenomena have not totally disappeared and a university like Lyon-III is periodically accused of constituting a Mecca of negationism. In February 2002, a committee of historians presided over by Henry Rousso was set up by the Minister of Edu-cation to inquire into the racism and negationism in this university, which included amongst its members � gures from the extreme right, beginning with Bruno Gollnisch, one of the main leaders of the Front

national nationwide. The conclusions of the committee, which were made public in autumn 2004, were balanced.1 The Université Lyon-III does indeed harbour about twelve extreme right lecturers and continues to welcome others. In the past it was mainly known for its inability to confront negationist activism, without actually going so far as to constitute a powerful bastion of active anti-Semitism. Very recently, the second-in-command of the Front national, Bruno Gollnisch, was suspended from his duties as a professor in Lyon-III by decree of the Minister of Education (3 February 2005), ‘for administrative reasons’ after having made remarks about the gas chambers which provoked widespread student mobilisation and a counter-mobilisation by the FN. In particular, he had declared (11 October 2004), “It is up to the historians to prove that the gas chambers existed”.

But if the present-day university is part of our research, it is for quite different reasons. On the one hand, tutors and other university

1 Cf. Henry Rousso, Le Dosssier Lyon-III: le rapport sur le racisme et le négationnisme à l’université Jean-Moulin, Paris, Fayard, 2004.


312 part five: introduction

staff, as well as students, organise political activities there and broad-cast ideologies. Those inspired by the extreme left or ultra-left include a criticism of Israeli policy which sometimes veers towards a thinly concealed anti-Semitism—the borderline, as we have seen, not always being easy to establish. On the other hand, a growing number of Muslim students are demanding religious rights (places of worship for example), but also seem liable to promote a particularly active form of Islam, including forms in which anti-Semitism can � nd a niche for itself. In the universities, slogans and graf� ti, possibly attacks linked to a militancy which makes enemy number one of ‘Zionists’ and, for example, of the UEJF, Union des Étudiants Juifs de France (Union of Jewish Students in France), initiatives intended to be pro-Palestinian (exhibitions of photos, for example) which in reality tend to anti-Semi-tism, indicate that the extreme right no longer has the monopoly on hatred of the Jews.

We have here two potential sources of anti-Semitism which are new to the university, even if the � rst was already noticeable in the aftermath of May ’68. At the beginning of the 1970s, the growing strength of a leftist or third-worldist support for the Palestinian cause could include an extreme form of anti-Zionism, to the point of incorporating, if need be, anti-Semitic dimensions. For example, Nicolas Weill recounts that:

The anti-Zionism of the extreme left and the logistic support provided to Palestinian terrorism by states like the German Democratic Republic (the GDR) formed a barrier which prevented me from sinking, bag and baggage, into the culture of radicalism and set me at odds with those of my generation whose struggles I understood but was not able to share their hope that the Jewish State would dissolve in the class struggle.2

Could it be that Islamism and various strains of leftist and third-worldist ideologies will converge in what Alain Finkielkraut has called ‘Islamo-progressivism’? Do some universities not provide a breeding

2 Nicolas Weill, Une histoire personnelle de l’antisémitisme, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2003, pp. 180–181. He states, “The links between anti-Semitism and the terrorism of that camp must have proved a great deal closer than I sensed at the time, particularly in Germany. The objective of the � rst glorious outbreak, in the FGR (Federal Republic of Germany), of the ‘German guerrilla war’ was to break the so-called ‘Jewish complex’ of the left inherited from an anti-fascist culture that groups close to Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof considered ‘powerless’”. Cf. also Thomas Haury, Antisemitismus von links, Hamburg, Hamburger Edition, 2002.


part five: introduction 313

ground for this convergence which, while it may not necessarily lead to anti-Semitism, may well include it?3

Once again, we must be careful. Islam, criticism of the State of Israel and extreme left ideologies do not automatically mean anti-Semitic fever, and exposures which challenge them may well themselves go too far, over interpreting positions and actions which call for terms other than anti-Semitism. This is why it seemed to us that a survey on site was required and, more particularly, in the Parisian universities (Paris-VI, Paris-VII, Paris-VIII, Paris-X, as well as in INALCO, formerly Langues orientales or Langues O (Oriental Languages) which media coverage brought to our attention.4

3 An extreme case of this convergence, as remote as it could be from university life, is given by the famous terrorist of the 1970s, Carlos (Illich Ramirez Sanchez ), detained today in high security in the Saint-Maur—Bel Air prison. In a book entitled L’Islam révolutionnaire (Paris, Éditions du Rocher, 2003), he presents himself as a ‘professional revolutionary’ who has drawn the best of his analyses from ‘Islam and Marxism-Leninism’. His notion of terrorism combines the political and the sacred, an ideology inspired by Communism and the principles of a spiritual and doctrinal Islam. The enemy is the decadent and unhealthy West, corrupted by a surfeit of possessions and a glut of colonialist, imperialist and Zionist pleasures. This malevolent � gure of the enemy makes the combat one of liberation and justi� es the recourse to violence and terror in the name of redemption.

4 This part is therefore based on interviews with students, tutors and administrative staff in these four universities and in INALCO, on press cuttings, on the � les of the journal, L’Arche, as well as on texts published on the website of the UEJF and in the publication online Proche-Orient.info.


CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

BOYCOTTING ISRAEL

On 16 December 2002, a motion was put to the vote and adopted by the Board of Governors of the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie (Paris-VI). It stated that “the Israeli occupation of the territories of the West Bank and Gaza prevents our Palestinian colleagues from carrying out university teaching and research”. Recalling that the Association Agreement between the European Union and Israel (the PCRDT), particularly in matters of research, implied a respect for human rights and democratic principles, the board voted in favour of non-renewal of this agreement. The motion which was voted for with the support of the University President, Gilbert Béréziat, (22 votes for, four against, six abstentions and one refusal to vote), was signed by the Comité Jus-

sieu de solidarité avec les universités palestiniennes (CSJUP) of the Collectif

interuniversitaire pour la coopération avec les universités palestiniennes (CICUP) as well as by the CGT, the SGEN-CFDT, the SNCS-FSU, the SNES-Sup-FSU and Sud-Éducation. This initiative was set in the context of an international movement marked by a call for a European Boycott of

Academic and Cultural Ties with Israel launched on 6 April 2002 in Great Britain by Professor Steven Rose, and broadcast in France on the same day and subsequently on 15 April in Libération by the physicist, Jean-Marc Lévy Leblond. The latter returned to the charge in Le Figaro (1 June 2002) with an article co-signed by the former President of the Université Paris-Dauphine, Ivar Ekeland.

The motion voted for by the Université Paris-VI gave rise to a strong wave of protests: demonstrations in front of the university on the Place Jussieu (6 January 2003); the publication of a petition ‘Contre le boycott.

Pour la coopération des savoirs’ in Le Monde (9 January 2003) which had 40,000 signatures at the end of the month of February; a petition inter-nal to the Université Paris-VI; strong condemnation of the Université Paris-VI motion by Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, when invited to the annual dinner of the CRIF (25 January 2003), etc.

Was this a respectable form of political criticism or a barely con-cealed form of anti-Semitism? The case, which is particularly sensitive, deserves to be examined.


boycotting israel 315

Political Criticism?

Speed and internationalisation were the two features characteristic of the movement for the boycott which was championed by the Board of Governors of the Université Paris-VI in France. As we have seen, it was initiated in Great Britain and very rapidly reached Australia, the United States, Belgium and France where the Université Paris-VI motion, in more or less modi� ed form, continued to be tabled in various universities despite the extent of the protests against it. On 7 January, it was clearly rejected by the Université Paris-VII; on 19 January, it was voted for by the Université Pierre-Mendès-France (Grenoble-II) (the vote was subsequently declared invalid as the quorum of voters had not been reached); on 24 January, it was voted for by the Université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier-III), and on 7 March by the Université Paris-VIII; while on 24 March the motion was rejected by the Université Libre in Brussels.

The international academic boycott did not only involve the demand for non-renewal of European agreements with Israel. In Oxford, at the beginning of 2002, a lecturer refused a young Israeli researcher entry to his laboratory, on the grounds that “he had served in the Israeli army”. The lecturer stated that he had “a huge problem with the way that the Israelis take the moral high ground from their appalling treatment in the Holocaust, and then in� ict gross human rights abuses on the Pales-tinians”. A few months later two Israeli academics, despite their being well-known opponents of the policies of Ariel Sharon’s government, were dismissed from the editorial boards of two linguistic journals, The

Translator and Translation Studies Abstracts, by Mona Baker who, with her husband, Michael Sinnott, directs St Jerome Publishing, where these journals, which are private, are published. In this affair, the owners of the publishing house in question go very far, as witness the remarks of Michael Sinnott reported in the journal, L’Arche: “Israeli troops in uniform kill and mutilate Palestinian children” and thus “the Zionist state is now fully implementing the historical and cultural origins of Zionism which is a mirror image of Nazism”. Israel, with the “atroci-ties in Jenin [. . .] is in the same situation as Germany was on Kristall-nacht”. Sinnott stresses further “the extraordinary power of the Jewish American lobby which allows Israel to do as it pleases” and describes the misdeeds of ‘Jewish power’ in the United States, its ‘capacity to control academic discourse’ and the ‘lies of the Jewish lobby’. By way of conclusion, he announced that “new life will be breathed into all


316 chapter twenty-one

the traditional theories about a Jewish conspiracy, which we thought had long since been discredited”.1

In the Université Paris-VI motion, and in the subsequent public statements of those who signed it, such a slide is quite out of place. The intention was to exert some in� uence with a view to shifting Israeli policy, to bring pressure to bear which would act as a form of sanction and to set themselves up as champions of the campaign for the respect of human rights. In some of the texts which circulate on theInternet to support, or to justify the boycott, it is possible to � nd the expression of clearly anti-Semitic positions. For example, when no distinction whatsoever is made between the Jews in general and Israelis who support the policies of Ariel Sharon: “Behind the Israeli citizen, there is nevertheless the idea that Israel is Jewish”; or, when the Jews stand accused: “You Jews, who have made so many outstanding contri-butions to science, how can you have sunk so low?”; or when reference is made to ‘Judeo-Nazi policies’. But these are not the words of those who promote the Université Paris-VI motion or similar texts, which are presented simply as criticisms of the present-day policies of Israel.

Beyond Respectable Criticism?

Nevertheless, we cannot stop here. Two points are worth stressing. The � rst is the way in which the motion was tabled, and then voted for, by the Board of Governors in Université Paris-VI. Testimonies, some of which have been bandied about in the press, indicate that the text was introduced ‘on the sly’, as we were told by a scienti� c researcher from this university. According to him, it was not on the agenda until 16 December, the day of the vote. It was given out to participants as they entered the meeting room. In the words of the researcher:

The vote was taken at the end of the session. It was clear that it had been prepared. I heard that from a trade union source, via a higher edu-cation and research inter-union group on this question of Israel, which is in contact with the CAPJPO (Coordination des appels pour une paix juste au Proche-Orient) a pro-Palestinian group, more or less on the extreme left, which is sometimes quite hardline [. . .]. Whatever the case may be, the organised element, the Trotskyist element did feature.

1 Cf. The dossier “Boycott universitaire: le dossier de l’infamie”, to which these pages owe a great deal, published in L’Arche, n° 539–540, January–February 2003, pp. 62–83.



A second, more important point relates to the content and the impli-cations of the motion. In the � rst place, the motion reveals a certain amount of ignorance. Israeli scienti� c research is not subsidised at a loss by the European Union; the PCRDT, the agreement, which it is suggested should not be renewed, is a cooperation programme which bene� ts the participating European states as much as the State of Israel. Abandoning it would encourage Israeli academics to replace their European partners with American partners. Moreover, universities in Israel are legally independent from the State and, by sanctioning them, one in no way sanctions the policies of Ariel Sharon’s govern-ment. Moreover, and therein lies perhaps the main point, it is in the universities that the most active waves of protest against this govern-ment are to be found. The effect of the possible non-renewal of the PCRDT would not therefore be to weaken the policies so disparaged. It would instead weaken the Israeli camp for peace and negotiation despite the argument according to which the agreement in question was concluded in the context of the ‘euphoria of the Oslo accords in sup-port of peace perspectives’ whereas we have now moved much further away from this context. Now this argument is not watertight, as Édith Cresson demonstrated. As EU Research and Education Commissioner, she was behind the PCRDT on the European side.2 Since this request is not realistic, since only the Council of Ministers of the European Union has authority in the matter, we are forced to conclude that the main implication of the motion, if not the aim pursued by those of its promoters who are best informed about the scienti� c policies of the EU and their workings, could only be a message addressed primarily to the French scienti� c community. Members of the French scienti� c community were advised to distance themselves immediately from the Israeli scientists and to boycott them.

In the circumstances, is it appropriate to speak of anti-Semitism? Most of those who protested against the Université Paris-VI motion preferred to criticise the threat to peace and dialogue in the Middle East with the Israeli government’s rationale of war and being caught up in its spiral of radicalisation. At the same time, they prioritised their own refusal to see the academic tradition of dialogue and exchange of knowledge, the universalist spirit of science, humanism and tolerance in

2 She explained her position in a “Tribune libre” published in Le Monde, 12 Janu-ary 2003.


318 chapter twenty-one

the French university challenged. There was no large-scale accusation of anti-Semitism. It was none the less suggested.

Other critics went further than those mentioned above, and, in the � rst instance, questioned the highly selective nature of the mobilisa-tion of those in favour of the motion. Why should the State of Israel be thus the object of a boycott whereas, throughout the world, many other states and many other regimes act in a brutal, dictatorial manner � outing human rights and democracy? For example, Bernard-Henri Lévy recalled Putin’s Russia in Chechnya or China in Tibet, and stated that once again he observed:

This strange use of two sets of weights and measures which is automati-cally appropriate whenever it is a question of Israel [. . .]. The aim—the only aim—seems to be, once again, to punish, condemn, demonise and banish a whole country from the family of civilised nations.3

On 17 September 2002, even before this affair, already well under way in the United Kingdom, had spread to France, Lawrence Summers, the President of Harvard University also spoke of his astonishment at seeing that:

hundreds of European academics have called for the cease of any sup-port for Israeli researchers without calling for a similar measure against scientists in any other country.4

The motion voted for by the Université Paris-VI was tabled by a group including several trade unionists, apparently without much discussion within their unions, which is evidence of the weakness rather than the strength of these players whom one normally expects to be concerned with social matters. It was voted for by two elected student members belonging to a Muslim organisation. However, from there to seeing the motion as the expression of a convergence of pro-Palestinian leftism and political Islam within the University would be a step which it would be dangerous to take too rapidly. It was obviously formulated without there having been much contact with various Israeli scienti� c academ-ics, who would have been able to point out the possible consequences, including from the point of view of the peace camp to which many belong. Nevertheless, we should mention the call (quoted in Libération on

3 In Le Point, 3 January 2003.4 In a speech, of which extracts are reproduced in the dossier in L’Arche, op. cit.,

p. 83.



21 May 2002) from about a dozen Israeli researchers to their European counterparts to boycott the Israeli universities as an expression of their disagreement with the policy of Ariel Sharon.

The Université Paris-VI motion creates the image of a university which is not very aware of the consequences and even quite simply of the effects its decision could have on national and international opinion. This is a prestigious institution, which in theory is well aware of the international mechanisms of research and is in� uential at international level in the sciences. Should it not have avoided becoming involved in such a radical form of politicisation which earned it widespread criti-cism, not only from political circles—from the socialists to the ruling right wing—but also from scientists? This motion may not in itself be anti-Semitic, but it does place its promoters in the grey area where doubt and suspicion reign.


CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

TWO EXTREME CASES OF ANTI-ZIONISM

Today the Université Paris-VIII is no longer the forum of highly politicised lecturers and students which it was for a long time, in the aftermath of the May ’68 movement, since its founding. Nevertheless, from its political past dominated by tensions between communist party militants and various leftist groups, it has retained a strong attachment to the Palestinian cause. Based for the past 20 years in Saint-Denis, in a working-class suburb, after a transitional period in Vincennes, its intake includes numerous students of immigrant descent, especially from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa: 26% of its students are foreign nationals. Against a background of the depoliticisation of the students and the weakness of left-wing trade union or political organisations, the students’ communal life is structured primarily around the network of community associations. These associations of Tunisians, Berbers, Moroccans, Algerians etc., are de� ned primarily in cultural terms but also in terms of the social assistance which they offer, particularly at enrolment, defending the students’ rights, supporting the students with no papers, etc. Everyone agrees that these associations get on well together. As a general rule, they do not present separate lists at the time of the university elections, preferring to group together and make alliances amongst themselves, or with the trade unions.

Student action sometimes gives rise to clashes with the administration. Thus in 2001, students without the requisite visa who came in particular from Nanterre (another university) in an attempt to obtain their enrol-ment, occupied an amphitheatre for one month. They were supported in their action by the CNT (the Conféderation nationale du travail, a trade union with libertarian leanings) and by other extreme left groups in the Université Paris-VIII, but also by the University of Nanterre and further, in particular, it would seem, by the AGEN (Association générale

des étudiants de Nanterre) which we will discuss later. Mme. A., in charge of an important division of university administrative staff, stated:

It was they who organised the action, in daily contact with the student associations, and they were very aggressive [. . .]. It reminds me of the


two extreme cases of anti-zionism 321

AGEN. They appear when there’s something going on. Normally we don’t see them except for one thing: they often set up a table and sell the Bolchevik journal.

The rise in religious demands and, in particular the “Islamisation of some of the North African associations”, is noticeable, according to the President’s of� ce (Le Figaro, 23 June 2003). Requests for prayer rooms have been rejected and it is not unusual for Muslims to pray in groups in the staircases. At the time of the last CROUS elections (the organisation which manages various resources placed at the students’ disposal), the highest number of votes was obtained by Avenir, a Muslim association from the Université Paris-XIII which is not established in Paris-VIII, but which stood by allying itself with the Étudiants musulmans

de France (EMF).Two cases which differ in nature, and are not necessarily related,

merit our attention.

Maria Poumier

In 1996, the Université Paris-VIII organised several cultural demon-strations in the context of an ‘Année de la Méditerranée’ (Mediterranean Year). Maria Poumier, holder of the ‘agrégation’1 in Spanish, and recently appointed a lecturer, invited Roger Garaudy, whose talk on Islam et

Modernité was listed on the of� cial programme. Two weeks before the date of the conference, Roger Garaudy’s book, Les Mythes fondateurs de la

politique israélienne (The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics) came out; it gave rise to a � erce controversy in the press on account of its content, and in particular its revisionist theses. In the context of this, his contribu-tion was deleted from the of� cial programme but Maria Poumier had him come all the same and the lecture took place.

This episode was not a chance occurrence. From the very well-documented � le dedicated to Maria Poumier by the journal L’Arche,2 it emerges that her involvement alongside Roger Garaudy, is long standing and she takes full responsibility for it. Amongst other things, it has resulted in her being marginalised by the research group to

1 Translator’s note: the ‘agrégation’ is the highest quali� cation available for teachers at secondary level. Many university lecturers are also ‘agrégés’.

2 L’Arche, n° 551–552, January–February 2004, pp. 94–101.


322 chapter twenty-two

which she belonged (Histoire des Antilles hispaniques—History of the Spanish Antilles).3 Moreover, along with Roger Garaudy and Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, (who L’Arche describes in the following terms: “one of the � gures in the ‘red-brown’ circles, a lawyer and subsequently the wife of the terrorist, Carlos, an anti-Semite who converted to Islam”), Maria Poumier is the founder of the journal À Contre-Nuit.

The dossier published in L’Arche is entitled “But who is this Poumier whom nobody knows?” This title picks up the title of an autobiographi-cal article by the academic in which she proposes an ‘update’ to reply to her critics and reasserts her commitments. We discover an admirer of Che, revolutionary and pro-Castro militant who, for several years, taught in the university in Havana where she had gone to “offer my services to the Cuban revolution”.4 This was when she met Roger Garaudy:

And I also wholly embrace his intellectual experience with his rediscovery of the religious dimension and his re-reading of Islam as the source of a rejuvenation of European thought. When I was appointed lecturer at the Université Paris-VIII, a university with the support of the staff in Spanish studies and specialists on Cuba who had a reputation for being the most left-wing in the academic world, I was delighted to be able to invite him to give a public lecture on Islam et Modernité.5

Since this meeting, Maria Poumier has displayed a keen and unrelenting interest in the Jews. In her writing we � nd many of the prerequisites of the most classical anti-Semitism with themes such as money, power, the Jewish lobby and world domination. According to her, the Jews are everywhere: “They are over-represented in the professions; some sectors like psycho-analysis, publishing and the press are almost entirely con-trolled by them”. The very word ‘Jew’ in all the languages in Europe: “has since time immemorial been synonymous with crook and, at the very least, being tight-� sted”. And the Jews are nothing but: “people who have the means of writing and disseminating the gaseous version

3 “In September 1996, in a vote by secret ballot, the General Assembly of the group excluded Maria Poumier from any function within the bureau and from any representation of the group outside, given that for several months her participation in the distribution of the book by Roger Garaudy, Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne, and, consequently, the disclosure of revisionist theses had become common knowledge. This discredited the research group and disrupted its workings” (extract from a document reproduced in the dossier in L’Arche, op. cit., p. 94).

4 L’Arche, op. cit. p. 95.5 Ibid.



of history”. These two quotations come from an article published by the academic on the Islamist website Quibla in October 2003, under the heading: “On gas: Spain, the Jews and Israel”.6

She considers that the 11 September 2001 attacks are the outcome of a Judeo-Israeli-Zionist plot. She shares unreservedly the positions of Israel Shamir which are “courageous, honest and really dangerous for Zionism”. Israel Shamir’s prose is “extremely useful in understanding the magni� cent spectacle of the towers collapsing live”, and has played an active role in the publishing of his book, L’Autre Visage d’Israël.7

In 2001, Maria Poumier went to Palestine and, on her return, dis-tributed an account on the Internet in which she denounced Zionism which strives: “in the direction desired by Sharon and Bush for the worldwide extension of the genocide industry which is unfolding before our eyes under the pretext of tracking down a few terrorists”.8 After this trip, she participated in a conference on Palestine, organised at the Université Paris-VIII by Oxygène bringing together several student associations in the University.

“The Holocaust Industry”, “The media Empire of the Holocaust”, or even “The obsessional pathos concerning the Holocaust in all the major media under the permanent control of a ‘thought police’”, which ensures a “guaranteed income and permanent immunity for Israel”—these are the ideas in an article entitled, “Iraq: the United States and Israel against the rest of the world”, distributed on the Internet in 2003 thanks to Maria Poumier who, moreover, criticises the Pleven and Gayssot laws: in her opinion, these hinder the work of ‘historians’ and prohibit the expression of ‘certain revisionist conclu-sions for the 1939–1945 period’.

Maria Poumier develops these themes by applying them to her � eld of specialism. She writes, “In Latin America, there is also a Zionist type of dynamic which is native and of long-standing”, and this driving

6 L’Arche, op. cit., p. 101.7 According to Proche-Orient.info (8 July 2004), this book—withdrawn from sale by

éditions Balland, which had the 3,000 unsold copies destroyed, whereas its co-editor, éditions Blanche, refused to withdraw the work from sale—has now been re-edited by éditions islamistes Al Qalam. It is prefaced by an interview with the author conducted by a pro-Palestinian militant living in Switzerland, Silvia Cattori. In this interview, we read in particular that World War III, which has already begun, “aims to establish a huge Judeo-American empire to subjugate the world, to kill the human intellect and complete the process of uprooting mankind, in the words of Simone Weil”.

8 L’Arche, n° 551–552, op. cit., p. 96.



force is said to constitute a breeding ground for the Jewish lobby and North American imperialism which “easily spread”.9

With Maria Poumier, we see links being formed between the problem of struggles in Latin America, anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism. We also see how links between extreme left and extreme right ideologies are created around the central idea of a ‘Jewish conspiracy’. This ‘unnatural’ alliance, in the words of Carol Iancu,10 becomes possible because it designates a joint enemy, and Maria Poumier expresses it openly by evoking her contacts with the FN. Her writings, for example the article entitled “Le sionisme en Amérique latine” (Zionism in Latin America), published in January 2002, in the journal, À Contre-Nuit, are distributed not only by various pro-Palestinian, Islamist or negationist Internet sites (for example, the Gazette du Golfe et des banlieues) but are also announced by the extreme right bulletin, Faits et Documents.11 And vice versa: Maria Poumier distributes extracts from the latest bulletin to subscribers to the sites. And when that provokes the indignation of certain of her pro-Castro comrades, she replies:

[. . .] as it happens, Emmanuel Ratier frequently distributes information which is very reliable and, in general, long before other informants. I sug-gest that when you discover that people from the FN are not bloodthirsty, foul-smelling brutes, an analysis which is just a little bit super� cial and which leaves all the advantages and all the initiatives to others who are sometimes a little smarter, you stop reacting like a scared young girl.12

The Université Paris-VIII is not the haunt of academics attracted by an anti-Semitism as pronounced as that displayed by Maria Poumier, and her case must be considered an extreme and exceptional form of deviation. But there is food for thought. Can a major Parisian univer-sity, the heir moreover to an image of progress and protest, accept a

9 Ibid., p. 98.10 Les Mythes fondateurs de l’antisémitisme, Paris, Privat, 2003. “Whereas in most coun-

tries,” writes Carol Iancu, “negationism remains the almost exclusive privilege of the collaborationist right wing and (or) the Nazis, this was not the case in France. In fact, in the negationist enterprise, a sort of apparently unnatural alliance, was established from the outset between the two extremes on the political scene, illustrated respectively by the action of Maurice Bardèche and of Paul Rassinier” (pp. 132–133).

11 The interview of Israel Shamir in preface to his book (see note 1, p. 347) was immediately available online, once again, not only on the Internet sites of numerous pro-Palestinian associations, but also on that of the extreme right Altermedia Belgique, on the French nationalist-revolutionary site Voxnr and on the French Islamist site Quibla (Proche-Orient.info, 8 July 2004).

12 L’Arche, op. cit., p. 100.



� gure of the type we have just described without reacting any more than it did? If it were an extreme right � gure, a negationist of the type accepted by the Université Lyon-II, many people would say it was a scandal. But here, probably because the drift started from an extreme left position and in a context which was particularly favourable to the Palestinian cause, the reactions are low-key and do not receive much media attention. It is easier in France to be anti-Semitic in Universities if you have a background like that of Maria Poumier than if you have extreme right � liations.

An Exhibition

In 2002, on the occasion of the Land Day in Palestine, the UGET (Union générale des étudiants tunisiens) organised an anti-Zionist event. On one of the tables set up for the occasion, observers noticed the presence of a � ag bearing an equation: ‘Star of David = swastika’. The President of the University asked the organisers to remove it. In vain. Mme. A., whom we have already met, explained, “A university security guard was given the job of doing this but his behaviour was slightly suspicious”. Mme. A. came out and explained to the people manning the stand that you can be pro-Palestinian and criticise the policy of Sharon, but that this � ag was unacceptable and that it had to be removed. The replies which she received were aggressive; the remarks were ‘absurd’ according to her and revealed the worst prejudices of the type: “You don’t know what they do in the prisons; they gouge out the eyes of the Palestin-ian prisoners”. In fact it would appear that the people who had set up the stand did not belong to the UGET. Militants from this association intervened to protect Mme. A., explaining that they knew her well and that she herself defended pro-Palestinian positions, etc. The table was only removed at the scheduled end of the event which lasted for a few days. In Mme. A.’s opinion, the activists in question were not students from Saint-Denis and they were not of North African origin. They had been invited to come from another university by the UGET.

A year later, from 25 to 27 March 2003, once again on the occa-sion of the Land Day in Palestine, an exhibition was organised in the Université Paris-VIII to protest against the occupation of the Palestin-ian territories by the Israeli army. It was given considerable coverage in the press (articles in Libération, Le Monde, Le Parisien, Le Figaro). The exhibition was held in the entrance hall of the university. On two rows of display panels could be seen:



• extremely violent photographs showing mutilated and bloodied corpses, the bodies of women and children blown to pieces, with the caption: ‘This is what really happened in Jenin, contrary to what the Jewish lobby gave you to believe’;

• alongside these photographs, there were long quotations from Roger Garaudy, 32 photocopied pages of his book, Palestine: terre

des messages divins, in which, for example, the Israeli Law of Return was compared with the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. The text, describ-ing, amongst other things, “the preventive war being waged on the Palestinians by Israel” was reproduced with neither quotation marks nor the author’s name;

• quotations written in Gothic letters, in particular the following one from the Israeli philosopher, Leibowitz: “The strength of the Jewish � st lies in the American steel glove which it wears and the dollars which line it”;

• caricatures, one of which showed a fat Jew wearing a black hat slapping Yasser Arafat, before taking cover snivelling in the skirts of an enormous Uncle Sam armed to the teeth, with the dollar sign for eyes. Or another one showing a Statue of Liberty strangling a small boy wearing a kef� yeh; beside him, Ariel Sharon with a large nose and a Star of David on the back of his jacket, is laughing at the scene.

The exhibition was rapidly perceived as openly anti-Semitic. And in the � rst instance by a few lecturers in the history department, includ-ing its head and Daniel Lefeuvre, lecturer in contemporary history, who moved his class to give it in the exhibition hall. He explained to us: “It’s absolutely meaningless to make speeches about contemporary history when there is an openly anti-Semitic event taking place within the walls of the university”.

In front of the display panels, he showed his students in what way this exhibition was anti-Semitic and not uniquely anti-Zionist or anti-Israeli: it was no longer a criticism of the policy of Sharon or of a government, but referred explicitly to the Jews to challenge them. The caricatures targeting the Jews were drawn in the manner of the posters which were to be seen during the Occupation under the slogan—‘Know how to recognise them’. The extracts from a book by a negationist author and the Gothic lettering—recalling the German writing also used by the Nazis—rounded off the picture. His explanations were met with understanding by the students. He said they showed “intellectual



honesty, perceptiveness, including the students of North African origin, and were perfectly capable of making their own judgement”.

Daniel Lefeuvre was insulted by the organisers of the exhibition who were standing in front of the display panels, called a ‘provocateur’ and a ‘Zionist’, but his comment to us was: “it did not go very far”. Alerted, the President of the University and his chief of staff came to see the exhibition. Being in absolutely no doubt as to its anti-Semitic nature, they decided to have it taken down after having taken some photographs. The tension mounted; the members of the UGET turned up the sound system to prevent any dialogue. The dismantling of the exhibition ended with shouts of “Death to the Jews” which shocked those who were present and provoked cries of protest.

Three students, with the help of lecturers in the history department and two secretaries then mobilised to draft and distribute a letter about the exhibition and circulated a petition amongst the students. Here are some extracts from the letter:

As students of history and as citizens concerned with the future of Paris-VIII, we wish to react.

The layout of the photographs, the texts and the caricatures might well have led to confusion and a lumping together of ideas concern-ing the responsibility for the massacres. We could not blame our fellow citizens of Jewish origin for the actions of soldiers in the army of the State of Israel.

The caricatures presented here obviously referred to the stereotypes con-veyed by anti-Semitic propaganda (in the historical sense of the term).

It is from this angle that the theory of the international Jewish con-spiracy, � nanced in ‘dollars’ and protected by the ‘steel glove of America’ has been revived. Whether or not it is intentional, the reference to pres-ent-day European anti-Semitism is explicit and therefore the exhibitors do have some responsibility.

[. . .] in addition to our moral reprobation, we therefore wish to express our acute anxiety as regards the form and the meaning which the debate within our university has assumed for some time now.

Finally, breaking with the tradition of settling these affairs internally, the university administration decided to refer the matter to the courts and register a criminal complaint against the organisers of the exhibi-tion. The communiqué from the President’s of� ce on 31 March 2003 states:

The anti-Semitic nature of the media used (images along with texts) is undeniable; their organisers will explain themselves in court as regards what is considered a criminal offence under French law. The university



administration insists on asserting that the academic community could in no way give their backing to acts of this type which, far from partici-pating in the spirit of peace in which we live, represents a call to racial hatred.

A complaint against X was therefore � led on 10 April 2003 with Bobigny High Court under the article dealing with incitement to racial hatred (Article 24 bis in the 29 July 1881 law). The President’s of� ce stated that some members of ‘associations of Tunisians and Moroccans immediately asked us if we were Jewish’ (Le Figaro, 23 June 2003).

However, the university administration decided not to take disciplin-ary action against the organisers of the exhibition ‘to restore calm’ as its representatives explained. It is also possible that the balance of power may to some extent have played a part: the President’s of� ce explained that the organisers implied that “they could involve the whole of the Arab community in Saint-Denis in their rebellion”. Now, over six thousand students on the campus come from North Africa and:

even if they do not approve of the racist ideas of some of the organisers of the exhibition, they will stick together: many have family ties or inte-rests, in particular in obtaining enrolment at the university.

It should be pointed out that some voices were indeed heard in support of the exhibition. A lea� et circulated signed ‘Comité Palestine—Université

de Paris-VIII ’, protesting against what was said to be:

inadmissible and reiterated blackmail invoking anti-Semitism [. . .]. We are at a point where the mere fact of recalling that the Palestinians are human beings means you are accused of being an anti-Semite.

Yes, we support the boycott of Israeli products.Yes, we organise information campaigns on the massacres of the

Palestinians.Yes, we are committed to ensuring that Palestine, which gets so little

media coverage, is not forgotten.Finally we are not frightened of the threats from the Betar, or the

UEJF.Victory to the intifada; long live Palestine.

Finally, Maurice Courtois, a lecturer in French literature posted a text entitled “Polémique à Paris-VIII” on the website of the Department of Literature. This text, written several months after the affair itself, endeavoured to play down, and that is putting it mildly, the anti-Semitic nature of the exhibition. We � nd there assertions which contradict the reality of the facts. He states, “Neither party has registered a complaint”; there is an omission: the quotations from Garaudy are not mentioned. Maurice Courtois’ argument can be summed up as follows:



• an exhibition showing the daily life of the Palestinians was held in Paris-VIII;

• an ‘unfortunate’ (or elsewhere, ‘macabre and regrettable’) incident occurred which disturbed the peaceful course of the event;

• the question posed is: after this incident will Paris-VIII, till then the French university “with the highest attendance by several com-munities”, a good example of communities living together, still be “a forum for intercommunity research and exchanges”?

After the intervention of lecturers from the History Department but also from the larger UFR (Unité de formation et de recherche) who complained to the President’s of� ce, Maurice Courtois withdrew his text from the website.13

It would appear that the Public Prosecutor’s of� ce had hesitated before setting up an inquiry and had consulted the French Minister of Justice. Finally the Public Prosecutor decided to initiate proceedings against the organisers. The trial has not yet taken place; the investigation is under way. We should add that in 2004 Land Day was prohibited by the administration and it did not take place.

An Atmosphere

The exhibition episode saw students implicated, and more particularly, one of their associations, the UGET, which has approximately 150 members and is considered in Paris-VIII to be an in� uential player. As we know, the context is highly pro-Palestinian and is characterised in the words of Mme. A. by “total identi� cation with the Palestinian cause”. Mme. A. went on to say, “It would seem that the sole aim is to organise these anti-Zionist events in which moreover no Palestinian students ever take part [. . .]. They go on for a long time and it’s very surprising”. The people in charge of the association are older with the pro� le of being eternal students.

Leader and founder of the UGET, 38 year old Ridha Bourguiba, has been studying in Saint-Denis for 15 years. He was the person who made the request for permission to set up the exhibition and, after the incident he wished to assume sole responsibility. But the President’s

13 In the letter in which he explained this gesture, Maurice Courtois stated, “My name is no longer on the list (not public) of anti-Semites where it had appeared.”



of� ce did not see things in the same light. A spokesperson close to the President said, “We are not fools. The people from the UGET were present in front of the display and the banner of their association had been pinned up”. If the university had not taken disciplinary action against him it was because “he is no longer enrolled this year”.14 Ridha Bourguiba presents himself as a representative of a Palestine com-mittee and, in his opinion, there was nothing anti-Semitic about this exhibition: it was simply a question of showing the reality of the daily life of the Palestinians. In his own defence, he pointed out that one of the caricatures which had shocked (the one of the Statue of Liberty strangling a small Palestinian boy as Sharon looks on) is available on all the pro-Palestinian websites, in this case arabia.com. Moreover, Ridha Bourguiba stated that “Tunisian Jews were amongst the founders” of the UGET (Le Monde, 2 April 2003). He admitted, “We didn’t think when we chose Garaudy. It was a mistake” (Le Figaro, 23 June 2003).

The point of view of the Assistant General Secretary of the UGET, Slah Hnid, is as follows:

This exhibition has absolutely nothing to do with us. Our association defends a pro-Palestinian position, but we are not anti-Semitic. At the moment, we are mobilising primarily against the war in Iraq.

A little further on, he added:

The Zionists are trying to shift the debate, to frighten the public by saying that the number of anti-Semitic acts has risen. What’s more, we refuse to talk with the UEJF on this point. They are not democratic (Le Monde, 2 April 2003).

In a university dominated by a strong attachment to the Palestinian cause but which, for all that, is hardly inclined to get involved in tensions and confrontations in which anti-Semitism would be a major issue, is the exhibition episode an epiphenomenon? This is a university in which no physical violence or attack on an individual has been reported to this day. Unfortunately, an answer in the af� rmative which is too cut and dried does not seem appropriate.

In the � rst instance, the Jewish students and lecturers complain that the general atmosphere is appalling, “because for the past two years in this university the Star of David has been confused with the swastika” (Libération, 1 April 2003). While they do not re� ect the campus as a

14 Le Figaro, 23 June 2003.



whole, incidents do occur from time to time and usually the scenario is the same. The President of the University states that: “This type of lapse does occur periodically, every six or eight months, on the occasion of pro-Palestinian events” (Le Monde, 2 April 2003).

In this depoliticised university, at least in the eyes of those who compare it with the 1960s and 1970s, the only theme which arouses passions and commitment is that of the Palestinian cause. This theme is a sensitive one but does not for all that mobilise many people. It is actively advanced by organisations which function along the lines of an active and radicalised minority and always in a dubious manner, because they rapidly move from criticising Ariel Sharon to anti-Semi-tism. Their activism rarely switches to movements of any great import and the vigilance of some lecturers as well as the robust action of the President’s of� ce helps to prevent these localised lapses from transform-ing into something bigger. But nor do the students mobilise to reject out of hand this anti-Semitism which is the work of very small groups. An episode which a student, Anna, related, may help us to appreciate this issue.

In May 2004, for three days, Anna, along with others, held a stall in the university hall inviting students to sign a petition entitled ‘Israel-Palestine: the � ght for peace is ours too’. This was the initiative of a collective for ‘Two Peoples, Two States’, calling for support for the Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives and, in particular, those in Geneva. Anna said that not only were the militants from SOS-Racisme who organised the action subjected to very violent threats from the UGET, such as—“There’s going to be trouble. You won’t last for more than a few hours. You don’t know Paris-VIII”, but, furthermore, and with-out giving any reason, not one student union or association wished to cooperate with them.15

This is a fairly widespread attitude in SOS-Racisme, which is often accused of defending Jews and even of having links with the ‘Jew-ish lobby’. Anna has often observed this position amongst extreme left militants of whom, she states, “Jews do not need to be defended because they do not suffer from discrimination socially”. According to

15 The action � nally took place calmly—with reinforcements from SOS-Racisme nationwide. Reactions, according to the organisers, were positive, and the petition was signed by over 700 people. Anna pointed out that the important thing was to demonstrate that it was possible to do something other than organising anti-Zionist events which take an anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic turn.



high-ranking trade union or political of� ce bearers, there may also be an element of political calculation. Anna observed that according to those who go around on polling days with Palestinian � ags “working with Jews would make us lose votes”.

In the Université de Paris-VIII, a latent anti-Semitism consumes some students and is the driving force behind very small active minorities. It does not grow into large-scale action and does not affect the vast majority of students. It does nevertheless � nd a niche for itself in so far as the Jews, identi� ed both with Israel and with access to power and money, are considered as not needing in the slightest to be defended. The criminal nature of anti-Semitism is then evacuated and, within a small politicised world, identi� cation with the Palestinian cause is inter-preted in a radical manner by players whose modes of organisation, as we have seen with the UGET, appear to be more closely related to national origin than part of a mobilisation for social ends.


CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

LEFTISM IN DECLINE AND EXTREME ANTI-ZIONISM

Physical and verbal attacks, oral and written threats, insults, tagging and graf� ti: do these anti-Semitic incidents which have seen a noticeable increase at the Université Paris-X-Nanterre since 2000 justify a more detailed study of this university? Below is a list which is not exhaustive and takes all types into account:

• According to a former head, ex-president of the University, as far back as 1998 a female UNEF militant had complained that insults and other remarks of the “go back to Israel” type had been levelled at her, and at other militants, by members of the AGEN, the Association générale des étudiants de Nanterre.

• In the course of the 2000–2001 academic year, a female student had her Star of David snatched; she was set upon by some 20 or 30 people (according to eyewitnesses), dragged to the ground and the university police had to intervene to free her; a complaint was � led. A male student, identi� ed as Jewish, was beaten up in the toilets.

• Graf� ti frequently appears on the walls: ‘Death to the Jews’ or else, the equation Star of David = Swastika. The word SIDA (Aids) is also found with the S replaced by the $ sign and the A by a Star of David.

• Insults and verbal attacks are repeatedly reported: “Filthy Jew”, “Filthy Zionist”, “Jewish gay”, “Filthy Jew get back to your syna-gogue”, “Go home, there’s nothing for you here”.

• In November 2003, an anonymous letter was received by the Nanterre of� ce of the UEJF (as well as by the national of� ce of the UEJF) threatening: “X1 will soon pay for his actions. Let this be an example to all of you . . . The arm of revenge will be long and strong”. At the same time, graf� ti scrawled read: “F*** the UEJF and X”.

1 X refers to an UEJF of� ce bearer who is named in the anonymous letter.


334 chapter twenty-three

• At the beginning of 2004, the female president of the UEJF in Nanterre went to remove an AGEN poster accusing two students, members of the UEJF of having participated in a ‘racist attack’ against the AGEN (to which we shall return). She was set upon by two female militants from this association and was told, “You are guilty of aiding and abetting them. You don’t have the right to defend them. We know what you look like. We’re going to get our mates from the housing estates to come and beat you up and you can tell your friend, Y2 that he is on our hit list in Nanterre”. ‘The mates in the housing estates’ could be a reference to the Mouvement de l’immigration et des banlieues (MIB) with which the AGEN is in regular contact.

• During a meeting of a psycho-sociological intervention group, the organiser of which has dual nationality—French and Israeli—AGEN militants poured into the room and one of them came up to him from behind and whispered, “Filthy Jew, Filthy Israeli, we’ll make you go back home”. In the course of a discussion with militants from the AGEN, this same person was called an SS by them. When he became indignant they explained that this was not what they meant and that in Arabic the word meant something else: “guard, supervisor”.

At the level of a major university like Nanterre, such incidents are minor and in no way indicate a marked deterioration nor a widespread slide towards anti-Semitism. In fact, they are within the context of an overall climate of considerable indifference to politics, which contrasts with the activism restricted to a few student organisations which would simply be small sectarian groups if the principle of student representation in various bodies did not lend it a certain weight. Confrontations provide this activism with a skeleton structuring. It sets in opposition, on the one hand, the varying degrees of pro-Palestinian commitment of the student associations and, on the other, the UEJF, which is the focal point of the tensions. In recent years the con� ict between the AGEN and the UEJF has been steadily gaining in intensity.

2 Y refers to another UEJF of� ce bearer who is named in the remarks reported by this witness.


leftism in decline and extreme anti-zionism 335

The AGEN

The Association générale des étudiants de Nanterre was set up in 1993, as a result of a split from UNEF-ID (Union nationale des étudiants de France), sometimes described as Trotskyist and sometimes as Maoist. Today it has approximately 30 militants as compared with 500 a few years ago and it is considered to be very active and capable of violence. It � gures as a force to be reckoned with on the political scene of the university. M. B., who is in charge of security on the premises, speaks of the ‘immense power’ acquired by the AGEN in the past seven or eight years; a former University head considers that it is impossible to understand what goes on in Nanterre without taking this organisation into account. Its main activities are related to the defence of foreign students, students without papers and students who cannot enrol; international mobilisation, particularly in connection with the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict; and the increasingly strong representation of the interests of Muslim students in recent years.

The founder of the AGEN—at the time of the split from UNEF—and its � rst president, Rachid Amar, is no longer a student at Nanterre but he is still often to be seen on the campus. The current president, Romain Heurtault, frequently introduces himself as a Breton, probably as a form of provocation. The majority of AGEN members are stu-dents of North African origin, which explains why it is often described locally as a community association, a description which is inappropriate. A number of its members come from deprived neighbourhoods and it maintains close links with the MIB. Militants from the MIB were seen on the campus when there were violent confrontations with the administration, and the President of the University had to call the police to evacuate the AGEN from some amphitheatres.

According to some university administrators, AGEN activities of ‘Islamist type’ have been observed in recent years. Requests for prayer rooms were made by the AGEN/ARENE3 at Ramadan. The university

3 Association de la résidence des étudiants de Nanterre, the Nanterre student residence asso-ciation, the housing group of the AGEN. Moreover, the university halls of residence represent a major problem for the Paris-X-Nanterre authorities, which is in no way simply limited to the activities of the AGEN/ARENE and which involves far-reaching networks. In recent years, a tendency to ghettoisation has been observed, encouraged, according to an in� uential chief administrator of the university who wished to remain anonymous, by ‘the weakness and complicity of the CROUS’. He referred to subletting ‘constituting up to 30%’, and mentioned drug traf� cking and prostitution. Another



rejected these requests but in 2002 the CROUS gave permission on paper for the student halls of residence to become ‘a forum for social interaction’ for Muslim students during the evenings of fasting—in practice, a place of prayer; thereafter this permission was not renewed. Moreover, the AGEN has endeavoured to establish itself in pre and post-16 educational establishments in Nanterre and the surrounding areas. Some of its militants obtained posts as monitors in schools which they are said to have used in an attempt to mobilise the pupils—for example, by encouraging them not to respect the two minutes’ silence imposed in each class after the 11 September 2001 attacks, or else, by distributing lea� ets to the pupils inviting them to refuse any teach-ing thought to be incompatible with the precepts of the Koran. This attempt did not last long. But for the President of the University there is still cause for concern: “At the moment there are Islamists at work on site,” he said, in relation to the university halls of residence, without going into details, and he wondered whether some of the members of the AGEN were not being ‘brainwashed by Islamism’.

It is true that this aspect of the action of the AGEN is very discrete. Much as it draws attention to anything to do with its anti-racist, pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist campaign, when it comes to this activity which could be described as pro-Muslim it has little to say. Moreover, it is clear that in matters of anti-Semitism, the AGEN does not really go beyond the limits of what can be said publicly. Does that mean that the suspicions surrounding it in this respect are unfounded?

Administrators close to the President of the University admitted:

They are very clever, very bright. We are sure that they are anti-Semitic. That’s our conclusion. There are things which would have to be proved. That is, there is some graf� ti, all the same. We know it’s them but we don’t have proof. We haven’t caught them in the act. We are sure that it comes from the AGEN. I have the video recording of a programme which was on television [. . .]. They’re very cunning, the AGEN, but our analysis is that they’re anti-Semitic [. . .]. They’re very careful in public, very cautious and they play the game very well, that is, they’re very good at reversing the situation and reversing the values.

The programme in question was about anti-Semitism and was broadcast in autumn 2003, on Canal +. Roman Heurtault, the President of the

administrator con� ded, “One day there will have to be a police search of the premises and they will � nd prostitution, and probably weapons.”



AGEN, is shown pointing to graf� ti on the wall—‘Death to the Jews’ and exclaiming, “It’s a scandal. It’s unacceptable”. The researcher can only express his discomfort: the AGEN, in the eyes of respectable and reasonable people, deserves to be accused of anti-Semitism but there is no clear and irrefutable proof. In this case, are its militants not right to take offence, and to denounce the absence of proof and therefore the improper nature of these accusations? What sort of anti-Semitism could be concealed or veiled to the extent that it is reduced to the impression that it creates, or the suspicions which it arouses? Undoubtedly, we have to go further if we wish to try to gain a clearer picture.

At the Frontiers of Hatred

The AGEN is a small group of committed and very active militants who have sympathisers or friends in other student unions and associa-tions in the Université Paris-X-Nanterre, in particular amongst the few dozen anarchistic militants in the CNT, the Trotskyists in the LCR or the Culture P X association which claims to be apolitical but which, in fact, systematically supports all the abovementioned groups.4 Moreover, the AGEN is capable of getting students from other universities to come to its demonstrations, in particular from Paris-VIII, Paris-XIII or Jussieu(Paris-VII), which means that its anti-racist and pro-Palestinian conferences can bring together up to two or three hundred people. And vice-versa: AGEN and its sympathisers turn up on certain occasions at other universities, as we have seen in the case of Paris-VIII-Saint Denis. This group is nonetheless speci� c to Nanterre, with no connec-tion at national level with a corresponding group—it did in the past have links with AGET (Association générale des étudiants de Toulouse) which then joined the FSE, a national union, but the AGEN preferred to keep its independence.

The aim of the � rst major actions through which it made a name for itself was to obtain the enrolment of French students of North African descent, or foreigners who had ‘no university’ for various reasons (lack of the requisite equivalent diplomas, missed deadlines, etc.). The methods

4 An of� ce bearer from UNEF—the union which includes militants from the LCR and LO (Lutte ouvrière)—described these two groups as being extreme left and the AGEN as ultra-left.



used were radical: occupation of the administrative premises, including the president’s of� ce, occupation of the roofs, hunger strikes—sometimes carried out, according to witnesses, with doctors who were complicit, but nevertheless . . . This militancy was not in vain and a former uni-versity president observed that it gained them a national reputation: when someone had dif� culty enrolling elsewhere they were told, “Go to Nanterre. We can’t enrol you but they’ll take you there”.5

The identi� cation of the AGEN with the Palestinian cause, which is in any event considerable in most other associations, is so strong, as we have seen, that sometimes students refer to the members of AGEN as the ‘Palestinians’, instead of the ‘pro-Palestinians’. It is, moreover, at times of AGEN demonstrations in support of the Palestinian cause that the emergence of the anti-Semitism which is lurking just beneath the surface in some of its sympathisers can most easily be seen. Thus, in 2002, on the occasion of the Palestinian Land Day, the association organised a colloquium attended by over 200 people. There were criticisms of the policy of Israel and the United States and it was also possible to hear revisionist theorem and a denunciation of the ‘lies about the � gures’. A young woman took the � oor—she was one of the two ‘members of the Lebanese resistance’6 referred to in the AGEN lea� ets. She paid tribute to those who brought about the collapse of the World Trade Center—they were ‘martyrs’. To a standing ovation, she said she was ready to use her own body to kill any Jewish or Israeli target anywhere.

The Jewish students who had come to attend the meeting—30 or 40 persons, members of the UEJF, but not only them—protested before leaving the hall. Someone shouted, “The university is not the place to say things like this”. Someone else shouted, “Say no to the vindication of terrorism”. Shouts of “Death to the Jews” were then heard in the amphitheatre.7 Everything which took place during this colloquium was recorded by the students from the UEJF, who said that they had warned the General Intelligence Service (Renseignements Généraux) and � led a complaint at the police station. The complaint was not successful.

5 The trials of strength with the administration, for one reason or another, have been frequent and prolonged. One of these con� icts is said to have contributed to the resignation of a president.

6 According to a well-informed observer, there was a member of Hezbollah and an FPLP (Front populaire de libération de la Palestine) member.

7 This description is based on eyewitness accounts which support each other almost entirely.



The University, for its part, did not � le a complaint, but the Head of Security did � le a report with the Public Prosecutor, a possibility provided for by law. In his statement, he speaks of ‘incitement to racial hatred and to murder’.

In this case, it was undeniable that anti-Semitism had been expressed. But, in general, the pro-Palestinian commitment of the AGEN presents itself in the guise of a virulent form of anti-Zionism, “always at the limit of the limit” in the words of Olivier Audéoud, the current President of the University, but speci� cally avoiding going any further: colloquiums to discuss the ‘genocidal’ policy of Sharon, exhibitions of photographs and eyewitness accounts of the cruelty of the Tsahal (the Israeli army) in the Palestinian territories, posters, lea� ets, etc. For example, for several years now, the AGEN has set up an enormous sign entitled “My people will live” in the E building. We see a fedayee (in fact there are two: the same one twice) wearing a kef� yeh, armed with a Kalashnikov ri� e on the barrel of which a Palestinian � ag is � ying. An inscription on this � gure reads ‘Long live Palestine’ and a little below, a quotation attributed to Leila Shahid: “One land, one State, one law, a roof for all in Palestine. We

stand for a historical, independent and multi-faith Palestine”.Olivier Audéoud, who is himself a lawyer, asked his colleagues to

examine this poster. Their conclusion was that it could not be attacked in a court of law.

From the Palestinian Cause to the Campaign against the UEJF

At the outset, the defence of foreign students was the AGEN’s prime concern. Since the turn of the century, Palestine has become the main focus. Thus, in November 2003, the Communiqué antisioniste, a militant newsletter of several pages published by the AGEN was only up to its � fth issue, while in February 2004 number seven was already available. The pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist commitment of the AGEN was evolving with the UEJF being increasingly and systematically targeted; confrontation with this Jewish students’ organisation now took up a considerable amount of space.

While the tension between the AGEN and the UEJF was mount-ing, at the same time the other aspects of the con� ict situations to which the AGEN was party were declining. The association was losing ground with the students, its troops had decreased noticeably and, in the most recent university elections it lost two out of its � ve elected



representatives. By far the majority of the students, despite their being in the main sensitive to the Palestinian cause, thought that the AGEN was going too far, and some observed that, furthermore, it did nothing else. Moreover, several associations or student unions, such as UNEF, were taking care of the foreign students more actively than previously, helping them to enrol etc., not to mention the reception facilities spe-cialising in this type of problem set up by the President’s of� ce. The AGEN was therefore developing in a context which was presenting it with increasing dif� culties. Very early on in the 2000s, on several occasions, the President of Paris-X-Nanterre had been taken to task by the association. They put up enormous posters all over the campus accusing him of pursuing a racist policy towards foreign students and of setting up an ‘apartheid’. Today, this action has lost its panache: in autumn 2003, the AGEN took the university administration to court for having cut its premises in two, and it lost the case.8

In danger of becoming marginalised as a result of its weakness and its radical stance, it could be surmised that the AGEN cast about for a source of con� ict in an attempt to survive, or start afresh, and that it found this source in confrontation with the UEJF—the Jewish students’ organisation being an opponent whose undeniably harmful nature would justify the virulence of the attacks. ‘AGEN—the union which � ghts’ declared its lea� ets: the action of the association became meaningful in combat. And when meaning eluded it and it lost contact with the students, it tended to embark on a rationale of reversal according to which the opponent became an enemy and the debate at the heart of the con� ict gave way to violence, and hatred triumphed over any constructive course of action.

The AGEN’s themes create the image of a leftism endeavouring to combine social criticism with an attack on the university authorities, guilty, in its eyes, of organising an ‘academic apartheid’, the expres-sion of an ‘unequal and hierarchical teaching which has its origins in the workings of the capitalist system’. It differentiated itself from UNEF, an ‘opportunistic conglomerate’ which went in for ‘acquiescent trade unionism’ while UNEF itself advocated ‘offensive trade union-ism’. It attached considerable importance to the ‘third world’ and to

8 According to the administrative staff, this operation was not targeted at the AGEN in particular. It was quite simply a question of re-organising the way premises were attributed to student associations, taking account of the number of elected representa-tives each had on the university boards.



North-South relations, for example, denouncing in its lea� ets a ‘new war of plunder against the peoples of the world’—the reference was to the ‘imperialist war’ in Afghanistan—and declaring that ‘humanitarian aid’ and the ‘anti-terrorist campaign’, (always in inverted commas), were merely pretexts for ‘direct occupation and colonisation’.

Finally, criticism of the State of Israel was a recurrent concern. The AGEN used a set of accusations to construct the image of an impla-cable enemy: apartheid, colonial policy, terrorist methods and American imperialism as ally and guarantor. This set of themes was recited ad libitum in its lea� ets and in the colloquiums which it organised. Thus, one lea� et denounced the “refusal (in Durban in 2001) of the United States and France to recognise slavery and colonialism (including in its present-day form of Zionism) as crimes against humanity”; another declared that “the Zionist entity has a free hand to repress the Pales-tinian people in cold blood and the second intifada”. It will be noted that the expression ‘Zionist entity’ is often used by the AGEN to refer to the State of Israel.9

Two other lea� ets are entirely devoted to Israel and to Zionism as well as to anti-Semitism. One is entitled: “In the face of Zionism, those who say nothing give their consent”, and the other: “From Palestine to France, down with selective memory”. The events behind them are signi� cant. In the � rst case, a member of the administrative staff of North African descent was attacked on the campus, probably by members of the Betar. In the second case, a conference on the Shoah prepared by the UEJF had to be cancelled and the AGEN was partly responsible—we shall come back to this. In these documents, Zionism is characterised as a ‘racist and colonial ideology’ in essence, we are reminded of resolution 3379 (1975) of the General Assembly of the United Nations condemning Zionism as ‘a form of racism and racial discrimination’ and an attempt is made to prove that it presents ‘the characteristics of traditional colonialism’. As far as anti-Semitism is con-cerned, it is a theme which from now on will be cynically manipulated: the authors assumed responsibility for a text which stated that:

9 This lea� et is an invitation to the meeting—debate, 5 December 2002, with the participation of Georges Labica, introduced as a ‘philosophy professor at Nanterre and anti-imperialist militant’. The lea� et is signed by the Paris-X-Nanterre Committee against the imperialist war and, as the AGEN explains in its documents, the AGEN is behind this committee.



The ignominy of anti-Semitism, which is indeed a European product [. . .] has thus found its normal ‘solution’ in the use by the West of the children of its victims to pursue the imperialistic objectives of the West against the peoples of the third world (taken from Samir Amin, L’Empire du chaos, L’Harmattan, 1991).

If we were to believe the AGEN, anti-Semitism is exploited to prevent any criticism of colonialism and Zionism:

All those who, despite everything, continue to demand justice for the Palestinian martyrs are habitually silenced by calling them anti-Semites to their faces. No condemnation of colonialism, no criticism of the self-proclaimed Hebrew state can therefore be envisaged. Similarly, anti-Zionism (that is, the struggle against colonialism in Palestine) is denied any political status and any value as a progressive struggle by deliberately confusing it with the heinous theses of the negationists.

The AGEN is thus clearly careful to dissociate itself from any speci� c expression of anti-Semitism: it intends to ‘relentlessly combat’ negation-ism. What it denounces is the use made of these themes, a use which is said to ‘demonise’ the struggle of the Palestinians, while ‘criminalising the young people of immigrant descent in France’:

Zionism has always raised the spectre of anti-Semitism to make people believe there is a permanent threat and to hide its own acts of vio-lence.

The AGEN takes the accusations of anti-Semitism levelled at it seriously. It took the journal L’Arche to court and stated, in one of its lea� ets:

L’Arche (a mouthpiece of French Judaism obsessed with the defence of ‘Israel’) published an article comparing the AGEN with the extreme right and with anti-Semitic discourse [. . .]. The AGEN won its case for defamation against L’Arche hands down, L’Arche was reduced to the most vulgar lies and was forced, by decision of the court, to withdraw them and never again reiterate its vile remarks.

This makes of the AGEN, and it is not the � rst time that we are confronted with this type of borderline case, a player manoeuvring in a grey area in which it is indeed dif� cult to make distinctions. On the one hand, in the words of Georges-Elia Sarfati,10 an anti-Zionist argument serves the AGEN in supporting a ‘criminal image of Zionism

10 Georges-Elia Sarfati, “La rhétorique antisioniste de l’AGEN”, Observatoire du monde juif, n° 8/9, November 2003, p. 9.



and, hence, of the State of Israel and its sympathisers’ while avoiding the ‘possible accusation of anti-Semitism’. Georges-Elia Sarfati also points to the inaccuracies of AGEN in quoting from texts, in particular those of Theodor Herzl, as well as the liberties which it takes in their interpretation. But, on the other hand, the AGEN does not confuse the Jews and the Israelis and does not make generalisations about the Jews; its extreme anti-Zionism, while it may come close to anti-Semitism and perhaps conceal it, nonetheless is not an unrestrained version of it.

The fact remains that while the enemy may in its view be Zionism and the State of Israel, the AGEN’s closest target and the one nearest to hand is UNEF. Confrontation with the latter takes various forms. Sometimes individuals are attacked, sometimes it is the association as such and on yet other occasions it is the association as the presumed representative of the ‘Zionist state’ and of ‘Zionism’ as an ideology on the campus of Nanterre. The three possibilities are easily combined. Here are a few signi� cant episodes of this confrontation.

In December 2001, the UEJF decided to organise a conference devoted to the Shoah with the participation of Henri Bulawko, a for-mer deportee, Francine Christophe, deported as a child now a writer, and Arno Klarsfeld, a French barrister—“to show that we are not only concerned with the con� ict in the Middle East” in the words of a UEJF of� ce bearer, a student at Paris-X-Nanterre. The administra-tion gave permission but the conference was ‘postponed’ and, in fact, cancelled a few hours before it was due to be held. Its theme did not meet with the approval of the AGEN nor of other extreme left groups which claimed that the idea was to sweep Zionist crimes under the carpet by discussing the Shoah, and called for it to be disrupted. The administration, which is responsible for security, had received various indications, including from the General Intelligence Service (Renseigne-

ments généraux), stating that it was highly probable that there would be serious incidents and the University President’s Of� ce took the decision to cancel the event. One of those in charge said, “There was no ques-tion of exposing these people, who were elderly and had experienced extremely dramatic events, to incidents of this type”.

On 13 November 2002, at the beginning of the afternoon, militants from the AGEN set up a huge stand in support of Palestine in the hall of the G Building, below the UEJF premises hindering entry and exit thereto. With the sound system at full blast in Arabic and Palestinian � ags and posters calling for intifada; the Jewish students were rapidly provoked, sharp altercations broke out and insults � ew from all sides.



Thus Romain Heurtault is said to have shouted at a militant who was not very tall and who wanted to leave the premises: “Zionist dwarf, get back to your synagogue.”

Alerted, the half dozen security of� cers employed by the university were sent to the scene to separate the two groups. The facts are dif-� cult to establish.11 Whatever the case may be, witnesses said that the security of� cers did indeed come but that they stood and watched without intervening. At around 3 p.m., two vehicles from the anti-crime squad with their sirens wailing, arrived on the premises following an anonymous telephone call. On learning that the call had not come from the President—a condition sine qua non for their intervention on a university campus—the police left immediately. This brief respite enabled the AGEN to leave the premises, or begin to put their things away. Towards 4 p.m. a small group of militants from the Betar appeared on the campus although the incident was almost over. They beat up a member of the administrative staff of North African descent on the university parking lot and destroyed his car. The victim of the attack was seriously wounded and � led a complaint. An attacker was taken in for questioning and the trial resulted in his being sentenced (a six month suspended sentence). The UEJF was seriously challenged and two days later the AGEN organised a demonstration with the slogan ‘Down with Zionist terror’ and published the abovementioned lea� et: “In the face of Zionism, those who say nothing give their consent”.

Since then, the AGEN has often recalled this incident in its lea� ets accusing the UEJF of being the perpetrator, or the accomplice, of the attack by the Betar. They refer to the ‘strong presence of a Zionist trend in Nanterre’ which spreads the ‘Israeli colonial mentality’ or the ‘colonial mentality of intimidation and fait accompli’ and present the UEJF as a ‘product’ of this trend and attached to the Israeli extreme right. For its part, the UEJF, in its communiqués, has � rmly denied having had any involvement in the intervention of the Betar.

Subsequently, the incident has resulted in various developments with communiqués from both sides mutually accusing one another. Thus, in December 2003, following the attack on militants from the AGEN who were attending the administrative tribunal (le tribunal administratif )

11 The accounts which were given to us do contain slight variations. There is a written version in the article by G.-E. Sarfati, op. cit.



in Paris,12 the association published an “Open letter to the President of Paris-X-Nanterre” entitled: “Get the fascists Cymerman and Perez off the campus.” This time, not only did the UEJF stand accused, but also two people were named. Benjamin Cymerman was accused of having participated in the recent ‘racist attack’ and Maxime Perez in the Betar attack one year previously. The UEJF made a formal complaint for defamation, particularly as these accusations naming names were repeated on several websites, including the website of the CAPJPO and it requested that the administration, who refused, to prevent the distri-bution of a lea� et on the campus. Once again, in its modus operandi, the AGEN, this time in its confrontation with a Jewish organisation, maintained a certain distance from anti-Semitism: it likes to think it is anti-Zionist and anti-fascist.

However, the doubt that many express with respect to it is not without foundation. Despite the fact that graf� ti is now regularly erased—the security agents have a special cleaning liquid for this purpose—it is no less frequent and some of it could be attributed to AGEN militants. Of the recurrent verbal insults from members of the AGEN—‘Filthy Zionist’, ‘Filthy feujard ’ ( Jew), some are not limited to targeting the Jews in UEJF alone. Thus, referring to the AGEN, a militant from UNEF said, “Now they are not only pro-Palestinian, they’re fascists”, and she explained, “They’re anti-Semitic. Recently they insulted one of our comrades; it was an anti-Semitic type of insult, because of his large nose”.13 A more subtle form of offensive behaviour can also be observed, but one which borders on anti-Semitism, which consists in interpreting the words and acts of a person by tracing it back to their origins. We experienced it ourselves during the interview with Romain Heurtault, President of the AGEN. After having spoken in a manner completely devoid of any hint of anti-Semitism and after the questions dealing with anti-Semitism had been broached, towards the end of the interview, Romain Heurtault said to one of the researchers, looking him straight in the eye, “What about you? Are you personally concerned about anti-Semitism? I read [. . .] that you were of Jewish origin.”

Moreover, their theory of the Americo-Zionist conspiracy and the idea that the Zionists rule the world convey their obsession—namely,

12 As we have already said, the AGEN took the university administration to court for having cut its premises in two. On this occasion, the violence came from members of the Jewish Defence League (Ligue de défense juive).

13 Remarks recorded in March 2004.



of seeing the pernicious presence of Jews everywhere—which sometimes borders on the grotesque. Thus, at the beginning of 2004, an AGEN lea� et entirely devoted to Haiti stated that the forces which had led this country to its present dramatic situation were well known. They were listed in a footnote: the United States, France and ‘Israel’.

Another instance in which anti-Zionism veered towards anti-Semi-tism was the meeting organised by the AGEN on 8 December 2003 entitled ‘Resistance to the new racist order’ (Résistance contre le nouvel ordre raciste).14 Amongst the guests was Michel Bousquet, introduced as a ‘CGT trade unionist’, known, according to the online newspaper Proche-Orient.info for his involvement alongside the negationist Mondher Sfar. A young man in the audience spoke up:

The members of the Zionist lobby are acting in disguise. It is the true soldiers of Israel disguised as journalists, like Christine Ockrent or like Arthur, on television, who organised a demonstration for the Likoud. It’s as if a demonstration in support of al-Qaeda had been organised (laughter), everyone would be in prison already.

He put forward another hypothesis too. The Muslims “are currently being subjected to a genuine pogrom. In comparison, anti-Semitism is nothing at all; it’s pitiful (laughter)”. Then Michel Bousquet intervened to say that today, there is an ‘apartheid’ targeting Muslims and allowing the Zionists “to do as they like at international level”. The audience gave him a long round of applause. Somewhat isolated, Tarek Kaw-tari from the Mouvement de l’immigration et des banlieues—despite the fact that this organisation is known for its radical stance—endeavoured to make the audience see sense: “We should not all be fantasising about Zionism at international level. I don’t feel comfortable with this; when I hear that it makes me think that international Zionism is to blame for everything”.

Finally, one last point undermines the theory that the AGEN’s attacks only target the Jews in the UEJF. The UEJF was in fact formed in Nanterre as a response to a climate in which not only anti-Zionist, but anti-Semitic graf� ti and insults had become commonplace. A militant behind this initiative explained:

There were no UEJF militants amongst the students at Nanterre [. . .]. In 2000, we revived it because, as a law student at Nanterre, I saw the

14 Cf. Proche-Orient.info, 5 January 2004.



Magen David torn off and ‘Filthy Jew’ scrawled on the walls [. . .]. Along with two friends, we decided that we couldn’t continue to let it happen, and we discovered that the UEJF had premises which were empty—there were people who came to study there, who met their friends, but there was no militant activity. So we took back the premises and decided to start up political activity again with a campaign against anti-Semitism.

And he added, “Because, if not, nobody was doing anything”.André Legrand, President of the University at the time, con� rmed

these remarks: “There was a general indifference to all that. The UEJF came on the scene and began to protest and to say that it was unac-ceptable. So we began to clean the graf� ti off the walls.”

Was the Academic Institution Inadequate?

Academic life at Nanterre is obviously not limited to these episodes, nor to the war waged by the AGEN and the UEJF. This confrontation only affects or heightens the awareness of a small number of activists and, on the whole, the concerns of the students, the academics and other staff are far removed from these con� icts which are, however, given a certain amount of media coverage. The problem is not therefore that con� icts of this type are intruding on the university world or that there is a threat of unrest: far from it. One might even surmise that the radicalisation ofthe AGEN, with its hardening into head-on confrontation with the UEJF, is an indication not of an increase but of a decline in strength, a sign of marginalisation. This extreme anti-Zionism, which justi� es suspicions of anti-Semitism, therefore becomes an ideology bearing witness to the crisis and weakness of a player less and less capable of mobilising on its own ground, that of student trade unionism.

However, this is all set in an institutional context and this point deserves to be considered for a moment. Is the way in which the situ-ation is dealt with by the institution not very important? The principle of freedom of speech governs the attitude of the administration and was advanced by the persons in charge that we interviewed. They are all anxious to ensure this, even if it means reinforcing precautionary measures and, if necessary, calling on police external to the university. It is when the university feels incapable of ensuring security that it cancels or prohibits events, like the colloquium on the Shoah organised by the UEJF, or a meeting with Elie Barnavi, when he was still the Israeli Ambassador (when he was no longer the ambassador and when



it was easier to guarantee security, another meeting did take place and went off peacefully).

In May 2004, it was precisely in the name of freedom of speech that the President, Olivier Audéoud, allowed an electoral meeting and discussion to be held at Nanterre during which the comedian, Dieudonné, spoke in favour of the ‘Euro-Palestine’ list. In fact, the name, Dieudonné, did not appear on the list put forward by the AGEN, which merely referred to a debate on the subject: “What anti-racism today?” The President did have the right to prohibit this meeting. He explained that he did not do so to avoid giving Dieudonné the chance to pose as a victim and to say to the press: “Look at the repression!” He preferred to grant him a room—to avoid a gathering on the lawn in front of the building—and leave the task of recording the exchanges and, if necessary of starting proceedings to the Criminal Investigation Department (police judiciaire), who were on the premises. Olivier Audéoud went on, “M. Dieudonné is a French citizen, at the time he did not have any criminal convictions and he was a candidate in an election [. . .]. I could not, a priori, forbid him from speaking”. The President gave orders to the security services not to let in supporters of either side if they were ‘very worked up’ or identi� ed as belonging to the Betar. The result was that the President of the UEJF who wanted to ask Dieudonné a few questions was not allowed to enter, nor were some of her friends. The only thing the UEJF and its sympathisers could do was to complain, noting once again that there seemed to be more freedom of speech on one side than on the other. This observa-tion was not denied by André Legrand, the former President of the University and responsible for cancelling the UEJF colloquium on the Shoah. He said that during his mandate he had tried to correct this imbalance, but to no avail.

But surely order could be maintained and provocations bordering on the anti-Semitic avoided by the adoption of an extremely robust attitude and the use of legal means should the need arise. The cur-rent president is prepared to take legal action against the AGEN if necessary, and he knows he can rely on the understanding of the Public Prosecutor. He promised the Jewish community of the Hauts-de-Seine, whom he met in the context of a meeting with the Prefect (préfet), the security services, the court, etc., that he would ensure the security of persons and refer matters to the state prosecutor each time the necessity arose. However, the opportunity does have to arise. In addition, the university does have its own disciplinary bodies which



the president can refer to, for example, each time a so-called ‘internal’ complaint is � led. The altercations between the AGEN and the UEJF frequently result in complaints of this type from both sides—roughly twenty a year. But, for lack of proof, these affairs are not dealt with by the disciplinary bodies. As a senior of� cial remarked, “Every time, it’s only a matter of words”.

The same applies to the courts. The complaints � led by the UEJF or by individuals have not yet been successful; the complaint lodged by the university concerns the anti-Semitic graf� ti on the walls. The response from the court is that in the absence of suf� ciently convincing proof (non-identi� ed perpetrators, insuf� cient proof ), legal proceedings cannot be instituted.

This being the case, many students have the impression that those who resort to acts of violence or written or verbal expressions of hatred go unpunished, and they observe the inadequacies of the administra-tion in dealing with the situation. This is what one of the leaders of UNEF had to say:

Before, when they (the members of the AGEN) were doing well, they would organise a soup kitchen for Ramadan in the evening in the uni-versity buildings. That was two years ago, they don’t have the means to do that now [. . .]. At the time, the administration accepted that. They were . . . in fact they are very violent with the administration. They no longer attend council meetings very often—they think it’s pointless but when they do attend, it’s always to shout at the administration. They speak very roughly. It’s almost insulting.

When she was asked why the administration tolerated this sort of behaviour, she stated, “I don’t think that the administration can do much . . . That’s democracy for you, isn’t it?”

The harshest criticisms from this point of view, are expressed by the UEJF. They think that the university administration is frightened to confront the AGEN activists head on. But in other associations, the analysis goes the same way. People explain that it is possible that the administration is now aware of the problems posed and is � rm in its intentions or its desire to put things right. However, at the same time we observe that it lacks the resources and the authority to impose respect of the internal regulations and the limits not to be crossed. In the president’s entourage, note is also taken of the fact that, while the police have proved to be available and ef� cient, the same cannot be said for the courts.



These observations bring us to the end of this chapter. On the cam-pus in Nanterre, anti-Semitism is a limited phenomenon, at least its manifestations, and it � nds its niche in the slides which start from leftist and pro-Palestinian stances. The encounter with Islamism is scarcely a reality, even if the AGEN does endeavour to represent the expecta-tions of the Muslim students who encounter very speci� c problems (in particular, the need for prayer rooms). The leftism in question is very much on the decline, has no real hold on student circles, is radicalised and attracted by a certain amount of violence, which is a mark of weakness. But while it is not entirely false to say that the university does present the image of a place where anti-Semitism is openly expressed, it is also because of the delay of the institution, in its capacity as such, in reacting to its initial manifestations. Does it lack the means for action? Is it refusing face-to-face confrontation with an active minority which is a cause for concern? Does it have a poor understanding of the issues at stake? The university administration has a share of the responsibility in the tensions just described—even if it has succeeded in preventing the climate from deteriorating and if it can be credited in part with the recent decline in the AGEN’s capacity for action. Its inadequacies have had two consequences. The � rst is the revival of the UEJF at Nanterre, and its confrontation with the AGEN: this con� ict which, luckily, to date is of no great consequence to the university, has an adverse effect on the structuring of its community life, focusing on an issue which is very far from those which ought to be the concern of this type of place. It quite evidently has absolutely no connection with any mobilisation raising issues of knowledge, its acquisition and its production, nor with demands of the student union type. The second consequence is the media coverage which should not be exaggerated either. When problems like those which concern us are not resolved within the academic institution, or are only resolved following the intervention of other institutions, for example the courts and the police, there is always the danger of promoting a vicious circle in which the media, from without, will blow them up, use them and transform them into social facts. At the same time, the problems tend to plunge the institutions ever deeper into the tensions, the fears and fantasies and the passions which mobilise society as a whole.


CONCLUSION

We have not yet encountered a university situation in which radi-cal Islamism would include an active dimension of anti-Semitism in a signi� cant and distinctly perceptible manner. We can reasonably deduce from this that leftism, which does not have much support and is in decline, backed by references to the Palestinian cause, is a much greater source of hatred of the Jews in the university than Islamism. To verify the relevance of this observation, our survey will now take us to INALCO (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales)—the ex-Langues O—an establishment characterised by a rise in Islamism which is mainly located in the Department of Arabic.1

INALCO

As a result of this rise in Islamism, can a more distinct form of anti-Semitism be observed at INALCO than at Nanterre for example? At the moment, the Departments of Arabic and Hebrew in this Institute are located on two different sites—Asnières and Clichy—and in Clichy we do not feel the effects of an Islamisation which might constitute a breeding ground for anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, there is a fear that the effects will soon be felt since, by the end of 2008, all the departments will be merged in Tolbiac.

In the Department of Hebrew, where a large majority of the stu-dents and almost all the lecturers are Jewish, on the whole there is no particular anxiety. The few tensions which are encountered are, in the opinion of everyone, of the everyday, ordinary kind in an establishment of this type. The small-scale ‘in� ghting’ between lecturers (the expres-sion was used by one of the students we interviewed) is sustained by

1 Though this phenomenon is not speci� c to INALCO, it does affect other university institutions. In October 2003, the Conférence des présidents des universités expressed its anxi-ety in the face of the rise in requests (for prayer rooms in particular) from associations as well as from religious, cultural and ethnic groups. At the Université de Villetaneuse (Paris-XIII), the administration has set up a working committee on secularism in an effort to � nd ‘negotiated’ solutions. For example: the sale of halal sandwiches during Ramadan or gym classes for women only.


352 part five: conclusion

all sorts of amalgams as well as by differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, religious and non-religious Jews, French and Israelis, those on the right and on the left, and in no way correspond to a more widespread anti-Semitic climate. A few incidents have been noted in the Department of Arabic and were reported in the online publication Proche-Orient.info:

• with regard to a colleague who had given a version which differed from his about a question concerning Algeria, a lecturer apparently said to his students: “Why believe him? He’s Jewish”;

• at the time of the elections at the Institut in 2003, a student handing out lea� ets was told by an Algerian student (who belonged to Avenir, a Muslim association established within the Université Paris-XIII-Ville-taneuse): “There are too many students of Hebrew on this list”. There were three out of a total of sixteen.

A Jewish student, J., explained to us that to go to Asnières to study Ara-bic, as well as Hebrew, he preferred to wear a cap rather than his kippa, so as not to be identi� ed as Jewish. If his identity is discovered—and this is not only his experience but also that of his friends—relations become glacial and people give him strange looks.2 On the other hand, when the Association pour la transparence et l’initiative des étudiants, of which he is a member, put forward a list for the elections, the lecturers said that it was a religious list—“because I wear a kippa,” he said. In his opinion, these accusations are unfounded since the programme for this list, which also includes Muslims, has nothing to do with religion.

J. and his friends from the association were also criticised by students on another list. They were told, “You’re religious people—therefore extremists—therefore on the right—therefore on the Israeli right”. He pointed out that without being anti-Semitism proper; it is an amalgam which gives cause for concern.

Two characteristics speci� c to INALCO are worth stressing here. The � rst refers to the presence of Islamism in the Department of Arabic which has been marked by several incidents in recent years: the refusal on the part of female Muslim students to speak in class or to be in the presence of a man with their face uncovered; demands concerning the content of the teaching and, in relation to this, the

2 In this case, J. is following the advice of the chief rabbi of France, Joseph Sitruk. In November 2003, on the day after the arson attack on a Jewish school in Gagny (Seine-Saint-Denis), in the course of an interview on Radio Shalom, he asked Jews to replace the kippa with a cap to avoid being attacked on the street.


part five: conclusion 353

emergence of self-censorship amongst some lecturers. In this context, the President of INALCO, Gilles Delouche, with the participation of the students elected to the various councils in the Institut, drew up a charter which has to be signed by each student at the time of their enrolment in the university. The charter recalls that “higher education is secular and independent of any political, economic, religious or ideological in� uence” and points out that any non-observance of the rules which are speci� ed therein may lead to disciplinary or even legal action. To date, the charter appears to have played an appreciable role in maintaining calm.

A second characteristic of INALCO is the almost total absence of extreme left and left-leaning student unions. The internal life of the Institut is very weakly politicised. This situation owes a great deal not only to its geographical dispersal and the behaviour of the lecturers, but also to the action of the students who have mobilised, as one of them said, “to stop politicisation [. . .]. We have too many pedagogical problems to deal with”. Thus, at the time of the elections for the Board of Governors in 2003, students from all departments, including the Department of Arabic, united to present a joint—Transoriental—list. This list obtained over 600 votes, which enabled it to occupy all the student seats on the Board and, as J. said, to ‘throw out’ two politicised student unions: the UNI and UNEF. The Muslim association, Avenir, was also eliminated.

Thus, while Islamism is gaining ground in INALCO and posing various problems there, the internal life of the Institut is not for all that disrupted by the rise of a more signi� cant form of anti-Semitism than elsewhere.

This is not only due to the geographical separation of the depart-ments of Arabic and Hebrew but owes a great deal to the proactive policy of those in charge. They have had the good sense to face the prob-lems squarely by drawing up a charter along with the elected students and by imposing it on each individual. It is also due to the moderate blend of references to the Palestinian cause in its most radical form, corporatism or clientelism and of the leftism which is characteristic of the politicisation within other universities and which is a factor in the drift towards anti-Semitism. We ought not to have an over-idyllic image of INALCO but we have to admit that this Institut has handled to its advantage a situation which could a priori be thought to be propitious to the expansion of the sphere of anti-Semitism.



The Campus at Jussieu

Finally, let us turn our attention to the campus at Jussieu which is home to a large part of both the universities Paris-VI and Paris-VII. Various incidents have been reported to us: Molotov cocktails thrown onto the premises of the UEJF and its windows broken—graf� ti on the walls reading: “Hamas will win”; a Jewish woman was threatened with a knife; insults; verbal abuse; graf� ti “and not only against Jews” a Jus-sieu UEJF militant speci� ed, “but also against Arabs and blacks [. . .]”.He went on to say, “It is true that in recent years there has been more action against the Jews”. Here are some examples: “The Jews are exploiting you”; “Down with the Judeo-� nancier terrorists”; “The Jews are exploiting you. Burn the Jews”, “Save the world, burn the Jews”; “Jew equals exploiter”; “Death to the Jews”. As in Nanterre, now and again a symbol appears: SIDA (the abbreviation for AIDS in French) with a dollar sign for the S and a Star of David for the A.

As a general rule, observed the President of the UEJF, this graf-� ti on the walls does not bother anyone except the Jews themselves: “If we were not there to � nd that strange . . . nobody else would have thought it strange [. . .]. When we see that, we feel targeted, it’s a per-manent attack”. After the UEJF had approached the administration, he remarked, “There are things which stay, there are things which go, but not much disappears”.

Here and there comments which overstep the mark are reported. A religious Jewish student who wears a kippa was summoned by the lecturer who is also in charge of disciplinary action and told: “I don’t want this symbol of Zionism in my class”. A few devout Jewish students requested that an examination be scheduled on a day other than a Saturday and a secretary answered, “No, no, there’s no question of it. You lot are always making problems”. Now, the lecturer concerned, to whom they had explained the problems, had agreed to � nd a solution even if, for example, it meant them doing the examination a little later, in conditions which would be a little more dif� cult.

The Jewish students associated with the UEJF complain not only of remarks which are anti-Zionist and hostile to Israel that they hear when there are colloquiums dealing with the con� ict in the Middle East, but also of hostile attitudes towards those amongst them who wear the kippa. One of them told us he was frightened to speak dur-ing a meeting organised by the student unions following the university boycott of the Israeli researchers referred to earlier.


part five: conclusion 355

On the Jussieu campus, in contrast to what we saw with the AGEN in Nanterre, the most radical positions are not really communicated by a visible and active organisation. Some members of the Averroes Association, but also militants from associations outside Jussieu (mainly the AGEN)—“much the same participants”, a UEJF militant said—meet together from one conference to the next, sometimes forming “collec-tives” and organising pro-Palestinian events. In 2002–2003, militants from the Averroes Association are said to have distributed lea� ets attacking the UEJF, accusing it of being an extremist and violent asso-ciation and demanding its dissolution. In 2003–2004, the association itself, more concerned with cultural af� rmation than political action, mobilised primarily on the issue of secularism declaring itself to be in favour of wearing the Muslim headscarf in schools. Furthermore, the extreme left, with the LCR in particular, the student union SUD and UNEF, is active but very much in the minority. Its public discourse is pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist, in no way anti-Semitic, and it is only in private that a few of its members, a very small number, drift. Thus, a UEJF militant reported to us a private discussion with a student belonging to the LCR who blamed the Jews for their misfortunes, explaining that the Palestinians have the right to carry out attacks and to kill civilians because “it was the Jews’ fault”, or that if the Shoah had taken place, it was because at the time, the Jews dominated the world economy. But this type of remark does not rise to the level of public discussion.

In Jussieu, and in circles which only ever concern a tiny minority of students, the atmosphere is sometimes tense. But perhaps less than might be imagined. Thus, when the con� ict in the Middle East is left aside, dialogue and even a search for points which are shared by the UEJF and the Averroes association, or by Jewish students, possibly even Israelis passing through Paris and Muslim students, can be envisaged.

Does the administration play a positive role in this atmosphere which, when all is said and done, is not one of spectacular confrontations, nor of unbounded anti-Semitism? Here we have to make a distinc-tion between the two universities which share the campus, Paris-VI (see Chapter 23) and Paris-VII, the policy of which, it would seem, consists primarily in minimising risks and in avoiding situations likely to encourage excesses. Thus, several colloquiums, considered by the administration of Paris-VII as potentially high risk, have been cancelled because they dealt with either the Jewish or the Muslim religion, or they threatened to be particularly volatile.



Anti-Semitism does exist on the Jussieu campus in latent, fragmented forms which are limited and relatively contained. But, once again, it can scarcely be said to be virulent and both the good results of the preventive approach implemented by the management of Paris-VII and the desire, despite everything, for dialogue, for example on the part of the UEJF and of the Averroes Association, suggest that there is no need to be overly anxious. The atmosphere is sometimes tense, hostility towards the Jews is palpable but there is little to sustain the image of an Islamo-progressive alliance.

At the end of this part devoted to the university, if we collate all our observations, we cannot but conclude that anti-Semitism is a modest reality in universities. What we have seen of the conditions in which it is expressed enables us to gain a better understanding of what is speci� c about anti-Semitism in universities which tend to be rather ‘progressive’ as compared with the experience of the Université de Lyon-III, as analysed in the report of the Rousso committee referred to in the introduction to this part. In every case, it would appear that anti-Semitism owes little to the rise of Islam and, in particular, to the political rapprochements which would lend a certain importance to radical Islamism. Furthermore, the phenomenon becomes all the more signi� cant and worrying when the university administration it-self demonstrates shortcomings through indifference, through lack of understanding or through fear of radicalising a part of the student pub-lic in opposition to it. But if traditional, extreme-right anti-Semitism is rooted in a national tradition which it perpetuates, the anti-Semitism of leftist or third-worldist inspiration is ‘global’, because it is incom-prehensible without reference to the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict and to an anti-Zionism from which it springs or which it possibly even creates.


PART SIX

ANTI-SEMITISM: A QUESTION IN SCHOOLS?



INTRODUCTION

According to the media, schools are one of the best places to observe the rise of anti-Semitism in French society. Does the ‘new’ anti-Semitism, attributed in the main to young people of immigrant descent living in working-class neighbourhoods, not put educational institutions at the forefront? On the one hand, because the school intake does include these young people who may bring with them prejudices or forms of violence. On the other, because it has a vocation to combat this type of phenomenon and, from this point of view, schools may be seriously challenged.

The concerns, as expressed for example in the publications already quoted,1 link two dimensions. The � rst is based on an alarming picture of the situation in which schools in France are currently said to � nd themselves, far beyond the question of anti-Semitism alone. The sec-ond has to do with the incapacity of schools to protect Jewish children from the attacks which they are threatened by and their dif� culties in teaching the Shoah. The images of a crisis in the republican institu-tion represented by the school are thus associated with those of the rise of anti-Semitism within it—an anti-Semitism in schools which has its own speci� cities and which is partly produced by the schools. From this point of view, the education system has its share of responsibility; it does not function uniquely as host to rationales which are totally external to it.

Occasionally, incidents break out, revealing a problem of anti-Semi-tism, but also and perhaps primarily the dif� culties and inadequacies of those within the establishment responsible for dealing with it. For example, the media gave considerable coverage to the harassment experienced by a Jewish pupil in the � rst year of secondary school at the Collège Montaigne, and to the way the situation was dealt with by the administration—we shall come back to this.2 Polemics may mean

1 Emmanuel Brenner (editor), Les Territoires perdus de la République. Antisémitisme, racisme et sexisme en milieu scolaire, Paris, Mille et Une Nuits, 2002; Michaël Sebban, Lehaïm. À toutes les vies, Paris, Hachette Littérature, 2004; Mara Goyet, Collèges de France, Paris, Fayard, 2003.

2 “Un lycée ébranlé par l’antisémitisme”, Journal du Dimanche, 30–11–2003; “Agression antisémite dans un grand lycée parisien”, Le Figaro, 5–12–2003; “Un élève de sixième dit


360 part six: introduction

the media are the focus of a debate, as we saw with the situation created by the documentary made by Elie Chouraqui in Montreuil—not only teachers and pupils but also political leaders intervened to challenge the reality of the anti-Semitism in an educational establishment in the town.3 Articles, dossier and broadcasts frequently reveal the experiences of teachers and heads of establishments faced with anti-Semitism.4 But what are the links between the world within and the world outside, the reality internal to the school and the concerns which the media re� ect in � ts and starts? Is there any correspondence or simple continuity between the inside and outside worlds? Does the concern expressed in the media convey a widespread reality or does it amplify dif� culties which are indeed real but limited? And in that case, on what condi-tions can damage and heartrending experiences, the media hype and dramatisation be avoided?

In practice, anti-Semitism in schools takes four main forms: it involves attacks, the victims of which are Jewish pupils with, if need be, elements of sadistic persecution which are rare but not unknown; insults, which are an everyday occurrence in some establishments, but of which the speci� cally anti-Semitic nature and the gravity are worth examining; the expression of prejudice and stereotypes including in the classroom, in particular when the content of a lesson involves Jews; and reactions of hatred or explicit hostility which may arise during a lesson, particularly in history and literature, in which the Shoah, World War II or else Israel are discussed, or else during events (the showing of � lms such as Nuit et Brouillard and Shoah).

avoir été insulté et battu au collège Montaigne à Paris”, Le Monde, 3–12–2003; “Pendant deux mois, un élève juif de onze ans a été harcelé par deux condisciples musulmans”, Le Nouvel Observateur, 11–12–2003; “Ces deux élèves d’origine maghrébine l’ont insulté et frappé à plusieurs reprises parce qu’il était juif ”, Libération, 13–12–2003.

3 Envoyé Spécial, France 2, Thursday 15 April 2004. See also the television report by Cyril Denvers and Stéphane Trichard, on France 3, “Quand la religion fait la loi à l’école”, broadcast on Saturday 27 March 2004 at 11.05 p.m. These two documentaries gave rise to heated controversy: “Un reportage sur le communautarisme suscite la polé-mique”, Le Monde, 14–4–2004; “Polémique après un reportage sur l’antisémitisme sur France 2”, Le Monde, 16–4–2004; “Éducation-médias-antisémitisme-France 2, La Croix, 16–4–2004; “Un mur d’incompréhension entre Montreuil et Chouraqui”, Libération, 17–4–2004; “Le reportage d’Élie Chouraqui vivement contesté”, Le Figaro, 17–4–2004; “Le racisme à Montreuil fait problème”, Ouest France, 21–4–2004.

4 Hearing before the Stasi committee, Tuesday 9 September 2003: Mme. Arvaud, Head of the Collège Beaumarchais, Paris 11e.


CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

THE CLAMOUR OF THE MEDIA AND THE SILENCE OF THE TEACHERS

In Sarcelles, where in 2003–2004 we carried out a sociological inter-vention,1 then in various pre and post-16 educational establishments in Paris and its surrounding areas (in Stains, Saint-Denis, Argenteuil, Garges-les-Gonesse, Meudon-la-Forêt, Courbevoie, Vigneux, Bois-Colombes, etc.), whenever the question of anti-Semitism in schools arises, the teachers and the other staff (heads, those in charge of the CDI, the CPE,2 school mediators, maintenance staff, supervisors) begin by launching into an almost systematic criticism of the media approach to the phenomenon. There is a considerable gap between this media approach, as it � lters back to them, and their own perceptions.

Furthermore, it is not easy to deal with anti-Semitism in schools during the interviews with the teachers: they demonstrate considerable inertia on this topic. Most of the time we had to insist, referring to current events to introduce the subject and then almost systematically provoking reactions of distrust, even hostility in relation to the media, which is accused of misrepresenting the problem and, above all, of exaggerating it.

1 The sociological intervention already referred to in the second part of this book consists in studying an action, a problem or a situation with one or several groups each comprising roughly ten participants who agree to participate in the research and analysis approach, including discussions with other players currently in their sphere of activity or likely to be so. In other research studies, the sociological intervention was able to take the form of a lengthy and demanding process in which the participants became heavily involved. This was not the case here for reasons which are essentially due to the low level of mobilisation in schools. This is why we have used the minutes of our meetings, treating them as traditional interviews, and extracting signi� cant remarks, as we have done in the other interviews for this research.

2 CDI: Centre de documentation et d’information (Centre for documentation and information); CPE: conseiller principal d’éducation (Educational Adviser).


362 chapter twenty-four

Media Coverage of Anti-Semitism as Seen by Schools

In some cases, the media was advanced as a justi� cation for the refusal to speak to us. Thus, one of the of� ce bearers of a parents’ association of the Collège Montaigne School in Paris deplored the ‘damage’ caused in his opinion by the media:

If you want to take an interest in schools there are other, much more serious subjects, like the question of comprehensive education, guidance for students, but, in this case, no, I refuse to be interviewed because the way this whole story has been handled by the media is just incredible.

And one of the few teachers in this school who agreed to meet us began the interview by pointing out:

I don’t instinctively distrust the media but in this matter I was able to see to what extent everything was twisted. On top of that, it’s not even intentional on the part of the journalists, but they make a mountain out of a molehill and vice versa. It causes a lot of damage.

Media Coverage and Exaggeration

The media are said to exaggerate the reality of anti-Semitism in schools and even to construct it. A teacher of French in a state secondary school in Stains where Claude Lanzmann went to present his � lm, Shoah, was surprised when she discovered how the media had covered the event:

It’s part of the curriculum in the � nal year. Well, [. . .]. The teachers had looked at it this way: it’s on the curriculum, there’s a possibility of viewing part of the � lm with Lanzmann, which was excellent. Well, the three articles were published under the heading “Anti-Semitism in the nine three”3 (93 is the administrative number of Seine Saint Denis). Generally speaking the tone of all three articles was the same: “Wow, Lanzmann, what a performance! The pupils in the audience were all Arabs,and they didn’t even snigger”. As if the pupils were going to snigger.

She reported to us the reaction of her pupils (who did not see the � lm) when she invited them to analyse this coverage by the media:

Everyone was fairly shocked by it and I was so shocked that I made my pupils read all three articles [. . .]. The � rst reaction was: “Miss, why did we not get to see it? It sounds really interesting” (laughter). Very well [. . .]

3 ‘Nine-three’, or ‘9–3’, people also sometimes say ‘9 cubed’: way of referring to the administrative division, Seine-Saint-Denis (93).


the clamour of the media and the silence of the teachers 363

and I said, “Now you take these three articles and see what information you can get out of them” [. . .], well, I’m doing my job as a teacher of French language and literature. The pupils listed the information. Then I said, “Now, you’re going to work on what is implied. What is not openly expressed but is implied?” [. . .] They went back to the articles: “But, Miss, it’s disgusting. Why the nine three? What relevance does it have whether we come from the nine three or not? Why the nine three and not the � gure, 93?” “They’ve written nine three in the title on the front page. And why do they say we’re all blacks or Arabs? If they’re writing an article against racism there’s no need to say that we’re this or that. And why do . . .? [. . .] It must be said that there were some phrases . . . of the type “the pupils the majority of whom seemed to be Muslim . . .”.

This same teacher also expressed her astonishment regarding the book in which Michaël Sebban recounts an experience of anti-Semitism to which he claimed to have been subjected, in precisely this state second-ary school in Stains:

At the beginning of the year, a philosophy teacher came to the school [. . .]. He came to replace another teacher for a while. But to cut a long story short, he had disastrous relations with almost everyone. With me, because he didn’t clean the blackboard before leaving so I said to him, “Would you be so kind as to clean your blackboard”, and he shouted at me [. . .].Things like that happened [. . .]. One day he suddenly disappeared and everyone was surprised that he could disappear and be replaced by someone else whereas, in theory, you can’t change schools. And it turned out that this bloke writes books [. . .]. Lots of people had seen him on television [. . .]. He had been on quite a few programmes [. . .] in broad-casts with Elie Chouraqui, Finkielkraut, etc., and where he posed as an example of a bloke who had been a victim of anti-Semitic persecution, particularly in our school. He wrote a book about it . . . And he therefore explained on the TV programmes that people didn’t say hello to him because he was Jewish. Personally I had never thought about whether he was Jewish or not. So I said to my colleagues, “Did you know he was Jewish?” “Of course I knew he was Jewish. It was impossible not to know. He introduced himself to the pupils by saying, “I warn you, I’m Jewish. I’m the son of a rabbi. I’m a teacher here and a DJ4 in Tel Aviv [. . .] and, “I can’t take classes on Friday because Friday is the eve of the Sabbath”, and he caused a lot of trouble by never being in on Friday.

Like many others, an Educational Adviser from a school in the 18th district was wary. He avoids journalists:

4 Disc jockey.



I’ve known for a very long time what they were going to show, because I know the TV crew who contacted me at one point. [. . .] They wanted something sensational. In any event, I didn’t want to get involved. Finally, the little we did discuss about it, didn’t interest me really because I had the impression that they wanted to revive something [. . .]. You can’t believe that a � lm director just comes along like that, and then he discovers that [anti-Semitism] and that nobody had noticed anything before.

Distrust and Tensions

The attention given to anti-Semitism by journalists thus provoked reserve and astonishment and resulted in tensions when the two unrelated worlds—that of the media and that of the school—came into contact. A teacher of history and geography in a school in Sarcelles, to whom we were describing an event covered by the media which occurred in another establishment in the town voiced his scepticism:

I’m usually very suspicious of talk in the media. I’ve not heard anything about this incident [. . .]. The incident has de� nitely either been blown up out of all proportion or not blown up enough.

Some people are so suspicious that they lay the responsibility for anti-Semitism at the door of the media. And here, pupils5 or parents of pupils may corroborate the remarks of the teachers. A pupil in the � nal year at a Parisian state secondary school stressed:

There are times when we don’t discuss it at all and there are times when you have the impression that it’s the biggest problem in France and that it’s the only thing that’s happening. It’s exaggerated [. . .]. One you could almost say the problem is being created [. . .]. By showing the only example that there is going to be � fteen times for goodness knows how long, you crystallise it . . . and afterwards, it brings things in its wake which shouldn’t have happened. There were problems in a Jewish cemetery [. . .] and people began to discuss it and then there were lots of incidents. It’s the same for the synagogues.

One parent made similar remarks, contrasting the school and the family with the media, and particularly, television:

It’s really the media which spoil the children’s lives. Such and such a child will take the side of the war that’s going on over there, because

5 We met several pupils in a dozen schools in Paris and the Parisian region.



over there it resembles his own religion, such and such a child will take it . . . [. . .]. They try to imitate what they have seen.

The media are thus said to contribute to anti-Semitism, by dramatis-ing and exaggerating the slightest event, by introducing the issues of violence in the world, beginning with the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict, to the youngest and by having an unhealthy in� uence on them. The director of a Jewish school in Sarcelles considered that:

Our minds are numbed by the media which harangue us with their observations and their judgements and, little by little, as a result of hearing a certain number of . . . the child makes errors of judgement. It’s brainwashing.

Similarly, a PE teacher at a school in Sarcelles thought that:

The pressure from the media or the information broadcast by the media can have repercussions on these adolescents who tend not to take a step back and who take what they hear on television at face value. At times when these con� icts are a little exacerbated and are at the forefront of the news, we notice that it can have repercussions on schools. We hear expressions, things that are said by the pupils and that can be a source of inter-ethnic con� ict between the pupils.

A teacher from the Paul-Vaillant-Couturier School in Argenteuil sug-gested that: “Media hype can put ideas into the minds of children who have none. And that’s extremely dangerous”. A maths teacher from the Evariste-Galois School in Sarcelles wondered whether overreacting to the problem did not have adverse effects:

The tendency to overreact to racism when it concerns the problems of the Jews bothers me, because too much is said about it in comparison with other things. I don’t feel it in school, but if they begin to talk about anti-Semitism too much in the media they’ll kill the problem. The subject needs to be opened up.

The loss of interest and the crisis of con� dence in the media go far beyond the question of anti-Semitism. Many teachers think that, in general, the news is reported poorly and they say they are particularly distrustful of television. It is obvious that the relationship between the world of the teachers and the world of the media is fraught with hostility and fear on the part of the teachers.



Using the Media

Is this to say that school is ‘good’ and that whatever the media say about it can only be bad, that the education system works well and that jour-nalists inevitably corrupt minds, particularly the youngest minds, which are also the most impressionable? These extremely widespread images of a struggle between good—the school—and evil—the media—are obviously profoundly ideological. Their effect is to prohibit any judge-ment being made of schools from the outside. They discourage any sort of criticism, any sort of re� ection and do not enable us to evaluate any possible problems.

This also explains why there are also teachers or members of the administrative staff who turn to the media to force the establishment to think about certain questions. They then expect the media, due to the link with the outside world that they offer, to help to introduce changes within. Not only do these teachers not complain about the media but, on the contrary, criticise those who are suspicious of them. They see therein a resource for modernising or democratising the education system and, consequently, meet with the hostility of their colleagues. Thus a history teacher and the head of a school in Argenteuil shared his experience with us:

R.:—If there’s one thing that the French Ministry of Education employees loathe, that they’re really terri� ed of and that causes them a lot of bother, it’s the media. I used it as a lever in the incident at the kindergarten. When my story went on the televised news bulletin at 8 p.m. on France 2 and Canal + I can tell you that it caused a furore and it forced the institution to move. Within 24 hours the whole of the teaching staff in the kindergarten had been transferred, suspended from duties.C.:—For example, he as a teacher and I as head had a real battle with colleagues from the school when we were confronted with a request from Antenne 2 to go on television. We appeared before an ad hoc tribunal. I appeared alone because it didn’t bother me. I gave permission for � lming in the school one Wednesday afternoon.R.:—I had to put up with being called a traitor, persona non grata, the person who did not respect the ‘code of silence’. There was a code of silence.

Pressure comes from colleagues; if need be, it also comes from the highest authorities. A teacher of French in Garges recounted:

They telephoned me at 8 p.m.; an advisor to the Minister called. She left three messages because I refused to answer the telephone [. . .]. The affair was going to be dealt with internally and we were not to talk about it . . . because Canal + (a television channel) was inviting me, there was



the chap from Le Monde de l’Education and one from Libé. . . . I had the � les but I said that I didn’t need to shout it all over the press or anything like that. I said that there had been an injustice and that justice had to be done, that’s all.

What is generally speaking the case is even more so where anti-Semi-tism is concerned. The media are criticised. But they are sometimes also expected to enter educational institutions which, till then, were hidden from the public eye, to speak about them and what they say may deprive the staff of their prerogatives, expose problems and reveal dif� culties or, at the very least, a malaise which the institution would like to deal with ‘internally’. The majority of the staff in schools feel the harsh glare of this watchful eye which, effectively, has been quick to magnify, distort and sometimes even produce problems which have to be made public—but which do nonetheless contain an element of truth. On the contrary, a small minority considers that the media open up educational establishments and force them to confront the dif� culties they face, rather than closing their eyes to them. The tension between the school and the media is just as acute within the school, between this small minority and the majority.

Silence

On the whole, staff in schools are not particularly keen to know and understand anti-Semitism in schools, or at least to think of means likely to counter it ef� ciently. Ultimately, the most critical question tends to become the low participation of the teaching staff whenever it is a matter of thinking about these questions. In the � rst instance, it is not so much the frequency, the nature and the perpetrators of anti-Semitism which deserve examination but the dif� culties or reluctance of the school in confronting these issues.

A Stream of Problems

In the establishments where we carried out our survey, the teachers have an extremely diverse range of views of the situation or of a possible incident and they often asked us, “Why discuss anti-Semitism rather than anything else?” The preparation of a sociological intervention which consisted in persuading approximately ten teachers to attend a series



of group meetings on the theme of ‘intercommunity relations, racism and anti-Semitism in schools’ proved to be particularly sensitive. It was much more dif� cult than in other research studies to get the ten or so participants required together even if, in other respects, many teachers said they were interested in these questions. For example, a teacher of history and geography agreed to be interviewed one-to-one but emphati-cally refused to participate in group work. He saw our approach as an expression of a general tendency to ethnicise social relations: “In your research, your starting point is an a priori which is to give preference to one aspect of the person, that is their ethnic origin. You start from the principle that that is what creates social ties.” Another teacher promised each week to come to the next meeting without ever ful� lling his promise—he � nally got out of it by saying that he was convinced we were working “for the government”. On the whole, participants of the meetings came more to listen and to learn than to advance collec-tive re� ection. The passive atmosphere of the meetings was illustrated by the following remark made by a physics and chemistry teacher at a school in Sarcelles:

These are questions I hadn’t really considered, in fact I � nd it interesting, I come here to form an opinion, I’m getting to grips with it. I haven’t yet given my opinion that much because I don’t have a very clear idea as yet. [. . .] There have been racist incidents, at the time I didn’t really react. I’m going to think about it and see how I could calm things down.

Whether it be a question of the sociological intervention carried out in Sarcelles, or other individual or group interviews, the teachers do not deny the existence of anti-Semitism in schools. But generally speaking, in their opinion, it is simply one of many problems, a single component in a stream of generalised tensions: the phenomena of gangs, sexism, violence in schools, the poverty of families leading to worrying behav-iour, etc. For many of them, the daily workload is heavy. For example, a teacher of French in a state secondary school in Stains made no secret of his weariness:

At regular intervals a big problem comes up which could be anything and everything. It could be a settling of scores between two rival gangs or drug traf� cking on the housing estate and, as a result, there are repercussions for the school. At one point it was the rivalry between the Clos-Saint-Lazare and I don’t know which housing estate in La Courneuve . . . When there is violence between the housing estates we inevitably know about it. [. . .] Pupils who open a classroom door and throw an egg, that’s something else, etc. And when in one week, there were three teachers who got eggs,



three who went to complain because they simply could not teach any longer it was such a shambles, when on top of that there are kids who have cut the electricity so that everything is in the dark and furthermore the alarm goes every ten minutes . . . you say to yourself, “Help! What’s going on?” [. . .] There are incidents—how should I put it?—sporadic incidents—a pupil who is rude, a pupil who is this, a pupil who is that [. . .]. At one point, for example, we were attacked by about forty kids. They were masked and armed with baseball bats and they were attacking the school.

The social question combines with the rise in ethnic awareness and the religious factor to make anti-Semitism one possible aspect of the situation, but one of many. The head of a school in Argenteuil, for example, comes up against new dif� culties every day:

I feel as if I’m discovering a lot of things which doubtless exist and which I don’t think about in the normal run of things. We had a meeting on Monday morning. Argenteuil also has a lot of different communities, people of foreign origin. I was completely taken aback . . . As it is, there are not many “rationnaires”, children on school meals. We struggle and set money aside for them to come and eat and I discovered that we were going to lose some of them because a growing number of kids come and don’t want to eat the meat because it’s not halal [. . .]. We have long since made a distinction between pork and non-pork dishes. There’s one question that the kids refer us back to and that is the families. Should we respond? If this question is posed, there are answers that have to be given.

Lack of Communication and Debate

If the staff are not necessarily aware of a possible problem of anti-Semitism in their establishment it is also, if some of them are to be believed, a result of a lack of communication and debate within the school. It would appear that the experience of all those concerned is fragmented and that each individual lives through and deals with the tensions on their own, whatever their nature.

In the course of a meeting of our sociological intervention group, a teacher of French literature, T., recounted that one day, on entering her classroom, she found Stars of David drawn on the blackboard. A librarian, B., who works in the same college, saw therein an illustration of the fragmented nature of the world of the school:

What you have just referred to, for example, Stars of David on the blackboard . . . why is this not reported each time? It should be reported, it’s awful. I’m beginning to think that if this has not been discussed until now it’s because something is genuinely being hidden.



A little later, during the same meeting, another conversation added to the analysis:

B.:—We made a trip to Germany (with the pupils) and, clearly, we came up against racism. The sports club where we were playing called the police and accused us of theft. Sports’ clothes, etc., had been stolen.T.:—Really? But you never told us, you concealed it from us, did you try to hide the problem?B.:—Yes, it’s true that we never mentioned it, but the teacher identi� ed it as racist behaviour toward the kids in our college.

Even in establishments where anti-Semitic incidents have been described and reported in the press as such, the teachers’ accounts stress the absence of information and the lack of debate. Thus, in the Evariste-Galois School in Sarcelles a teacher of French explained how she had learnt about an event which had been the talk of the school:

But I wasn’t there, I didn’t see anything, I heard about it one day in the canteen [. . .] And, all the same, I was really astonished that the pupil who had been attacked had been excluded from the school. It really shook me.

In the same tone, a teacher from the Collège Montaigne in Paris recounted how he had learnt about the incident which had shaken the establishment:

Up to the half-term break in November, nothing at all, nobody had mentioned it, it really wasn’t news. It was in the month of November that people began to talk about it. One day in the canteen, a teacher of the class said that something dreadful had happened and that: “I think that we’re going to be able to hush it up but it’s been poorly handled to date”. I turned to the CPE (Educational Advisers) and asked them: “Do you know anything about this?” and one of the CPEs said: “Listen, frankly speaking, we can’t sort out exactly what’s been happening here but I’m afraid that in the present circumstances there are hints that the situation may erupt”.

There is apparently not suf� cient debate in schools, except about trade union issues. A music teacher remarked:

When there are events which lend themselves to discussion, usually there is no debate or else it’s just in the corridors. Have you ever seen real debate? Apart from the ones against the Loi Allègre (a proposed reform in education) when the teachers really had their say.

And a librarian remarked that at the time when the media did not talk about anything other than the work of the Stasi Committee on secularism:



It was mad; in the school there was not even the precept of a debate, nobody asked what we thought about it. What was to happen was to be decided from on high once again.

No matter what the problems encountered may be, the teachers repeat-edly depict the lack of links and information about what is happening in their establishments. Examples poured in to denounce these de� cien-cies which lead to:

A sort of violence which is an everyday occurrence, a widespread unrest which inevitably ends in problems of discipline which are greater than usual, everyone shouting, material damage and what not. It’s often because further up there have been other things that we know nothing about. Then, occasionally, we might � nd out about it by accident, but it’s only by accident.

The Causes of the Silence

Some people blame a form of psychological inhibition. “It’s true that teachers do have dif� culty discussing what they experience in their classes with each other”, explained a PE teacher. Others refer to the fact that staff are no longer held to account, for example, when they are incapable of protecting the pupils from the violence that some of them display. A teacher of French in a secondary school in Stains recounted:

One pupil was threatened with a knife by another pupil. Well, there was a pupil who went all over his body with a knife during the break and, as it happens, there were adults who knew about it and nothing was done either to punish the pupil who did that or to protect the other pupil. We found out about it three months later; we were completely aghast. Nothing had been done. And in that case, we did � nd out about it but I think that, on the whole, we know nothing. If we do know something, it’s purely by chance, or it is something so serious that . . . When it’s against a teacher, then there is a reaction, of course. But, in nine cases out of ten, it’s the pupils, amongst themselves.

Yet others spoke of indifference and noted that those who act differ-ently are not popular with their colleagues. A teacher of French at a secondary school in Garges said:

We were in the canteen and we saw some pupils � ghting. I pointed it out to a colleague and we went to see. The others said we were mad and that we shouldn’t intervene. We went over and separated them. When we came back we were shouted down by our colleagues who told us it



was not our job to do that. One of them was so worked up, he took his tray and left.

The picture painted by the most critical is certainly exaggerated because not all teachers display this mixture of passivity and refusal to act. But it presents an image of these members of staff which puts an end to the myth of categories united by the values of progress, democracy or a campaign to reduce racism of any sort. A history teacher in Argenteuil was unable to conceal his fury:

The world of education in France has salved its conscience until now by saying, “We are on the left, we are progressive people”. This is totally false because it’s a world which, by its attitude, particularly when you’re in a ZEP college,6 like mine, a dif� cult ZEP . . . For some colleagues, I won’t hide it and I won’t mince my words even if it may seem blunt, it’s a relationship of coloniser to colonised. There is even a sort of condes-cension . . . “I am educated, I am superior, all you bougnoules7 (black-skinned foreigners) and nègres (niggers) shut up, I’m here for you [. . .]. On top of that, they salve their consciences by convincing themselves that they are not racist, that they are progressive [. . .] I have to force myself to stay in the staffroom, because what I hear there makes me bristle. They make remarks which are borderline of being plain racism. I’m sorry but when I hear colleagues say that, “in any case, ‘he’ or ‘she’ should just go back to where they came from . . .”.

It would not be fair to generalise this type of representation but nor would it be correct to ignore it. Ultimately, it is the observation of a teacher of French in Garges who referred to a rift between teachers and stated: “In the staffroom there is a distinct rift; this year it’s seri-ous. In my eight years, I’ve never seen anything like it. This year, it’s dreadful”.

As long as racism and anti-Semitism could be attributed to the extreme right alone, there was no problem. But if, without being able to admit it openly, here and there the teachers behave like ‘colonial-ists’, and, furthermore, if the bearers of anti-Semitism in the school are young people whom those on the left with their easy consciences consider � rst and foremost to be victims of racism, then it is easy to understand that a sort of paralysis grips these teachers. Their ideology blinds them to the social reality around them and to their own role in

6 Zone d’éducation prioritaire, or Priority educational area, in which schools are given additional resources.

7 Translator’s note: bougnoule and nègre are both highly pejorative slang terms.



these social realities. A history and geography teacher from a college in Argenteuil put it well:

When we are simply dealing with the anti-Semitism of the extreme right there is no dif� culty; all the barriers are up and we have the means to intervene. The problem which leaves our colleagues somewhat disarmed, helpless and ill at ease, is when they realise they’ve got themselves in a tight corner. There’s a North African community which is not at all integrated, which is rejected, marginalised and subjected to racism and it is these people, who are themselves victims, who are creating racism.

Turning a Blind Eye

Whether the dubious, racist or anti-Semitic remarks come from the pupils or from the teachers, the tendency amongst the latter is to turn a blind eye. There are scores of illustrations of this attitude, some even to deplore the fact that the absence of an instant reaction is intoler-able. A teacher of French in Garges referred to a discussion between two colleagues:

“Yes, anyway, there’s only riffraff in the school”, and in the course of the discussion one of them let slip: “Yes, there are only blacks and North Africans, nothing but riffraff”. I wasn’t there. I asked the person who came to tell me what he had said. He answered that he hadn’t said anything, that he had taken his tray and left. There were a lot of people at the table, they all took up their trays and left. Nobody said a thing. I said that I was going to speak to them; the others advised me to leave it because it had nothing to do with me.

This same teacher referred to another incident during which some young Germans had behaved in a racist manner with the pupils in his school in the presence of the head (proviseur):

I said that we were going to � le a complaint. The head claimed there was no point, that all they had to do was to apologise. He wanted them to say they were sorry and to consider the matter closed. I said no, that we should � le a complaint.

This type of anecdote points to a more general observation: the world of the school does not appear to be suf� ciently aware or to be overly unaware of expressions of racism and anti-Semitism. But, should we in actual fact distinguish between the two problems? The teachers who did agree to discuss this stressed how interwoven these two problems were and therefore considered they were part of the same reality and tended to sustain one another mutually. A teacher of French,



for example, was concerned by the anti-Semitism of populations of immigrant descent:

What is disturbing about it, what can be noted about this type of racism is that it is generated by a population which is itself subjected to racism in other circumstances [. . .]. What I cannot understand is that these popu-lations experience racism every day and that they themselves generate a new type of racism towards another population.

And, in con� rmation, B., whom we have already met and who is him-self Jewish, explained that the Jews may very well behave in a racist manner:

In the Jewish community too there are people who are very racist. Nobody is spared. Racism should be denounced each time it arises, no matter who the perpetrator is. It’s vile, no matter where it comes from.

But it is not necessarily easy, as a Jew, to be the � rst to encourage educational establishments to break with the silence or the indifference. A teacher from the Collège Montaigne described the atmosphere in his establishment following an incident which made the headlines in the media:

We’ve come to a point . . . One of my colleagues happens to be of Jewish origin. She makes no attempt to assert her Jewish identity, but she was really worried at one point because she held the same view as me. And one day she came to tell me, “You know, I avoided saying so openly”. I asked her why and she said, “Because, with my origins, I’m going to be accused of taking this position because I’m Jewish”. And this is where things begin to go wrong. But the prize goes to a colleague with the best of intentions who holds the same opinion as I do. A few weeks ago he asked me, “Can I put a question to you?” I answered in the af� rmative. “You, yourself . . .” and I knew what was coming, “you’re of Jewish origin, aren’t you?” So, I said to him, “Because I defended the idea that perhaps this really was an anti-Semitic incident, I’m Jewish?”

The way educational establishments deal with cultural differences demanding recognition is a sensitive issue and we will come back to this. The dramatic social situations of some pupils complicate the issue and the scope for consideration of anti-Semitism is all the more reduced where communication is poor or indifference creates a climate of igno-rance. Consequently, the media coverage of anti-Semitism in schools creates a great deal of tension between the internal and the external worlds, exacerbating the dif� culties there may be in pinpointing the



problems appropriately. Excesses and shortcomings continue to prevail. Nevertheless, amongst teachers, it is possible to � nd an arena for the consideration of anti-Semitism as long as it is introduced diplomatically or because it is imposed from without.


CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

DEALING WITH THE SHOAH IN SCHOOLS

If schools do not talk about anti-Semitism it is not necessarily, or uniquely, due to indifference or the easy conscience of the teachers but primarily because the school does not know how to deal with it, how to confront it or to guard against it. When the issue crops up spontaneously or, rather, when it is introduced, there are outcries and outbursts questioning the responsibility of schools.

Talking about Anti-Semitism

In the course of our research, it was always the researchers who intro-duced the issue of anti-Semitism. Generally speaking, interest in the subject is generated from without, or else from above. The principal of a school in Argenteuil who took part in our sociological intervention explained how he had come to turn his attention to the question:

Since I came here, it’s true that I have discovered things, in particular about racism towards Jews which did not seem that important to me. I was with Luc Ferry (the Minister for Education) last week. He was hold-ing talks with heads of establishments about the law on secularism. By way of introduction, he gave some � gures. He gave the � gures for acts listed as racist between 1990 and 2000. There were ten per year. But what threw me into a panic and you could have heard a pin drop at the time—there were about 30 people present in the room—was that the � gure which he had given in 2003 had been multiplied by 150 or 160 with what he described as anti-Semitic racist acts. And he said, “90% of the culprits are North Africans”. He said it of� cially, and that we could con� rm the � gures. I came back to the school and we (the heads of esta-blishment) have a data base called SIGNA that we have to � ll in every month recording acts, or incidents. Now, and this is new, we are asked to list racist and, in particular, anti-Semitic acts of violence in SIGNA. I’m telling you what I heard. That means that racist acts doubtless target Jews more than others.

In some cases it is the intervention of the victim, or their families, which forces the institution, which would otherwise be reticent, to take


dealing with the shoah in schools 377

up the issue of anti-Semitism. B., a librarian in a school in Sarcelles, gave us an example:

One and a half months ago we had a Board of Governors’ meeting. There was a Jewish mother, who is a representative, who vented her anger because her kid was being subjected to anti-Semitic insults. This created an incredible malaise. I would like to be as non-violent as possible. I don’t want to call people anti-Semitic or cowards. But all the same, there was a general reaction of embarrassment which tended towards: “Stop talking about that. We’re not going to discuss that now. We’ll talk about it later, in private”. Now if they talk about it in private, I won’t know anything about it. I asked this parent to go on, saying that I was very happy she had raised the issue because if she had spoken about it in private I would not have known about it. And that is what is so dreadful. It must not be hidden any longer. We have to stop concealing it, and fooling ourselves, thinking that will protect us.

B. is part of the in� nitely small minority who would like to open up the � les and see the issues dealt with. He comes up against a climate dominated by the refusal to act. In this climate, indifference can be combined with misunderstanding and an inability to perceive the gravity of the facts. A teacher of French in Stains recounted:

I was walking down a corridor when I happened to hear one pupil say to another: “Filthy Feuj” ( Jew). I stopped [. . .]. The teachers who were there said, “Don’t bother”. Apparently I was the only person to think there was a problem.

The fact remains that even within schools there are some individuals, possibly somewhat isolated, who do break with the law of indiffer-ence and put an end to the dumb reticence about dealing with the question.

The very reality of anti-Semitism in schools, when it is not absent—or denied—is constantly interpreted. Four heads of establishments who had reported incidents of anti-Semitism by means of the SIGNA1 data file kindly agreed to meet us. The principal of a school in

1 Since January 2004, the SIGNA data � le which compiles a register of violent incidents in schools has been re� ned to include more categories. Before this date, the data � le only offered the category ‘insults of a racist nature’. Nowadays, heads of establishments who report an incident must systematically specify whether it is an act of ‘racism’, or of ‘anti-Semitism’, by a culprit who is ‘unknown’, or ‘other’. The � les included data about the victim, the perpetrator and the place, but, on the other hand, say nothing about the importance of the facts. Speci� c details of a possible punishment were optional. In six months, a total of 36 anti-Semitic incidents were listed by these


378 chapter twenty-five

Meudon-la-Forêt had been the victim of insulting graf� ti targeting her. ‘Fat pig’ had been scrawled on the façade of the building. She is not Jewish, and, in her opinion, the insult targeted her as a North African. She considers herself a ‘Semite’ and therefore considers the incident anti-Semitic. The principal of a school in Courbevoie discovered a whole host of graf� ti on the door of the toilets, amongst which was ‘� lthy Jewess’ (a schoolgirl was named), but also ‘� lthy Black’, ‘� lthy Arab’. Her counterpart in a school in Vigneux-sur-Seine reported that, “In May 2003 [. . .], a drawing representing a Star of David pierced by a dagger with a drop of blood turned up on the desk of a Jewish schoolgirl in class”. The culprits, two North African boys with consider-able learning dif� culties, were described by her as “spoilt rotten kids, the youngest of large families, with elderly parents who can’t cope, kids who could easily become juvenile delinquents, but they’re not the type to demand things, masked and with clenched � sts”. In her opinion, it was “incredibly stupid, more than anything else”. The parents were brought in by the principal. The boys had several sessions with a teacher of history and geography ‘to put things straight’. But “they tended to try and wriggle out of it. They didn’t understand the importance of what they had done”. Part of the family of the young girl who made the complaint lives in Israel. Her elder brother had gone back there and the principal wondered whether it was a coincidence or whether there was some sort of identi� cation with the ‘Jewish/Zionist/Israeli/Palestinian question’? The fact remains that she reported the incident to the education authority (rectorat) “because I thought it was serious and I didn’t have the slightest desire to see that developing in the school”. More recently, a teacher in her school found graf� ti on the desk of a pupil targeting her as Jewish. It so happened that in the previous lesson she had said that her grandparents had been deported:

The pupil had written remarks of the type: ‘Death to the Jews’. I sum-moned the pupil and asked him to empty his schoolbag. He refused. I therefore called the police who made him empty his bag—I wanted to be sure that he didn’t have any documents—there was nothing special in it [. . .]. The teacher considered that she had been supported and therefore she did not think it necessary to alert the staffroom.

Finally, the principal of a school in Bois-Colombes recounted:

means in the Académie de Versailles. The Inspection générale requested an inquiry on anti-Semitism and information about the communities.



We did effectively have pupils making remarks of an anti-Semitic nature in the schoolyard. It was pupils in the second form. Three young boys set upon another calling him a “little Jew, I’m going to put you into the shower”. There were several sentences which could be interpreted as anti-Semitic. This is what the mother did. She was a lawyer and therefore wanted to take all the necessary precautions.

At a glance, there are two dif� culties. The � rst is the dif� culty in describing anti-Semitism appropriately and the second is in evaluating the gravity of the acts or the remarks. Here the teachers are in an awkward position. A major issue emerges from these two problems: should the speci� cities of anti-Semitism in this context be recognised or not? In some cases the question is whether or not the victim is not also guilty to some extent. Thus, when a teacher of French and an educational adviser (CPE) in a school in Sarcelles referred to the acts of violence to which a Jewish pupil was subjected in the playground in our presence, they did not tally: one said the pupil called the oth-ers names (‘� lthy Black’, for example), that he was obnoxious anyway and the fact that he was Jewish was irrelevant whereas the other stated that the pupil was attacked as a Jew and they could not come to a satisfactory conclusion. In situations in which ethnic categories are so common that they should not give rise to too much alarm, given that they are such an integral part of the everyday life of young people, the question posed becomes that of determining whether the epithet ‘Jew’ deserves special treatment, in particular because of the consider-able historical weight which it bears. Thus, a maths teacher wondered why there was so much talk of anti-Semitism in schools. He had not noticed it even though there were Jews in his class: “We’re still living in the past. We don’t have the right to say the word ‘Jew’ in the same way as we would say ‘stupid Malian’. ‘Stupid Jew’ always has historical connotations [. . .]. The principal of the school will � nd ‘stupid Jew’ dreadful, ‘stupid Arab’ would be different.

Remarks of this sort help us to move forward in our consideration of the dif� culties in dealing with anti-Semitism in a school environment. For, beyond indifference, beyond, also, a lack of understanding about the meaning of some remarks or actions, and also, beyond the inadequacies of the institution and its dif� culties in dealing with certain incidents internally—we shall come back to this—anti-Semitism does confront teachers with a very dif� cult question: does recognition of the speci� c-ity of this phenomenon not imply that an injustice is being committed in relation to other forms of racism and their victims? Would this not



be to accept a ranking which would favour Jews to the detriment of other groups who are, however, also subjected to hatred, hostility and many acute forms of discrimination and violence? A � nal year pupil in a Parisian secondary school said so in speci� c terms:

Amongst young people, those who experience the most racism are the Blacks and the Rebeus (the Arabs). It’s not the Jews. What’s more, the problems which may exist for Jews will only be with people of their age. Whereas the Rebeus and the Blacks have problems with the police. That’s the main problem for them actually. When I go out, nobody ever asks me for my ID. Never, never, never. But when my Black or Arab mates are together—or even when they’re alone—they are asked to show their ID all the time. Every day, several times a day.

And in this discussion, in which anti-Semitism competes with other forms of racism, one point constitutes a locus of � xation: the Shoah.

Malaise about Teaching History

Anti-Semitism in schools does not only take the form of insults and attacks. It is also linked with a malaise concerning the content of the curriculum and, in particular, in the case of history when it is a ques-tion, precisely, of talking about Jews and anti-Semitism. The teachers and the heads of establishments whom we met had a variety of experi-ences of the problem.

Showing the Shoah

The principal of a school in Argenteuil saw teaching about the Shoah primarily as an opportunity for developing debates and re� ection but admitted that it was dif� cult to engage the pupils in these:

When the teachers talk about the Shoah there is a person in our school whose family is part of that history, and who has a whole lot of documents and who comes into the classes, to bear witness to that history. Each time, I must admit, I am overcome. They come with stars and lots of things and tell the pupils, “Look, that’s how you stigmatise a people”. And there are always pupils who say, “But we could be wearing a yellow star in France,” and then there are debates [. . .]. It’s true that in a school where there are a lot of Muslim pupils or pupils with that historical background, these things might be rejected [. . .]. It is an issue which is debated in the school. The history and geography teachers say that we are no longer in the domain of reason but in the domain of feelings.



What the teachers see as anti-Semitism consists partly in eradicating messages that the memory of the Shoah is supposed to relay. They see therein ultimately a challenge to their teaching vocation which affects their personal integrity and the values which are the most fundamental in their eyes.

They frequently condemn the lack of gravity in the face of such a serious subject. The jokes, the laughter, the lack of respect on the part of the pupils when the teacher is discussing the Shoah, appear to be more hurtful than many other provocations. A teacher of history and geography in a school in Argenteuil showed his pupils Alain Resnais’ � lm Nuit et Brouillard:

I’ll never forget, in 1996 or 1997. It destabilised me profoundly. I had presented the Shoah and I had shown them Nuit et Brouillard, and for the � rst time I found myself facing a class who didn’t care. It meant absolutely nothing to them. I was jeered at. It was a total joke. And one of the pupils made a remark which bowled me over: “Your � lm is crap, Sir, there are no special effects”. The whole class roared with laughter!

However, reactions of this type are far from systematic. The remarks of a history and geography teacher from a school in Sarcelles dem-onstrate that people so fear and anticipate the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in certain contexts that they end up being almost surprised at its absence:

That said not all (non-Jewish) pupils are the same [. . .]. Obviously, if you ask them, “What do you think of the Jews?” it’s highly sensitive. But, last year, I went with them to see the � lm The Pianist. I didn’t hear one single anti-Semitic remark, not one [. . .]. The kids were really upset by the scene in which an SS of� cer threw an invalid out of the window [. . .]. Yet on the way to the � lm we expected the worst, particularly as we had two classes. In Saint-Ouen, my wife saw something simply awful. In the theatre, traditionally, the deportees come to talk. And there, the reaction of the kids was to shout, “Into the oven”. It was absolutely dreadful. What calmed them down and in a way, it was even worse, was that there was a young North African who spoke up and said, “No, in Islam, we respect all religions”. They were kids from the school.

It must be admitted that many subjects other than the Shoah provoke disconcerting reactions. For example, racism can emerge in connection with the Blacks. A teacher of French at the Evariste-Galois School in Sarcelles showed his pupils a short � lm which took place in the Central African Republic and recounted how the pupils:



were extremely ill at ease watching it and they had totally racist reactions, including the young black pupils, for whom it was shocking. It was as if they wanted to deny all that. As it happened, it spoke about traditions and rites and it was as if they wanted to reject this tradition and this vision of life. They didn’t want to be identi� ed with that, just because they were black. They began to laugh.

The banalisation of the Shoah is set in a context where it is not alone in creating the feeling that the major dramas in history are not dealt with equally. A history teacher in a school in Sarcelles disagreed with his principal over the minute of silence requested for the victims of 11 September 2001:

I said, “Did we observe one minute’s silence for the massacre of the Algerians by the police in Paris, or for the Tutsis who were massacred?” She said, “You are a civil servant. You have to obey.” I said, “We heard this sort of argument during the war, thank you very much. I refuse to obey. My pupils can do as they please, but I will not observe one minute’s silence”.

Perhaps we should also have no illusions as to the pupils’ level of knowledge. A teacher of French in Stains stressed their ignorance:

I say to myself that if someone were to ask young people: “Do you know what Auschwitz is?” and the kids were to answer, “Well, no, not the slightest idea,” that might have a strong whiff of negationism or what not about it. But the kids think there were dinosaurs in Versailles and that Versailles is part of Greek antiquity. They haven’t the slightest idea about anything . . . although they have studied it. That’s something to be surprised about, but they know nothing, nothing, nothing at all, particularly about history.

The fact remains that the teachers have noticed a lifting of the taboo which used to shroud the Shoah—nobody nowadays cares about the suffering. At times its evocation even becomes a pretext for expressing the worst stereotypes. A teacher of French in a school in Sarcelles took his third form pupils:

mainly non-Muslim Africans to see the animation � lm about Anne Frank. And there, I was astonished because the black pupils, who weren’t Mus-lims, thought that the family got what they deserved, that it was to be expected, etc. It was awful. They told me that the Jews were all rich. All the stereotypes. I tried to show them that these were stereotypes and that in fact there were all sorts of professions, but I know that I didn’t change their thinking. I was totally taken aback by that [. . .]. They were racist through and through and they were not Muslims so it had nothing to do with religion. Their reaction was: “It served the Jews right”.



A teacher of history and geography in a school in Sarcelles pointed out that it was not easy to teach certain questions, like World War II or genocide:

With a Jewish population in the school, a population of Arab descent and Turks there’s always a certain amount of tension. Even if there aren’t any insults � ying around, and I do insist on that, the atmosphere is tense. The worst thing is the bad taste. It’s not negationism either. That’s not their line.

But when, what in other contexts, on other issues, could pass for mere youthful protest or somewhat unruly youths challenging authority, arises in the context of the Jews and their destruction, this is a phenomenon which is obviously not a trivial matter. Some teachers interpret this as a rather crude version of competition amongst victims, racism on the part of the victims of racism. A teacher of French in Stains mentioned a pupil by way of example: she suspected that he had been groomed by an Islamist network and noted that he had no hesitation in stating in class that anti-Semitism was exaggerated. She reported his remarks: “When the Arabs are victims of racism, nobody ever talks about it and as soon as the slightest thing happens to a Jew, its headline news”.

A teacher who teaches at the Collège Montaigne in Paris reported the reaction of some of his pupils when two 11 year old pupils were punished for anti-Semitism:

There are quite a few Portuguese children [. . .] and they have been the butt of jokes for a long time. And there are the Brazilian children who are the butt of jokes made by the Portuguese. I have a very clever little Brazilian who said to me: “But, Sir, if it’s a question of principle why have these two pupils been expelled? For years now we have been subjected to insults. Why is nothing done about that?” [. . .] They have the impression that the Jews really do have the right to special treatment.

Thus there is a feeling of resentment amongst some of the pupils and, sometimes also amongst the teachers, that even when they are victims, the Jews fare better than others. Teaching about the Shoah can afford an opportunity for this to be expressed.

How Should This be Confronted?

The remarks in class about the Jews or the Shoah shock, disconcert or discourage many of the teachers who report them. Each individual endeavours to react as best they can. The � rst response is pedagogical,



in which case it is a question of explaining, introducing reason and knowledge. A teacher of French in a school in Sarcelles recounted, “They said that the Jews were all rich”. They were against the Jews. We tried to discuss their arguments and the situation in general. ‘Are all the Jews rich?’ A history teacher from another school in the town considered that action had to be taken at once:

We have to take this into consideration immediately, otherwise we are opening the door to very serious things. In the third year history book, there is a caricature of a Jewish beggar from Hitler regime propaganda. There are pupils who say, “It’s true the Jews have bags of money”, or, “Yes, but he doesn’t want for anything, he’s a Jew”. Well, these are things which I take them up on because, even if they are not racist insults as such, the insults are just below the surface.

The appeal for consideration implies that the teacher is able to debate, as can be seen with this teacher of history and geography in Argenteuil:

I had a class which was a bit dif� cult. Some pupils had no hesitation in displaying � agrant anti-Semitism throughout the year. When we were studying Nazi Germany one of them said to me that they “got what they deserved” [. . .]. That’s what they really believed. I looked at the pupil in question and said to him: “If it was Arabs or Blacks, and not Jews, what would you think then?”

This same teacher is the one we have already encountered when he talked about the reactions of his pupils at the screening of Nuit et Brouil-

lard, when one of them had regretted the lack of ‘special effects’. He had been tormented by this remark:

That evening, I said to myself that the members of the Resistance, all those who had perished in the ovens, had just been killed a second time. What should I do? I couldn’t let something like that pass. He thought it was just a � lm, end of story [. . .] And then I had an idea [. . .] I had recorded � lms from the German archives about the Shoah, including the short � lm that was shown during the Nuremberg Trials [. . .]: the Jews were lined up facing a grave � lled with corpses and there were people � ring revolvers . . . There was a documentary on Envoyé spécial, about Sierra Leone. There was a truly shocking scene in which you saw a group of young black adolescents, armed, surrounding a man whose hands were tied behind his back and who had a tyre in � ames round his neck, and it was in colour. I thought to myself that that was something which might make them react [. . .]. The business of the ‘special effects’ was something I found hard to swallow. So I made a montage. I showed the whole of the archive � lm (ten minutes) and without any commentary, or anything,



I went on to Sierra Leone. I took advantage of the class in civics about ‘News and the media’. I put on the � lm and went to sit at the back of the class. At the beginning I explained brie� y what they were going to see. The images were shown and there was a feeling of malaise. And then we came to the images from Sierra Leone and at that point they were trans� xed. The whole class was petri� ed. I put the lights back on and I asked them to explain the difference between the two events they had just seen. There was a long silence and then one of them said it was the same thing. This was despite the fact that in the � rst clip it was Jews and then it was Blacks. “Blacks and Jews are human beings. Does the colour of their skin make any difference here?” “No, Sir”. And I also heard remarks like: “We Africans have never massacred anyone at all”. I turned to the pupil who said that and just at that moment one of his friends said to him: “I thought that would be Roland” and he turned pale—he really looked ill. And I said to myself that I had won. Why? Because the pupils had identi� ed with a problematic which is dear to my heart, namely that “ordinary people who � nd themselves in extraor-dinary situations can become torturers”. Anyone can become a torturer, or the victim. The lesson left the class very shaken. From that day on, the inappropriate remarks stopped.

What is important about this response is that there is no insistence on the exceptional nature of the Shoah. On the contrary, it relies on another expression of barbarism to encourage the students to re� ect. It does not call on the students to recognise the speci� city of the horrors of the Shoah. It does not, for example, rely on an action of the ‘visit to Auschwitz’ type. It sets the destruction of the European Jews by the Nazis at a level at which it is comparable with other mass crimes in order to stand a better chance of reducing anti-Semitic hatred. The problem which is posed here is the issue of whether or not the Shoah can be equated with other genocides.

The End of the Uniqueness of the Shoah?

In most cases, teachers who are shocked by the anti-Semitic remarks and attitudes of the pupils have no hesitation in stressing the need to re-think the teaching of the history of the Shoah so that it is not put forward as exceptional. In any event, this remark applies to those whom we have met and who work in establishments located in working-class areas which are often dif� cult. Their stance obviously takes the char-acteristics of their population into consideration; they identify more readily with victims of slavery or of colonialism than those of Nazism.



These teachers do not themselves identify with any particular category of victim, but appeal instead to universal values which pose no problem for teaching about human barbarism, but make it trickier to insist on a history as unique as that of the Jews confronted with Nazism. Therein lies the paradox of their situation. In order to be able to deal with the Shoah, they either have to erase the speci� city of the victims and give an account of crimes targeting human beings, but without stressing the fact that they were Jews. Or else, in their concern for equality which, in the opinion of some, the nature of their school population imposes, they have to enter into the rationale of competition between victims and endeavour to put various experiences of genocide or other crimes against humanity on the same level.

A teacher of history and geography at a school in Sarcelles consid-ered it was:

a grave mistake to set the Shoah apart from the rest. There is no hierarchy of horror. I don’t think that the Jewish populations have suffered more or less than the black populations. You know, it’s terrible to talk like that, especially after the wearing of the yellow star in France, but a Jew who is being pursued in the population will be able to escape unnoticed in the midst of the population, whereas a black person cannot hide behind a French-sounding name or something of the sort. I completely refute the idea of a hierarchy of racism. ‘Filthy Jew’ is just as despicable as ‘� lthy Black’ or ‘� lthy Arab’ or ‘fat pig’ or ‘� lthy gay’.

A maths teacher at a school in Sarcelles added another dimension to the criticism of the uniqueness of the Shoah: it is said to have served to introduce an excessive degree of guilt:

During my schooling, I was forced to feel guilty although I had done nothing [. . .]. And I don’t see why I should have to bear the guilt of my parents [. . .]. History is not very well taught. It’s interesting to know what happened and it’s interesting to know how things could have been done differently. At what point things went wrong and what could have been done. Instead of saying, “You’re guilty”. I quarrelled with a Jewish friend about that. He said, “The Shoah is the supreme horror”, that’s what we are taught. And I said to him: “I don’t agree with you [. . .]. There have been other genocides”.

It was with regret that this teacher had to recognise that she could not introduce other experiences of suffering which would be comparable to those endured by the Jews, because we “are classed with the wicked, because we have not suffered like they have”.



Weariness in the face of the memory of the Shoah is far from being con� ned to the world of certain pupils. It is perhaps even primarily felt by teachers. A teacher of French in Sarcelles referred to a colleague:

He made an anti-Semitic remark one day, he said, “Oh, the Jews are always reminding us of their history . . .”. I told him that he was becom-ing revisionist. . . . to which he replied, “Yes, go on—get on your high horse right away…”. I said to him: “These dreadful events have taken place. That doesn’t mean that we all have to feel guilty, but it is history”. He said to me: “Yes, how do people . . . how do we know about all these things, through � lms, through literature, so it’s all twisted under the pretext that it’s twisted by the media . . .”. I replied, “But there are books with eyewitness accounts. It’s not just stories.” It was as if he wanted to remove one of the foundations of history. That’s why in my opinion he is anti-Semitic [. . .]. In other words what I experienced as anti-Semitism was his way of saying, “Really, we’re totally fed up with their history”. That is the discourse.

The introduction of the Shoah to the school curriculum is relatively recent and the anti-Semitic remarks on the part of the pupils began to appear in this context, which is more broadly speaking, that of the 1980s and of a widespread dawning of awareness about the Shoah and its introduction to public debate, to television. A teacher of history and geography noted:

When Holocaust was shown on television, it was totally counter-productive because the kids had had enough of it. There was a monopoly on victimi-sation. So the majority of kids in our school are black, so this monopoly on victimisation was, ultimately, destructive. As a result of saying the Shoah is unique. . . . Well, obviously each massacre is unique—it’s different from the others, but you know, the deportation of the Black Africans to America was not exactly a picnic. So there were remarks . . . But that was a long time ago now.

For some teachers it is perhaps not so much the fact of dealing with the Shoah, as the way it is approached which deserves to be criticised and the question then becomes one of a pedagogical nature. Here is what a young teacher of philosophy in a secondary school in Garges had to say:

When we talk about the Shoah I have the impression that in class we have a very moral view. Very sentimental [. . .]. Afterwards, I get together with my � nal year pupils who tell me that they don’t understand and they ask me: “Why the Jews?” I think that on various points the teachers are not able to deal with all the issues, and to � nd tools for analysis. The fact is, explaining current events does demand a certain knowledge.



The question is both social and historical. Some pupils expect to learn about experiences which correspond to their own memory and not only to the drama of the Jews. And the same pupils, or others, may move in social circles where they are ill prepared to think about something like the Shoah. A history teacher in Argenteuil observed:

The school population that I have in front of me are kids whose expe-rience, history, past and suffering are quite different from what I would be faced with if I taught at the Henri-IV in Paris where the pupils would come from upper middle class families. It’s not the same thing at all. The problem is that we are asked to teach something to people for whom it is incomprehensible. In the best of situations, it completely passes them by.

Ultimately, it is the very conception of the teaching of history which is challenged and, perhaps, at the same time, its adaptation to the school population.

The idea that it is necessary to adapt the curriculum to the new char-acteristics of the school population in fact follows on from an awareness of a cultural diversity which is now having an impact in the classroom and which calls for other curricula and other contents with a greater degree of � exibility because, in the words of one teacher:

School populations are not the same everywhere but there we have another question which is the question of the national curriculum. I have real questions about that and I am not the only person to ask these questions—I sometimes hear them in the staffroom.

History in particular, as it is taught in France, remains focussed on national experience and its themes are those of the countries of the northern hemisphere. Its teaching is planned out in the intellectual and political context of a society which has not experienced serious violence for a great number of years. Now, as a teacher of French in Sarcelles said, it is taught to pupils for whom World War II is not the most recent historical experience of mass violence, and for whom World War II does not necessarily rank “uppermost on the horror list”: “They know that there are wars, terrorist acts in Algeria, etc.”.

The anti-Semitism which may come to the surface in class when the Shoah is mentioned challenges the school in its own way at several levels. It suggests a lack of adaptation on the part of the school, its curriculum and its methods. It challenges one subject more especially, history, of which the conception and even the most basic foundations, demand consideration: history can no longer be identi� ed with the



nation and its universal message, as it was in the past. It is under pres-sure from various memories which, in a somewhat confused manner, are suggesting that it change. Anti-Semitism is genuinely issuing schools with a challenge: can recognition of the uniqueness of the Shoah be combined with modern individualism and modern egalitarianism on the one hand and the existence of community speci� cities other than those which unite the Jews on the other? Can a link be made between the viewpoint of one victim in particular, human rights and the viewpoint of other victims? The Shoah was for a long time almost absent from the curriculum and only recently found its way in. It is inconceivable that the Ministry of Education reverse the process. But it is clear that a new period has begun in which there is a need for re� ection and experimentation to decide on a policy to address the following ques-tion: how can the presentation of this historical fact be de-dramatised without banalising it in the process?


CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN SCHOOLS

It is not possible to understand the nature of anti-Semitism in schools without taking stock of the considerable changes affecting schools since the 1960s. These include democratisation, the extension of mass education as well as the reinforcement of social inequalities as a result of the system’s own rationales and institutional dif� culties in ful� ll-ing the promises of the Republic, etc. The sociology of education, in particular the work of François Dubet,1 is a particularly dynamic sphere and one which deals with both the ongoing changes and the conditions which would enable the introduction of in-depth reforms. We would refer any reader wishing to enter fully into this immense � eld of analysis and re� ection thereto. In our own research, we were very obviously confronted with these questions. The most outstand-ing of these, at least where it is a question of considering anti-Semi-tism in schools, is a social phenomenon of considerable importance: the racialisation of relationships between young people and the use which has become widespread, sometimes going so far as to be part of the daily routine, of categories and descriptions of the ethnic or racialtype. The phenomenon is relatively recent—in any case it has become more pronounced over the past 20 years.

A teacher from the Collège Montaigne retraced his career marked by these at once social and cultural changes. He explained that in the 1980s there were caïds (bosses) and gangs “but not on a basis of ‘we the rebeus (Arabs) and you the this, that or the other’”. Nobody mentioned the ‘tournantes’ (gang rapes) nor girls wearing headscarves. Then he was assigned to a ZEP (Educational Priority Area) in the 19th district in Paris:

with 26 nationalities in a school of between 600 and 700 pupils. I began to see something else coming to the fore. For example, I saw a black pupil

1 Cf. in particular the books Les Lycéens, Paris, Le Seuil, 1991; À l’école (with D. Martuccelli), Paris, Le Seuil, 1996; L’École des chances. Qu’est-ce qu’une école juste? Paris, La République des idées, 2004.


ethnic diversity in schools 391

accuse a teacher of racism whereas, in fact, the pupil was a pain in the neck. The teacher happened to be of Polish descent. She was blond with blue eyes and she was married to an Ivorian or a Cameroonian! At the time, there were the Portuguese and the beurs (Arabs) but there was nothing particularly contemptuous about that. They themselves said, “We are the ‘tos’, you’re the ‘beurs’”, but it was their way of de� ning themselves, and it was not something which excluded the others. Then I was sent to a school near Anvers (underground station, Paris 18) where the classes were unmanageable, the worst in my career, and where the majority of the pupils had been born to immigrant parents and at that point I noticed that they still called each other the ‘beurs’ and the ‘tos’ etc. And, as the year went on, at times that created incidents and it was beginning to give rise to jokes in poor taste.

Reception and Production of Differences

The widespread pervasion of differences into the world of the school, combined with the social dif� culties of whole sections of the ‘popu-lation’ of the school, confronted pupils with identities they had not even suspected the existence of before going to school. One parent recounted:

My children come from Cameroon and they do not distinguish between a French person, an Arab and a Jew. They see people who are white, they don’t make any distinction. They asked me how you tell who is Jewish, how you recognise if a person is Jewish. If this child says a word in school tomorrow, ask him if it’s a word he learnt at home or else if he learnt it at school.

In such circumstances, requests arise which the school is not always capable of confronting. One head of establishment explained:

A child who knows that his parents were not necessarily born on French soil, who has a culture behind him of which he is to some extent aware, wants to have answers to his questions. And if he gets no answer at home, what do we do with all that? Children who are different from one another are all mixed together and at some point they want to assert this difference. And the differences are exacerbated by the socio-political context.

This means that schools are reception centres for differences but they also contribute to producing them, reinforcing them and nowadays they have to deal with this.

The effect of ethnic diversity in schools is also revealed in the constant demands of the pupils who try to categorise their teachers and want


392 chapter twenty-six

to know about their religion, their origins and their opinions about speci� c current events. A teacher of French recounted how when she was teaching in Chatou:

The pupils thought I was Jewish [. . .]. And yet, Chatou is very upper middle class (BCBG = Bon chic, bon genre). I was surprised at this desire to categorise everyone according to origin [. . .]. They used to say to each other, “She’s a feuj ( Jewish)”, but they purposely said it so that I could hear.

A history teacher in Argenteuil heard his pupils talking about him: “Do you think he’s Jewish? No, he must be Catholic . . . He must be Protestant. . . . Is he a Muslim?” A teacher of French in a secondary school in Garges explained how his origins puzzled people:

I am always being asked to explain where I come from because they see my name and think that there are S… in Senegal and that I must be a Muslim. They ask me if I am. I reply that it’s a private matter. I get a lot of questions about the Koran, and the headscarf. The pupils try to get me on their side. When we take decisions which involve them they criticise me for it, stressing the fact that we belong to the same religious community but I say that that has nothing to do with it. We are all � rst and foremost individuals.

The fact is that he is more respected precisely because of his religion:

When a colleague asks them to take off their headphones, they say “OK—what’s the problem . . .”, but when I ask them, they say “Oh, yes Sir—I’ll do it since it’s you—you’re a Muslim”.

Sometimes, categorisation works in the opposite direction: the teachers are assigned an identity by the pupils on the basis of what they have said about politics or geopolitics. Thus a history teacher in Sarcelles noticed that his pupils associated his remarks on radical Islamism, Bin Laden and the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict with a religious identity which was then attributed to him, as if one’s identity necessarily determined political leanings. When he spoke to them about American imperialism and when he criticised American policy in the Middle East, following the attacks on 11 September 2001:

The reaction of one kid was to say, “You’re a true Muslim”. I said to him: “Listen, you know very well that I’m Jewish and an atheist at that”, and he said, “No, no, you’re truly a Muslim”.

This shows that the children have binary and community-based boxes to tick.



When invited to think about it, the teachers admit that there is a widening gap between their world and that of their pupils. They have dif� culty in identifying with each other, in recognising each other, they do not know much about each other or they do not know each other very well. There is nevertheless a strong demand on the part of the pupils to set up or reinforce processes of rapprochement or of iden-ti� cation. The ethnic diversity of the school and the fact that it is to a great extent combined with the social and economic dif� culties of the populations of immigrant origin sometimes provide a reply here, obviously one which is not particularly republican. From this point of view, when teachers can be identi� ed with an ethnic or religious dif-ference or the colour of their skin, they can be perceived by the pupils as close to them, as similar to them. At the same time, in the pupils’ eyes, they are the living proof that it is possible for the children from the ‘dif� cult’ areas to succeed. A teacher of French in a secondary school in Garges, who comes from Africa, said:

When I entered the classroom for the � rst time here, the pupils stood up and clapped. I asked them why and they told me that they were very happy because it was the � rst time that they had had a teacher like them—in other words, an immigrant. They said they had not had one since primary school. A lot of people are not very happy about it but I maintain that the pupils, our pupils, are a bit, I myself would even say, very racist.

A history and geography teacher in a school in Sarcelles said that he played on his:

ethnic and social origins. It’s something I make no secret of [. . .]. I don’t want to hear any insults whether they be in Arabic, Creole or Bambara because there are quite a few Malians and I myself am from Mali. So I ask them not to insult each other, particularly in their own mother tongue. And I tell them that failure is not inevitable in that a person can very well come from a deprived social environment and manage to do something. It’s something which I say up front at the beginning of the year. That goes down very well [. . .]. They do have a sort of respect for me, because of all that.

Ethnic diversity of and in schools does not stop at the classroom door, but comes inside. This is not necessarily experienced as a serious problem. It may even be a source of relaxation. A teacher of French explained how country of origin and its food came to the fore, for example, when they were doing a play:



One day we did part of a play. It was a text by a contemporary Canadian author [. . .]. I got them to improvise a little. The mother was making leek soup, so I said, “You can say something else, whatever comes into your head”. [. . .] Everybody wanted to try and they said things on purpose like, “You can make couscous and he can make rice”, trying to tease one another and make the others laugh.

But these assertions of identity can lead to rationales of anxiety and rejection. The pride that some young people express when asserting their identity (whether it be as an insult, a joke or merely as a way of introducing themselves) can be interpreted by the others as a refusal to be French. A mother, the parent of a pupil in Sarcelles, recounted:

A teacher who is Portuguese in origin but French on paper [. . .] asked the class who was French. And the only person to put up their hand was my daughter. She looked round and nobody else had put up their hand. She pointed an accusing � nger at the others, saying that they were French: “Oh no, no, I’m not French, I’m Turkish”, “No, no, I’m not French, are you joking? That looks really bad!” And another little girl who really is French, of French descent and who had tried to hide a little was asked, “But you—aren’t you French?” “No, no, not in the slightest. They’re going to call me a toubab again . . .”

One might even say that there was an ‘anti-French racism’ and we were informed about the remarks of schoolchildren which expressed it: “France, this shitty country” for example. In this context, the Jews may possibly appear as a personi� cation of France. They signify successful integration into society and into the nation. They symbolise this France which behaves badly in other respects towards newcomers, refusing to integrate them fully while lecturing them on equality and fraternity.

If ethnic diversity in schools poses a problem, it is also because it compounds profound inequalities. Over and above not only the criticism of France in general expressed by certain insults but also a number of assertions of identity, the issue at stake is an awareness of being kept on the wrong side of the social divide. Asserting an identity and playing on the identity of others is then a way of getting one’s bear-ings, giving individuals a cultural identity in the absence of satisfactory participation in social life. There too, everything concerning the Jews takes on a speci� c nature because the Jews may personify successful social integration, access to money and to consumption in the eyes of young people. This is distinctly apparent when it is a question of a particularly sensitive point for young people: fashion.



Fashion

Astonishing as it may seem, when we talk about Jews in certain schools, we also talk—and sometimes even predominantly—about fashion. This is particularly the case in Sarcelles, a town where there is a large Jewish community, as we have seen. A young woman, who, today, is a supervisor in a school in the town, recalls:

At the time, those [of the Jews] who were at the school liked to be called [. . .] the ‘chalala’. So the dress code was a Mickey Mouse cap and pullover, very tight jeans, Reeboks with socks pulled up. That was 12 years ago.

Fashions have changed since then but apparently there is still a Jewish speci� city. A schoolgirl in Sarcelles con� rmed, “There really is a very distinct image which is conveyed, because in fact the Jews are charac-terised by the clothes they wear.”

This is only true for some pupils as a boy in the � nal year of a Parisian secondary school in the 18th district explained:

There are perhaps two styles of Jew in my secondary school […]. Those you don’t notice, in fact, who are, what’s the word—like everyone else. And those who, in fact, really advertise their identity. It’s quite open. And it’s also mainly because of the fashion—that’s it—it depends on the fashion.

As soon as it is a question of Jews, the mention of fashion is always likely to depart from the reality to conjure up an abstract image. The issue of money also emerges. They are perceived as privileged people, ‘people who have money’ and who make no secret of it. A teacher of French in Stains asked his pupils:

“Have you already witnessed anti-Semitic speech or acts in school?” I asked two � fth form classes and the spontaneous answer was: “No, never”. And I said, “Are you sure?”, “Yes, never.” “And what about outside school?” “Oh, outside, a bit more” [. . .]. “Now and again, of course, we call each other ‘feuj ’ when people are mean or something like that, but it’s not, we don’t consider that anti-Semitic” [. . .]. “Generally speaking, Jew is the equivalent of mean. So Jew is mean and Jew is when you’re well-dressed. At least, when people dress like Jews”. “Explain what you mean because I don’t know what you mean by dressing like Jews”. “It’s dressing differently from people on the housing estate”. This stresses money and perhaps social pretensions, I’m not sure. And they say it’s not anti-Semitic [. . .]. When someone is mean, he’s called Jewish and when someone steals he’s called an Arab. And that has nothing at all to do with whether he is really Jewish or really an Arab.



Two accusations are thus mixed, one associating the Jews with money and the other reproaching them for showing off their wealth, for being ostentatious, perhaps also for being unaware of the economic dif� cul-ties of other pupils. A schoolboy in his � nal year in Paris referred to a Jewish pupil:

She was talking to a girl in my class, who doesn’t like her, and she knows that, and she went over to see her [. . .]. She said she had bought a pair of jeans and that she had saved money because they only cost 200 euros. Things like that.

Sometimes young Jews have dif� culty in facing up to this image of them. A teenager in Sarcelles noted, in her mother’s presence:

It’s to do with how we’re dressed, how we come to school. We’re insulted immediately. When we were insulted we said nothing because we were frightened. The sister of the African girl came to see me . . . Because I had a little jacket, you know the one you bought me at the market, Mum, and she said to me: “Where did you buy that little jacket?”, “I bought it at the market”, “And do you think you look good in it?”

Another young Jewish boy in Sarcelles recalled that the father of one of his friends had taken them to school one day in his Jaguar: “For the next month it was: ‘Yeah, look at the rich boy—he’s got a Jaguar’. It was unbearable.” And the friend in question added that for six months when he went to school: “I felt sick with fear”.

Later in this book we will refer to the quasi-lynching to which a Jewish pupil in the Evariste-Galois School in Sarcelles was subjected. Here we would merely like to point out how it started according to the principal of the establishment:

There was an Israelite pupil and three girls had attacked him over a problem which had nothing to do with the community she belonged to. It was about fashion, about a pair of trousers . . . In reality, it was an underhand sort of attack. I can’t tell you who started it all.

The principal of a school in Argenteuil recounted an incident which occurred in his establishment.

Last year an art teacher asked his pupils to draw some garments. A young girl had drawn a pair of jeans with a Star of David. The art teacher put all the work in the storeroom of the art room. And the drama [. . .] was that the jeans were pinched, stolen from the storeroom and displayed at the entry to the school, although that never happens. And so it created an incredible stir because someone had really wanted to display that and therefore almost to lynch the girl who had done this drawing.



At the crossroads of cultural assertions and social relations, of ethnicity and money, fashion, and therefore appearance or ‘look’ tend to reveal tensions and jealousies which are not necessarily in themselves anti-Semitic but which are not always very far from it. Insults and attacks can � nd a niche for themselves there.


CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

ABUSE AND ATTACKS

If anti-Semitism in schools is mentioned in the public sphere, it is usually after the most serious expressions of it, those which can be referred to as ‘incidents’, beginning with attacks on Jewish pupils. Anti-Semitism also makes an impact when it has the proportions of a scandal, as is particularly the case when it arises in connection with the Shoah. But it can also be part and parcel of daily life in schools, in pupils’ remarks where it is associated with interaction, the gravity of which is more often than not the subject of contradictory interpretations. Anti-Semitic insults at school, between pupils, are rarely the subject of disciplinary action. They do not come under the category of acts which are reported and on which statistics are kept as such. They nevertheless constitute a signi� cant reality, especially for those whose intellectual or moral integrity may be affected by the contempt and the desire to humiliate and reject revealed by these insults.

The phenomenon is relatively widespread, including amongst the youngest, even before adolescence and one parent complained:

What my daughter tells me is that in school, in the second form, there are in fact remarks made by the pupils which are anti-Semitic. But they are not made openly. Those who hear them are not those who are targeted by them [. . .]. The teachers are not aware of this.

In fact, the teachers are not aware of speci� c remarks but the phe-nomenon of abuse and, in particular, that of ‘� lthy Jew’ is a matter of concern both to them and the school staff as a whole. A daily, recurrent phenomenon, abuse hostile to Jews is drowned in a torrent of other abuse which is equally pejorative (‘sale négro’ (� lthy negro), ‘sale Arabe’ (� lthy Arab)). Is it on the same level or does it have special signi� cance? When all is said and done, are the tensions involving young Jews, if not acceptable or tolerable, at least commonplace, suf� ciently in line with the usual con� icts between pupils to avoid our speaking in this context of anti-Semitism?

Faced with abuse of an ethnic, racial or religious nature, members of staff in schools hesitate or waver between two attitudes. The � rst con-sists in considering them as jokes, juvenile provocations or mere marks


abuse and attacks 399

of familiarity with no hostile intention, especially if it is a question of interaction between pupils. In class, provocative remarks targeting the teacher or expressions denoting af� liation to a different culture are then perceived as part of the adolescents’ attempts to � nd their bearings or else, the inevitable consequence—but one which does not imply any racial hostility—of young people of different origins and cultures coming face to face. This position always risks endorsing expressions which are not pleasant for those targeted and tolerating distressing remarks until a really serious drift forces a reaction and a punishment. It underestimates the possible burden of humiliation, of desire to belittle or to hurt the person targeted in his or her moral integrity.

A second attitude is based on the idea that the insults and abuse are meaningful and that this meaning is alarming. While the teacher may not really be able to evaluate their status, he or she attributes meaning to them, at the risk of overloading them and of reinforcing processes of identity construction and therefore of associations or identi� cations, beginning with those which refer to the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict.

Relativise or De-Dramatise?

A teacher of French in Stains referred to:

This story of a boy who was called a ‘� lthy Jew’ [. . .]. Perhaps he was Jewish, perhaps he wasn’t and perhaps that had nothing to do with what followed . . . I think he was simply a child who was being victimised by the others and was being called a � lthy Jew, � lthy homo, � lthy whatever, and there was a gang of children who had been tormenting him since the beginning of the year. That’s the story. And at some point he couldn’t bear it any longer and he must have punched a child who had come to taunt him and . . .

All in all, in this teacher’s opinion, the incident was banal and it had little to do with anti-Semitism. A teacher at the Collège Montaigne, dealing with an incident which was in the news, followed a similar course and called for caution:

There was a child who was being taunted by several others and at the outset, there is no question about it, one has to be on the side of the weakest person who is being oppressed. I also think that after a while the morons found nothing better to do than to play on the fact that he was Jewish to hurl anti-Semitic insults at him. But now I think that, at the outset, they were not oppressing him because he was Jewish but because he was feeble, etc., and that the whole thing gained momentum. I was


400 chapter twenty-seven

in favour of a disciplinary council with aggravating circumstances on the grounds of anti-Semitism.

The � nal robust approach is exhibited as a conclusion to consideration and not prior to it.

For some teachers, the appeal for caution and perspective is based on a concern not to exaggerate the frequency of the abuse. A PE teacher in Sarcelles had effectively observed:

some remarks which were made. But it’s very minor because, in the end, there aren’t many Jews in the school. I didn’t feel it. There were some chil-dren who complained they had been called ‘� lthy Jew’ but—(silence)—it was not a major event. It’s not the majority of cases and it’s not something of any great importance in the school.

This teacher associated the low incidence of anti-Semitic abuse with the small number of Jews in his school which leads one to think that they are primarily the expression of inter-ethnic tensions and interac-tion between Jews and non-Jews, rather than being associated with imaginary constructions of the Jew as a � gure of evil. To some extent this is con� rmed by the head of a school in Argenteuil:

I have no problems of that type. Well, there are a few minor problems between the Black and the Arab communities, but I don’t have any Jews [. . .]. I probably have two families. And the children are in no way tar-geted. So the question does not arise.

Very often the teachers and the other school staff � nd that young peoples’ insults are super� cial and plead for them not to be taken seriously. They are said to be just juvenile attitudes. A maths teacher in Sarcelles declared:

It doesn’t come from them. The racist remarks which can be heard in school and which often have nothing more to them come from outside. But if not, these are concepts which they do not grasp.

A PE teacher insisted on the transitory, ephemeral nature of the moments of tension and on the ‘gratuitous’ nature of much of the abuse:

I have seen children who are the best of friends ten minutes before tearing each other to pieces and who become friends again afterwards [. . .]. What disturbs me a lot is in fact this rise in gratuitous verbal abuse without a moment’s hesitation.

Finally, banalisation takes yet another path when it stresses the social dimensions of the tensions and the dif� culties while ignoring the cultural,



ethnic and religious aspects; for example, when there is an insistence on the poverty shared by all, Jews and Muslims alike, or when there is a description of a subculture of poverty leading to interaction which in the end goes wrong. Thus an educational adviser in a school in the 18th district in Paris declared:

There are con� icts but I think they are con� icts between people rather than con� icts of colour or of culture [. . .]. When the children here get confused, it’s because something has been stolen. Then, afterwards, things can indeed degenerate and one can digress on the theme ‘All the Arabs are thieves’, for example.

In the past, teachers regularly complained that ‘the level was falling’. Nowadays they evaluate the change by comparing behaviour. A PE teacher in Sarcelles explained that the pupils are much more aggressive amongst themselves:

The presence of an adult no longer acts as a brake on them [. . .]. The pupils who come from these rather dif� cult housing estates do not have enough boundaries and adults are no longer a point of reference. They no longer have much in� uence on their behaviour, except if we do decide to do something and intervene very � rmly.

The abuse therefore points to a situation in which growing signi� cance of the ethnicity of the pupils combines with rationales of individual aggressiveness and loss of meaning. At the same time, the same grow-ing signi� cance of ethnicity sets interaction between young people in the context of globalisation, for the categories which are used rapidly point to a much larger area than that of the town, the region or even of the country. This is a source of anxiety for some teachers who make a distinction between a banal insult, localised in time and space, speci� c to a precise time and space (the schoolyard, for example) and an insult which in some way ‘globalises’ the problems and, above all, sets them in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict. A PE teacher expanded on this distinction:

When there is a con� ict situation at international level and this con� ict emerges at the level of a school through abuse, I don’t deal with it in the same way. However, if it is just ordinary abuse, because that’s part of their way of speaking . . .

It is at the crossroads of localised interaction and international con� icts that anti-Semitism between pupils makes its way. A head teacher in Argenteuil had:



participated in several school trips where we then took everyone to an enclosed space: the bus or the youth centre, etc., and there were no problems. There was a mixture. They did insult one another but the insults were not racist.

She remarked:

But times have changed. We have moved from identi� cation with place of residence to associations with ethnic or religious communities across transnational or supranational boundaries.

Nowadays, abuse, jokes on the basis of origin, the use of the word ‘race’ are everyday occurrences and considered banal within the con� nes of the school, to the extent that members of staff in schools sometimes express the feeling that they have no choice but to ignore it. A maths teacher at a school in Sarcelles said:

The problem is that it has become widespread. Therefore, we cannot deal with every case. It’s not necessarily racist. It may also involve physical aspects. It can be things like “you’ve got mushrooms on your head”. A per-son is often identi� ed by a physical trait, because he or she asserts it.

The problem adults have is that they themselves do not always have all the keys to decode conversations between young people. This teacher went on:

Sometimes they say ‘bâtard ’ (bastard), which is their way of saying hello. I’ve already caught two pupils who, theoretically, were insulting each other. And when I asked them, they said, “No, it’s not serious”. We never know whether the word is an insult or a greeting. It’s like: “I’ll give you a bit of a shove” and we’ll � ght. That’s what they mean by these words.

The language of young people is said to be very poor. A PE teacher said they “only have a very limited vocabulary which is very aggressive and quite � lthy.” It quickly:

spirals out of control and gives rise to fairly strong language, particularly if one is dealing with pupils who come from two different ethnic groups or have different skin colours.

That being the case, insults are so commonplace that:

In the end we don’t pay any attention. We no longer intervene [. . .]. We sometimes reach an impasse on this mode of communication between them; otherwise we never see an end to it. We’ll say something but we don’t punish them. This year, one pupil’s favourite expression has been



‘ta mere . . .’1 and he tended to punctuate his sentences with that. I think he did understand in the end but it’s exhausting because it’s a sort of steamroller and it’s hard to struggle knowing that you are always going to have to correct him again. When it’s one person in the class, it’s not so bad but when there are four, � ve, six or seven pupils, it’s exhausting and we end up giving in and only intervening when it goes beyond certain limits.

This type of insult is sometimes presented as something which goes beyond the pupils and sometimes as inherent to their language and their world. And indeed, sometimes it does humiliate the target who becomes a victim and belittles and discredits him or her and sometimes it is merely an instant in an action which is in the main harmless. But how can we judge? There is indeed a recognition of these racist expres-sions on the part of the school staff, but also some uncertainty as to their status and therefore as to the risk of underestimating or, on the contrary, of overestimating, them. The dominant trend is to banalise and to play down:

Yes, there is abuse of a racist nature but which, from their point of view, is not said with the intention of hurting one another but because those are the things that they have to say and which are felt or should be felt as a joke [. . .]. They do say, “Sale Noir, sale Chaldéen, ta race . . . (� lthy black, � lthy Assyro-Chaldean, f *** you and all like you . . .)” but it’s not necessarily taken badly. It’s a sort of adolescent jargon in the schools and for them the tone is not very aggressive. It’s part of everyday language.

Or else, in the words of a teacher of Spanish in Sarcelles: “At the bottom of their hearts, they don’t really mean it [. . .]—it’s become normal”.

Taking this argument a step further, a young educational adviser in a school in the 18th district of Paris suggested de-dramatizing the phenomenon by learning how to ‘digest’ it:

When I was little, when somebody didn’t want to share something, it was ‘sale Juif ’ (� lthy Jew) [. . .]. And when work was done badly it was ‘du travail d’Arabe’ [. . .]. It’s no use crying about all that. We should take it on board, because . . . we’ve got to digest the thing. Here, if you go round [. . .] I’m sure that, on the desks, you’ll see remarks like [. . .]: ‘The Arabs are all thieves’. And now, what importance should be attributed to that? Is it not just words? What does it convey? I don’t really know . . . And then,

1 Translator’s note: ‘ta mère . . .’ an abbreviation of ‘nique ta mère’, slang expression for ‘Go f *** yourself ’.



at the same time, there has to be room for that too. I don’t know—it’s also part of � nding out about others . . .

Insults are not the only method used to disparage or stigmatise the Jews, ordinary language also plays a role. And here too, the general trend is to banalisation and not indignation. A � nal year pupil in a Parisian secondary school in the 9th district pointed this out:

Something which comes up again and again has to do with money. ‘Mean’ is almost synonymous with ‘Jew’. In fact, it’s an expression. It’s an expression and people don’t even pay attention to it. “Could you give me a euro?” “No”. The immediate response is “Oh, you’re such a Jew”.

Educating, Explaining, Punishing?

If, in the overwhelming majority, we witness a tendency towards banalisation and de-dramatisation of abuse, this does not mean to say that members of staff in schools are sometimes at a loss. A PE teacher complained:

We have absolutely no means of preventing certain things. There are a great many things which are extremely vague so we don’t know exactly how far we can or cannot go.

How should they react? Should a distinction be made between some insults and others? What sanctions should be adopted? Attitudes within the same establishment may vary depending on the teacher. Some introduce a gradation which is speci� c to them. Thus, for the head of a school in Montmagny:

As long as it’s ‘nique ta mère’ (mother f *****), it’s all right, but when it’s ‘sale Portos’, (� lthy Portuguese) ‘sale Noir ’, (� lthy Black) ‘sale bougnoule’ (� lthy dark-skinned foreigner) etc. it’s not.

Others have a policy of intervening to calm things down and to think about the situation. For example a PE teacher explained:

I deal with abuse in general. When I hear two pupils talking to each other aggressively, I intervene and I ask them to use other words. When the quarrel is more important and they are getting worked up, I exert my personal authority and I raise my voice very � rmly. I think that one does have to intervene immediately, but punishment does not solve the problem and I prefer to leave a way out through discussion.



An educational adviser at a school in Sarcelles appealed for situations to be dealt with on a case by case basis:

The reaction of the school should not be the same in all cases, it depends on the context. We always tend to respond in the same way, by invoking the law [. . .]. The little boy in the � rst form calls his friend a ‘� lthy Arab’ or a ‘� lthy Jew’ and we talk to him about the law, the penal code and defamation! So there are times when it would be better to deal with things differently. There is more than one answer.

A teacher of French at a secondary school in Garges takes the peda-gogical approach:

When I am faced with a racist remark, whether it be anti-Black, anti-Arab or anti-Jewish, I begin by analysing the terms and I ask the pupil to justify them, then I tell them where they are wrong. That’s the way I deal with it. I don’t start talking about the law immediately.

He is also forced to take the ethnic diversity of the school into consid-eration and the emergence of cultural, even religious, differences within it. He has adapted his teaching to this situation:

If their remarks really are based on religion, I analyse their religion to prove to them that their religion has no part in it [. . .]. When I ask them why they don’t like the Jews, they reply that it’s in the Koran. I always give them my Koran. I’m sorry but sometimes I have to use it . . . I know I don’t have the right to but when I have a thing like that I ask them to show me the page . . . they are incapable of doing so and I tell them that it is not written anywhere.

This teacher is well aware that introducing the Koran like that in the classroom poses a problem: is the religious argument not taking the place of a reminder of republican values? The objection is quickly dismissed by a speci� c example:

When little Mohamed was killed for instance [referring to the death of a Palestinian child apparently killed by Israeli bullets—an event given a lot of media coverage] there were outbursts of violence outside in the � rst instance. My car was vandalised. In the apartment building where I live, there are Orthodox Jews. My neighbour came to tell me that his car had been vandalised and I told him that mine had been too. These people make no distinction. The Koran is just to say that there is no such thing written in it, that they are wrong. Everyone is equal [. . .]. It’s afterwards, when they insist with the Koran that I tell them.

Insults, both anti-Semitic and others, � y around school all the time and the attitudes of the teachers vary. They shape the climate, they



de� ne an atmosphere and, in some cases, they are only one element in a bigger process in which anti-Semitic hatred can assume much more serious forms.

From Abuse to Attack

It is not easy, nor even always possible, to face up to the abuse and the stereotypes, to explain, to educate and possibly even to punish. But when it is a question of attacks and physical violence of an anti-Semitic nature, schools seem even less capable of dealing with the problems in a satisfactory manner. In this case, the very perception of the facts is often far from clear and the disciplinary measures taken are not neces-sarily discerning—to put it mildly.

At the Evariste-Galois School in Sarcelles, the head teacher was faced with a particularly serious and complex problem. A Jewish pupil was almost lynched in the schoolyard, under the noses of numerous pupils, supervisors and teachers:

There were teachers passing by. They did not understand. They saw a crowd and they did not feel responsible. There was another supervisor who was not . . . well, he did intervene a bit. And afterwards, the little Jewish kid was removed and put into another school. And so they said it was settled. The three girls went before a disciplinary council and the Jewish child too because he also said . . . and I called some of those who were there as witnesses. I went into the classrooms to say they had been photographed and that we knew who was in the schoolyard and that what had happened was unacceptable.

She explained the meaning of the decisions taken in terms which makes the blood run cold. The Jewish pupil:

[. . .] was the origin of the problem, through no fault of his own. The fact that he was Jewish2 was becoming a handicap. At the same time, everyone was involved so I would have had to expel everyone! I couldn’t empty the school, could I? So I had to � nd solutions and one of the three was expelled, one changed classes and one . . .

2 Translator’s note: Israélite in the French.



In Stains, seven pupils were expelled for � ghting and abuse. A teacher of French explained:

Seven kids were involved in a � ght. All seven went before the disciplinary council. They were all expelled. [. . .] When, in actual fact, it was realised that in the � ght � ve or six of them had attacked one of the kids, and that the kid in question had attacked because, since the beginning of the year, they had been calling him a � lthy Jew. But in this case, � lthy Jew and � lthy homo [. . .]. What’s more, I think the kid said something like “� lthy Jew, I don’t care, I’m used to it, but � lthy gay, I don’t like that”. But to begin with he was expelled along with the others. Afterwards, there were a lot of problems [. . .]. The Head of the Local Education Authority cancelled all the decisions of the disciplinary council, so all the expulsions were cancelled and everybody had to be re-admitted to the school. Well, to cut a long story short, it all went on for three months.

Other accounts have similar conclusions and it has to be acknowledged that when a school is not prepared to face up to this type of incident, then the measures taken are either too little or too much. Either nothing is done and the situation deteriorates or the incident is hushed up at the expense of the victims and the general climate of the establishment. On other occasions the reaction, for example, of the parents of a victim provokes the participants and instead of the problem becoming one for internal discussion and considered, possibly negotiated, decisions, it becomes an ‘incident’, enters the media arena where it is twisted and exaggerated; it may even become a matter for the police and the courts. A teacher at the Collège Montaigne, when speaking about the incident which we are now going to discuss in greater detail, deplored the absence of any attempt to adopt an educational approach:

I was in favour of a disciplinary council with aggravating circumstances on the grounds of anti-Semitism. But what I � nd regrettable is that at no point, apart from discussing sanctions, was there any question of an educational approach, and everything was done any old how. And when dear colleagues say, “The headmaster failed” etc. the fact is that they do not wish to acknowledge that we, as teachers, have failed since the outset and that when preference is given to personal disputes or settlement of scores in the interests of all, we are not doing our job of educating and the climate has seriously deteriorated.

It must be admitted that the whole business of the ‘incident’ in the Collège Montaigne in Paris is edifying but also surprising because it undermines a spontaneous notion of the geography of anti-Semitism whereby its revival is con� ned to the working-class neighbourhoods in



the banlieue alone. Here we are in the heart of the Latin Quarter and totally remote from these stereotypes.3 At the outset, two 11 year old � rst year pupils of North African descent repeatedly attacked a third pupil, who was Jewish, at the beginning of September 2003 and did so for more than a month. It would appear that one of them said to him: “All the Jews are going to be exterminated” and used physical violence, the other called him a ‘� lthy Jew’ and appeared to be an accomplice in the bullying. On 10 October, after having taken the child to accident and emergency in hospital and to doctors on several occasions, the parents discovered the facts and reported them to the administration. On 13 October, the administration decided to move the victim to another class and the head teacher informed the local education authority (rectorat). It was on this date that the form teacher of the three pupils was informed of the facts. On 10 November, the father of the Jewish pupil sent a letter to the headmaster informing him that he had noti� ed the police of the situation and reminded him of his responsibilities. On 21 November, the headmaster � led a complaint against X on the grounds of blows accompanied with anti-Semitic remarks and sent a circular to the par-ents of the pupils in the � rst year. He mentioned “physical abuse” and “insulting remarks concerning his faith [of the pupil being victimised]”. He added that a “long, dif� cult and detailed inquiry was being carried out in the school” and announced that a case would soon be submitted to the disciplinary council. On 30 November the � rst article appeared in the press. On 17 December the disciplinary council met and the two pupils were expelled. From that point on, the incident took a new turn. There was a general teachers meeting in the secondary school, a poster campaign, interventions in the media and a petition circulated by Sud 4 trade unionists protesting against the decisions to expel. Two teachers of the class in question expressed their disapproval publicly. A climate leaving no room for the victim began to develop and went as far as to transform the victim into the culprit. A report by the Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH—Human Rights League) played down the facts of the case and reduced the affair to a banal dispute without any real racist basis. According to Le Monde (3 December 2003), their

3 Apart from our own on site survey, our information comes from a press dossier and report compiled by the Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH—Human Rights League) on this incident (April 2004). This report has itself been severely criticised.

4 Translator’s note: SUD—the initials stand for Solidaires, unitaires, démocratiques. SUD Education is a federation of left-wing trade-unions in education.



readership in Paris also banalised the facts. Events followed thick and fast not only within the school but also in the public sphere. A second disciplinary council took place for the appeal. The parents of the aggres-sors came with a lawyer and the decision to expel was con� rmed. The same parents then changed lawyers and took the incident to court. And a few months later, on 1 June 2004, the administrative tribunal in Paris cancelled the exclusion of the two pupils who were the aggressors, one of whom had been excluded for anti-Semitism, and this court decision was upheld on appeal on 11 August.

All this gives an appalling picture of a problem which should have been settled within the school and without the dramatisation which made it an ‘incident’, revealing not only the presence of anti-Semitism in the school but also of a rift within the teaching teams and amongst the parents. The educational institution, at least within this establish-ment, was obviously paralysed, incapable of preventing extremes from rising and spilling into the public, media and legal sphere. The biased report of the LDH had apparently in� uenced the court (the decision of the administrative tribunal). Moreover, in July 2004, the reader is reminded that another incident, that of Marie L., hit the headlines. This gave the newspaper Le Monde the opportunity to compare the drama of the Jewish pupil in the Collège Montaigne with the fabrications of this young woman.

Anti-Semitism in schools is undoubtedly a reality. But it is exaggerated or, conversely, played down and always twisted as a result of the huge inadequacies of the educational system creating scandals in situations where simple measures, taken locally and internally with a minimum of common sense, should suf� ce.


CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

ANTI-SEMITISM IN SCHOOLS AND GLOBALISATION

Anti-Semitism in schools is rooted in problems which would appear � rst and foremost to be part of the framework of the nation state: the crisis in educational institutions, as we have just seen, the increasing signi� cance of ethnicity in daily life, including in schools, against a background of the social dif� culties of working-class families, especially when they are of immigrant origin, etc. Now if, generally speaking, as we have seen from the � rst chapters of this book, events in the Middle East have an impact on anti-Semitism in France, should this observation not also be applied to schools? In other words, how far is anti-Semitism in schools also part of the rationales of globalisation which, in this instance, refer primarily to the geopolitical issues of our times—the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict, Islamist terrorism, the American war on terror, etc.?

The Israeli-Palestinian Con� ict

The aspect which has the most impact in the opinion of numerous teachers is the ignorance of pupils or the very super� cial and unreli-able nature of their information: the image of oppression—of Arabs, of Muslims or of Palestinians—is enough for them. For a teacher of French in a school in Sarcelles:

On the Israeli-Arab con� ict, there’s total silence. Absolutely nobody talks about it. I wonder if the pupils are aware of it. It’s something which goes right over their heads. As far as the war in Iraq is concerned, it’s a war about oil but that’s all. But there again, it’s oppression. Whence the ecstasy over Bin Laden on the day of the attacks, because the oppressed had risen.

A teacher of philosophy in Garges made a similar observation, except for the fact that she is not in the least disillusioned:

I can tell you that I teach them about what’s happening in Israel. They know nothing about it [. . .]. Whether they be Jewish or Muslim, they know nothing. My pupils do not identify with anything at all.


anti-semitism in schools and globalisation 411

She also noted the absence amongst her pupils of ethnic cliques, rac-ist remarks or anti-Semitism: her remarks remind us that not all state schools are the scene of immense dif� culties and tensions: in numerous establishments, the classes take place normally, without serious incidents; the pupils want to learn and to know. This teacher went on to say:

I have taught my pupils what they wanted to know. Not long ago we were discussing the Papon affair. They wanted to know what had happened and why there was a problem with the Jews during the war.

Sometimes the teachers question their pupils about the Israeli-Palestin-ian con� ict. After a visit by Claude Lanzmann to the secondary school, a teacher of French in Stains asked them:

All the articles talked about the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict so I asked them: “Do you discuss it amongst yourselves?” They told me: “Never, we never talk about it”. I said, “Really?” “No, in any case not in school, never, we never talk about it”. Their reaction was almost unanimous. They said, “But anyway, it’s a long way away, it doesn’t concern us,” etc. That was the � rst reaction. Afterwards, it was perhaps a little more complicated in that they did say they discussed it at home.

On this occasion, she learnt that:

all the Arab pupils watch Al-Jazira. I’m sure that they don’t understand but all the same . . . They talk a lot about the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict. I asked them: “And so, does the con� ict affect you?” “Yes, yes, it does affect us because it’s unfair”, etc. and I said to them, “That’s true, but there are other con� icts which are unjust too, so why this one?” “Because they are Arabs”. And I said, “Are you talking about Iraq?” “No, no, it’s not the same”. “Why”. The answer was that the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict was one they were always hearing about. And then they said of the Palestinians, “We see them everywhere. When you go to the butcher’s and the baker’s, there’s the little collection box for the Palestinian children”.

In this respect, the pupils say they are permanently exposed to the media. “It’s on the news every day”, shouted a third year pupil; “Things happen every day”, added a classmate. And without having to discuss things amongst themselves, they know that there is a war: “We don’t really talk about it”, said a third child, “but we know there is a war because if people wonder why we don’t like the Jews . . . Well, I’m not speaking for myself but in general”.

Sometimes basic images replace information: “There are bombard-ments every day, that’s all I know”. And in this context, some know one thing for sure: you must hate the Jews. A school pupil explained:


412 chapter twenty-eight

It’s in the families. Well, in Arab families, I think. In fact, nobody knows, but all they say is that you must not like the Jews.

Although she did not say so in so many words, a schoolgirl in Sarcelles did suggest the possibility of a link between anti-Semitic acts and events in the Middle East:

When there was the Israeli-Palestinian war . . . not long afterwards there was a bomb in the synagogue and there were clashes between the Jews and Muslims . . . I mean the North African Muslims because the Black African Muslims are not our problem.

The in� uence of the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict is also found even in the most local expressions of anti-Semitism. The head of the school in Argenteuil, where a Star of David drawn on a pair of jeans had triggered anti-Semitic tensions, interpreted this drawing in the light of this in� uence:

Why had the pupil put this Star of David on the jeans? It was really a reference to a Jewish story and an Arab story and obviously to the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict, because that’s what it is.

This is an interpretation which ignores the Nazi persecution and the fact that the Jews were forced to wear the yellow star then.

Nevertheless, while recognising that the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict plays a fundamental part in the problems of anti-Semitism, schools do seem to take every precaution to repress or to keep this issue ‘out’, in the same way as they exclude anything which concerns the geopo-litical situation in the Middle East. A teacher of French at a school in Sarcelles reported a circular requesting that these con� icts not be brought into school. He said:

In other words, there are things happening but we must not say a thing [. . .]. Everyone was discussing the 11 September attacks. We were asked not to discuss it with the pupils.

Once it has been decreed that the con� ict cannot be discussed, an imagined version takes over in people’s minds and from then on inter-pretations are juxtaposed or become mixed up. A history and geography teacher at a school in Argenteuil observed that:

In the present-day imagination of young people and teachers alike, there’s something unhealthy and dangerous developing. There is the con� ict in the Middle East and especially the Palestinians. The Palestinians are victims so the North Africans are victims of French society—that’s the reasoning behind it.



The problem includes dimensions linked speci� cally to the Israeli-Pal-estinian con� ict or to the warlike Islamism of Bin Laden. But it is also part of a much larger entity and it does point to the dif� culties which the school has in dealing with current affairs while the media play a leading role in the lives of the pupils who are constantly referring to it. Should there not be debates on current affairs in schools, with discus-sion of points other than those in the curriculum? Some people are astonished to see that the schoolyard is the only place where young people discuss current affairs; others think that if the family does not explain things adequately it is the school’s job to do so. A history and geography teacher in a secondary school in Paris said that young people are sometimes ‘disturbed’ by international events and it can happen that they ask the teachers. The head of a school in Argenteuil had:

already heard history teachers talking about pupils who asked them to tell them about the history of their country or a point in time in the history of their country. There is a class where all the kids are of differ-ent origins. If there is a Pakistani kid and there is something going on in Islamabad . . . well, I know that two kids asked the history teacher to tell them about that.

Requests for the school to open up to international current affairs are thus inseparable from the considerable space occupied by the media in the lives of young people on the one hand, and on the other, ‘globalisa-tion’ which introduces all sorts of cultural differences, possibly coming from afar, into state schools. Ethnic diversity is a phenomenon which ensures the link between the outside world, geopolitics, major events at world level and the internal world of the school and the individual identity of each person.

But in fact, when teachers tackle the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict, they are guided not so much by the attitudes and reactions of the pupils as by their own point of view or by the positions of other colleagues. The link between anti-Semitism and the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict appears to be obvious here and shows up the divisions which crisscross the teaching world. Thus, a teacher from the Collège Montaigne returned to the incident which we recalled above, suggesting that the possible anti-Semitism of the pupils had brought out that of the teachers:

Amongst the teachers, it was extraordinary [. . .]. I can tell you that I really did see an anti-Semitism which came from the left and the extreme left which people were not even aware of. Some of them had the intelligence to say: we have to sort out what’s true and what’s false.



However, others displayed:

An obstinate refusal to recognise that there had been a victim and two bullies which con� nes them to turning a blind eye and to a form of irra-tionality, the lack of a will to recognise that someone had been insulted as a Jew at one particular point. In my opinion, this was a manifestation of a fairly obvious latent anti-Semitism.

This analysis dismisses the two groups without pronouncing in favour of either. In the � rst group, the teachers see the aggressors as:

Poor Arab children, victims of oppression, of colonialism [. . .]. They tend to be close to the extreme left [. . .] and, given that they are in the minority and isolated, their reactions are slightly hysterical.

In the second group:

There are some Jewish colleagues and a minority have reacted by feeling attacked and really having a community-oriented re� ex. It was staggering: it was quite impossible to talk to them! I have in mind, in particular, a female colleague who defended Sharon whereas one year earlier she was totally anti-Sharon. She thought it was an anti-Jewish conspiracy at international level. Ultimately, it’s a form of hysteria just like any other.

After 11 September 2001

In the imagination of the pupils, it is often impossible to distinguish what refers exclusively to the Israeli-Palestinian question from what is part of radical Islamism, as we see it unfolding at international level. Identi� ca-tion with the Palestinian cause is constantly mingled with understand-ing and even with a liking for Bin Laden. Similarly, in particular on the Jewish side, the same criticism links anxiety over the action of the Palestinians and other concerns relating to Islamist terrorism. The 11 September 2001 attacks have de� nitely accentuated this phenomenon, revealing, and at the same time, exacerbating the considerable changes which have taken place recently in state schools.

A history and geography teacher in a secondary school in Paris had observed a rupture:

That year I had been given the elite � nal year class in the arts stream. Many were left-wing pupils who thought they were highly original and the following day we discussed it. Some of them took a stand and said, “Yes, they’re talking about the Americans because they had a few thousand vic-tims, but they have created hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide”.



A simplistic anti-Americanism broke out and I reacted fairly curtly [. . .]. There was an 11 September effect, it’s true. And at the beginning of the following year I really had the impression that things were coming out [. . .].Israeli � ags drawn on a desk with ‘Long live Israel!’ beside them. I had never seen that before [. . .]. And I began to hear that there were some-times fairly violent discussions. In a third year class [. . .], a pupil whom I had not recognised as Jewish since the beginning of the year, but who displayed it so obviously that I understood that he was Jewish, suddenly said something under his breath which shocked the others and there began, in the classroom, an extremely violent discussion between Jews. I understood that in fact, when he was not in class, he defended positions such as “the day when the Arabs have all been imprisoned or thrown into the sea, we’ll � nally have some peace” and the others were shocked.

What this teacher observed in a ‘good’ secondary school in Paris points on the one hand to the radicalisation of some Jewish pupils, particularly those favourable to the State of Israel (the � ags) and, on the other, to a strong expression of a leftism imbued with ‘simplistic’ anti-Americanism. He stressed the image of a connected rise in anti-Semitism:

There’s a feeling that things have got out of control; the 11 September, the American war in Iraq and the association that has been made between anti-Americanism, anti-Israelism and an anti-Israelism which is so virulent that it has become anti-Semitism.

A pupil in a secondary school in the 9th district of Paris also observed that some pupils, on the day following the attacks, did not respect the minute’s silence requested by the teachers: “They said, “No, we’re not doing it because the Americans got what they deserved”. But it was half-heartedly observed all the same.”

In a very different situation, that of a ‘dif� cult’ banlieue, a history and geography teacher in a school in Argenteuil noted a radicalisation of his pupils of immigrant descent:

During the Gulf War, I had in front of me pupils who were anxious, fearful that there might be a war in France, dreading being deported. Their families were stocking up and had almost emptied the small super-market nearby. And then the war in Iraq and, even before that, the 11 September attacks, brought about a totally different attitude in that it was no longer fear that was manifested but a radicalisation of identities. Very obviously, that completely changes the lie of the land.

This observation is very widely shared: the effect of 11 September 2001 amongst the pupils of immigrant descent was to create a strong identi� cation with Bin Laden and the perpetrators of the attacks. A PE teacher in Sarcelles recounted:



Bin Laden was put on a pedestal. For example in the carnet de correspondence they disguised the photos, by putting a beard on a pupil’s photo. They discussed Bin Laden the whole time. They insulted the others calling them Bin Laden, but it was really a way of getting their own back. It was very confused.

He insisted on the playful aspect of this discourse, which Canal + de� nitely helped to encourage:

The Guignols (a satirical TV show) generated a certain number of expres-sions which were to be heard on all sorts of occasions and for many weeks but it never went all that far. It wasn’t ideological.

A supervisor at the same establishment con� rmed his words, but in this context she had also observed:

a real movement against the Jews, even amongst those who were of Caribbean or African descent, even amongst Catholics. It was a fashion and one had the impression that it was trendy.

In other contexts, the playful or ‘trendy’ nature was not on the agenda and it was much more an alarming frenzy. A head of a school recounted:

I was in a school in Bezons and I must admit that the kids, the popula-tion . . . well, the Muslim children were uncontrollable at one point. From one day to the next. It took us at least three months to calm them down. They thought they could do anything. And it’s true that, well, when you’re a convinced pro-Palestinian, it’s true that it was cocking a snook at America . . . in a way nobody could imagine. And, as a result, they felt they could do what they liked. And I had graf� ti on the walls etc. at the time. It took a good three months to calm them down.

Everything is mixed up here, probably as much in reality as in the words of this head: the Palestinians, Bin Laden form a whole which hatred of America helps to cement.

Anti-Semitism in schools, amongst the pupils, is sustained both by poorly informed identi� cation with the Palestinian cause and by sym-pathy with the anti-American and anti-Western attacks. At the same time, anti-Semitism is sustained by the growing signi� cance of ethnicity in community life. It � nds conditions conducive to its spread in the in-adequacies of the schools which encourage rationales of media coverage and scandal, while teachers and supervisory staff are not suf� ciently prepared to confront the recent changes in schools. The teachers have dif� culty in reconciling the universal (human rights, rejection of any type of racism, modern individualism) and the speci� c (recognition



of the unique nature of the Shoah, attacking one precise group to destroy it, the unusual characteristics of anti-Semitism and the Jews which it targets). This gives rise to attitudes and reactions which tend in the main to be either too little or too much, rather than to display a capacity to tackle problems calmly. The result is that the problems are either blown out of proportion and pushed to extremes with the media playing a decisive role or else ignored or banalised.

Amongst the teachers, some give a meaning to their experience by relying on categories to the ‘left of the left’ or on a certain third-world-ism which brings them closer to a criticism of American imperialism or of Zionism. Others con� ne themselves to the categories of ‘republican-ism’ which can neither accept nor understand the presence of cultural differences within the sphere of the school. In both cases, they are ill equipped to confront anti-Semitism. The former are hostile to Israel and identify with various victims in terms which challenge any idea of the uniqueness of the Shoah—their opposition to anti-Semitism, which is almost always very real, is almost paralysed by these aspects of their view of the world and of history. The latter speak of a school which no longer exists, and which has perhaps never existed, a mythical school world. They dream of pupils without identities or visible cultural or religious af� liations.

Anti-Semitism in schools is also very ‘global’. Its speci� city lies in the meeting of international rationales and local problems, speci� c to French society as a whole, but also internal to the school as an insti-tution with its school population, its staff and its particular dif� culties.


GENERAL CONCLUSION

We must now answer the key question which gave rise to this research, namely, how important is anti-Semitism in France today?

On the Rise but Limited

Our analytical tools do not enable us to provide quantitative statistics and while we have done � eld-work in a number of areas we have, obvi-ously, left aside many aspects which deserved to be examined. Since our conclusions, therefore, are intended to be general, they must leave room for doubt, or reservations. However, each of our empirical in-depth inquiries does lead us to the same type of observation: the phenom-enon does exist, and can be observed. But it is also not as strong, not as omnipresent or as obvious as might have been expected.

In Roubaix, when the young people in a working-class area made openly anti-Semitic remarks, others held out against them, including some invoking the name of Islam. In prison, only a small minority of Muslim prisoners are dominated by hatred of the Jews; the majority would like the prison administration to respect Islam as it does Judaism. In Sarcelles, there was quite a strong feeling of resentment towards the Jews who were accused, in the � rst instance, of being community oriented, with a tendency to keep themselves to themselves and to promote only their own community interests; this rarely develops into a more abstract form of anti-Semitism. In Marseilles, the ‘nostAlgeria’ among the oldest of the erstwhile settlers (‘pieds-noirs’) does incorporate an old form of anti-Semitism which nurtures what is intended to be an objective observation, namely that, ultimately, the North African Jews have managed better (than the non-Jews) and, in particular, they have wrongfully appropriated the ‘pied-noir’ identity; but this point of view tends to merge with a much stronger anti-Arab racism. In Alsace, the traditional anti-Semitism which we observed especially in the country-side remains repressed and is rarely, if ever, expressed in the presence of outsiders, or is anonymous (we have in mind here in particular the desecration of cemeteries). When it does rise to the political level, in the guise of the two important radical right-wing organisations (and a


general conclusion 419

tiny Muslim party which is quite unique in France) it does not appear to be in itself the bearer of a powerful impetus. Instead it reveals the incapacity of the region to implement the self-criticism which its some-what inglorious past demands. In the universities, anti-Semitic tenden-cies which are used to breathe life into a moribund leftism are based on anti-Zionist sympathy for the Palestinian cause, but they mobilise very few students or teachers apart from the activist minorities and have no links at all with radical Islamism. Finally, in schools, the problem lies primarily with the inadequacies of the institution. Instead of renewing their programmes and conceptions of teaching, schools are frequently very reluctant to enter the 21st century. In some instances schools are quite unable to confront events within the teaching establishments. These then become “affairs” when people either inside or outside the school, associations, teachers, parents, journalists, lawyers, etc., bring them to the attention of the media and the courts. But, in the main, anti-Semitism is only one aspect—and a secondary one—of a crisis which is expressed in many other forms. It does not dominate the life of the school and only concerns some of them.

We therefore have to recognise the existence of an anti-Semitism which is on the increase, working its way into French society in various places, and various social classes but never lapsing into the excesses which would make of it a widespread, massive phenomenon driven by powerful social or political groups.

The Old and the New

Contemporary anti-Semitism in France is really a phenomenon which combines continuity and renewal.

The continuity resides in this anti-Semitism being an extension of the old Christian anti-Judaism and the modern hatred of Jews, as it crystallised at the end of the 19th century at the time of the publication of La France Juive by Drumont (1886) and then of the Dreyfus Affair. It also resides within the context of nationalist ideologies and is receptive to an updating of these themes: the destruction of the European Jews by the Nazis, then the creation of the State of Israel have been added to the classical discourse of hatred and are, in particular, a source of inspiration for holocaust denial and accusations targeting the ‘Shoah business’. From this point of view, anti-Semitism is a legacy from the past which � nds a means of expression once the symbolic protection


420 general conclusion

afforded by the mere evocation of Nazi crimes is eroded and when the new dimensions of the phenomenon open up new paths.

The new dimensions are not particularly original and return to the classical themes of hatred and contempt. But they do also have some special features. The most signi� cant is undoubtedly the fact that they are “global”. In other words, to understand them the analysis can-not be restricted to the context of French society, the French nation and the French state alone. We have to understand how two types of approach become merged. One is global in nature and questions the geopolitics of the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian con� ict, the general rise of Islam and Islamism, including its terrorist dimensions, the functioning of many of the Arab-Muslim countries, the position and the behaviour of the United States in the world, as well as the major contemporary migrations and the increasing phenomenon of the Diaspora. A further factor is the tendency afforded by the most modern media and digital resources to compress both time and space. The other approaches are local: social exclusion and racism and how they operate in a working-class area in Roubaix; the tendency to be community and ethnically centred, including amongst the Jews, the crisis in republican institutions in Sarcelles, starting with state schools which, we now know, through their shortcomings, help to produce the anti-Semitism which they then have to combat. The changes in French society open the way to renewed hatred of the Jews and the latter is exacerbated by the way in which at international level these same Jews are described by their enemies as an evil power.

The traditional view is that anti-Semitism tends rather to be articu-lated by people and groups who identify with France as a nation, whose social being and identity, including religious, is allegedly threatened from within and without, by the Jews. The novel view is that it is the opposite, because the Jews are identi� ed with France; they are, in the words of the sociologist Norbert Elias,1 ‘established’ people who are accused by the ‘outsiders’ of having succeeded in integrating into society perfectly while the others are subject to the social exclusion and racism of those in power. In the � rst instance, references to the Israeli-Pal-estinian con� ict and Islam are of little importance and when they do occur they tend to weaken anti-Semitism, the idea being that the main

1 Norbert Elias, The Established and the Outsiders, London, Frank Cass and Co., 1965.



threat no longer comes from Jews but from Muslims. In the second case, the identi� cation with the Palestinian cause, with Islam or with both, reinforces the discourse of hatred by merging in the same image of evil and source of misfortune the government of Ariel Sharon, the State of Israel, Zionism and the Jews of the Diaspora.

The Risks of Convergence

On the whole, contemporary anti-Semitism is fragmented; its sources do not all merge into a single, unique stream: the hatred for one same group of human beings, the Jews, is fragmented. It is highly unlikely that those who transmit it will participate in a joint political and ideo-logical project.

Nevertheless, traditional anti-Semitism stands to gain from the new anti-Semitism which, in particular, hastens the widespread erosion of the taboos originating in the realisation of what Nazi barbarism involved. People in general, in all social classes are more likely to make remarks hostile to Jews when those who do so most openly and most explicitly are often themselves of immigrant descent and victims of racism. It seems more dif� cult to punish them, or report them than when it is a question of extreme right wing actors. As a result, the arena of anti-Semitism is spreading because it becomes dif� cult to combat on the one hand what is more or less tolerated on the other.

But is there not any evidence of any rapprochement, even if only partial? From this point of view, the most serious hypothesis is that of progressive Islam: the rapprochement between radical Islam and leftist or third-world ideologies on the basis of that same identi� cation with the suffering and injustice which is the lot of the Palestinian people. Our research, particularly in the universities, demonstrates that a hypothesis of this sort has little validity, even if there are here and there a few elements which could con� rm it. These elements are abstract or theo-retical rather than concrete and tangible. They tend to be seen more in public demonstrations where the extreme left is present to protest for example against the war waged by the United States in Iraq, or during international forums, like the one held in Durban,2 or even in publications, rather than in the concrete experience of Islamism.

2 The UN World Conference Against Racism, August 2001.



From Analysis to Action

Our research is a contribution to knowledge and it is legitimate to ques-tion the researchers involved. Is it possible to go from analysis to actionand draw lessons from this kind of work which could help to reduce anti-Semitism? The answer is clearly ‘yes’ as long as the suggestions below are not transformed too directly or simplistically into a list of practical recommendations.

In Roubaix we observed that the breeding ground for anti-Semitism narrowed, at least temporarily, whenever the expectations and demands of the young people in the working-class area were really taken in hand. When the Mayor of the town came to meet them, they wanted to discuss two quite different issues with him. The � rst was social: they denounced the exclusion and, above all, the racism to which they are subjected and which calls for political action. The Mayor could very well acknowledge the urgent need for this. The second was cultural: they would like their roots to be recognised—particularly those who are Algerian—which, once again, the Mayor took seriously into consider-ation. In both instances, the youths then moved away from hatred of the Jews and imaginary identi� cation with the Palestinian cause. Let’s make a cautious generalisation on this empirical observation: the implication is that anti-Semitism should decline if an active and volontarist form of political management at both local and national level were to replace, on the one hand, the processes of ghettoisation, racial and social dis-crimination and on the other, the non-recognition of the past and the historical roots of populations of immigrant descent. There is nothing paradoxical about stating forcefully that one of the essential conditions of the struggle against anti-Semitism is that it must go hand in hand with a tireless campaign against the racism to which the populations of immigrant descent are subjected. This is a moral imperative—it is not acceptable to promote something for one group which would be refused to others. There is also a political imperative here. The racism to which the immigrant descent populations in France are subjected is transmitted in ways which are more numerous and diversi� ed than the racism which targets the Jews. In particular, it involves widespread discrimination in the workplace, considerable inequalities, if only in the functioning of the educational system, exclusion leading to segregation in social ghettos and violence including from the police. It creates suf-fering and resentment which, via various identi� cations (with Islam, the Palestinian nation) turns against the Jews who are said to have succeeded



in putting an end to the racism which targets them speci� cally. To be ef� cient, action against anti-Semitism must endeavour to go to the sources of the evil and, amongst these we do � nd the powerful forms of racism which affect the recent immigrants and their descendants.

In Sarcelles we see that to begin with, the action of the Jews in the town as a community contributed positively to erasing the negative image which the town had acquired. Subsequently their community-oriented lifestyle gradually aroused jealousy and resentment while these same Jews in Sarcelles became increasingly isolated. The problem is not one of the juxtaposition of communities which is, incidentally, an increasing reality in many towns in France. Instead it is the refusal of one community—the one which is the most established—to play their role in a well-tempered multi-culturalism capable of ensuring that they all live together harmoniously with an egalitarian co-existence of dif-ferences. Anti-Semitism, as speci� c to Sarcelles, is the outcome of this failure of multiculturalism as a project of pluricultural democracy; in its place a form of fragmentation into communities has taken over. The hostility or the resentment towards the Jews here would de� nitely decline if the latter, while continuing to retain their speci� cities and their visibility, were to resist their tendency to fall into community-oriented isolation.

Not all forms of Islam are radical and very few are warlike or ter-rorist; the experience of Muslim prisoners suggests that hostility to Jews increases when the latter get better treatment in prison than they do: rabbis, kosher food and the possibility of practising their religion. This is a direct challenge to the penal institution: the Muslims’ anti-Semitism would de� nitely decline if even more rapid and appreciable progress than is currently being made or looked into showed the same consideration in prison for Islam as there is at the moment for Cath-olics, Protestants and Jews.

The speci� city of anti-Semitism in Alsace is that it conveys an inca-pacity or a refusal to deal decisively with the memory of a regional past characterised by ambivalence, fragmentation and at times, shame-ful, behaviour. The comparison between Germany and Austria can facilitate our understanding here. In Germany, the Nazi past has been come to terms with and debated; it has been discussed at length and a considerable effort has been made not to gloss over it: the breeding ground for anti-Semitism is much more restricted than in a country like Austria which has not succeeded to date in producing a similar type of self-criticism. In this respect, we might bear in mind the recent Polish



experience. Until lately, Poland refused to confront its own past and the way in which the fate of the Jews was decided before, during and after World War II. The question of anti-Semitism has become much less distressing and threatening since the publication of the book by the historian Jan Gross which describes the massacre of the Jewish com-munity in Jedwabne by the Polish inhabitants of this small town—and not by the Nazis.3 This publication opened a new page in Polish history and inaugurated a labour of re� ection on the past which, until then, had on the whole been massively rejected by the Polish population.

In the universities there are two main problems. On the one hand there is pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist activism which is an avatar of left-ist or third-world thinking. This activism is not in itself anti-Semitic. It becomes anti-Semitic in private or amongst tiny groups of activist political minorities. We might think that the solution to this problem is far beyond the capabilities of anyone in France. But the more the opinions of people, particularly amongst the Jews in France, who refuse to be forced to choose between the existence of the State of Israel and the recognition of the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians gain momentum, the more obvious it will become that the issue at stake is not supporting one camp against the other, but promoting peace and searching for a just and negotiated solution between the two par-ties. The grounds for the expansion of this radical activism will then gradually disappear. The second problem in the universities stems from the dif� culty of leading academics in confronting possible situations where anti-Semitism � nds an expression. There is often a reaction of indifference, a lack of understanding, sometimes a feeling of guilt, particularly if hatred of the Jews is coming from the extreme left and not the extreme right. In many instances, if the university administra-tion were to be extremely � rm or sensitive that would suf� ce to stem the excesses which otherwise develop rapidly.

The same is true in schools. What is indeed undeniable is that the administration and the staff are ill prepared to deal with events such as insults, graf� ti, threats and attacks. If these were dealt with simply, rapidly and diplomatically the climate of insecurity and anxiety which is developing today in state schools could not very well be sustained. The vocational training of the personnel employed in state education should take these inadequacies into consideration and � nd ways of dealing with

3 Jan Gross, Les Voisins, Paris, Fayard, 2002.



them. Moreover, the content of some subjects, history in particular, and the way in which the Shoah is presented to pupils de� nitely calls for thought to be given to and broadened on the curricula and teaching of this subject; the Ministry of Education has already taken initiatives here as have some Jewish organisations. In particular, the preparation of school trips to Auschwitz, the utility and the salutary nature of which are undeniable, should be improved to avoid incidents (in particular, inappropriate behaviour on the part of the pupils).

As we see, it is possible to imagine local or national policies in vari-ous spheres which should contribute to the decline of anti-Semitism in France. But one of the main � ndings in our research is that this phenomenon is “global”. It feeds on transnational and world events over which a country like ours has very little in� uence. France can endeavour to control the the media when the message is charged with manifest hatred. We can endeavour to prevent immigration ending in processes of fragmentation into ethnic groups or communities. We can also resolutely adopt a stance in favour of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Finally, all this research—as we said at the outset in the introduc-tion—is dominated by a concern for knowledge and understanding, which has constantly distanced us from ideological and partisan posi-tions. We have always refused both overestimation which leads to dis-proportionate images of anti-Semitism and underestimation which, on the contrary, would be to be blind to reality. But both overestimation and underestimation are social productions, they are social constructs which owe everything to the interplay of countless actors in the sphere of politics, associations, religion and professionals of different persua-sions and tendencies. Amongst these actors, the media which shape our perceptions day after day and suggest ways of understanding play a major role. This is why we must plead for journalists to exercise their sense of responsibility and their professional conscience with immense vigilance when dealing with a theme as sensitive as this; they must never hesitate to make an in-depth investigation and never jump to conclu-sions nor blindly follow predetermined speci� c points at the expense of factual information.


WIEVIORKA_index_426-430.indd 426 7/31/2007 1:51:43 PM

Adler, Alexandre: 37Alaoui, Fouad: 300Allienne, Philippe: 125Amar, Rachid: 335Arafat, Yasser: 207, 278, 326Arendt, Hannah: 52, 54, 198Arif, Kader: 42Aron, Raymond 25Arvaud, Mme: 360Attal, Sylvain: 31Audéoud, Olivier: 339, 348

Baker, Mona: 315Bala, Medhi: 278Balibar, Étienne: 31Barbie, Klaus: 57, 83Bardèche, Maurice: 23–24, 324Barnavi, Élie: 347Barrès, Maurice: 282Barruel, Augustin: 272Bataille, Philippe: xxvBaudrillard, Jean: 145Ben Gurion, David: 58, 72Ben Rafaël, Eliezer: 72Benakoun, Salazar: 175, 215–216, 218,

221, 223Benayoun, Chantal: 164, 165Bensimon, Doris: 88, 165Benveniste, Annie: 165, 171, 180Benyachi, Ahmed: 94Béréziat, Gilbert: 314Berlioz, Jean-Marc: xxviBerthaux, Sabine: 125Bézecourt, Jocelyn: 290Bilal: 133Bin Laden, Oussama: 33, 100, 115, 147,

149–151, 154, 201, 203, 207–209, 278, 392, 410, 413–416

Birnbaum, Pierre: 81, 165Blanchard-Latreyte, Christine: xxviBleskine, Hélène: 94Bloch, Marc: 263Boniface, Pascal: 41, 42Bouamama, Saïd: 94Boumaza, Magalie: 272Bourguiba, Ridha: 329Bourhis, Stéphane: 273, 278, 279–280,

290, 292, 304

Bourrette, Matthieu: 5Bousquet, Michel: 346Bousquet, René: 57Boussouf: 242Boutih, Malek: 38Bové, José: 253Brasillach, Robert: 23Brauman, Rony: 31, 33Brenner, Emmanuel: xv, 16–19, 21, 84,

106, 359Brigneau: 282Brunin, Jean-Luc: 113, 125Bulawko, Henri: 343Buono, Clarisse: xxv, 228Bush, George: 100, 129, 133, 135, 151,

154, 273, 323

Camus, Renaud: 28Canacos, Henri: 169Castro, Fidel: 60Cattori, Silvia: 323Chaumont, Jean-Michel: 51, 54, 59Chavannes: 294Che, Guevara: 322Chevalier, Yves: 63Chirac, Jacques: 58Chomsky, Noam: 25Chouraqui, Élie: 289, 360, 363Christophe, Francine: 343Codderens, Bill: 272–274, 275, 277Cohen, Erik: 83, 86, 88, 161Cohen, Philippe: 27Cohn-Bendit, Gaby: 25Contassot, Yves: 44Cordonnier, Jacques: 270, 279, 292,

304Coston, Henry: 282Courtois, Maurice: 328, 329Coutant-Peyre, Isabelle: 322Crémieux, Adolphe: 229, 237Cresson, Édith: 317Cukierman, Roger: 33, 44Cymerman, Benjamin: 345

Daeninckx, Didier: 32Daniel, Jean: 26Daniel, Sara: 32Darquier de Pellepoix, Louis: 24

INDEX


428 index

David, Michel: 125De Beauvoir, Simone: 56De Clermont-Tonnerre, comte: 161De Niro, Robert: 150Debbouze, Jamel: 33Debray, Régis: 28Deforges, Régine: 32Del Valle, Alexandre (D’Anna Marc):

280Delly, Mgr Emmanuel III Mar: 166Delouche, Gilles: 353Delsalle, Paul: 94Delsalle, Sébastien: xxvDenvers, Cyril: 360Desmoulins, Camille: 40Deutsch, Émeric: 88Diagoras, Léon: 94Dieudonné: 33, 198, 348Diligent, André: 94Djebali, Marc: 175, 215–217, 225Dreyfus, capitaine: 81, 419Drumont, Édouard: 81, 282, 419Dubet, François: 390Dumont: 146Duprat, François: 282Duprez, Dominique: 94Durafour, Michel: 26

Eichmann, Adolf: 52–54Ekeland, Ivar: 314El Alouani, Aziz: 299Elias, Norbert: 420Elkabbach, Jean-Pierre: 26Erckmann-Chatrian: 263

Fackenheim, Emil: 54Farbiaz, Patrick: 44Farrakhan, Louis: 14Faurisson, Robert: 24–26, 283Fauvarque, Bernard: 35Ferry, Luc: 18, 376Filippetti, Aurélie: 43Finkelstein, Norman: 29, 78Finkielkraut, Alain: xxv, 33, 37, 39–40,

312Fogiel, Marc-Olivier: 33Foster, Paul: 35Fourier, Charles: 40François, Étienne: 258Frank, Anne: 50Frégosi, Franck: 249, 285, 289Fresco, Nadine: 23, 25Friling, Tuvia: 50Furet, François: 25

Garaudy, Roger: 26, 321–322, 326, 328, 330

Gaultier, Mireille: xxviGeisser, Vincent: 14Ghazi, Randa: 32Gibson, Mel: 57Giniewski, Paul: 69Glucksman, André: 37Godard, Jean-Luc: 31Goldenberg: 57Goldnadel, Gilles William: 36, 46,

279–280, 281Gollnisch, Bruno: 311Goyet, Mara: 19, 359Gross, Jan: 424Grossmann, Robert: 242, 285Guénif, Nacira: 15, 85, 166, 171Guillaume, Damien: xxvGuillaume, Pierre: 24–25Guyot, Régis: xxvi

Haigneré, Claudie: xxviHajdenberg, Henri: xxviHalévy, Jean: 66Hamlaoui, Riad: 112Hanin, Roger: 233Harvey, David: 75Haumont, Nicole: 165Haury, Thomas: 312Hazan, Éric: 31Hedli, Muhieddine: 94Heller, David: 272Henri-Lévy, Bernard: 39Herberich-Marx, Geneviève: 265,

267Hertzberg, Arthur: 40Herzl, Theodor: 69, 343Heurtault, Romain: 335–336, 344,

345Hilaire, Yves-Marie: 94Hirt, Heinrich: 295Hitler, Adolf: 10, 29, 49, 52, 60, 141,

220, 222, 263, 269, 275, 298–300, 384

Hnid, Slah: 330Hochhuth, Rolf: 54Hollande, François: 41Hussein, Saddam: 44, 278, 283

Iancu, Carol: 324Iganski, Paul: 75Igounet, Valérie: 23, 25–26Iquioussen, Hassan: 141Isaac, Jules: 3


index 429

Jaeg, Jean-Luc: 298Jospin, Lionel: 38, 41, 42, 116, 133Junker, Rémi: 170Juppé, Alain: 300

Kaganski, Serge: 31Kahn, Jean: 281Kahn, Jean-François: 26Kasmin, Barry: 75Kawtari, Tarek: 346Kéchichian, Patrick: 28Keller, Fabienne: 242Kepel, Gilles: 143Kerbourc’h, Sylvain: xxviKhalfa, Pierre: 38Khedimellah, Moussa: xxviKhlei� , Michel: 30Khosrokhavar, Farhad: xxv, 15, 142,

145, 166, 171Klarsfeld, Arno: 343Klein, Théo: 88Kling, Anne: 270, 278, 279, 280Kouchner, Bernard: 37Kreis, Emmanuel: xxvKriegel, Annie: 3, 81Kronawett: 84

L., Marie: xxii, 222, 409Labica, Georges: 341Lancelot, Thomas: 125Langmuir, Gavin L.: 64Lanzmann, Claude: 52, 56, 57, 264,

362, 411Lasfar, Amar: 111–113, 188Latrèche, Mohammed: 242, 249,

283–286, 287–290, 291, 292Laurens, Henry: 71Le Bras, Hervé: 88Le Pen, Jean-Marie: 26, 42, 60, 104,

250, 256, 276Lévy Leblond, Jean-Marc: 314Lefebvre, Barbara: 19Lefeuvre, Daniel: 326, 327Legrand, André: 347–348Lellouche, Pierre: 6Lemaire, Gilles: 44Lendvaï, Paul: 40Levaï, Yvan: 26Leveau, Rémy: 143Levi, Primo: 19Lévy, Bernard-Henri: 28, 37–39,

318Lindon, Mathieu: 31Lipietz, Alain: 44

Longérinas, Jacqueline: xxviiLouër, Laurence: 72–73

Mabire, Jean: 282Macias, Enrico: 233Mamère, Noël: 38Marat, Jean-Paul: 40Marr, Wilhelm: 62, 64Marty, Laurent: 94Marty, Paul-Louis: xxviMarx, Karl: 40Maspero, François: 31Maurras, Charles: 282Mayer, Nonna: 12Mégret, Bruno: 270–271Mélenchon, Jean-Luc: 38Mermet, Daniel: 33Michelat, Guy: 12Milcent, Thomas alias docteur

Abdallah: 290–291Millon, Charles: 270Milner, Jean-Claude: 65, 73, 74Minczeles, Henri: 30Morin, Edgar: 31Moschenross, Ferdinand: 283

Nabaoui, Abdelhaq: 250, 289, 300, 301Naïr, Sami: 31Nallet, Henri: 41Néher, Richard: 263Neveu, Catherine: 94Nikonoff, Jacques: 38Notin, Bernard: 26,Novick, Peter: 49, 50, 53, 54, 56

Ockrent, Christine: 346Ohana, Jocelyne: xxviOphuls, Marcel: 55

Papon, Maurice: 57, 83, 411Partouche, Prosper: 194Paxton, Robert: 55Péan, Pierre: 27Peillon, Vincent: 38Percq, Pascal: 125Perez, Maxime: 345Pergola, Sergio Della: 88Perrin, Ambroise: 256Pétillon, Chantal: 94Phan, Bernard: 21Pierre, Abbé: 26Pinsker, Leo: 66Podselver, Laurence: 164–165, 171, 180Poli, Alexandra: xxv


430 index

Poliakov, Léon: 63, 67Pollak, Michael: 51Popkin, Richard: 54Poumier, Maria: 321–325Pressac, Jean-Claude: 26Proudhon, Pierre Joseph: 40Pupponi: 168, 191Putin, Vladimir: 318

Rabin, Yitzhak: 204, 209Raffarin, Jean-Pierre: 314Ramadan, Tariq: 37, 38, 39, 40, 44,

218Raphaël, Freddy: 252, 253, 258, 262,

264, 265, 267–269Rassinier, Paul: 23–25, 324Ratier, Emmanuel: 324Reemtsma, Jan Philipp: xxviRenan, Ernest: 62Revcolevschi, Anne-Marie: xxviRittersporn, Gabor: 25Roques, Henri: 26Rose, Steven: 314Roth, Jean-Pierre: 298Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: 69Rousso, Henry: 311, 356Roustel, Damien: 94Ru� n, Jean-Christophe: 7

Sallenave, Danièle: 31Sanchez, Illich Ramirez: 313Saragoussi, Pierre: xxviSarfati, Georges-Elia: 342–343Sarkozy, Nicolas: 39, 119, 130, 193,

277Sartre, Jean-Paul: xxi 131Schäfer, Peter: 66, 76, 77, 80Schnapper, Dominique: 165Schonberg, Élisabeth: 286Schultz, Pascal: 298Sebban, Michaël: 19, 359, 363Segev, Tom: 50Sfar, Mondher: 346Shahid, Leïla: 34, 339Shamir, Israël: 32, 323, 324Sharon, Ariel: 18, 20, 29, 32, 37, 40,

42, 43, 86, 100, 118, 121, 127, 150, 152, 207, 210, 220, 283, 315–317, 319, 323, 325–326, 330–331, 313, 339, 414, 421

Sidos, Pierre: 269Sieffert, Denis: 68Sinnott, Michael: 315Sitruk, Joseph: 352

Sivan, Eyal: 30Spielberg, Steven: 56Spieler, Robert: 270, 277–279,

280–282, 284, 285, 291, 304Sprang, Frédérique: 42Stalin, Joseph: 40, 49Steiner, George: 54Steinschneider, Moritz: 62Sternhell, Zeev: 75Strauss-Kahn, Dominique: 191–192Summers, Lawrence: 318Szafran, Maurice: 51

Tabatchnikova, Svetlana: xxvTabboni, Simonetta: xxvTaguieff, Pierre-André: 12, 37, 65Tarnero, Jacques: 46Thibaud, Paul: 25Thion, Serge: 25, 283Tietze, Nikola: xxvTouraine, Alain: xxvi, 124Touvier, Paul: 57, 83Trautmann, Catherine: 285Trichard, Stéphane: 360Trigano, Shmuel: 6, 45

Valls, Manuel: 38Van Laethem, Hervé: 283, 293Vandierendonck, René: 125, 135Veil, Simone: xxvi, 51, 272Venner, Fiammetta: xxvi, 60Verfaillie, Bertrand: 94Vidal, Dominique: 90Vidal-Naquet, Pierre: 25, 31Vieillard-Baron, Hervé: 162–163Voltaire: 40, 142, 272

Weill, Nicolas: 14, 312Weil, Simone: 323Weill-Raynal, Clément: 35Weisz, Johan: 5Weitzman, Marc: 27Wiesel, Elie: 54Wieviorka, Annette: 50, 52, 125Wieviorka, Michel: 15, 40, 85, 94, 124,

166, 171, 285

Willem, Jean-Claude: 121Winock, Michel: 89

Zawadski, Paul: 15, 166, 171Zeller, Adrien: 300, 301Zidane, Zinedine: 278Zimeray, François: 43


