Editorial

When, two years ago, we began thinking about an issue of Plurielles whose theme would be fear, we were far from imagining that current events would catch up with us so quickly. That they would catch up so quickly with the Jews of France. For French Jews, like the Jews of Europe, like a good part of the Jews of the world, are once again afraid.

One need only glance at the new political regimes in Eastern Europe, with their populist and nationalist parties in power, to observe the rebirth of antisemitism and of the fear it provokes. In France too, antisemitic hatred is on the rise. A hatred that translates into acts (a 74% increase in 2018 over the previous year), into the desecration of cemeteries, insults and assaults, graffiti, antisemitic slogans of the kind seen at certain demonstrations — such as the one against marriage equality, but also, much closer to us in time, at certain Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) demonstrations.

Nor can one forget that France is today one of the European countries where citizens, adults and children alike, have been attacked — and some of them tortured and killed — for no other reason than that they were born Jewish, as was the case for those murdered by Islamist fanatics and terrorists in recent years.

Despite the government’s real efforts to combat this hatred, fear has thus taken hold of French Jews. As the historian Vincent Duclert reminds us,¹ there is in France a convergence of several currents of anti-Jewish hatred, yet we reassure ourselves cheaply by supposing that a penal response exists against phenomena imagined as archaic or residual. He writes:

Antisemitism in France has perhaps not yet reached the stage of a convergence of anti-Jewish struggles. We must nonetheless ask ourselves about that hypothesis when we observe this circulation of themes, this public expression of hatred, these accusations of “Judaizing,” this ordinary violence and this license for destruction that accompanies antisemitic expression. The anti-Jewish hatreds expressed in recent weeks reinforce that characteristic halo behind which genuine ideologies flourish: though everything sets them at odds in their identitarian, racialist, anti-Zionist, Islamist, traditionalist, nationalist, conspiracist, denialist (and other) roots, hatred of the fantasized, obsessional Jew unites them. And beyond that, the same objective is revealed — the “ethnicization” of society, which seals the death of democratic universalism.

We cannot ignore the analyses or claims that overstate the case for a national immunity to the radical phenomenon of antisemitism. That this violence does not target Jews but serves as an outlet for anger of an altogether different kind. That to dwell on this violence prevents us from grasping what it says at its deepest level, which is perhaps worthy of respect. That this violence remains verbal and cannot spill over into physical acts. That this violence is far worse in other countries. That it would also be the responsibility of Jews themselves, because they would not be cautious enough, because they would flaunt their full belonging to France, because they would ask that the Shoah be remembered, because they would endorse legitimate tributes such as the one we are entitled to pay to Captain Dreyfus — a French officer, a patriot, a member of the Resistance…

And he rightly concludes:

Antisemitism is a marker of the destruction of societies, and history teaches us as much.

The fear felt by the Jews of France has become palpable, particularly in certain mixed neighborhoods where Jews and Muslims live side by side, to the point of pushing some to contemplate leaving — so much so that a CNRS researcher, Danny Trom, could give a very recent book (February 2019) the title La France sans les juifs ? Émancipation, extermination, expulsion (France Without the Jews? Emancipation, Extermination, Expulsion).

Which brings us back to our theme of fear.

Fear has dwelt within man since the dawn of time, whether individual fears or collective ones. In the era when societies were predominantly religious, they were steeped in the fear of God or of the gods, the fear of divine punishment in all its forms. Since their secularization, fear has changed in nature: it has become the fear of men, of others, of strangers, of the unknown.

Since the advent of post-industrial society — which the German sociologist Ulrich Beck characterized as the risk society — fears have shifted onto our living environment (pollution, nuclear energy, pandemics, and so on). Our new framework of collective life can heighten our fears and our sense of insecurity, and the latter can broaden until it becomes what some call “cultural insecurity.” And this in turn opens the door to xenophobic sentiments, hostile to immigrants, and to populist and nationalist movements. The regimes of illiberal democracy now seen across post-communist Europe illustrate this use of fear.

A new phenomenon and a new danger have been added to this picture with the very rapid development of the digital age, one of the by-products of this new era being our entry into a world where conspiracism has carved out its place, illustrated by the proliferation of fake news and the rise of irrational fears.

We open our issue with a text by Russell Jacoby that shows the links between fear and violence, advancing the hypothesis that fear and violence — in society as in the individual — have more to do with the near and the known than with the distant and the unknown.

Martine Leibovici offers us a study of Elias Canetti’s Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power), an analysis of National Socialism in which, within this twentieth-century phenomenon, Canetti detects an “archaic ground” where fear holds a central place — the fear of contact with others, paradoxically overcome in the Nazi mass rallies.

We have tried to understand what role fear played in the Bible and in the Jewish religious tradition. An interview with Delphine Horvilleur, rabbi of the MJLF, and a text by Guila Clara Kessous on the fear of God, answer this question.

Two further examples of the relations between fear and violence are given in contributions of psychoanalytic inspiration. That of Hélène Oppenheim-Gluckman, who likewise underscores the archaic foundations of fear and destructiveness, examining — with reference to the work of Christian Ingrao — their effects on the exterminatory behavior of the Nazis; while Daniel Oppenheim turns his attention to disabled children and adolescents, or those with severe visual impairment, in whom disability exacerbates the fears, the terrors, the violence that exist in everyone.

Jean-Charles Szurek evokes the return of fear in Poland, brought on by the policies of the far-right Polish nationalist government and by the violence those policies provoke. A very recent illustration confirms this: the serious incidents provoked by Polish nationalists at a Paris colloquium devoted to the new Polish historians of the Shoah.

Brigitte Stora, noting that what threatens us is perhaps less a fascist tidal wave, as in the 1930s, than the abstentionist erosion of democracy that makes possible the victory of national-populist parties, underscores the danger of “underestimating” the dangers of certain discourses, for in her view “fear is also a compass.”

On a more cultural plane, Lydie Decobert’s contribution on Hitchcock studies the visual and aural means, the treatment of space, and the strategies he deploys to make us feel fear and to send us back, in our innermost depths, to our chaotic and terrifying origins.

As for Guido Furci, in a study of Aharon Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939 — a text that metaphorically describes the advance of Nazism and the blindness of its victims — he analyzes the workings of fear as much as those of denial.

Finally, we asked Yaël Pachet for permission to reproduce a short testimony about her father, Pierre Pachet, a text titled Mon père n’avait pas peur (My Father Was Not Afraid).

Outside the dossier, we have a testimony by Gilberte Finkel on her life in Israel, and a text by Sylvie Halpern on the fascination Koreans feel for the Talmud.

We close this issue with an essay by Philippe Velilla on the political situation and the place of the religious in Israel — an essay all the more topical in that, in less than a month, there will be elections in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, hemmed in by the courts over corruption cases, having drained Israel of part of its democratic foundations through the Nation-State Law, finds himself confronted by the emergence of the centrist Blue and White party of Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, which seems well placed in the polls. Let us cross our fingers…

Paris, 21 March 2019

Notes