For more than fifteen years now, a climate of anti-Jewish hatred has settled over France, of a magnitude unequaled since the Second World War. With, in its most murderous facets — which are only the emerged part of the phenomenon — a series of assassinations of Jewish persons, solely because they were born Jewish. With, as its culmination, the terrorist and Islamist killing in Toulouse in 2012 that targeted Jewish children, for the first time since the Shoah in France. Even if they do not all reach this level of bloodthirsty violence, antisemitic acts multiply in the most diverse forms: physical and verbal aggressions in certain suburbs as in the school setting, the desecration of religious and symbolic places of Judaism, the development of conspiracist and antisemitic Internet sites, the amplification of the hateful, anti-Jewish obsession by the far-right tandem Dieudonné/Soral, who have become veritable mentors of antisemitism for many of their followers. All of this, let us recall if need be, with, as a backdrop, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, very present in France since the early 2000s. We have since been witnessing the rise of a particularly virulent anti-Zionism, issuing from certain Arab-Muslim currents, and also from elements belonging to the far left and the ultra-left, whose links — at times — with antisemitism itself we shall have to examine.

It is therefore not surprising that this whole set of constituents of the process of antisemitic violence should create a climate of anguish within the Jewish world, and above all within its most visible part, with profound repercussions on the daily life of a growing number of Jews in France: in terms of place of residence, of the choice of schooling outside the public system, and of emigration to Israel or to other countries. The stupefaction in the face of such a resurgence of antisemitism, only seventy years after the Shoah, extends, to be sure, beyond the Jewish world. The historian Vincent Duclert, for example, a great specialist on the Dreyfus affair, expresses his dismay, writing that “it [this climate of anti-Jewish terror] is inconceivable in France, in a country that founds its ideals, even more than at the time of the Dreyfus affair, on the rule of law, civil peace, the equality of citizens, religious tolerance….”1

The studies, surveys and statistical data on racism and antisemitism are numerous and all report an apparent contradiction concerning the Jews:2 antisemitic opinions are regressing across the population as a whole, whereas antisemitic acts have considerably increased, notably since the renewal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the early 2000s.

On the level of opinions, on the basis of an Ipsos survey of 2014-20153 in collaboration with the sociologists Dominique Schnapper and Chantal Bordes-Benayoun, the French massively consider that “the Jews are well integrated in France.” Even if a certain number of stereotypes remain firmly anchored, such as: “they have a lot of power” (56% of those polled), “they are too present in the media” (41%); 60% of those polled even think that “the Jews bear their share of responsibility in the rise of antisemitism”; finally, “only” 13% proclaim that there are “too many Jews in France.” But, Dominique Schnapper notes, other judgments are far more favorable, such as: “Judaism is part of French culture,” or, “the Jews have contributed a great deal to French arts and literature.” If, then, one keeps to opinions, the Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme [National Consultative Commission on Human Rights] notes in its 2017 report on the struggle against racism, antisemitism and xenophobia: “The hierarchy of rejections remains stable: the Jewish, Black and Asian minorities remain the best accepted, the Maghrebis and the Muslims the least accepted, with the exception of the Roma and Travelers, by far the most rejected.”4

Antisemitic acts are catalogued by the Service de protection de la communauté juive (SPCJ) [Service for the Protection of the Jewish Community] in liaison with the Ministry of the Interior. The antisemitic acts recorded comprise attacks or attempted attacks, homicides or attempts, acts of violence, arson or attempted arson, vandalism and damage. Alongside these “acts” is added a “threats” rubric, which groups together threatening words, gestures and injurious demonstrations, leaflets, letters and inscriptions of an antisemitic character. In their study based on an IFOP survey for the Fondation Jean Jaurès, bearing on the rise of antisemitic violence and its repercussions on the life of the Jewish population in France, Jérôme Fourquet and Sylvain Manternach note, with regard to this classification of “acts,” that, to be sure, “the inventoried facts are of a very different nature and their impact is of course highly variable. A homicide (like that of Ilan Halimi) will not at all have the same resonance as an aggression in the street or the desecration of a place of worship; but these facts, repeated regularly, also contribute to creating a climate of insecurity and to sustaining the feeling of a permanent and diffuse threat…. This perception was progressively put in place within the Jewish community under the effect of the explosion of antisemitic acts (of every kind) from the year 2000 on.”5

Indeed, if the Ministry of the Interior records “only” 82 antisemitic acts in 1999, the figure explodes to 744 in the year 2000, that is, nine times more in one year. Then these figures hold at a very high level, with peaks following the intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: for example, a record figure in 2004 (974 acts, ten times more than in 1999); or 851 acts in 2014, eight times more than in 1999. Jérôme Fourquet and Sylvain Manternach, taking up a conclusion of the SPCJ report, note that “51% of the racist acts committed in France in 2014 are directed against Jews, whereas they represent a little less than 1% of the French population. Less than 1% of the country’s citizens is the target of half of the racist acts committed in France.”6

In the light of all of these data, one conclusion imposes itself: There exist in France active and particularly virulent hotbeds of antisemitic hatred that have manifested or reaffirmed themselves over the past fifteen years, notably in the wake of the renewal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Moreover, the year 2018 inaugurated a rupture, concomitant with the assassination of Mireille Knoll, 85, a survivor of the Shoah: whereas the peaks of antisemitism were generally correlated with an intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the recorded acts rose by 74% compared with 2017, without any apparent link to it. Faced with the scale of the phenomenon — combining assassination, anti-Jewish violence of all kinds, and the uninhibited display of antisemitic vociferation accompanying certain Gilets jaunes [Yellow Vests] demonstrations — the press began to take alarm. We reproduce here, for example, broad excerpts from the editorial by Laurent Joffrin in the newspaper Libération of 12 February 2019, entitled “Resurgence,” which seems to us to sum up well the state of antisemitism at that date:

“The hydra is forever reborn…. It is often added, and rightly so, that acts of the same nature also strike Muslims and Catholics. But the equivalence is deceptive. A sinister ratio chills the blood: whereas they form barely 1% of the population, French Jews suffer half of the racist attacks recorded in the country…. There was diagnosed in the country, some ten years ago, the development of a ‘new antisemitism,’ linked to the rise of Islamist fundamentalism, to the prejudices that prevail in certain working-class neighborhoods, to the drifts of an anti-Zionism that poorly conceals a visceral hostility toward the Jews. It is still at work, to be sure…. One must fear that the resurgence of the evil has yet other roots […] the success of the ‘fachosphere,’ which draws, with virtually no control, ever broader audiences on the web […]. Between conspiracism and antisemitism, the kinship is close. Those who profess the first favor the second.”

In this editorial Laurent Joffrin perfectly sums up the situation in mentioning the principal hotbeds of anti-Jewish hatred in France: beyond the old Christian anti-Judaism, which persists but seems passive, three particularly vivacious currents stand out: far-right antisemitism, reactivated by the “Dieudo-Soralian” networks [with the Dieudonné-Soral tandem]; far-left antisemitism, which can take on the mask of anti-Zionism; and the antisemitism issuing from the Arab-Muslim world, under the double influence of political Islam on the one hand [Islamism] and of identification with the Palestinian cause on the other. These three sources of anti-Jewish hatred at times converge and coagulate, thereby multiplying their impact [pro-Palestinian demonstrations, anti-system riots like that of the Gilets jaunes, etc.].

For the clarity of the exposition, we shall, however, present each of these antisemitic currents successively, following a similar framework:7 1) The field and the themes of intervention: conspiracist antisemitism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, etc. 2) The genealogy, the cultural foundations and the historical references. 3) The general mode of action: terrorist violence, permanent aggressions and harassment, social networks, public demonstrations, etc. 4) The social base: issuing from the far right, from the far left, from Arab-Muslim immigration, undifferentiated, episodic or permanent, etc. 5) Their respective contribution in the passage to the antisemitic act, distinguishing the diffusion of ideas on the one hand and, on the other, the engagement in acts properly so called.

Among antisemitic acts, one may, in simplifying, distinguish three broad categories: - Terrorist acts (or intentions), assassinations (or intentions). - Acts aimed at symbolic provocation and with strong national resonance: the desecration of the sacred or profane places of Judaism (damage in cemeteries, depredations of synagogues, swastikas on Jewish shops) on the one hand, and, on the other, calls to hatred (proto-Hitlerian gestures of the quenelle, to the murder of Jews in demonstrations, etc.). - Finally, the daily and permanent acts of violence at the local level, of harassment, of multiple threats, of verbal and physical aggression.

  1. The concrete consequences of the respective action of each of the hotbeds of anti-Jewish hatred on the major changes in the modes of life of a part of the Jewish population in France. Notably:

The whole of these analyses is underpinned by a search for an answer to two questions: Firstly, what assessment can be made as to the respective importance of each of these components of anti-Jewish hatred in the effects of anguish, of destabilization, of forced effacement and even of flight provoked within the Jewish world in France. Secondly, is the struggle against antisemitism merely a component of the anti-racist struggle? Or must it, in numerous circumstances, adopt autonomous forms of reaction and of struggle, taking account of specificities to be made precise.

The antisemitism of a new far right, or ultra-right

For some years now, antisemitic hatred has been revived in France by a galaxy of fringe groups that comprise adepts of fascism and even worshipers of Nazism, nostalgics of Pétainism or of revolutionary nationalism. This protean galaxy, which we shall here qualify as ultra-right, is situated outside the organized far right. This “fachosphere,” according to a particularly well-found journalistic expression, expresses itself very abundantly on a series of Internet sites. One of its pivots is represented by a tandem united by one and the same proselytizing antisemitic obsession, between Alain Soral — the essayist and above all the ideologue — and Dieudonné, the provocateur “comedian.”

For Alain Soral, the new mastermind of the “fachosphere,” who defines himself as a French-style national-socialist, the cause of very many problems is to be sought on the side of the Jews and of their “organized community.” On the world level, the Jews (a term recently replaced by that of “Zionists”) would be plotting to gain mastery of the banks and of the financial system, and thus to control most of the developed States on the planet. On the French level, curiously, the “organized community” that generates the plot would be represented by the Crif (Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France [Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France], a secular body born of the Resistance) and the Licra (Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme [International League against Racism and Antisemitism]). Alain Soral can affirm, through multiple videos viewed by a public completely uninformed on these questions, that these two bodies “would have their hand on all the important levers in France, and would dictate their conduct to the French political leaders.”8

The themes of antisemitic hatred developed by Soral are anchored first of all in a logic “of the Jewish plot,” proper to the far and ultra-right, with a will to reach two other publics: the far left on the one hand, and the Arab-Muslim world on the other:9 First, then, the most familiar — economic antisemitism, with the famous link between the Jews, money and the plot to dominate the system. Here, Soral does not fear to enlist the German sociologist Werner Sombart and his book, Les Juifs et la vie économique (The Jews and Economic Life), published in 1911, which situates the Jews at the heart of the invention of capitalism (contrary to Max Weber, for whom capitalism is Protestant in essence). Distorting Sombart’s argument, Soral proclaims: “Capitalism is a Jewish invention, which makes our Western world a child of Jewish thought, and the capitalist bourgeoisie a synthetic Jewry. Which means that it is normal that [in] the bourgeois commercial capitalist world, in its most accomplished form, at the summit of this hierarchy, there should be the Jews of Wall Street, for they are the inventors of this world.”10

To bolster his accusations about the plot of the Jews to dominate the world, Soral sets himself up as a scholar of the Talmud, referring to this book of commentaries that completed its written work in the fifth century, drawing from it proofs of the Jews’ contempt for the goyim (the non-Jews).

Next, addressing himself more specifically to the aforesaid publics of the far/ultra left and the Arab-Muslims — who include, moreover, many adepts of economic antisemitism, as we shall see — it is the lever of anti-Zionism that is activated. With statements such as those drawn from one of the Soralian videos of September 2014: “We are all, in the end, Palestinians. The Palestinians were treated in this war like goys (non-Jews) whom one can kill without any problem…. I think that a civil war between French Christians and Muslims tomorrow will not bother them much, if it is in their interest….”11

Finally, let us cite a third recurrent theme, even if it is rather in the repertoire borrowed from Dieudonné: the promotion of revisionist theories in order to attack the Shoah head-on, which would allow the Jews to shelter as victims so as the better to mask their will to domination.

On the level of historical references, if the themes of anti-Zionism and of revisionism with regard to the Shoah are of the moment, the central one, which links the Jews, money, the capitalist system and the plot, goes back to the invention of antisemitism in the nineteenth century. It brings us back, principally, to the writings of the polemicists of that era such as Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras and above all Édouard Drumont. Not forgetting authors of the far left, in the wake of the utopian socialists such as Auguste Blanqui or Charles Fourier, certain of whose disciples even inspired the antisemitic delirium of Édouard Drumont. As Alexis Lacroix shows in his book of reflection on the permanence of antisemitism,12 in France notably, the principal ingredients of the antisemitism related to the accusation of economic and even spiritual domination of the Jews over the nations are inscribed in Drumont’s best-selling book, La France juive (Jewish France) (1886).

According to certain historians, Drumont is truly the inventor of modern antisemitism. One finds in him the fantasmatic obsession, omnipresent in Soral, of the Jew dominating finance in order to subjugate and destroy the nation: “These speculators become masters of finance and despoiling France on a grand scale through loans and financial companies.”13 One also finds in him the Soralian idea of an antisemitism turned toward all social classes, the maleficent action of the Jew extending beyond the economic sphere to reach the domain of the spiritual: “Upon whom does the present regime [of Jewish domination] weigh most harshly? […] Upon the revolutionary worker and the Christian conservative […]. The one is wounded in his vital interests, the other is wounded in his dearest beliefs.”14 One finds in him, finally, the inauguration of another fantasy today at the heart of the thought of Soral and of the whole “fachosphere”: conspiracism, closely associated with antisemitism. Thus, Drumont particularly castigates the politicians presumed to be accomplices of the Jewish plot, on the occasion of the Dreyfus affair notably: “the true scoundrel is not Dreyfus, it is that politician minister, familiar with every baseness, who, to please Reinach [the Israelite deputy], installs this Jew in an office where the most confidential intelligence ends up.”15

In his modes of intervention, Soral makes abundant use of the resources of digital technology. It is there that he attracts a certain number of sympathizers, by means of monthly videos that are to be found on Dailymotion and on YouTube. As Philippe Corcuff — academic and far-left militant, who sees a return of the 1930s through Soral’s thought and a certain influence of his ideas — remarks, Soral has understood that the space of the Net is more powerful than the dominant media.16 Moreover, militants of the Soral-Dieudonné movement have attempted to infect the Gilets jaunes demonstrations by imposing an antisemitic turn upon them: multiple antisemitic inscriptions on banners and leaflets, tags and swastikas. With certain culminations, by way of example: portraits of Simone Veil crossed out with swastikas; then, the provocative gesture of the quenelle — a sort of obscene salute invented by Dieudonné as a sign of recognition among his adepts — performed in very visible fashion by five men in Montmartre on 24 November 2019, one of whom outright made the Nazi salute twice; on 16 February, finally, the verbal aggression, of a rare violence, of the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. It seems that the adepts of the Soral-Dieudonné tandem are resolved to infiltrate certain demonstrations of social or political protest (relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) with a single objective: to diffuse their conspiracist vision and their antisemitic hatred.

In terms of social base, the number of militants won over to the Soralian vision seems rather restricted: a few hundred at most across the whole of France (see Libération of 12 February 2019). But, even if difficult to quantify, a not negligible number of sympathizers take part in the conferences organized by Soral. A student who analyzes his speeches testifies: “During the two public meetings I attended, there were people of all walks, immigrants or not, from thirty to sixty years old.”17 Beyond that, the potential social base reaches several thousand persons on the Internet, a broad and varied public, a part of which comes from the left, which has allowed him to sell more than 70,000 copies of his book Comprendre l’Empire (Understanding the Empire) (that is, the globalized Jewish organization), published in 2011.18

What is the contribution of the enterprise of the Soral-Dieudonné tandem to the diffusion of ideas and the realization of antisemitic acts of every nature and every gravity?

For the political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, an analyst of the movements of the far and ultra-right, it is rather in the domain of ideas that these currents manifest their antisemitic rancor. He recalls, moreover, that in its 2017 report the Commission nationale consultative des droits de l’homme noted that “antisemitic aggressions issuing from the ranks of the far right were marginal.” In the same vein, Jean-Yves Camus does not see these agitators “passing to violent physical actions against persons. The tags, on the other hand, the deranged texts, the conspiracist theses, the paintings, the insulting letters, the harassment — there, yes. It is wholly in the tradition of these movements.” And he adds: “In fact, these milieus [Dieudo-Soralian] seized upon the Gilets jaunes movement to try to inoculate their theses. By pointing in particular to a president who represents the elites, globalization, money, but who above all was a banker at Rothschild’s, the man of stateless finance. From there, the equation ‘Jew equals money’ came fully into play and explains in large part the return of this antisemitic discourse.” (See the newspaper Libération of 12 February 2019.) If adepts of this movement probably carry out certain antisemitic acts, it is in episodic fashion, on the occasion of demonstrations or of the desecration of symbolic places (synagogues or cemeteries).

What, finally, are the consequences of the overall action of this ultra-right, of the reanimation of an aggressive antisemitism “in the manner of Drumont,” on the destabilization of a part of the Jewish world in France?

Assuredly, the Soralian logorrhea participates in the creation of a halo that, according to Vincent Duclert, “envelops and encourages the most odious antisemitic acts, from barbaric assassination to targeted harassment, to verbal threats, to assault and battery — a whole set of acts and words that creates a climate of terror for our fellow citizens, guilty of having been born Jewish….”19 It is therefore a question of an important influence, but of an indirect nature for the moment. The acts that probably prolong it, with a strong symbolic reach as during the Gilets jaunes demonstrations, are not of a nature to panic the Jewish population.

More generally, the mode and the strategy of intervention of an Alain Soral, or of his tandem with the “comedian,” entails serious limits as to the effects on the Jews themselves. The most important concern the strict confinement, constrained, within the social networks. The audience is, to be sure, considerable, but the immense majority of Jews are simply unaware of the deliriums poured out there. On the other hand, the essential of the intervention is of the order of discourse; the tandem, even if it has created a political party in order to mobilize funds, is incapable of organizing concrete actions of any scope. Finally, contrary to Édouard Drumont, who had succeeded in creating a fairly broad consensus around his antisemitic verve, Alain Soral appears rather isolated. In particular, the organized far right, which shares the same phobias of the risk of the dissolution of the nation, does not expressly take up, for the moment, this anti-Jewish vindictiveness.

The radical left in the face of antisemitism

We shall group together under the expression “radical left” the so-called organized far-left organizations (essentially of Trotskyist, Maoist or anarchist obedience) and the galaxy of associations and individualities of the so-called “ultra-left” that are not situated within an organized and enduring political framework. Indeed, contrary to the divisions between far and ultra-right on the questions of racism and antisemitism, one does not find these same cleavages on the left.

On a historical level, we shall distinguish two types of “left-wing” sources of antisemitism: the direct one, that of the classic antisemitism previously evoked, assimilating the Jew to money and to capitalist domination; and the more indirect one, permanently instructing the trial of Zionism, which can more generally express a hatred of the Jews, as personalities as different as Martin Luther King and Frantz Fanon perceived.

Firstly, we shall not dwell on the filiations between the current radical left in France and their nineteenth-century ancestors who, like the utopian socialists Charles Fourier or his disciple Alphonse Toussenel, preceded and even inspired the antisemitic diatribes of Édouard Drumont. But one may consider that the outcome of the Dreyfus affair sealed the alliance between the Jews, the Republic and the whole of the left (from Jean Jaurès to Jules Guesde), while the antisemites regrouped in the anti-republican camp. Thus, the historian Michel Dreyfus demonstrates that, if there persists an [economic] antisemitism in the left (moderate or radical), it is not an antisemitism of the left.20

Secondly, after the end of the wars in Algeria and Indochina, it is anti-Zionism — the arraignment of Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — that mobilized the essential of the energies of the radical left in its international militancy. From the very beginning of the appearance of the Zionist doctrine in Poland and Russia — the project for the Jews to self-organize on the land of Israel, in the wake of the self-determination movements of the [nineteenth] and early twentieth centuries — the principal champions of international Marxism opposed it. This was also the case of Jewish Marxist leaders such as Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, who saw as a solution for the emancipation of the Jews only their assimilation into socialist societies. Let us note the competing project of the Bund (the Union of Jewish Workers), very popular among the Jewish masses until the Shoah and the extermination of its principal leaders and militants, which advocated a certain Jewish autonomy within the societies of residence.

But once the existence of the State of Israel was established, recognized by a majority of the countries of the UN, including the USSR, what is the attitude of the Marxist States and political movements of every obedience? It would be, in line with the prewar Marxist positions, one of hostility, not to the policies of the successive governments alone, but to the State as such. Moreover, the Trotskyists even came out against the creation of the new State in 1947: “The Fourth International […] will be in the vanguard of the struggle against partition, for a united and independent Palestine […].”21

Next, two dates mark the increasingly radical, violently anti-Israeli orientations of a far left being reborn (or born, in the case of the Maoist current) in the 1960s: first, the Six-Day War in June 1967, where Israel, under threat, achieves a lightning victory. The French radical left in gestation, Trotskyist and Maoist, takes a position from the outset in favor of the Arab States. Then the year 2000 and the second Palestinian Intifada, with a demonization of the State of Israel that would only intensify. Robert Hirsch, himself a militant of the radical left after 1968, who remains faithful to his conceptions, explains thus the new, ever more virulent turn of the radical left with regard to the Hebrew State from the year 2000 on:

“The new militant generations, often less sensitive to the memory of the Second World War, henceforth advocate a more aggressive anti-Zionism, notably through the boycott, including the cultural boycott, of Israel. At times using ill-considered comparisons with Nazism. The term anti-Zionism, ceaselessly put forward, is no longer differentiated as clearly from hostility to the Jews as it was in the post-’68 years, especially when it spreads in milieus that scarcely know the history of Zionism.”22

In its modes of intervention, the radical left acts in classic fashion, by means of its own press and by mobilizations in the form of demonstrations each time the occasion presents itself. The audience, and thus the direct influence, of the radical left are therefore limited. It is rather by an indirect influence that its audience multiplies: by the activism of its militants in the unions and their leadership bodies, in the associations and in the organization of social movements; by their numerous relays as well, in intellectual milieus and among journalists, where a certain number of them passed, for a more or less prolonged time, through one of the radical-left organizations. In the 2000s, for example, at the moment of the abrupt intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the militants or former militants of the radical left already had at their disposal “turnkey” explanatory schemes in the face of a complex situation. They were then in a position to imprint a doxa in the media, among social actors, and more generally in public opinion. In substance, it was the State of Israel as such that underwent all the most virulent criticisms, the Israeli left and the right finding themselves united in the same opprobrium. (As in 2000 and 2001, when, in a large part of the opinion influenced by the radical left, all the responsibility for the failure of the Camp David and Taba negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian authority was attributed to the Israeli left-wing government.)

The intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as we know, offers the radical left the occasion to broaden its social base in the direction of the Arab-Muslim populations, who massively identify with the Palestinian cause. On this subject, Robert Hirsch delivers to us a little-known piece of information concerning the evolution of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR) [Revolutionary Communist League], then of the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (NPA) [New Anticapitalist Party] that succeeded it in 2010:

“Palestine has become a little the Vietnam of the generation of the 2000s, but the situation there is infinitely more complex. This radicality of the young militants manifests itself particularly within the LCR and then the NPA. A part of this generation comes from the current linked to the British SWP, an important Trotskyist organization. This tendency, represented in France by the group Socialisme par en bas (SPEB) [Socialism from Below], which entered the LCR in 2003, considers that the Muslims, being part of a world dominated by imperialism, can constitute a revolutionary cohort that ought to be brought to the fore. From this point of view, the radicalization in Palestine is an essential element of the international situation. These militants, quite different from their elders, often situate themselves in empathy with the Indigènes de la République [Indigenous of the Republic], whose weight does not seem considerable in the suburbs, but who influence a part of the intellectuals.”23

What is the contribution of the anti-Zionism of the radical left to the diffusion of antisemitic ideas and acts?

Let us note first that, if there is a link, it manifests itself on the basis of anti-Zionist opinions, the statistics revealing no direct antisemitic act, and rarely any antisemitic remarks, issuing from the radical left. But for Robert Hirsch this link does indeed exist, inasmuch as “the evolution of anti-Zionism, its radicalization, will have, in the 2000s, consequences on the relation to the Jews, the majority of whom manifest themselves in defense of the State of Israel, too often in unconditional fashion. This is one of the sources, but not the only one, of the evolution of the question of antisemitism, which will provoke in French society, and particularly within the radical left, complex and impassioned debates.”24

In fact, different interpretations or political attitudes, with possible overlaps, lie behind the ideology of anti-Zionism.

Firstly, radical anti-Zionism assimilates the State of Israel to a colonialism, not for its current policy, but by the mere fact of its existence on this land. It should be noted that, even though the Trotskyists had refused to recognize the State of Israel at its birth, the organized far left prefers to attack the State as it is rather than to call its existence into question. Thus, outside the Arab-Muslim world, radical anti-Zionism asserts itself around certain individualities. This was the case notably with the signing of a text gathering 400 signatures of personalities, entitled “Anti-Zionism is not a crime,” in reaction to the fear (unconfirmed) of an assimilation in the law of certain of its forms of expression to antisemitism (newspaper Libération of 28/02/2019). This text attacks directly the very roots of Zionism, and therefore of the State of Israel, assimilated by nature to a colonialism. It feigns to inscribe itself in the continuity of the anti-Zionism that preceded the creation of the State, that of the revolutionary militants of the Bund notably: “The anti-Zionists were and still are anti-colonialists (…), for Zionism has proven that when its colonizing logic is pushed to the extreme, as is the case today, it is good neither for the Jews of the world, nor for the Israelis, nor for the Palestinians.”

It is Denis Charbit, an Israeli researcher and left-wing Zionist, a longtime militant against Israeli colonization in the occupied territories, who brings a scathing response to this petition (“When anti-Zionism overlaps with antisemitism,” newspaper Libération of 25/03/2019). He denounces first the mystification that consists in inscribing oneself in the continuity of the Jewish revolutionaries of the Bund of before the Shoah and the creation of the State of Israel. (Let us recall that the Bund militants in Poland and the USSR, who did not emigrate to the future Israel, were massively exterminated in the Shoah. The survivors did not call the existence of the State into question.) Then, Denis Charbit comes to the principal point, the overlap between anti-Zionism and antisemitism: “Why have the crimes of Stalin, of Hitler and of Bashar al-Assad never led anyone to consider that Germany, Russia and Syria have lost all legitimacy and ought to disappear? […] To examine Israel and Zionism only through the interchangeable categories of racism, apartheid, Nazism and imperialism, is to hold Israel to be a State worse than the others, is to hold Israel to be the worst of States […].” And Charbit concludes: “[…] we must hold firm against an anti-Zionist discourse that excludes us and against an intolerable occupation that plunges us into the abyss.”

Secondly, without calling the existence of the State into question, the radical left hardens its language, especially in the 2000s, by using more and more the terms that recall the Second World War.25 Thus, as in the previous case where the legitimacy of Israel is called into question, the behavior of the State of Israel will frequently be compared with that of the Nazis. There will be talk of a genocide of the Palestinians, or, like Nathalie Arthaud, the Trotskyist candidate in the 2012 presidential election, who does not fear to compare Gaza to “an open-air concentration camp,” a few weeks after the terrorist assassinations in Toulouse by Mohamed Merah.26

The antisemitic outcome of this whole climate of demonization of Israel ends up disturbing, beyond the Jewish world and all those traditionally revolted by antisemitism, even certain militants belonging to the radical left. It is thus that the journal Vacarme, which inscribes itself within this movement, interrogates itself on “the non-subject of antisemitism on the left [of the left].” It is under cover of anti-racism, sustained by an ever stronger hatred of Israel, that antisemitism liberates itself in a growing number of very varied circles:

“The falsely contestatory and liberatory aspect of antisemitism finds a particularly clear form of expression in the sustaining of a resentment with regard to Israel, resting on a totally fantasized vision of an omnipotence of the Jewish State. This goes beyond the framework of the legitimate condemnation of Israeli policy and its abuses that one can find in left-wing circles. The critique of Israel as it expresses itself daily, in the lycées, the universities, on YouTube and the social networks, in bar-counter discussions, popular music, etc., is largely disconnected from a knowledge of the historical stakes on the question […]. This framework furnishes the talking points, the narratives and the images through which a part of contemporary antisemitism expresses itself and feeds various forms of conspiracism. Israel would be the very incarnation of injustice on earth, of the nationalist sickness and of the concretization of sovereign violence. The Jewish State becomes the principal, indeed the sole, party responsible for the disorders and misfortunes of the world — in short, ‘the Jew of the nations,’ to take up Poliakov’s formula.”27

One finds in the remarks of these observers, engaged on the far left, on the devastating effects of a particularly virulent anti-Zionism within the radical left, the same observation as that of Denis Charbit previously: this anti-Zionism, obsessive and disproportionate, installs an unhealthy climate that generates antisemitism, under the shelter of the good conscience of anti-racism.

Thirdly, the radical left has abandoned all solidarity toward the Jews since the 2000s, even when they are the target of crimes (Ilan Halimi in 2006), and at the time of the terrorist assassinations in Toulouse in 2012, even though their antisemitic character could no longer be ignored. The LCR notably, which was still at the forefront of the struggle against antisemitism in the 1990s, refuses to demonstrate after the murder of Ilan Halimi, and the NPA that succeeds it does not call to join the very sparsely attended procession in Paris, in reaction to the barbaric acts of the terrorist Merah in 2012.28 Without dwelling further for the moment, one may simply observe that the question of antisemitism, especially when the far right does not appear directly implicated, becomes a non-subject, and even an awkward problem for the radical left. Among the most plausible reasons for this new orientation: first, the Jews in France, not being for the most part part of the economically dominated populations, are outside the Marxizing software that presides over the choice of targets eligible for the militant solidarity of the far left. Next, the French State having adopted measures that penalize antisemitism, the Jews are supposed to be sufficiently protected; and, what is more, expressions of solidarity in their favor could appear as a defense of the “system” that the radical left otherwise combats. Finally, and above all, all the organizations of the radical left wish to draw militant and sympathizing forces from the immense potential social base issuing from the Arab-Muslim world; at the risk of tolerating, of trivializing or of justifying antisemitic acts, including the most serious, issuing from these populations, on the grounds that they are in the grip of discrimination and economic domination.

If it is difficult to assess statistically the influence of radical anti-Zionism — on the passage to the antisemitic act on the one hand, and on the effect of panic and destabilization provoked within the Jewish population on the other — it is, by contrast, easy to bring these links to light by describing the unfolding of certain demonstrations of solidarity with the Palestinians, transformed into demonstrations of antisemitic hatred. For example, the demonstration of 13 July 2014, in reaction to the Israeli military intervention in Gaza, which gathered the radical left, Dieudo-Soralians and partisans of Hamas, where the slogans drifted toward an extreme antisemitic verbal violence such as Death to the Jews, Hitler was right, we’re going to burn you, etc. To be sure, the whole of the demonstrators does not endorse these remarks. But they are uttered well under cover of the demonstration, without the authors being expelled. Worse, a group of demonstrators detached itself from the procession to attack the synagogues of the rue des Tournelles and the rue de la Roquette, and to engage in a veritable hunt for Jews in the middle of Paris. Other demonstrations would be organized in Paris and in the provinces in that month of July 2014, the most important taking place on 20 July in Sarcelles, giving rise again to scenes of the hunt for Jews (some spoke of pogroms) and of riots against the forces of order. Finally, similar demonstrations, giving rise to antisemitic acts on their margins, took place just about everywhere in France, contributing to “feed the idea of an antisemitic wave touching the whole territory, and potentially able to strike each member of the community, whatever his place of residence.”29

In the course of their surveys, Jérôme Fourquet and Sylvain Manternach gathered significant elements that account for the effect produced by the demonstrations of July 2014 in France — infested by antisemitic verbal and physical actions — on the Jewish population of this country:

“Encountered during our survey in the summer of 2015, Myriam, a Sephardic Jew of the Paris region, explained to us that the demonstrations of the summer of 2014 and the violence that took place provoked a veritable psychosis/terror among a part of the French Jews she knew. An organizer of ‘off-the-beaten-track’ trips to Israel for some ten years, she steered her activity toward the preparation of aliyah, at the express request of her clients.” She had received calls at 3 a.m. from clients telling her: “We must leave, it’s starting again, we have nothing left to do here.”30

Arab-Muslim antisemitism

Let us say it at the outset: The question of antisemitism of Arab-Muslim origin is extremely sensitive, and it is understandable that official bodies such as the CNCDH surround themselves with many precautions in their conclusions on this subject. At least two reasons incite to prudence: Firstly, in making remarks that are too general, on an ideological or emotional basis, the risk is great of stigmatizing a whole population. Secondly, an important fraction of these populations are themselves in the grip of racism, of discrimination, as well as of economic and cultural relegation. Hence the hesitations to cast suspicion within their ranks by an infamous accusation of antisemitism.

That said, in the face of the magnitude of antisemitism in the France of the 2000s, amplified in the 2010s, in the face of the rise and the perpetuation of violence of all kinds done to Jews, including the most barbaric, by young people in connection with Islam, in the face, finally, of the consequences for the specific insecurity and the destabilization of a part of the Jewish world in France, it is no longer possible to act as if these were minor and passing phenomena. It is very difficult also to keep to the two following assertions, even if it is important to bear them in mind, namely: Firstly, not all the antisemitic acts committed in France come from the Arab-Muslim world. We have already evoked the demonstrations of July 2014, for example, with a strong participation of the Dieudo-Soralian far right and their slogans of an unheard-of, uninhibited antisemitism, unthinkable in the France of the twenty-first century. In the same vein, we could have referred to the “Day of Anger” demonstration, earlier in January 2014, where this same fascistoid movement had already uttered the same kind of ignominies. Secondly, the manifestation of an antisemitic hatred concerns only a part — and, quite obviously, not all — of the persons of Muslim or Arab religion or culture. For example, with regard to the criterion of “the negative opinion of Jews,” one of the comparative surveys at the international level indicated a proportion in this sense of 28% of the Muslims of France against 13% of the whole of the French population. The figure is, to be sure, larger than the French average, but one is far from an antisemitism of the whole of French Muslims.31

Without calling into question the observations above, the manifesto of 21 April 2018 “against the new antisemitism” (published in the newspaper Le Parisien), followed by a collective work on “the new antisemitism in France,”32 pointed to the role of Muslim hotbeds in its denunciation of “the terror that is spreading” against the Jews in this country. In its conclusion notably, the manifesto demands that the theological authorities strike with obsolescence “the verses of the Koran calling for the murder and the chastisement of Jews, of Christians and of unbelievers […] so that no believer may rely on a sacred text to commit a crime.”

Beyond the polemic over the demand for the modification of a religious text by a group of petitioners, the opponents of this text and of the orientations of the work it announced immediately contested what appeared to them as an exclusive foregrounding of the Arab-Muslim populations in the instauration of this antisemitic terror in France. Thus, the historian Nicolas Lebourg accuses the authors of the work of affirming “that all the acts of violence are the doing of the Arab-Muslims […], whereas the opinion surveys showed a polarization of antisemitism on the far right as well as a strong prejudice about the power of the Jews among the French issuing from immigration from the south and east of the Mediterranean.”33 In fact, this remark is largely exaggerated, leading one to believe that the proponents of the “New antisemitism” would exonerate the far right of its antisemitic hatred, replaced exclusively by the Arab-Muslim source. Yet, if one refers, for example, to the remarks of Pascal Bruckner, one of the very engaged authors of the work, he writes: “In the France of 2017, the hatred of the Jews is no longer the sole doing of the far right, but comes in the majority from the ultra-left (which rebaptizes it anti-Zionism) and from a part of the French of Maghrebi or sub-Saharan origin.”34

What are the indications that emerge from the numerous surveys and studies on the level of opinions and of the passage to the antisemitic act? Three observations appear in the available data:

Firstly, there exists a very strong proportion of antisemitic prejudices within the population of Arab-Muslim origin, compared with the general population. For example, among many others, the Ifop survey at the request of the Fondation pour l’innovation politique (Fondapol) indicates that 67% of the representative sample of this population consider that the Jews have too much power in the domains of the economy and finance (that is, 42 points more than in the whole of the population); likewise for the media (39 points more); 53% think that the prohibition of shows with proven antisemitic connotations is not justified (27 points more). The analysis of the detailed results of this survey reveals, according to Ifop, “that all the demographic categories are concerned (men and women, young and less young) and that this antisemitism, far more prevalent than in the rest of society (which is not, for all that, exempt from it), is not confined to the first generation of immigrants, but is also encountered very frequently among the members of what is called the second, and even the third generation.”35 Let us note, however, that the same survey reveals notable distinctions according to the level of religiosity: “30% of the respondents who declare [only] a Muslim origin, 43% of the ‘believing Muslims’ and 60% of the ‘believing and practicing Muslims’ agree with at least four of the six antisemitic affirmations proposed to them. The average in the whole of the population is 15%.”36

Secondly, on the level of the passage to the antisemitic act, the population of Arab-Muslim origin is also over-represented in the surveys. At the moment of the strong increase in antisemitic acts in 2005, about half of the arrests followed by presentation to justice concerned persons belonging to Arab-Muslim milieus (a term employed in the CNCDH report). To be sure, for an important number of the acts, the authors are not identified (62% in 2006, for example), but for those identified, the proportion of persons issuing from this milieu is far superior to that of far-right milieus (28% against 11% in 2006, for example).37

Thirdly, beyond the quantitative aspect, it is the nature of the acts of antisemitic hatred that matters for the consequences in terms of terror, of prolonged anguish, of permanent insecurity and of profound changes in the modes of life of the Jews in France. Now, among the three groups of passage to the act — blood crimes, symbolic desecrations and daily aggressions (physical or verbal) — the Arab-Muslim milieu is the only one of the three hotbeds of antisemitic hatred that contains authors of acts of the first group (blood crimes) and of the third group (the localized and enduring flows of antisemitic aggressions). The only one that generates sources of terror at the global level, and of the rotting of daily life at the local level.

Fourthly, the Arab-Muslim world is traversed by two ferments propitious to a revival of the hatred of the Jews, namely identification with the Palestinian cause on the one hand, and conquering Islamism (jihadism) on the other. By this fact, it is also the only one of the three hotbeds of the hatred of the Jews to harbor, on a broadened territorial base, both designers of the passage to the act — of Islamist origin for the blood crimes, of political and pro-Palestinian militant origin for the daily aggressions — and a social base not directly implicated, but liable to bring its support to the different forms of the passage to the act (those who dissociate themselves from the immense surge of solidarity in the face of the Charlie Hebdo attacks and make it known, those who applaud the crimes of Merah, etc.). Let us note that, in part, this social base issuing from the Arab-Muslim world is sensitive to the discourses and the actions of the other sources of antisemitic hatred, those of the Dieudo-Soralians of the far right on the one hand, and of the radical anti-Zionists on the other.

Beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, can one speak of cultural references with antisemitic connotations transmitted by Muslim or Arab-Muslim culture, analogous to Christian antisemitism and the associated cultures up until the council of repentance (Vatican II) in the 1960s? This question was, for example, in the backdrop of the trial brought against the historian Georges Bensoussan for incitement to racial hatred, by anti-racist associations and at the instigation of the Comité Contre l’Islamophobie en France (CCIF) [Committee Against Islamophobia in France].38 The object of the trial — won by the historian in the first instance and then on appeal (May 2017) — was centered on two phrases pronounced during the program Répliques (Alain Finkielkraut’s, on France Culture), and notably: “In Arab families […] antisemitism, one suckles it with one’s mother’s milk.” Let us add that Georges Bensoussan had declared that he was simply citing (unfortunately from memory) remarks made by the sociologist of Algerian origin Smaïn Laacher in a film for television (Prof en territoires perdus de la République [A Teacher in the Lost Territories of the Republic]). The CCIF, taking advantage of the use of an expression evoking transmission through the mother’s milk — a simple metaphor for the historian, but one that Smaïn Laacher had not pronounced — seized the occasion to bring an accusation of anti-Arab and anti-Islam racism: with “the mother’s milk,” one would pass from the cultural to the biological, and the whole of the Arab-Muslim world, according to the CCIF, would be assigned to antisemitism in its essence by the historian.

But on the margins of the trial, Georges Bensoussan and Smaïn Laacher endeavored to make their thinking precise, on the basis of their respective works, with regard to the role of the transmission — cultural and not biological, of course — of an antisemitism of Arab-Muslim origin. Thus, Smaïn Laacher, in an op-ed published in the newspaper Le Monde (on 21/01/2016) entitled “Antisemitism, a family story?,” validates the fact of the existence of a culturally originated antisemitism in the Arab-Muslim world, but one that is transmitted within the family, in the intimacy of the domestic universe. But the sociologist insists at the same time on the absence of public policy in this direction, on the school level for example:

“Thus, it is not at school that antisemitism must be flushed out. The modes of socialization are determining. It is precisely that the language of the home, of the among-ourselves, is learned in the mode of ‘it goes without saying.’ It is rooted well before any schooling. It is already there. And upon this language of the interior, of ‘interiority,’ are deposited the words that designate the hateful people and the ‘good people’ whom one holds up as an example, those one must frequent and those one must keep away from oneself and one’s own.”

And Smaïn Laacher takes care to avoid stigmatizing Arab-Muslim culture, by underscoring that such “repellent figures” exist in all cultures. And he concludes: “In this deadly adventure, the Jew is not the only one targeted. Accompanying him are all the blasphemers, the miscreants, the profaners of every sort. Has it been forgotten that hatred was a universal ideal?”

Georges Bensoussan, for his part, noted in his research the expression of a “low-noise” antisemitism through the archives of the French protectorates in Morocco and Tunisia, the police and justice reports that note multiple acts hostile to the Jews that they tend, moreover, to trivialize.39 Thus,

“in a part of the immigration come from the Maghreb, the anti-Jewish soil was already there, and the testimonies in this sense are now numerous, from Amine El Khatmi to Saïd ben Saïd and to Zineb El Rhazoui […]. Following Lewis, Fenton, Littmann, Stillman, Hirschberg and a few others, we knew that the common image of the Jews in the Arab-Muslim world was that of beings fearful and of no importance, more often despised than truly hated. Even when socially elevated, the Jew remained mentally a dhimmi, even though this juridical status had disappeared.”40

Finally, even if they express it differently, Smaïn Laacher and Georges Bensoussan are both in agreement on the causes of a latent Judeophobia in the older generations, transformed into antisemitic hatred for only a part of the current younger generations: a feeling of humiliation and even of resentment in the face of the discrimination undergone, of their social and cultural marginalization in the face of Jews supposed to occupy dominant positions in society.41

To evaluate the consequences of the antisemitism issuing from a part of the Arab-Muslim world, let us examine successively the three principal indicators of the destabilization of the Jewish population in France: emigration out of France, forced removals, and the upheavals in the relation to school.

1) Emigration out of France, mainly to Israel (the aliyah)

A new phenomenon, and one of magnitude The emigration of the Jews out of France is principally oriented toward the State of Israel, but it also concerns other countries (United States, Canada, Australia, etc.). But one has reliable statistics only for the principal contingent, which is largely sufficient to indicate the new tendencies.

7,231 Jews of France made their aliyah in 2014 and 7,835 in 2015. These are the most important figures, by far, recorded by the Jewish Agency since the Six-Day War in 1967. To appreciate this peak of emigration to Israel, it suffices to compare it with the previous peaks, in 2006 and 2007, which amounted to about 2,700 emigrants, corresponding to a renewal of the Israeli-Lebanese conflict (propitious to an intensification of antisemitic acts in France) on the one hand, and, on the other, to the murder, preceded by torture, of Ilan Halimi, as a Jew supposed to be linked to the world of money. As for the new peaks, they are consecutive to the Islamist attack in Toulouse in 2012 and to the antisemitic killing in Vincennes in January 2015, taking account of the lapse of time necessary to organize a departure as a family.

Beyond these figures, however, Jérôme Fourquet and Sylvain Manternach insist on a veritable change of perspective that they reveal with regard to aliyah to Israel: whereas before the 2000s the very idea of emigrating was rarely envisaged, henceforth, 13% of the persons interviewed in their Ifop survey of 2015 declared that they were seriously envisaging it (1 person in 8) and 29% that they had already thought of it, that is, 42% in total. Far from corresponding to purely individualized decisions, family by family, “a mimetic or contagious process also seems to be at work. 62% of those who seriously envisage leaving have one or more relatives who have already accomplished this choice; this proportion falls to 43% among those who have already thought of it and to only 13% among those who have never dreamed of it: the ‘snowball’ effect is thus confirmed by our figures.”42

From insecurity to insecuritization Jérôme Fourquet and Sylvain Manternach establish a distinction between the feelings of insecurity and the feelings of insecuritization, particularly suited to the evolution of the state of mind of the Jewish population in France since the 2000s. Beyond a state of insecurity, insecuritization conveys the idea of a prospect of a deterioration of the situation that can only amplify. In the face of a rise in power and in ferocity of antisemitic acts, many Jews “have the feeling of being caught up in a spiral of violence that would go crescendo without anything, or anyone, managing to halt it. It was first the multiplication of insults, then physical aggressions in the street; a threshold was then crossed with the burning of schools and synagogues, then the murder of Ilan Halimi, the attack and killing of children in Toulouse, followed by what some have qualified as a ‘pogrom’ in Sarcelles, the massacre at the Porte de Vincennes.”43 Let us add the particularly barbaric murders of Sarah Halimi in 2017 and of Mireille Knoll in 2018.

The culmination, the killing that constitutes the triggering element of the change of perspective for a part of the Jews of France with regard to aliyah to Israel, was the Islamist attack on the Jewish school of Toulouse in 2012. For those who leave or envisage leaving, the general climate of hostility to Israel and then to the Jews in certain territories, or on the occasion of certain demonstrations, predisposed them to take their distance from France. But it is the terrorist attacks that forced the decision in a majority of cases.

2) The internal exodus

“The departure (some, in the Jewish community press, even speak of an exodus of the Jewish families from certain suburban municipalities) has resulted in a fairly profound redrawing of the map of the implantation of the Jewish communities in the Île-de-France (and in the Lyon region).”44 To be sure, the phenomenon is not always easy to evaluate with rigor: first, the process of removals and regroupings combines with the aspirations to social ascension common to all the households living in the deprived suburbs; next, there exist no official statistics on this subject, so one must rely on those of the Jewish community, which does not have the same means of recording residential mobility as the public authorities; finally, the community bodies can identify only the changes of implantation of the Jewish families with whom they have ties, and are therefore unaware of those who do not participate in Jewish life, principally religious.

However, in certain departments with a high proportion of population of Arab-Muslim origin, such as the Seine-Saint-Denis, the movements are so spectacular that the motivation of the removals, confirmed by opinion surveys, is indeed of a security order: the number of families said to be “of Jewish faith” (thus identified thanks to their participation in religious life) has very strongly diminished since the year 2000, for example in towns such as Aulnay-sous-Bois (going from 600 to 100), Blanc-Mesnil (from 300 to 100), Clichy-sous-Bois (from 400 to 80) or La Courneuve (from 300 to 80). The Ifop survey of 2015 for the Fondation Jean Jaurès confirms this feeling of insecurity (or rather of insecuritization) among the Jewish families confronted with antisemitism, in certain territories with a high proportion of population of Arab-Muslim origin:

“Thus, if 53% of the interviewees residing in Paris or in the Hauts-de-Seine subscribe to the item ‘one feels safe nowhere,’ this proportion reaches 72% among the inhabitants of the other Île-de-France departments.”45

3) The insecurity of Jewish pupils in the public establishments

Jean-Pierre Obin, a former Inspector General of National Education, was charged with a report on “the signs and manifestations of religious belonging in school establishments” by the Minister of National Education (Luc Ferry) during the 2003-2004 school year (a collective report, with the assistance of some ten Inspectors General). The observation on the magnitude of an antisemitism at school, in neighborhoods with a high proportion of immigrants, was particularly alarmist, which led the following minister (François Fillon) to keep it secret until May 2005. Here, notably, is one of the conclusions of the report that frightened the minister: “Whatever the case, if the most developed racism in society remains anti-Maghrebi racism, this is no longer the case in the school establishments, where it has been very clearly supplanted by anti-Jewish racism. It is indeed, before our eyes, a stupefying and cruel reality: in France, Jewish children — and they are the only ones in this case — can no longer, in our day, be schooled in just any establishment.”46

On the occasion of this survey, Jean-Pierre Obin and his team made another observation, which touches on the weakening of the relation to the secular school and to its “republican” welcome of children of all social origins and all faiths: the resignation and even the indifference of many teachers and officials in the face of the forced departure of the Jewish children in the grip of antisemitism. There were even some hostile reactions within the Inspection Générale at the sight of the facts reported — reactions of relativization, of denial, indeed of veiled accusation of “Islamophobia” with regard to the authors of the report.47

What of it, ten years after the publication of the “Obin report”? Ifop, in its 2015 survey, noted that among the parents interviewed, 52% feared that their children might be insulted because they are “Jews” and 35% that they might be assaulted. That said, the Jewish families have often modified their behavior: either, as in the Seine-Saint-Denis or in the territories with potential threats, they have placed their children in a Jewish school (the number of these establishments went from 3 to 8 in ten years in this department), or, out of fear of attacks following the Toulouse assassinations, certain families place their children in a non-Jewish private school. When they do school them in the public school (65% of them, against 85% in the whole of the population), it is at the cost, often, of a dissimulation of the children’s Jewish identity.48

Since the publication of the “Obin report,” and of other works such as Les Territoires perdus de la République (The Lost Territories of the Republic),49 the media, the establishments and the teachers more generally are more sensitized to the question of antisemitism in the school setting. But, twelve years after the publication of the survey he directed in 2003-2004, Jean-Pierre Obin, still under the effect of a certain stupefaction, concludes his article thus:

“History will perhaps retain that exactly five hundred years after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal, the French school knew a wave of departures of Jewish pupils from certain public school establishments under the effect of violence, of threat and of fear. And this in a fairly general silence, due no doubt to the pusillanimity of National Education and to the repressed guilt of the French. The targeted assassinations, on French soil, of Jews and of Jewish children, alongside other French people, seem today to change the situation, to modify the strategies of the families and to draw the officials and the media out of their indifference.”50

Conclusions

  1. The Arab-Muslim world (or, more exactly, the Arab world, and, more broadly, the Muslim world) contains within itself the most preoccupying hotbed of antisemitic hatred, the one that calls into question the possibility of a serene life for the Jews in France (for the most visible Jews as a priority). It is this milieu that produces a majority of antisemitic acts, ranging from the most barbaric crimes to daily violence and aggressions just about everywhere on the territory. Among the three hotbeds examined — that of the Dieudo-Soralian ultra-right, of a certain far left tipping over into radical anti-Zionism, and of the Arab-Muslim world — it is within this last that there reside both designers (of Islamist and fundamentalist source for the terrorist murders, of political source for the daily violence in reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) and armed wings for the passage from a passive hatred to antisemitism in act.

But the two other hotbeds of hatred also play a very important role in the amplification and often the legitimation of numerous antisemitic acts of Arab-Muslim origin. The Dieudo-Soralian hotbed, for example, in abundantly diffusing on the Internet and the social networks the infamies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and of the international Jewish plot, in replacing the word “Jew” with “Zionist” in order to avoid legal proceedings, has strongly contributed to popularizing the idea of an international Zionist plot among the French population (the young more especially), which, for the most part, understood nothing of these questions. Thus, in an Ifop poll on “the French and the 70 years of Israel,” published in 2018, 53% of the French agreed with the idea according to which “Zionism is an international organization that aims to influence the world and society to the benefit of the Jews.”51 As for the far left and the fraction of its radical anti-Zionist militants, by their propaganda of systematic demonization of Israel, whatever its government and its action, they contribute to relativizing and even to finding excuses for antisemitic acts, presented as understandable reactions to “Israeli savagery” and to the complicity of all the Jews of the world.

  1. Antisemitism, as we have seen, does not concern the whole of the Arab-Muslim world, or, more broadly, the whole of the Muslims of France. To be sure, on the statistical level, the stereotypes associated with the Jews are often shared in this milieu. By contrast, it is more nuanced as to the general negative opinions with regard to the Jews (in 2006, this was the case for 28% of the Muslims of France, against 13% of the whole of the French population). Moreover, with regard to the Jewish population of France, according to the Ipsos survey of 2014-2015 (at the request of the Fondation pour le judaïsme), if 42% of the persons interviewed declared having had problems (aggressions, insults, etc.) with persons of Muslim faith (and 39% with those of Maghrebi origin), 78% declared that they maintained rather good relations with persons of Maghrebi origin (and 74% with Muslims).

In still more telling fashion, the assassination by defenestration, preceded by a long period of torture, of Sarah Halimi, 65, in April 2017 by a Muslim of Malian origin frequenting a Salafist mosque, offers a good example of attitudes of strong empathy with the victim on the part of persons of Arab-Muslim or Muslim origin. This is the case, for example, of a woman of Kabyle origin, who denounces the terror in this neighborhood of Belleville, by an alliance between the delinquents and the bearded ones, and of which she is herself a victim along with her family: “My daughter was called a whore because she came home with her boyfriend, my son was assaulted because he has fair skin and blue eyes,” she chokes out. “When one is not like them, one is nothing.” As for the Kadda family, Sarah Halimi’s neighbors across the landing, Moroccan Muslims who were in their home country at the time of the assassination, “they confide that they wept a great deal when they learned the news.” “We loved her very much,” says the father: “For us, she was someone of the family. On Saturdays, the day of the Sabbath, I would sometimes go and light the gas at her place.”52

  1. The violence done to Jews in France was accompanied for a long time by a deafening silence on the part of the political class and the media (until the Toulouse attack in 2012), and above all of the social body and its vital forces (union, associative), including at the time of that killing as of the ones that followed. Hence the immense feeling of abandonment felt by the French Jewish world, especially when it refers to the hundreds of thousands of non-Jews who marched in a sign of solidarity in 1990, in response to the desecration of the Jewish cemetery of Carpentras. At that time, the presumed culprits, even before the confirmation years later, pointed toward cores linked to the far right. But once the murderers proclaim themselves linked to the sphere of the victims of discrimination, the Jews, sent back to the world of the dominant, are excluded from the benefit of a social solidarity that is nonetheless necessary to overcome these tragic ordeals. To be sure, the political officials, becoming aware of the disastrous image of a France where one continues to kill Jews for what they are seventy years after the Shoah and the collaboration of the Vichy regime, reacted to the antisemitic attacks with comforting declarations. Following the attack on the Hyper Cacher in January 2015 notably, the words of the Prime Minister Manuel Valls, proclaiming that “France without the Jews would no longer be France,” soothed the hearts of many of them. But, in the now-absent empathy coming from the social body and the militant bodies that animate it, many Jews in France keenly felt this lack of solidarity; which contributed to the emigration of some of them and to the disaffiliation of many others with regard to French society.

Unfortunately, the third wave of surveys carried out by the Ipsos Institute for the Fondation du judaïsme français in October 2017 confirms the weak empathy of the French population with regard to the Jews in France: although they are conscious of the fears for the Jews of living in France, 62% of them consider that their departure would be neither a good nor a bad thing; this figure rises to 67% among those under 35 and to 74% among manual workers.53 Has a majority part of the French population already resigned itself to the idea of a France without the Jews? This is the pessimistic version, which is combated, let us recall, by a large part of the political elites notably. But it is that of the philosopher Danny Trom, who concludes thus his essay on La France sans les Juifs (France without the Jews): “The Jews are leaving, but it is not seen, for it does not really matter. The departure of the Jews discreetly closes a long historical sequence, already ratified in Europe.”54

  1. Must one automatically link the struggle against antisemitism to the struggle against all racisms? For some, those close to the far left above all, the anti-racist struggle cannot be divided without weakening each of its components. Now, to mix the struggle against anti-Black or anti-Maghrebi racisms, for example, on the one hand, and antisemitism on the other, would be an error for two principal reasons: The first refers precisely to the difficulty signaled in the introduction, of an antisemitic hatred, and even of a passage to the act, issuing from certain persons themselves potential victims of racism. The second holds to a difference in nature between these two components: whereas racism strikes with discrimination populations in a dominated situation (economically, socially, culturally), antisemitism, in a fantasized construction, attacks the Jews supposed to belong to the camp of the dominant, and even to those who possess many things in addition to others: money, power, influence and the status of victim.

Despite a will to struggle against all racisms, henceforth confirmed by ambitious governmental measures since the year 2018,55 but with effects deferred in time, one does not see, for the coming years, what could dry up the sources of antisemitic hatred that we currently know. The Jews will therefore have to integrate the idea of living with a high level of antisemitism, at least latent, as everyone knows, for example, that one must accept living with a certain level of delinquency. But it is not a matter of resigning oneself for all that. To avoid flight and the bitterness of failure that accompanies it, it is necessary to reinforce the level of the struggle against antisemitism. Even if it is understandable that the Jews should be in the front line in this combat, they must associate with it a maximum of other forces of civil society, and as a priority those issuing from the populations in the grip of racism, as much as possible. And the best way of working in this direction consists, for the Jews, in associating themselves with the combats against all the forms of racism.

Notes

  1. Vincent Duclert, “L’antisémitisme sans fin,” in the journal Esprit, April 2019.↩︎

  2. The name “Jew” will here be written with a capital J when it is a question of the people and with a lowercase j when it is a question of the religion. But in the quotations, we will respect the author’s writing.↩︎

  3. Perceptions et attentes de la population juive. Le rapport à l’autre et aux minorités (Perceptions and Expectations of the Jewish Population. The Relation to the Other and to Minorities), 2015, Ipsos.fr website. See also: Dominique Schnapper, “Enquêtes sociologiques,” in Dominique Schnapper et al. (eds.), Réflexions sur l’antisémitisme, Odile Jacob, 2016, pp. 231-234.↩︎

  4. Cncdh.fr/27s-rapport-sur-la-lutte-contre-le-racisme.↩︎

  5. Jérôme Fourquet, Sylvain Manternach, L’an prochain à Jérusalem (Next Year in Jerusalem), Éditions de L’Aube, 2016, pp. 25-26.↩︎

  6. Ibid., p. 26.↩︎

  7. It is a question of an overall frame of reference. We will not necessarily examine the six rubrics in the same order, and their respective importance will be different in the three hotbeds of antisemitic hatred analyzed.↩︎

  8. Dan Israël and Pierre Puchot, “Comment Soral gagne les têtes” (2/2), article published on mediapart.fr on 17 November 2014, p. 1. I will refer largely to this article for this whole part devoted to the antisemitic hatred of Alain Soral.↩︎

  9. Ibid., pp. 1-3.↩︎

  10. Let us recall that Werner Sombart (1853-1941), a left-wing German sociologist who often debated with Max Weber, affirmed that his book was not a thesis-driven book (for or against the Jews) but a text of a scientific character. “Comment Soral gagne les têtes” (2/2), op. cit., p. 2.↩︎

  11. Ibid., p. 2.↩︎

  12. Alexis Lacroix, J’accuse!, 1898-2018. Permanence de l’antisémitisme, Éditions de l’Observatoire, 2018.↩︎

  13. Cited by Alexis Lacroix, Ibid., p. 43.↩︎

  14. Ibid., p. 44.↩︎

  15. Ibid., p. 45.↩︎

  16. Dan Israël and Pierre Puchot, “Comment Soral gagne les têtes” (1/2), article published on mediapart.fr on 20/01/2017, p. 2.↩︎

  17. “Comment Soral gagne les têtes” 2/2, op. cit., p. 3.↩︎

  18. Ibid., (1/2), p. 1.↩︎

  19. “L’antisémitisme sans fin,” op. cit., p. 1.↩︎

  20. Michel Dreyfus, L’antisémitisme à gauche, histoire d’un paradoxe, de 1830 à nos jours, La Découverte, 2009.↩︎

  21. Cited by Robert Hirsch, Sont-ils toujours des Juifs Allemands? La gauche radicale et les Juifs depuis 1968, Éditions Arbre bleu, 2017, p. 120.↩︎

  22. Ibid., p. 257.↩︎

  23. Ibid., p. 158.↩︎

  24. Ibid., p. 160.↩︎

  25. Ibid., pp. 146-148.↩︎

  26. Ibid., p. 215.↩︎

  27. Camilla Brenni et al., “Le non-sujet de l’antisémitisme à gauche,” Vacarme, https//vacarme.org/article 3210.html, 19/02/2019, pp. 7-8.↩︎

  28. Following the assassinations at the Jewish school in Toulouse, once the identity of the killer and his link with Muslim fundamentalist milieus were known, a demonstration was organized in Paris on 26 March 2012: “Only a few thousand people (3,000 according to the police) marched at the call of SOS Racisme, the UEJF and the LICRA. The MRAP and the left-wing parties called for attendance, but neither the NPA nor LO (…). No one seems to have wanted to give scope to this demonstration, perhaps because of the electoral campaign, or so as not to discriminate against the Muslim population” (See Robert Hirsch, Sont-ils toujours des Juifs Allemands?, op. cit., p. 206).↩︎

  29. L’an prochain à Jérusalem? op. cit., p. 43.↩︎

  30. Ibid., pp. 44-45.↩︎

  31. International survey carried out in 2006 by the American institute “Pew Global Attitudes Project,” cited by Günther Jikeli, “L’antisémitisme chez les jeunes musulmans de France,” in Réflexions sur l’antisémitisme, op. cit., p. 216.↩︎

  32. Collective work, Preface by Élisabeth de Fontenay, Albin Michel, 2018.↩︎

  33. http//www.slate.fr/societe-nouvel-antisemitisme-France, p. 7.↩︎

  34. “Il n’y en a que pour les Juifs,” in Le Nouvel antisémitisme en France, op. cit., p. 135. The bold emphasis is ours. Moreover, the notion of “New antisemitism” is not really stabilized. While it always designates the renewal of the motifs and forms of the hatred of the Jews, reactivated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, sometimes it targets the Arab-Muslim source alone, and sometimes its coagulation with the radical anti-Zionist left.↩︎

  35. L’an prochain à Jérusalem? op. cit., p. 62.↩︎

  36. Cited by Günther Jikeli, “L’antisémitisme chez les jeunes musulmans de France,” op. cit., p. 217.↩︎

  37. L’an prochain à Jérusalem? op. cit., p. 59. Moreover, Günther Jikeli notes that “between 2000 and 2011, the identified authors of antisemitic violence were in the majority issued from the Muslim world. Unfortunately, since 2012, the CNCDH no longer publishes such data, probably for political reasons.” See Günther Jikeli, “L’antisémitisme chez les jeunes musulmans de France,” op. cit., p. 218, footnote no. 9.↩︎

  38. Following the CCIF, the four major anti-racist associations — the LDH, the MRAP, the LICRA and SOS Racisme — became civil parties. The LICRA, ill at ease in this trapped judicial combat — it had no doubt as to the anti-racism of Georges Bensoussan — justified itself by means of a letter from its president: its presence among the accusers in this trial would have been determined by its practice of following the Procureur Général [Public Prosecutor] when he investigates a case of racism, on the one hand, and by the historian’s refusal to apologize to those who would have misunderstood his remarks on the other. Now Georges Bensoussan refused to apologize in the face of what he rightly considered a campaign of calumny based on a phrase taken out of its context.↩︎

  39. Georges Bensoussan, “sur un ‘lâche soulagement,’” in Le Nouvel antisémitisme en France, op. cit., p. 161.↩︎

  40. Georges Bensoussan, “Pourquoi les musulmans de France n’ont pas crié ‘Pas en notre nom’?,” Interview for the journal Causeur, 2/2, on 09/06/2018, p. 3.↩︎

  41. The psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony advances other reasons for the antagonism between the two cultures, Jewish and Islamic, which would go back to the nature of their respective founding texts: on the one hand, a rivalry as to the validity of the distinction attributed to the Jews at the reception of the divine message, called into question in the Koran on the grounds that they “have fallen through their sins”; on the other hand, the acceptance by the Jews of bearing an “ontological” identity fault, between “what is and the possible,” a fault that the other faithful of the monotheistic religions would not bear; and notably the Muslims, who claim a “full, complete, tranquil identity, and, from this point of view, the Jews are disturbing.” See Daniel Sibony, “Mise au point sur le ‘Nouvel antisémitisme,’” in Le Nouvel antisémitisme en France, op. cit., pp. 111 and 116-117. See also Delphine Horvilleur, who takes up the explanation of antisemitism, notably, by reason of something that the Jews would have and that the others would not have: simply, the acceptance by the Jews of living with a fault, “a ‘lack’ creative of belonging,” the non-Jews bearing only full identity. (Delphine Horvilleur, Réflexions sur la question antisémite, Grasset, 2019, pp. 105-110).↩︎

  42. L’an prochain à Jérusalem?, op. cit., p. 183.↩︎

  43. Ibid., pp. 200-201.↩︎

  44. Ibid., p. 85.↩︎

  45. Ibid., p. 91.↩︎

  46. Jean-Pierre Obin, “La déscolarisation des élèves juifs de l’enseignement public français,” in Réflexions sur l’antisémitisme, op. cit., p. 208.↩︎

  47. Ibid., p. 210.↩︎

  48. L’an prochain à Jérusalem?, op. cit., pp. 101-103.↩︎

  49. Georges Bensoussan (ed.), Les Territoires perdus de la République, Mille et une nuits, 2002; expanded reissue, Pluriel, 2015.↩︎

  50. “La déscolarisation des élèves juifs de l’enseignement public français,” op. cit., p. 214.↩︎

  51. Poll carried out at the request of the Union des étudiants juifs de France. To this question, only 11% answered that this formula “applies very well,” and 42% that it applies “fairly well.” There is thus a certain uncertainty in the response, which shows that a large part of the respondents had only a very vague idea of what Zionism is.↩︎

  52. Noémie Halioua, “Enquête sur une histoire française,” in Le nouvel antisémitisme en France, op. cit., pp. 27 and 28.↩︎

  53. Ipsos.com/2017/relation-à-l’autre, p. 19.↩︎

  54. Danny Trom, La France sans les juifs, PUF, 2019, p. 154.↩︎

  55. Plan national de lutte contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme (2018-2020), Premier ministre, Dilcrah.↩︎

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