Natasha Lehrer
IN NOVEMBER 2018, a new French protest movement was born. The fury of the protestors – who took their name from the yellow vests drivers are legally obliged to keep in their cars in case of an accident – was triggered by a sharp rise in the price of petrol, disproportionately affecting millions of people living in towns and villages inadequately served by public transport, who depend on their cars for getting to work or taking their children to school. The protests rapidly came to be seen as a new emblem of a divided country, highlighting the vast economic gulf that lies between large, prosperous cities like Paris, and France’s hinterlands, where people struggle to get by on their monthly pay cheques.
Even after President Macron had withdrawn the price hike and broken his promise to Brussels to bring down public spending by offering billions of euros to benefit the least well off, the sporadically violent weekly protests continued, burning out only when France’s strict pandemic lockdown came into force in early March 2020, almost a year and a half after they had begun.
The Gilets Jaunes, a predominantly – but not entirely – white, male phenomenon, drawing support from left, right and centre, appeared not to be remotely concerned with immigration or race. Nonetheless, within a month of the movement coming into being, familiar and disturbing antisemitic tropes were beginning to emerge among their supporters. In truth, to note it feels almost mundane, so frequently does the antisemitic trope appear on the streets in France, even when there is no apparent link with whatever is being protested.
At first the reports were anecdotal. One Saturday evening in December 2018, a journalist returning home on the Paris metro witnessed a verbal attack on an elderly Jewish woman by two young men still wearing their yellow jackets, on their way home from the protest. After they made the “quenelle” gesture (a hybrid gesture crossing a lowered Nazi salute and a bras d’honneur, the French equivalent of sticking up two fingers, popularised over the last decade by the comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, who has been convicted multiple times of inciting antisemitic hatred), they insulted her, told her the gas chambers had never existed and praised Vichy, the French collaborationist government during the Second World War.
It was a single episode, but hard to ignore. Others followed. One Saturday afternoon in February 2019, one of the country’s most prominent, and controversial, public intellectuals, the Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut – who, ironically enough, had been a vocal supporter of the movement since its inception – was verbally attacked as he left his apartment; a group of passing Gilets Jaunes called him a “filthy Zionist bastard” and began chanting familiar far-right slogans, “France belongs to us” and “We are the people.” The incident, which was filmed by a passer-by, shows a number of men screaming, “You’re going to die and go to hell.”
Events like these took place week after week. In January 2020, during one of the last Saturday marches in Paris before the country locked down, an orthodox Jewish family who had come out onto their balcony was whistled at, jeered and catcalled by the crowd; some people, carrying Palestinian flags, were filmed yelling, “Rentrez chez vous!” (Go back to where you came from) as they passed by. The Gilets Jaunes was evolving into a populist movement, leaning increasingly towards the extremes on both the left and the right, and proving to be an incubator for a pernicious and increasingly open expression of the kind of blatant antisemitic rhetoric that so often goes hand in hand with populism.
For many years, traditional white, often Catholic, antisemitism has been considered to be in retreat in France. Even Marine Le Pen, whose father Jean-Marie, an unashamed and vocal antisemite, founded the National Front, the party she now leads (renamed in 2018 Rassemblement National or National Rally), abandoned it during the last presidential campaign in 2017 in favour of trying to court Jewish voters with her anti-Muslim rhetoric. For over a decade, some of the most shocking antisemitic acts in France have been committed by people known in French parlance as “descended from North African immigration”, and others who have been radicalised by Islamic State, with attacks on people, synagogues or other sites such as cemeteries usually triggered by flare-ups in the Middle East.
The 2017 murder of 65-year-old Sarah Halimi, who was savagely beaten before being thrown from the third-floor balcony of her home in a working-class neighbourhood of Paris by a young man of North African origin, was horrifically typical of a bleak roll call of victims since the turn of the millennium. Although more Jews have been murdered in the US in the last three years than in the last decade in France, the French tally is nevertheless shocking. Since the beginning of this century, casualties include: 23-year-old DJ Sébastien Selam in 2003, stabbed to death by a childhood friend; 23-year-old phone salesman Ilan Halimi, kidnapped and murdered by the self-styled “Gang of Barbarians” in 2006; three Jewish schoolchildren and a teacher shot in a school playground in Toulouse in 2012; four hostages, of whom three were Jewish, shot at the Hypercacher supermarket in January 2015, two days after the murder of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo offices; Sarah Halimi; and 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll, killed in her apartment by a neighbour and an accomplice in 2018. And that’s not to mention the regular verbal and physical harassment of Jewish adults and children as they go about their lives, the victims of break-ins and robberies and violent attacks on people and property that are almost commonplace in certain neighbourhoods of Paris and other cities. In Lyon, a rabbi’s 14-month-old baby daughter was burned after acid was poured into her stroller, parked in the hall of the family’s apartment building. An orthodox Jewish woman told me that she did not allow her husband or young sons to go out wearing their kippot – skullcaps – for fear that they would be attacked. Her husband stood beside her with a Knicks baseball cap wedged firmly on his head, concealing the kippah underneath. According to official police statistics, antisemitic acts rose by 74 per cent in 2018, and by a more modest but still significant 27 per cent in 2019. Well over half of all racist attacks in France target Jews, even though they number less than 1 per cent of the population.
The police were at first hesitant to acknowledge that Sarah Halimi’s killers had been motivated by antisemitism, just as they were after the murders of Sébastien Selam and Ilan Halimi (who shared a surname but was not related), as James McAuley noted in the Washington Post: “French authorities have often hesitated to formally ascribe a motivation of ‘antisemitism’ to attacks on Jews in recent years. This has been a point of contention between Jewish leaders and the French government. The Sarah Halimi killing became a national scandal when authorities initially declined to investigate it as an antisemitic attack, despite her family’s testimony that the suspect had confronted her with verbal slurs on a regular basis.”
It might seem, to a casual observer, that the avoidance of ascribing antisemitic motives for the murder of Jews could be attributed to failings within the criminal justice system or even evidence of institutional antisemitism. In fact, such reticence when it comes to labelling crimes of racial hatred is embedded in republican ideals of equality and “universalism”, whose roots go back to the French Revolution. In the pre-revolutionary ancien régime, the circumstances of a person’s birth dictated their station in life, whether peasant, landowner or aristocrat. After the revolution, the inclusive status of “citizen” was created, granting full and equal rights to all Frenchmen (notably, for well over a century, universalism did not include women within its purview). This means, in effect, that racial, ethnic or religious difference is legally erased from a person’s identity. The state is, supposedly, colour-blind, and accords rights to individuals, not on the basis of any group identity or ethnic or religious particularity. (Though it is illegal to collect data on race or religion, this was not the case during the Second World War, when the word “juif” was stamped on the identity cards of Jews, making the job of the French police charged with arresting them considerably more straightforward. This blot on French history, which was not to be fully acknowledged until the 1990s, is another reason for the continued taboo on identifying French citizens as belonging to a particular minority.)
In the years immediately following the French Revolution, Jews were the first minority to be fully emancipated, in an ongoing process, on condition that they agreed to put the laws of their country above those of their religion, thus abiding by the laws of the new Republic. The acceptance of Jews as citizens is both the cornerstone of modern French-Jewish identity, and a foundation stone in the edifice of French republicanism. As historian Maurice Samuels makes clear, “Despite representing a tiny minority of the French population, Jews have played an out-sized role in the French political imagination since 1789, shaping the ways in which universalism has been theorised and implemented.”
Universalism could, in a country that at least in its own imagination is fiercely secular, legitimately be called the national religion. Yet the constant recourse in both political and media discourse to “republican values”, however lofty they may be in theory, has led to the impoverishment of the language needed to address very concrete problems of antisemitism and racism. Debates around religious or ethnic identity and prejudice that have been going on for decades in English-speaking countries remain virtually taboo in France. The term “race” was actually removed from the constitution in 2018, on the high-minded grounds that the term is “outdated” and “unhelpful”. Of course, republican rhetoric and the insistence on purportedly “universal” values cannot erase the reality of racism; rather, they render it spectacularly difficult to discuss.
On 28 March 2018, five days after Mireille Knoll’s body was found in her burned-out apartment, some 30,000 people marched through the streets of Paris in silent homage. The march was notable for being the first time since 1990 – when as many as 200,000 demonstrators across the country denounced the desecration of the Jewish cemetery of Carpentras – that significant numbers of people of all faiths and backgrounds gathered in Paris in solidarity with Jews. Social media was awash with various high-profile Jewish figures declaring that they were not marching because Knoll was Jewish but because she could have been “anyone’s” grandmother: in the words of the rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, “I dream of a France that knows that her grandmother was murdered... and not just ‘mine’. A nation that stands up to horror, and does not simply offer condolences to a ‘community’.” Horvilleur’s sentiment was well-meaning, but troubling: Knoll was not killed because she was a grandmother, but because she was a Jew. Not everybody’s grandmother is Jewish. Horvilleur neatly, if inadvertently, summed up the contortions that French people, Jews in particular, make as they try to articulate the problem of acknowledging the specificity of racism without acknowledging the specificity of race.
Two years later, the reliably knotty question of how to counter racism in a country that refuses to collect data on ethnicity was infused with new urgency as the relaxing of the lockdown in the wake of the first wave of coronavirus in France coincided with the emergence of the global Black Lives Matter movement. (Limited statistics are collected based on the “nationality at birth” of an individual or their parents or grandparents, as a senior demographer at Insee, the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, was at pains to point out recently.) The classic republican refusal to recognise race found itself up against vast public fury after the June 2020 judicial review exonerating the police of guilt for the death of a 24-year-old Black man, Adama Traoré, in police custody in 2016, which uncannily prefigured the asphyxiation by a police officer of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Large demonstrations took place in several French cities, protesting police violence and triggering the faltering beginnings of a difficult conversation about institutional racism, slavery and France’s colonial history. The continuing dogged refusal in France in parts of the media (the reports of his death at the time completely failed to mention that Traoré was Black) much of the political class and all of the legal system to acknowledge even the possibility of systemic racism in parts of French society renders this conversation agonisingly complicated. However, some politicians, even on the more conservative end of the spectrum, are beginning publicly to recognise the extent of systemic racism in France. In June 2020, human rights ombudsman and former minister of culture Jacques Toubon published his report on systemic racism. It can hardly be emphasised enough how radical it is, in a country that has up until now refused to budge from its official colour-blind position, to acknowledge, in the words of the report, that “those of foreign origin or perceived as such are disadvantaged when it comes to access to employment or housing, and are more exposed to unemployment, insecurity, poor housing, police checks, poor health, and educational inequalities”.
In her magisterial work The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought, Sarah Hammerschlag argues that in every era of political change in France, the negative characteristics associated with Jews also change. “As a figure in the rhetoric of the 1789 revolution, [the Jew] represented the negative image of the Enlightenment ideal.” Even when Jews were emancipated almost immediately after the revolution – the first Jewish community in the world to achieve political emancipation – Hammerschlag argues that it remained the case that “whatever the political ideal, the Jew was its antithesis”. For progressive reformers, the Jew was “a tribal remnant of an outmoded culture, a figure trenchantly attached to backward customs and superstition… a symbol of particularism, which the Revolution was meant to overcome”. But by the end of the 19th century, leaders of the Catholic right, including notably the journalist Édouard Drumont, known as France’s “pope of antisemitism”, were identifying the cosmopolitan Jew as the “secret victor” of the 1789 revolution.
In the years leading up to the Second World War, the negative trope of the “rootless” Jew had become the antithesis of all that sovereign culture and nationalism represented as fascism took hold in the country. A quarter of a century later, during the student uprising of May ’68, the Jews’ outsider status had evolved into “a resistance to an abstract humanism by its very exceptionality and the foil of foreignness to a French identity built on roots”; when activist-turned-politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit led fellow students in the chant “We are all German Jews”, he was in effect refusing the terms of identification with the available political structures of power. The figure of the Jew now represented “destabilisation itself”.
Hammerschlag deftly illustrates how for over two centuries the idea of the Jew has had a moral and political significance in the way French identity is constructed and bolstered at different historical moments. When, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo/Hypercacher massacres in 2015, then prime minister Manuel Valls declared that “France would not be France without the Jews”, what sounded like a platitude was in fact its opposite: the emancipation of the Jews was literally one of the defining characteristics of the post-revolutionary Republic. Not only that: as Maurice Samuels reminds us, Jews were able, thanks to France’s “rigorous policy of equality and neutrality”, to penetrate “the highest levels of the education and political establishments much sooner than Jews in any other country”.
For two centuries, Jews in France – who today comprise the third-largest Jewish population in the world, after Israel and the United States – have, in effect, been the “model minority”, against whom all other minorities must be measured, as in the words of prominent Jewish philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy: “French Jews, since the time of Napoleon, have erased from their body of thought all that could be in strong conflict with the law of their country. The Muslims have not done it yet. The Christians did it, but only very late. The depth of Judaism does not come into conflict with the idea of the French Republic.”
The Holocaust, during which the collaborationist Vichy government deported some 75,000 Jews from France to their deaths (of whom fewer than 3,000 survived), engendered a complicated Jewish identity in the post-war era. The prevailing narrative has long been that in the two decades after the war the Jews accepted de Gaulle’s project of national healing, which encouraged them not to see themselves as having experienced a distinct and specific trauma: what historian Leora Auslander has called “a quiescent fidelity to republicanism”. But this too has been challenged by historians such as Daniella Doron, who stresses the nuanced complexity of French-Jewish identity right up to the present day, contesting the image of the assimilated Jew of the post-Enlightenment era, and pointing out that even those who reached the highest echelons of French society, whether in political administration or commerce, “balanced their loyalty to republican universalism with continued Jewish particularity”. Indeed, beginning in the 1960s, with the arrival of 300,000 Jews from France’s former colonies and protectorates, primarily Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, there has been a well-documented and significant uptick in the Jewish embrace of community politics, as these Sephardi populations began to use communal organisations to express an assertive collective identity in defiance of the republican model of French-Jewish citizenship. This rise in communitarian politics has been at least passively condoned by the state since the 1990s. During his presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy expanded Holocaust education in schools, leading to an outcry on the part of some activists that slavery was not similarly prominent in the secondary education programme. It is a long-established tradition that the country’s president and other important ministers attend the annual dinner held by the CRIF, the main Jewish umbrella organisation, while there is no regular presence at any official event organised by other minority groups. For complex historical reasons, to do with both French guilt about the Holocaust and the longstanding relationship of Jews with the Republic, Jews are essentially the one minority group that is permitted this level of state representation in a country supposedly rigorously opposed to manifestations of minority identity.
At the same time, Jews have long been at the forefront of broad social justice movements in France; the dawn of the anti-racist movement dates back to the 1920s and 30s when, in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, the LICA (International League Against Anti-Semitism), the forerunner of the LICRA (League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism) was set up. SOS-Racisme was co-founded in 1984 by a Jew, Julien Dray. As historian Emmanuel Debono explains, both the LICRA and MRAP (Movement Against Racism and For Friendship Between Peoples), founded in 1949, played a major role in militating for the anti-racism laws that were eventually adopted in 1972, and were highly influential in defining anti-racist discourse in France, drawing on the universalist paradigm of fighting racism by integrating every citizen as an individual into the body politic. Indeed, in the wake of the recent demonstrations, France’s main Jewish organisations’ response has been to declare that “they will continue to fight racism alongside their traditional partners”, including SOS-Racisme, rather than aligning themselves, as have a few high-profile individuals such as senator Esther Benbassa, with the Traoré protest movement. Francis Kalifat, head of the CRIF, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in July 2020, “I think what needs to be done now is intensify our actions against racism, push more for change, denounce all discrimination. The universal fight against racism can bring results.”
There are many militants on the frontline of anti-racist action in France who would disagree with Kalifat’s statement, which manages to be both banal and contentious. Since the beginning of the 21st century there has been a growing sense on both right and left that in what is today one of the most multicultural countries in the world, albeit one whose constitution and legal system remain defiantly colour-blind, the traditional model of universalism is breaking down. The arguments from the left claim that universalism is a form of forced assimilation, erasing difference in favour of conservative cultural norms, while those on the right worry that the country is becoming increasingly communautaire, fragmented into minority communities who defend their religious or ethnic affiliation above pride in their national identity.
The far right has traditionally opposed universalism for its undermining of France’s traditional Catholic roots. However, as historian Emile Chabal explains, in the last three decades even the far-right National Front “has selectively deployed the transformative narrative of republicanism as a way of exhorting the French people to protect their distinctive national ‘qualities’.” This has led to “an extensive reinterpretation of one of republicanism’s core values, laicité”, which requires that the secular rules of the republic take precedence over religious law, and has evolved to mean that all manifestations of religious affiliation must take place exclusively in the private sphere. This brief explanation does not do justice to the protean nature of laicité, which has been used over recent years to justify decrees promulgated by governments of both left and right banning Muslim mothers from wearing headscarves on school trips or allowing mayors to refuse to provide alternatives to pork in their towns’ school canteens. With the ghastly beheading of Samuel Paty in October 2020 after he showed his class of 13-year-olds a caricature of the prophet Mohammed, the French found themselves being strongly criticised at an international level for the state’s unbending support of laicité as being absolutely central to French values. Where a century ago laicité was most strongly associated with progressive politics, deployed in muscular opposition to Catholic conservatism, it is now those who cleave to the centre-right, often labelled neo-republicans, who most strongly adhere to its ideology, while the far right has increasingly been co-opting its vocabulary to call for draconian limits on immigration, claiming that immigrants, particularly those from Muslim majority countries, do not respect its hallowed dogma.
In 2021, former journalist Eric Zemmour emerged as one of the most popular potential candidates for president. His Berber-Jewish parents immigrated to France during the Algerian War. A far-right provocateur who is mainly known for his sulphurous contributions to a popular nightly television chat show, Zemmour began an enthusiastic campaign to rehabilitate the wartime Vichy government, which he claims – against all the historical evidence – refused to collaborate in the deportation of French-born Jews and were in fact trying to save Jewish lives. That, plus his hate speech against Muslims, for which he has received several suspended sentences, and his anti-immigration rhetoric, plays well in a conservative population that sees “traditional French values” as being under threat.
The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, who was targeted by the Gilets Jaunes with antisemitic abuse, remains a constant and controversial presence in the debate around integration, identity and universalism in France. Virulently opposed to any whisper of identity politics, he has increasingly become the face of a universalism that is hostile not only to multiculturalism but also to certain minority identities themselves. Finkielkraut’s rhetoric, which links anti-racist movements with both racism and antisemitism, perfectly illustrates the neurosis of the traditional conservative universalism pitted against the new identitarian anti-racism. In the words of Emmanuel Debono, in an interview with Le Monde in June 2020, “We are emerging from the historic struggle for general emancipation and laws that are supposed to apply equally to everyone. We are moving away from the idea of a common cause.”
Today, Jews find themselves on the faultline of antiracist activism, as universalism, the basis of their emancipation and an ideology to which they have, largely, loyally cleaved for two centuries, is now being loudly repudiated by militant anti-racist collectives, who argue that it is inadequate for the purpose of fighting inequality in what their supporters believe to be a society deeply riven by systemic racism. True to Hammerschlag’s observation that the negative characteristics associated with Jews shift at moments of political change, today the mainstream Jewish population finds itself sidelined from the current debate on racism, at a time when Jews are still frequent targets of antisemitism. Long-standing tradition, and implicit and explicit positioning within official state memorials, including state representation at annual Holocaust memorial ceremonies, has led to a belief among many Black leaders that Jewish history is dealt with far more favourably than Black and Muslim history. The last two decades have seen a bitter and contentious debate develop over “competitive victimhood”, pitting the traumatic memory of the Holocaust against both the traumatic memory of slavery and the more recent deeply divisive legacy of the bitter and bloody Algerian War. One unfortunate effect of the competitive memory discourse has been an increase in antisemitic rhetoric, with a number of activists in other minority communities claiming that the official recognition the Jewish community receives is evidence of Jewish “power” or “privilege”. But what this rhetoric fails to acknowledge is that whatever recognition the Jewish community enjoys today, it was hard-won over years of organisation and campaigning within the Jewish community itself, which struggled for decades to break the post-war silence around the role of the collaborationist Vichy government in the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps. The same level of organisation is now materialising in other minority communities. The Foundation for the Memory of Slavery (its name, not uncoincidentally, echoing the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah), officially launched in February 2020 by its instigator, former prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, will, it is hoped, go some way to genuinely addressing these concerns.
In 1998, historian Paula Hyman presciently observed “how France and her Jews together negotiate the balance between equality and particularism will determine the contours of Jewish life in France in the 21st century”. It has become urgently apparent that how France deals with the challenge of ethnic and religious particularism of all minorities will determine the contours of French identity as a whole and the wider political landscape in the next few years. Until France accords similar levels of representation to minorities other than Jews, who have been historically, and to all intents and purposes remain, the only group allowed to be “different” within the “universal” republic, the perception of Jews as a privileged minority places them in a difficult, even potentially dangerous, position in a national landscape of fracturing and fractious identity politics.