Temple Emanu-El

Letter from France By Sheldon Kirshner January-6-2006

Reprinted by permission of Canadian Jewish News

The Théâtre Des Champs-Elysées in Paris glows in the dark, casting light on Avenue Montaigne, an elegant street whose sleek, upscale shops bear such eye-catching names as Dior, Prada, Valentino, Louis Vuitton and Harry Winston. The five-storey Canadian embassy building is close by, and the iconic Eiffel Tower glimmers enticingly in the distance.

On this chilly night in the City of Lights, Parisians line up to watch a live performance of La Flute Enchantée (The Magic Flute), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s passionate, playful opera. The thirtysomething performers, dressed in contemporary clothes, put on a rousing show. There is thunderous applause as they take their bows and the curtain falls.

Avenue Montaigne, a symbol of the bourgeois comforts and delights of a historic and cosmopolitan city, is far from the bleak cités, the low-income public housing projects in the troubled northern suburbs of Paris.

Late last autumn, in the worst civil unrest France has endured since the 1968 student revolts, the youthful inhabitants of depressed cités such as St. Denis, Clichy-sous-Bois and La Courneuve went on a violent three-week rampage, torching thousands of cars and burning hundreds of buildings. The riots – spearheaded by disaffected, alienated Arabs and Africans from mostly immigrant families – spread throughout France, greatly embarrassing the French government. Facing the spectre of a European intifadah, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and his interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, clamped down, declaring a three-month state of emergency.

These events brought into sharp relief a whole host of simmering social problems that France may have underestimated or misunderstood. The have-not residents of cités are shackled by an unemployment rate that is twice the national average and are victimized by various forms of discrimination, said Marilou Jampolsky, the press secretary for SOS-Racisme, an organization dedicated to fighting racial prejudice and improving conditions for immigrants and their offspring.

It goes without saying that these embittered youths in the drab suburbs have not been properly integrated into French society. As a result, France, which regards itself as a secular bastion of human rights and a beacon of egalitarian ideals, all rooted in the 1789 revolution, has an immense problem on its hands.

France responded to the rioting by tougher policing and with belated promises to defuse the grievances in the cités, some of which have been breeding grounds for Islamic radicalism and anti-Semitism. But Jampolsky is skeptical that the government really means business, claiming it has not seriously addressed the grievances of the rioters. “It’s blah blah blah,” she said cynically.

Significantly, though, the riots did not affect France’s Jewish community, the largest in Europe, with a history dating back to Roman times. True, two synagogues in the Paris suburbs of Pierrefitte and Garges-les-Gonesses were attacked, but the rioters do not appear to have known that they were shuls.

Until quite recently, French Jews were the objects of a flurry of anti-Semitic attacks, which broke out after the second Palestinian uprising began in September 2000. Synagogues, schools and institutions were subjected to random attacks, as were individuals, especially Orthodox Jews. Many of the perpetrators were identified as North African Arabs from the cités.

The Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut drew flak by alluding to their religion and ethnicity. His comments caused outrage because religious affiliation is supposed to be a private matter in France. Having breached a sacrosanct republican convention, he apologized for having singled out Muslims, who comprise roughly 10 per cent of France’s 60 million people.

Nonetheless, the consensus in the Jewish community is that Muslims, both Arabs and Africans, have been largely responsible for the recent wave of assaults, with neo-Nazis having played a secondary role. The conventional wisdom is that Muslims have lashed out against Jews to avenge the deaths of Palestinians in the intifadah and to register their disgust with their lowly status in France.

I discussed that sensitive and explosive issue with Haim Musicant, the director general of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF), France’s equivalent of Canadian Jewish Congress.

“I have a feeling that Muslims used the intifadah as a pretext to attack Jews,” said Musicant, whose utilitarian office is just blocks away from the former offices of Le Monde, France’s premier daily, as well as an unobtrusive bookshop specializing in Quebec literature. As far as he is concerned, Muslims have scapegoated Jews in retaliation for the discrimination they have encountered in French society when seeking jobs and housing.

Not surprisingly, Musicant is worried about the rising phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism. “There are networks of radical Muslims in France,” he said. “This is a problem not only for Jews but for the French Republic.”

As worrisome as anti-Semitism has been lately, it pales into relative insignificance compared to the past century. The Dreyfus affair, which converted the assimilated Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl into a political Zionist, polarized France. It was the cause of the formal division of church and state in France in 1905, a defining moment in modern European history.

Like Germany, France has produced a steady stream of anti-Semitic agitators, from Charles Maurras and Maurice Barres to Edouard Drumont and Henri de Rochefort.

In 1936, when France’s first Jewish prime minister, Leon Blum, introduced his government, a parliamentarian named Xavier Vallat, said, “To govern this peasant nation of France, it would be better to have someone whose origins, however modest, lie deep in our soil, rather than a subtle talmudist.”

By no coincidence, Vallat became a top official in the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, which governed France from 1940 to 1944 and worked closely with Nazi Germany in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews.

Despite these black clouds, there was a silver lining: France was the first European country to offer Jews full citizenship and emancipation.

Since the 19th century, France has produced a dazzling array of Jewish luminaries in a multiplicity of fields: Pierre Mendes-France and Simone Veil in politics; Henri Kagan and François Jacob in science; Henri Bergson and Jacques Derrida in the social sciences; Sarah Bernhardt and Claude Lelouch in theatre and film; Jacques Offenbach and Camille Pissarro in music and art; Marcel Proust and Romain Gary in literature; Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and Anne Sinclair in journalism; Bernard-Henri Levy and Paul Celan in philosophy and poetry; and Andre Citroen and Edmond James de Rothchild in business. Last month, Alexandra Rosenfeld, 19, was crowned Miss France for 2006.

No one here is sure of the precise size of the community. “The last exact figure was arrived at in the early 1940s, when Jews had to register with the police,” Musicant explained. Today, France is home to about 600,000 to 700,000 Jews. Half live in and around Paris and many of the rest in cities such as Marseilles, Lyons, Toulouse and Strasbourg.

Since 50 per cent of French Jews are of Middle Eastern, Spanish or Portuguese origin, France has the world’s biggest agglomeration of Sephardi Jews after Israel.

When the yoke of the Nazi occupation was lifted in 1944, 180,000 Jews lived in France. From 1945 to 1948, more than 35,000 Jewish refugees, all European Holocaust survivors, poured into France. North African Jews from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria streamed into France in the 1950s and 1960s, revitalizing the community. The Algerian Jews were French citizens, having acquired their nationality by virtue of the 1870 Cremieux decree. In the past decade, an additional 2,000 Moroccan Jews have joined them. “It took them about 20 years to find their footing,” said Musicant of the North African Jews.

Jews from the former Soviet Union have not settled in France. “They were not of French culture,” Musicant noted. “They felt the gates were open in Germany.”

He claimed that the vast majority of Jews are confident they have a bright future in France, notwithstanding the anti-Jewish attacks since 2000 and the subtle anti-Semitism of right-wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Yet, a trickle of Jews are leaving France. On average, 2,000 have emigrated per year since 1995, most having made aliyah. But a growing number have immigrated to Quebec, according to Miguel Banet of Montreal’s Jewish Immigrant Aid Society. JIAS processed 58 French arrivals in 2001 and 96 in 2002. In 2003 and 2004, the figures jumped to 206 and 430, respectively. Last year, JIAS handled 580 applicants from France.

These are not alarming statistics by any means, but they suggest that a small minority of Jews feel ill at ease in France.