Soccer Dad

France - Inside and Out

How do French Jews feel about their status in the world?
In a ""A Frenchman or a Jew?" Mary Eberstadt asks a French Muslim about antisemitism.

For Hajiba (who also insisted that her last name not be used), born in Morocco and raised in a housing project in Strasbourg, the current wave of anti-Jewish violence is best understood as the product not of old-country prejudice but of an imported fundamentalism whose arrival in France she herself witnessed. Well before the second intifada and the recent flurry of violent incidents on French soil, she said, fundamentalists transformed the way many French Muslims regarded Jews. A tall, majestic woman with huge eyes like black grapes and an air of intense drama, Hajiba described the changes that took place in her easygoing Strasbourg banlieue in the early 80's.

''After the Iranian revolution,'' she said, ''suddenly radical Islam arrived in France.'' Its growth was made possible by a legal loophole according to which foreign governments -- most notably Saudi Arabia's -- were able, through the medium of charitable foundations, to build their own mosques and appoint their own fundamentalist imams in France, a dispensation that is only just being questioned.

This newly imported Wahhabi-style Islam contained a high-octane dosage of anti-Semitism. ''Until 1980, there was no talk of 'the Jews,''' Hajiba recalled. ''In Morocco, we had Jewish neighbors, although they didn't come to our house the way Christians did.'' It was the fundamentalists who started stirring up an anti-Jewish discourse in the banlieues. Hajiba added, however, that today, both sides, Muslim and Jew, are responsible for inflaming the problem.

The current Jew hatred in France, according to this view, is imported.
Not everyone agrees. When I first saw "Betrayed by Europe: An Expatriate’s Lament" by Nidra Poller, I wasn't inclined to read the article. It was extremely moving, though, and more than a little frightening. Ms. Poller sees the antisemitism of France as being a repeat of sixty years ago.

Paris, January 14, 2004

I’m being treated to a poignant lesson in European and Jewish history. The 30’s: why did they stay? Why didn’t they run for their lives? Couldn’t they see what was happening? I see before me a vivid demonstration of the deep roots we dig to make our lives bloom, the intricate biology of a human life, irrigated with the lifeblood of a community, inextricably connected to a society, born of life to give life to keep life alive. Leaving is not packing up and tipping your hat goodbye. It is tearing live flesh out of a living matrix.

I am, or was, the first American-born generation in a family that fled Europe before World War I: a lesson in the wisdom of leaving before it is too late. Now I am the first stage in the story of a three-generation "French" family. Why don’t people just pick up and go while they still can? It’s always the same. There is an ailing grandmother, a son in medical school, a daughter who just got married, a business too good to throw away and not good enough to sell. There are in-laws and obligations and unfinished business and . . . hope. Hope that it will all blow over. That people will come to their senses, reason win out, normal life resume. And so, blinded by hope, people minimize danger and cling to an imagined stability.

Jews are being persecuted every day in France. Some are insulted, pelted with stones, spat upon; some are beaten or threatened with knives or guns. Synagogues are torched, schools burned to the ground. A little over a month ago, at least one Jew was savagely murdered, his throat slit, his face gouged with a carving knife. Did it create an uproar? No. The incident was stifled, and by common consent—not just by the authorities, but by the Jews.

(Ms. Poller's comparision of antisemitism with anti-Americanism brings to mind the recent Natan Sharansky article, originally in Commentary, but reprinted in OpinionJournal, "On Hating the Jews")
Ms. Poller's diary is excellent and well worth reading. Read it before April. (And get to the Times magazine article before Sunday.)
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.

Posted by SoccerDad at March 5, 2004 5:29 AM