No. 51, 15 December 2009, 28 Kislev 5770

Interview with Shmuel Trigano

• The way a country's population views the Jews largely determines their position in its society. This is often far more important than the Jews' own behavior. The French perception of the Jews is different from how the Jews see themselves. To a certain extent, everyone lives in his own mental sphere.

• In France in the 1980s, rather suddenly the Holocaust replaced almost all of the Second World War history in collective memory. Thereafter the image of the Jew as the victim, the person with whom one should commiserate as a matter of principle became dominant. Today this role hardly survives.

• Other roles for the Jews that have developed are as a positive model for the Muslim immigrants, an instrument for the authorities to maintain social peace, a witness to the tolerance of Muslims, or as whitewashers for French problems such as anti-Semitism.

• The media's obsession with Israel and the Jews is well evident on French television. It is not by chance that it was a French public television station, France 2, that created the al-Dura affair. The media's anti-Israeli narrative leads to enmity against the Jews, who are placed in the role of the representatives of Israel. As a result, criticizing Israel and Jewish tribalism has become a key element of a successful career for some Jewish members of the cultural elite.

"The way a country's population views the Jews largely determines their position in it. This is often far more important than the Jews' own behavior. French society and the Jewish community often live in different mental spheres. In recent years, to be involved in Jewish life has become synonymous with communautarisme - a term with a negative connotation - and withdrawal. This was not the case before. French public opinion now sees the Jewish community as ambivalent toward national citizenship."

Shmuel Trigano is professor of sociology at the University of Paris-Nanterre and a fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He is also director of the College of Jewish Studies at the Alliance Israélite Universelle.

He remarks: "The Jews in France have a symbolic role that results from their lengthy past in European civilization. This role was greatly influenced in the previous century by the Shoah and more recently by the large immigration of Muslims.

"In the immediate postwar years, an obscuring of the Shoah took place. Initially Gaullism ruled, which promoted the myth of the ‘resisting France,' as if the majority of Frenchmen had actively opposed Vichy. The country's authorities and elites had to conceal the fact that the Vichy government had come to power democratically as a result of a vote by the French parliament."

The Jew as Victim

"That situation changed radically in the 1980s. Suddenly the Holocaust replaced almost all of the Second World War history in collective memory. That made the ‘Jewish question' an extremely sensitive one. It started with a scandal over statements by Louis Darquier de Pellepoix. He had been commissioner for Jewish affairs under the Vichy regime. By fleeing to Spain Darquier escaped French postwar justice, which had condemned him to death.

"In 1978, he told the weekly L'Express that only lice had been gassed in Auschwitz and that the Jews were lying about what went on there. Thanks to this interview and the reactions it sparked, the Jews suddenly became the subject of both media and public debates.

"When Darquier gave his interview, the new perceptions of the Jews had not yet crystallized. That would happen only in the 1990s. The image of the Jew as the victim, the person with whom one should commiserate as a matter of principle became dominant in that decade. This image has been managed by state - rather than Jewish community - institutions such as the Museum of the Shoah Memorial and the Foundation for the Remembrance of the Shoah.

"What is nowadays remembered in this victim image is the human condition as it expresses itself in Jewish suffering. That is an ambivalent role. To be acceptable to the larger society, the suffering must be greatly de-Judaized. Many public personalities or educators say that transmitting the Shoah to the current generation requires stressing and valorizing its universal aspect. That means exposing barbarianism, inhumanity, and suffering in general.

"During the 1968 student riots in Paris, the slogan ‘We are all German Jews' was used to defend one of the student leaders, Daniel Cohn Bendit, a German Jew. It meant, indirectly, that one identified with the victims of a  Nazi state. Twenty years later the saying  obtained a new connotation: ‘We identify with universalist, assimilated German Jews but not with Zionists and Jewish communautarians.'" 

The Muslims: New Victims

"Since the second half of the 1980s, the role of the absolute victim in France has gradually mutated from the Jews to the mainly Muslim immigrants. Their condition is often publicly compared with that of the Jewish victims in the past. In the 1980s, one started to hear that when fighting against the extreme-Right racism of Jean Marie Le Pen and the general anti-Arab racism, one was combating anti-Semitism.

"This is the implicit meaning of the slogan ‘Jew equals immigrant.' It was promoted by SOS Racisme, a movement established in 1984 under the direct influence of President François Mitterrand and his Socialist Party. A key contribution to it was made by the UEJF, the French Jewish student organization. One of its members, Julien Dray - nowadays a prominent Socialist politician - became the linchpin of SOS Racisme.

"The so-called Debré laws of 1997 - named after the interior minister, Jean Louis Debré - regulated the immigration and the status of foreigners. In demonstrations against these laws, some participants dressed up as camp prisoners. They wore striped pajamas and carried bags on their backs as if going toward the trains that would deport them to concentration camps. Those demonstrating and their supporters associated the fate of the immigrants as victims of French racism with that of the Jews as victims of the Shoah."

A Model for Immigrants

"Thus developed yet another role for the Jews: as a positive model for the Muslim immigrants. French society perceived the Jews as an example of people who had successfully integrated into the country. This implied that the Jews were seen as immigrants. Yet the great majority of them were French citizens, including those who had come from Algeria. It was yet another example of the ambiguous position of Jews in French society.

"The Jews' adaptation to French society through religious reform was used as yet another example for the Muslims. When the Socialist politician Pierre Joxe was interior minister (1988-1991), he attempted to create an organization of Muslims similar to the CRIF (the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France), the umbrella body of the country's Jewish organizations. It was to be named Le Conseil Représentatif de l'islam de France (the Representative Council of Islam in France), but it remained a mere proposal. It was later established in the form of Le Conseil Français du Culte Musulman (the French Council of Muslim Worship).

"Joxe made this comparison explicitly, and thereby profoundly distorted the meaning of the CRIF and its history. The CRIF was not an organization of immigrants or people originating from a specific country; it had been founded in the French underground in 1944 to replace - after the liberation of France - the UGIF (the General Union of Israelites in France). The UGIF was the organization of Jews established by the Vichy government in 1941.

"Besides Jews whose families had long resided in France, the CRIF also included representatives of Jews who, or whose parents had come from Eastern Europe to France. Many of these had not been members of the Consistoire, the body that represented the Jews as a denomination. The CRIF represents the Jews as a community."

A Religious Model for Muslims

"Joxe was far from alone in his distorted perception of the Jews. In 1997, President Jacques Chirac spoke on the occasion of the 190^th anniversary of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish rabbinical assembly convened by Napoleon. Chirac suggested to French Muslims that they should regard the Jewish community as an example of religious integration. It was this Sanhedrin that had reorganized the Jews in national and local Consistoires.

"Thus not only the model of the CRIF but also that of the Consistoire was proposed to the Muslim immigrants. To put forth the Jewish community organization to Muslims as a model could only provoke resentment and jealousy among them. They held Jews in contempt and considered them inferior in their home societies and cultures. In 2002, as interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy tried to put this model in practice when he created the CFCM (the abovementioned French Council of Muslim Worship). He did this, however, without imposing on the Muslims a reform similar to the one Napoleon had forced on the Jews in 1807 by convening the Sanhedrin.

"Whereas there are stereotypical perceptions of the Jews in French society at large, there are also specific images and attributions to the Jews in particular communities. The Muslims constitute the clearest example. They say to the government: ‘You do various favors for the Jews, and you should do the same for us.' Muslims from black African countries, North Africa, and the Antilles have expressed envy about the institutionalization of Shoah commemoration.

"The CRAN (the Representative Council of Black Associations of France) was created to promote the institutionalization of the remembrance of slavery. A competition has emerged between memories or memorial identities. All groups take Shoah remembrance as an example and seek to compete with it.

"When in 1989 the French government forbade the wearing of headscarves in the schools, a female militant Muslim in Strasbourg compared it with the Jews being forced to wear a yellow star during the German occupation. In 2003, a former secretary of the Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (UOIF) also compared this ban with the yellow star. Some Muslims also draw an analogy from Jewish victimhood in the Shoah to their own immigrant condition. Since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, comparison of the Palestinians' condition with that of the Shoah victims has become a central element of the anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic discourse."

Authorities Using Jewish Symbols as Political Instruments

"Jews have also sometimes played the role of a political instrument for the French authorities. To put this in perspective, one must better understand government attitudes toward immigrants. Initially it seemed that the French government did not want to integrate the arriving Muslims. It preferred to confine them to their own community. This approach radically contravenes the republican ideals of France, which posit that one can only belong to a religious community, not to any ethnic or minority community.

"It is strange that such a policy was adopted during the presidency of the Socialist Mitterrand. A new body, the abovementioned SOS Racisme, was set up to prevent the development of an autonomous immigrant body and to neutralize the impressive march through France of immigrants, know as La marche des beurs, in 1983.

"To some extent, the authorities' utilization of the Jews as an instrument of social peace started during the Gulf War in 1991. There were rumors in Marseille that suburban Muslims were aiming to massively vandalize the town's center in expression of support for Saddam Hussein. To counter this, Robert Vigouroux, the center-left mayor at the time, created an association called Marseille Espérance (Hope for Marseille).

"He brought together an imam, a rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Protestant pastor, as well as a Buddhist representative, and asked them to help maintain social peace, thus creating an image that they were united. The mayor even asked them to come dressed in their religious vestments. Vigouroux thereby sought to make an impression among the masses. He used the religious communities as a tool for safeguarding public security. This, however, is not their role. The state, and in particular the Interior Ministry is responsible for public order. France is a secular state and there is no legal basis to ask religions to enter into political matters."

Witnesses to the Tolerance of Muslims

"The role of the Jews in this association was crucial. It was well known that they were the object of the enmity of many Muslims. This was further accentuated by the widespread Muslim hatred of Israel. One could ask what the Catholics, who represented France's largest religious group, had to seek there, as this was meant to be a meeting of minorities. By inviting the Catholics they were also assigned a symbolic role, as if they too were considered a minority community. Similar Espérance (Hope) associations or other groupings dedicated to interreligious dialogue were also created in other towns such as Roubaix. The French state supported these financially.

"The Jews were presented as the central subject of interfaith peace and dialogue. Their role was to be a witness to the tolerance of the Muslims. This was both a new function and a new way of using the Jewish symbol. There are Jews who are happy to play this distorted role.

"Nowadays this is a public role the authorities encourage the Jews to play. They should always appear together with Muslims and if possible together with Catholics as well. The political dimension of religion has now been enlarged from the local to the national level. All these uses of Jews as a reference point for Muslims have a mischievous undertone. They denationalize the Jews and their community, identifying them with the ‘immigrant community.' If the Jew is the tool to promote immigrants, he is indirectly being told that he is an immigrant himself. The consequences for the Jews are even more severe. The role they are expected to play attracts criticism directed at them as well as at Judaism in general."

Conspiracy Theories

"Conspiracy theories to explain contemporary events are very popular in the French media. The theme of the global Jewish influence is still much alive in some French circles. The kidnappers of Ilan Halimi - who was murdered by them - had thought his family was rich because they were Jews. It was yet another return of an anti-Semitic motif: all Jews have money.   

"That theme is, indeed, widespread in French society. In the 1980s, I gave a lecture to a branch of the Socialist Party in Lille. The questions there made me realize that the audience was convinced of the great wealth of the Jews and the power they derived from it.

"In many French environments, the CRIF appears as the national incarnation of the Jewish lobby. When it asked for a retrial of Halimi's murderers, this ‘Jewish lobby' was accused of demanding a special justice for the Jews.

."Earlier in 2009, the sociologist Laurent Mucchieli asserted that there was no anti-Semitism in France.[1] Sociology is a profession that is supposed to be based on facts. Mucchieli's claim is one more example of how academia has been permeated by an emotional dimension that dominates the scientific one. One also finds historians who write about the Jewish community while ignoring its past. A typical example is the book by the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People. During the summer of 2009 it became a major media event in France and thereupon a bestseller. It even received the highly prestigious Aujourd'hui prize."  

Jews as Promoters of the French Image

"Sometimes Jews are used by the authorities as promoters of the French image. At the end of 2000, a wave of anti-Semitic incidents broke out in France. The Socialist government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin ignored these under the pretext of maintaining maintain law and order.

"President Chirac, who pursued an anti-American policy, was greatly annoyed by the American media attention to French Islamic and media anti-Semitism. On a visit to the United States he took a number of leaders of the French Jewish community with him. Their role was to explain that the situation was under control. At the time there were accusations that by talking about anti-Semitism the Jews were expressing anti-French sentiments. Promoting France's image was a way to prove that this was not the case."

Israel 

"Israel plays a special role in France. One only has to follow French television to understand how obsessed the media are with Israel as well as the Jews. Sometimes stories are outright invented. An abstract symbolic sphere is created where, seemingly, there are tens of millions of Israelis while in France there are millions of Jews. In reality about half a million Jews live in France. 

"It is not by chance that it was a French public television station, France 2, that created the al-Dura affair. It accused the Israeli army of killing a young Palestinian boy in Gaza at the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000. Most probably he died from a bullet fired by Palestinians. The killing of this boy, however, has become the symbol of the Israeli Jew, killer of children. This is a mutation of an old Christian anti-Semitic motif, a revival of the ancient blood libel.

"This anti-Israeli narrative leads to enmity against the Jews, who are seen as the representatives of Israel. It would be politically incorrect, however, to hold the Muslims in France responsible for the many crimes of Muslim states. One says instead that ‘Islam is a religion of peace.' A corollary is that all problems with Muslims are a result of their adversaries' behavior. Thus the problems the Palestinians cause must be Israel's fault.

"False claims that ‘Islam is a religion of peace,' and that Muslims and Jews lived happily together in the Middle Ages in Andalusia, have a profound influence. This makes criticizing Muslim infractions more difficult; all such criticism is called Islamophobia. The latter term has been invented to create a parallel with anti-Semitism and neutralize the criticism."

The Decline of French Jewry

"At present French society no longer has much public interest in the Jewish symbol. Their role as witnesses to the tolerance of Muslims has largely been fulfilled. There is a symptom of this evolution: today one important way for Jews to play a role in French society is to denigrate other Jews or criticize Israel. They will, for instance, publicly state that they do not like Prime Minister Netanyahu, or make some other negative statement about the Jewish state in order to be accepted.

"These people consider that this distancing from Israel or other Jews makes them more acceptable in society at large and is good for their professional aspirations. Jacques Attali, who was an adviser to President Mitterrand, even declared in October 2009 to the Israeli daily Haaretz that there is no anti-Semitism at all in France."[2]       

Interview by Manfred Gerstenfeld

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Notes

[1] Laurent Mucchieli, "Le Retour de l'antisémitisme: Discours Rituel Au Diner Annuel Du Crif," Le Monde, 11 March 2009.

[2] Ironically, some days later a member of the Socialist Party, Jean Louis Bianco, attributed Mitterrand's position on the German unification to the influence of his Jewish adviser. Attali then accused Bianco of being an anti-Semite.

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Professor Shmuel Trigano is professor of sociology at the University of Paris-Nanterre and a fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He is director of the College of Jewish Studies at the Alliance Israélite Universelle, editor of Pardes, a journal of Jewish studies, and author of numerous books, especially on Jewish philosophy and Jewish political thought. Prof. Trigano is also the founder of L'Observatoire du Monde Juif, a research center on Jewish political life.

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