There is currently an upsurge of anti-Semitism all over Europe. In France, the European country with the largest Jewish community, it is reaching alarming proportions. According to a recent poll, one French Jew out of three feels threatened enough or unsure enough about the future to be considering leaving the country or advising his children to leave the country.

A few preliminary remarks:

1. The French crisis is not a case of petty anti-Semitism, as we may have known it for about fifty years in North America and in most of Western Europe. It is not a tale of marginal incidents being carried on by fringe extremists but a development that affects the entire nation.

2. It is not a case of mere anti-Zionism either. Jews and Judaism, not Zionists, are explicitly targeted as such by the contemporary French anti-Semites. There is no decoupling, neither in their doctrine nor in their action, between the Jewish people at large or the Jewish community in France or Europe and the State or the government of Israel.

3. This is not a case where anti-Semitism is derived from a lack of information about Judaism and the Holocaust. On the contrary, Judaism has been playing an important and visible national role in France throughout the last decades of the 20th century; and Holocaust awareness or pieties about the Holocaust are deemed to be part and parcel of the contemporary national culture of France. The Sixteenth of July, the anniversary of the infamous round-up of Parisian Jews in 1942, is now a National Day. Every school where Jewish pupils were arrested either by the German Gestapo or the Vichy France police has been turned into a national landmark. Yet, it doesn't prevent the new anti-Semitism from gaining ground day by day.

What are the facts?

Since 2000, anti-Semitic violence is rampant in France. According to the Interior Ministry, anti-Jewish violence has dramatically increased, from a yearly average of about ten incidents throughout the nineties to a yearly average of about one hundred twenty incidents in the 2000-2002 period. Eighty percent of all racist incidents in mainland France (the island of Corsica being excluded) are anti-Semitic.

Some twenty synagogues, schools, and other communal facilities were destroyed either by arson or utter vandalization in the 2000-2002 period. A further case of synagogue utter vandalization has occurred in 2003. It is worth noting that no synagogue or communal facility had hitherto been destroyed in a criminal, pogrom-like, manner in France, at least since the Middle Ages.

Even at the peak of the Dreyfus Affair or even under the Vichy regime and German occupation, synagogues as buildings were spared. The only exception was the destruction of the Great Synagogue in Strasbourg in 1940, carried out by the Germans (Strasbourg had then been incorporated into the German Reich proper and was under direct Nazi rule).

Several Jewish shops have been attacked in a similar way.

Jewish people are routinely being molested or harassed in some areas, especially on their way to synagogue or at school.

Commando style attacks against Jews have been reported. Jewish youths have been attacked while exercising at public sports facilities. Jewish school buses have been stoned or even shot at.

No murder so far, but one reported case of abduction and one reported case of near lynching in the street.

Some twenty synagogues, schools and other communal facilities were destroyed either by arson or utter vandalization in the 2000-2002 period.

Murderous anti-Jewish slogans (Death to Jews!) are routinely shouted at large scale pro-Palestinian or pro-Iraqi or leftwing demonstrations in Paris and other major cities. By the beginning of 2003, it reached such a level that it could not be ignored anymore or dismissed as insignificant, and pro-Palestinian, pro-Arab and leftwing organizations had to issue guidelines prohibiting such slogans in order to avoid being prosecuted for incitement to hate and murder.

Explicitly anti-Jewish books have been published by major publishing houses, including books intended for children and teenagers, a market that is strictly regulated by law in France ( Carnet de route en Palestine Occupee by Danielle Sallenave, Stock; Est-il permis de critiquer Israel ? by Pascal Boniface, Robert Laffont; Rever la Palestine by Randa Ghazi, Flammarion).

Jews have been routinely ascribed the role of defenders or even convicts at debates on Israel and the Middle East conflict, either at school or in the media.

Jews have been pressured into disavowing Jew-

November 2003               - 3 -               Outpost