How France Became a Dangerous Place to Be a Jew

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/books/review/marc-weitzmann-hate.html

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HATE The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in France (and What It Means for Us) By Marc Weitzmann

Anti-Semitism is rising throughout the Western world, a byproduct of the nationalist, nativist wave that has targeted cosmopolitan, globalized elites as culprits for growing inequality and cultural alienation. Jews know all about that “cosmopolitan” thing. They also know about the power of myth. Conspiratorial slurs have never multiplied as fast as in the age of social media. Things do not have to be true, Marc Weitzmann writes in “Hate,” they “just need to be transmitted as many times as possible.” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has found in technology a powerful multiplier, as have various forms of Islamophobia.

In Europe, where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spills over (another Gaza war, another synagogue desecrated), the anti-Semitic surge has been particularly marked. France, home to the continent’s largest Jewish and Muslim communities, cradle of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the emancipation of the Jews in 1791, has been its epicenter. Even the yellow-vest protests of the marginalized have not been immune. “Go back to Tel Aviv!” demonstrators yelled recently at the prominent French essayist Alain Finkielkraut.

The slaughter of Jewish children at an Orthodox school in Toulouse in 2012, the terrorist attack on a kosher supermarket in a Paris suburb in 2015 and the brutal murder in 2018 of Mireille Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, form a trail of horror. Weitzmann, in this impassioned book that swirls sometimes chaotically from personal to historical reflections, sets out to understand the reasons for the scourge and to cut through what he sees as persistent French obfuscation of it.

The author is from a secular French Jewish family. At the age of 30, he gets himself circumcised and has a bar mitzvah. Weitzmann asks himself: Is this an act of madness or an affirmation of Jewish identity? He says he is unsure but seems to provide the answer by saying he would do it again.

In moving passages, he describes the deaths of his father, who worked for a theater company, and his great-uncle, a Resistance war hero. Both men, at the ends of their lives, had to endure signs of France’s anti-Semitic reawakening. Near his father’s apartment in Bobigny, a swastika is sprayed on a wagon at Drancy, the main transit camp for the more than 70,000 Jews sent by the Vichy government to Nazi death camps. Howls of “Juif! La France n’est pas à toi” (“Jew! France is not yours”) issue from a demonstration in front of his great-uncle’s house in 2014.

Survivors of World War II, Weitzmann’s forebears had considered such a resurgence impossible. Weitzmann is haunted by these family memories. Working at a newspaper, he finds his perspective “questioned because of my last name” at a time of several “anti-Jewish brutalities” in the “Cités,” or projects. Ringing big French cities, these decaying agglomerations are home to a large immigrant North African Muslim population.

His colleagues suggest the incidents — beatings, insults and threats — are probably the work of Mossad. To protest, Weitzmann suggests, is to risk being dismissed as “an identity politics nut” in a country where citizenship is supposed to subsume differences of ethnicity or religion through the secular model known as laïcité. France’s multihued World Cup-winning soccer team is French: end of official story.

That model worked for many decades, as generations of Portuguese or Italian immigrants can attest. It faltered with the large influx of Muslims from the Maghreb. Often the object of prejudice, these new migrants, many from Algeria, whose savage war of independence from French rule traumatized both countries, found themselves in a country “haunted by the loss of its colonial glory.” Some turned to radical Islam absent any genuine French option.

For these young project dwellers in search of “cultural roots,” embracing “tropes of an anti-Jewish hate” that are woven into the language of their environs was, Weitzmann suggests, an easy step. The stand-up comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala became a wildly popular figure with “jokes” that played on Jewish stereotypes. His repressed Nazi salute known as the “quenelle” went viral.

Faced by these fractures, France has hesitated to question its system. The lone-wolf explanation of violence, its attribution to psychotic episodes rather than Islamist networks breeding in the Cités, spared the nation self-examination. It was easier to speak of a single delirious mind than a delirious anti-Semitic mind, even if the core of the delirium was often this: Jew as devil.

Weitzmann cites a psychiatrist who examined Kobili Traoré, the man accused of defenestrating a Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, in 2017. His report found that the sight of Halimi’s mezuza produced an immediate association “with the devil” that amplified “the frantic outburst of hate.” A judge recently classified the murder as an anti-Semitic act after French authorities had been hesitant to do so.

An exploration of the French intelligentsia’s cultural paralysis — its tendency to find excuses for, or alternative explanations of, anti-Semitic violence — stands at the core of the book. Weitzmann recounts in great detail the case of Mohammed Merah, the 23-year-old killer of three Jewish children and a rabbi at the Ozar Hatorah School in Toulouse, as well as of French soldiers in the preceding days. These soldiers happened, like Merah, to be of North African origin — testament to the fact that French integration can still work.

Merah, later killed in a shootout with police officers, came from a dysfunctional family, plagued by domestic violence, petty crime and drug trafficking. His father, born in Algeria, was unstable, a sometime supporter of Algeria’s radical Islamist Salvation Front, the father of 15 to 20 children (nobody knows precisely). Merah had the odds stacked against him.

That, of course, is also the case with plenty of people who don’t end up spraying bullets through Jewish children or young soldiers. Still, Merah is widely portrayed in French media as a victim of France’s social and racial prejudice. Neocolonial anti-Muslim racism and discrimination lie behind the killings. “Do not generalize!” becomes the watchword in the aftermath of the attacks, Weitzmann writes. Yet Merah had been in Waziristan, he had received training there, he had told police negotiators during the long siege leading to his death that in Waziristan, he was instructed to “kill everything,” but fearing he would be seen as just “another crazy terrorist,” he decided to “just kill soldiers and Jews” — the French soldiers who fight Muslims in Afghanistan, the Jews who oppress Palestinians and run the world.

“Hate” is at times a sloppy, frustrating and repetitive book. It aspires to reportage without much of the hard-won, on-the-ground reporting needed to undergird that ambition. It often reads as awkwardly translated French — “the souvenir of the guillotine.” It can veer close to psychobabble — “Any system that pretends to authenticity must give way to psychopathy and violence, if only because it is the best way to communicate.” But it is redeemed by often illuminating intensity as it grapples with an unresolved French and European quandary.

A friend recently told me that during a taxi ride from Charles de Gaulle airport to the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris, he encountered this piece of graffiti: “Macron+Les Juifs=Va t’en!” or roughly, “Macron and the Jews, Get out!”

Emmanuel Macron has not been forgiven for once working at the Rothschild investment bank. Rothschild, to French Jew haters, has long been a “code word” for a “U.S.-imported capitalist system backed by the foreign ‘kikes’ who were said to control it,” Weitzmann writes. The bank’s name was a regular anti-Macron cry among rightist National Front supporters during the 2017 presidential election campaign. In the almost two years since then, the climate has worsened.

For Weitzmann, the reason for this is that many threads have converged to form 21st-century French anti-Semitism. He sees his country at war with modernity, one part aligned with the universalism of the Enlightenment, the other decrying the loss of nation and identity in rootless globalization — for which the stateless Jew becomes a symbol. He notes how “the global democracy of homosexuals and Jews” attacked by Islamists intersects with tropes about the decadent West from rightists of every stripe. He is cleareyed about what the banal anti-Semitism coursing through blighted projects has wrought.

What Weitzmann does not do is propose solutions, even if one is implicit in his unflinching account: France needs an honest confrontation with the untamed demons in its midst.