The epithet dirty Jew is the scourge of our time.
It’s a lie! — and it is all the more odious and cynical that they lie with impunity… They stir up France, they hide behind its legitimate emotion, they close their mouths by disturbing hearts, by perverting minds. I know of no greater civic crime. These, then, are the facts that explain how a miscarriage of justice may have been committed; and the moral proofs, Dreyfus’s fortune, the absence of reasons, his continual cry of innocence, finish showing him as a victim of the extraordinary imaginations of the commander of Paty de Clam, of the clerical environment where he was, hunting down “dirty Jews”, which dishonors our times…
Emile Zola, J’Accuse …!, 1898.
Four years ago, Sarah Halimi, age 65, was tortured, beaten to the brink of death, and thrown from the window of her third-floor apartment because she was a Jewish woman. Last week, in a final decision by the highest court in France, the French state made a final decision that Halimi’s murderer should not stand trial, nor be held accountable for his actions, because he smoked a cannabis blunt prior to committing the murder.
This tragic and heinous incident of hate, murder, and impunity is one chapter in a much larger story: the resurgence of virulent forms of antisemitism in France, Europe and globally. Modern France inspired the world with its clarion call to liberté, égalité, fraternité, its overthrow of monarchy, and its declarations of human rights.
Tragically, however, France has failed to adhere to these principles when it comes to its minority citizens: Muslims, Africans, Jews, and, all too often, women.
In this blog posting, following gatherings throughout France to protest the failure of justice and accountability in the case of Sarah Halimi’s killing, we focus on the widespread dissemination and rise of antisemitic beliefs, speech, hate crimes and murders in France today. The roots of this toxic hatred are deep: from the persecution of Alfred Dreyfus during the Third French Republic at the end of the 19th century, to French collaboration with Hitler during the Vichy era, leading to the deportation of tens of thousands of Jewish men, women and children to the Nazi death camps.
The 21st century revival of antisemitism is a mix of the antisemitic tropes and prejudices that has been latent in French society since the Dreyfus Affair and new forms of hatred that have been adopted by some members of the second-generation Muslim immigrant population, including but not limited to individuals identifying with radical forms of Islamism. According to Noam Schimmel (“The “Loneliness” Of French Jews: French Responses To Anti Jewish Racism, Bigotry, And Discrimination”, published under the auspices of Humanity in Action):
“Further, the intersection of anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish sentiments and the rise of both in response to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in which attacks on French Jews are perversely justified as legitimate expressions of rejection of Israeli government policies, may contribute to the increase.”
In this context, the beating and killing of Sarah Halimi was one of many horrific crimes in which French victims were targeted, brutalized, beaten and murdered simply because they were Jews.
Some of the most heinous examples include:
- • The 2006 killing of Ilan Halimi (no relation to Sarah), a young French Jewish man of Moroccan descent who was kidnapped and tortured to death over a three-week period by an anti-Semitic group that called themselves “the Gang of Barbarians”;
- The 2012 murder of a teacher and three children at a Jewish day school in Toulouse;
- An assault on a Jewish couple in their apartment, and rape of the woman, by assailants who attacked them because they were Jews;
- The January 2015 attack on a Kosher supermarket, killing four hostages;
- The March 2015 attack on security personnel guarding a Jewish community center in Nice;
- The October 2015 stabbing of three Jewish men outside a synagogue in Marseille;
- The November 2015 stabbing of a teacher in Marseille by assailants shouting anti-Jewish slogans;
- The January 2016 machete attack on Benjamin Amsellen in Marseille;
- The August 2016 stabbing of a 62-year old Jew wearing a kippa on avenue des Vosges in Strasbourg by an self-proclaimed anti-Semite who had previously stabbed another Jew in 2010 in Kléber square; and
- The March 2018 murder of Mireille Knoll an 85-year old Holocaust survivor, who was stabbed and torched by fire in her Paris flat in a subsidized housing project in Paris.
This list does not include countless hate crimes against Jews in France and across Europe by desecration of graves in Jewish cemeteries with Nazi swastikas, the increased use of anti-Semitic slogans in political rallies on the extreme right and extreme left, the widespread dissemination of anti-Jewish tropes in social media, and the increased hatred of Jews as measured by public opinion polling.
In a speech to the French National Assembly on January 13, 2015, then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls spoke with eloquence against the resurgence of antisemitism in France greater than at any time since the Vichy era (The Algemeiner):
Since Ilan Halimi [who was tortured and murdered] in 2006, after the crimes of Toulouse, [the murder of Jewish schoolchildren and a rabbi] anti-Semitic acts in France have grown to an intolerable degree. The words, the insults, the gestures, the shameful attacks, as we saw in Creteil a few weeks ago, which I mentioned here in the Chamber, and which did not produce the national outrage that our Jewish compatriots expected. There is a huge level of concern, that fear which we felt at the HyperCacher at Porte de Vincennes and in the synagogue de la Victoire on Sunday night. How can we accept that in France, where the Jews were emancipated two centuries ago, but which was also where they were martyred 70 years ago, how can we accept that cries of “death to the Jews” can be heard on the streets? How can we accept these acts that I have just mentioned?”
In the six years since Valls’s impassioned plea, the incidents of anti-Jewish racism and hate violence have only increased, and anti-Jewish racism continues to permeate French society. Today, France it at a crossroads. Will it adhere to or forsake its proclaimed values of human dignity, equality, brotherhood and freedom? Valls’s words remind us of the moral clarity of Emile Zola’s famous 1898 letter to Letter to Mr. Félix Faure, President of the Republic. Zola’s condemnation of the travesty of justice in the Dreyfus case, and the existential questions it raises for French democracy and human rights, echo through the decades to the present day:
It is a crime to poison the small and the humble, to exasperate the passions of reaction and intolerance, by sheltering behind the odious anti-Semitism, of which the great liberal France of human rights will die, if she is not cured of it.
Jonathan D. Greenberg
