The problem of French Jewry is related, of course, to the emergence on the political stage of a new population, including important sectors that carry a latent antisemitism which has been revived by militant fundamentalism. Because the new population is experiencing significant demographic growth, it is being courted by the political parties. French society seems then to have sacrificed the Jews in order not to alienate French Arabs and Muslims. A fatal choice has been made.
A more basic problem also exists: the way French society reacted to these attacks, always beginning by denying, refusing to accept the reality and accusing the Jewish community of being the instigator of aggression. As always, the Jews have been accused of being responsible for the outbreak of antisemitism. The same reaction occurred some years afterwards, in 2006, even after Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy came to power, when the young man Ilan Halimi was murdered. These reactions are the symptom of a profound crisis: a permanent, not temporary, crisis of the Jewish condition in France.
The main accusation against the Jews during those years, and already during the 1990s, informs us about the problem. Indeed, the Jews were largely accused of what is in France a political sin: communautarisme. This is a typically French ideological notion, very different from the American communitarianism. The French term signifies that one is at odds with the Republican State and its laws and that one lacks fidelity to the nation. This accusation seems a strange one to make against the Jews, who have been French citizens for a very long time (since 1791 for the Jews in France, and 1870 for the bulk of North African Jewry, the Jews of Algeria). French Judaism, moreover, entered into the national pact with the state in 1807, reconstituting itself so that Jews could perform their duties as individual and anonymous citizens and no more as a community. Consistorial Judaism was born. Napoleon created the ‘Consistoire’ as a unique and obligatory religious institution for the Jews.
My thesis is that the Jewish identity born after World War II is no longer backed up by French society. It became a thing of the past. The Jews are at a crossroads and will have to choose which road they will take. There is, obviously, a hidden dimension to this situation: France itself is facing an important and totally new challenge concerning its identity and state; its future will be determined at the same time. French Jews have the feeling that they are experiencing the last dying light of an entire civilization.
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